Quick notes from Access 2006

Calvin and I are crashing at a Comfort Inn up Rue Rideau after a fun day seeing Parliament and the National Gallery of Canada [1] with Karen [2]. We're both wiped out, especially after devouring the combo platter at Horn of Africa [3]. Oh, and after watching THE DETROIT TIGERS WIN THE ALCS ON A BOTTOM-OF-THE-NINTH HOMER.

But enough about the PENNANT WINNING DETROIT TIGERS. For now.

Here are some random bits about the conference. I'll be posting much more from it soon.

• Access is the best library conference in North America. Don't let anybody tell you anything different.
• Hackfest went well again, even with 55 (!) people and two locations. See the suggestions and report presentations at this temp location [4].
• Ross [5] and I will package up the HMS Presentr app we wrote based on last year's HMS (Hackfest Management System). There were some valid gripes but considering we spent one person-week on this and that there were 55 people reading suggestions and thirteen different presentations written, edited, and presented completely from scratch in less than 24 hours it worked pretty damned well if I do say so my damned self.
• It was a bit freaky taking pictures using photo booth but it was fun posting them to flickr in near-realtime, especially while sitting up front. :)
• Calvin and I just set up a flickr group called "accessconference [6]". It's public. If you have Access photos from 2006 or any previous or future year (though I'd like to see your code if you can accomplish the latter) please consider joining the group and adding your photos.
• I've recorded three separate upcoming episodes of Library Geeks at the conference - they'll be posted in turn in the next few weeks. I think the combination of all three will give a much better feel for the character of the conference than just a blog entry and some photos can.
• I'm *tired*.
• Like after every other year I've attended I have about six new project ideas.
• It was great to see such big staff turnouts from OSU and SFU, my favorite three-letter libraries. :)
• Friday afternoons in #code4lib [7] are still the best.
• Talk of the year for me was, hands-down, the "Stella, the German library bot" talk. Does anyone have a link to her slides? I wonder if we could do something similar with jess [8] or something like it.

One of the mini-thunder talks I gave [9] had the theme "green librarianship." I meant it to be half-funny and half-serious, but the more I think about it, there's more than meets the funny bone. Asking "what's your information footprint?" can lead in lots of interesting directions. Try it out! I'll write more about it soon.