Computers In Libraries
Topic: Librarianship
The Computers in Libraries conference will be held in DC at the Hilton on March 16-18. Being that this is my home town, I plan on going! According to the brochure it is "North America's largest technology conference for Librarians and Information Managers." Very cool. Definitly looking forward to it. The only problem is that there are too many sessions I want to attend! Lots of cool stuff that directly apply to my job and career.
I've registered for a post-conference workshop as well, "Web Content Management: Essential Pre-Implementation Planning." This is right up my alley as one of my current projects has been researching content management systems and we are about to start the design phase. I've built a couple prototype sites to test out different CMSs and we've nearly settled on one. It has been a fascinating project as I pretty much began from scratch, not even knowing what a CMS was. I have learned so much in the past two months. One very interesting thing about our situation though is that we have very little money to spend on a CMS. Partly because it will be used for the staff intranet and not the public site. Most libraries spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a CMS custom tailored or designed for them, but I have mostly been looking at open-source solutions.
I've always been a fan of open-source and I have become even more so as I have learned about all of the open-source CMSs out there. There is some good software being developed by these people and if I had more time I'd love to involved with one of these projects. I have a friend who's involved in the OpenOffice.org project and it involves some real dedication (he's a doctoral student in math at UMD). The whole concept of open-source seems utopian, but it really does seem to work. Firefox is a fantastic recent example.
But I digress. Computers in Libraries will be my first professional conference and I am stoked. You can expect a full report following the event.
The Computers in Libraries conference will be held in DC at the Hilton on March 16-18. Being that this is my home town, I plan on going! According to the brochure it is "North America's largest technology conference for Librarians and Information Managers." Very cool. Definitly looking forward to it. The only problem is that there are too many sessions I want to attend! Lots of cool stuff that directly apply to my job and career.
I've registered for a post-conference workshop as well, "Web Content Management: Essential Pre-Implementation Planning." This is right up my alley as one of my current projects has been researching content management systems and we are about to start the design phase. I've built a couple prototype sites to test out different CMSs and we've nearly settled on one. It has been a fascinating project as I pretty much began from scratch, not even knowing what a CMS was. I have learned so much in the past two months. One very interesting thing about our situation though is that we have very little money to spend on a CMS. Partly because it will be used for the staff intranet and not the public site. Most libraries spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a CMS custom tailored or designed for them, but I have mostly been looking at open-source solutions.
I've always been a fan of open-source and I have become even more so as I have learned about all of the open-source CMSs out there. There is some good software being developed by these people and if I had more time I'd love to involved with one of these projects. I have a friend who's involved in the OpenOffice.org project and it involves some real dedication (he's a doctoral student in math at UMD). The whole concept of open-source seems utopian, but it really does seem to work. Firefox is a fantastic recent example.
But I digress. Computers in Libraries will be my first professional conference and I am stoked. You can expect a full report following the event.
posted by Jonathan at 2/09/2005 05:54:00 PM
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