Terry’s Worklog

Goodbye Ottawa

So for me, Access 2006 has come to a close.  Thank you Ottawa for the night terrors (courtesy of the ghost walk :)), the Art Center, the gorgeous weather (the rain made me feel like home) and a fantastic group of speakers and topics over the past 3 days.  There was Roy’s talk on the “last mile” to encourage us, Tito Sierra’s talk on the NC State’s Endeca catalog giving us a picture of some of the things that can be done in spite of our current ILS systems and then Peter Hickey’s talk on the lack of privacy in the digital environment (btw, I’ll make the tin hat to protect myself from the satellite waves when I get home Pete :)).  Great conference, lots of fun.

Being my first Access conference, I really didn’t know what to expect.  I’d been told by many that Hackfest was a must, but that the conference would offer some things that we don’t see quite so often at many U.S. conferences.

1. A very international flavor — well, for me, international
2. Pretty laid back.  Dan had commented to me that Access, and particularly Hackfest, is a real social event where you will find very little competition between individuals, etc.  I’m a competitive person — I take that into a lot of what I do, but it was really nice to simply get to kick back and socialize a bit. 

So a couple of closing thoughts from the conference.  

1. If we send this many people for OSU again (5), we are going to have to co-sponsor the conference in Victoria :).  No really…we had 5 folks from OSU make the trip — the most from any one institution I believe.  Which was actually pretty cool because we had a real cross section from the library attend.  We had John, our AUL for public and innovative services, we had Jane and Anne-Marie from our reference services group and then Jeremy and myself.  So a real cross section — which will make reading the trip reports for this particular event interesting since they will likely be colored by our different perspectives (mine of course being the most unbiased and entertaining :))
2. With so many laptops in the room, it was refreshing to see zero battery fires :) 
3. Cool gadgets.  One thing I love about technology conferences is the cool gadgets the people bring and this was no exception. 
4. Canadian money!  Its like a rainbow in my pocket.  I love foreign currency — so many colors.  And I love the coins.  When I traveled to London a few years ago, one of my favorite parts was the coins I got to bring back.  I’ve always been a bit of a coin collector (though I don’t do it quite so much any more).
5. Snow — why didn’t we get any. :(  I actually got a little excited when I seen how much snow the folks in Buffalo and the north of New York were suppose to be getting last night.  I’d hoped that maybe, just maybe, I’d get to see some snow flakes — but no.

 

–TR

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