One Big Library.

This was a very good year for new music. Here are some of my favorites:

Allen Toussaint, The Bright Mississippi. We saw him at the Silver Spring jazz festival. If you were ever looking for a record to use to introduce a non-jazz fan to jazz, this could be it: it's immediately accessible, it's dripping with talent and experience and emotion and That Feel, it references and looks back to tradition while keeping a forward-moving vibe, and above all else Allen Toussaint's playing has this incredible measured-groove touch that I can't get enough of. Do yourself a favor and go get this.

Beirut, March of the Zapotec. Didn't see him. In the past I haven't liked his music much, but I love this part of his 2009 record and have listened to it constantly. This happens once in a while -- I don't like Bright Eyes but I loved "I'm Wide Awake". There's something about the arrangements and vibe and how his voice fits into it all that makes me think I've been missing something.

"La Llorona" New Official Beirut Video from Owen Cook on Vimeo.

Califone, All My Friends are Funeral Singers. I love everything this band does. We saw them at the Rock and Roll Hotel, and it was a terrific show. I just can't believe there weren't more than 100 or so people there. If you get a chance to see them, don't miss it.

califone - funeral singers from Califone on Vimeo.

Do Make Say Think, Other Truths. Saw them at Rock and Roll Hotel, another great show. I couldn't find any videos from this record but here's one of a favorite song from an earlier record, 'You, You're a History in Rust.'

No. 4 Do Make Say Think - "A With Living" from Retread Sessions on Vimeo.

One of the best things about the DMST show was that the opening acts were basically the same musicians in different configurations. One of these configurations was a set of performances of music/recordings from Charles Spearin's Happiness Project. Do yourself a favor and open that link up in another tab, stop reading this, and go check that out. You'll be glad you did.

Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest. Call me a fanboy, I can take it. Hell, ask my family, one of my favorite impressions to do is Michael McDonald, and they released a remixed track with him (!). Check out this video of Grizzly Bear (sans our friend the Doobie Brother) playing in a cab.

Metric, Fantasies. I like every record they put out more than the one before. I saw them in Ottawa at the civic center on a stage, which, essentially, is a hockey rink. I don't understand why they aren't the biggest pop band in the world. Maybe it's better we keep them our big little secret. The kids of the friends I attended the show with mishear the line and chant "everybody just wanna play the wii, play the wii, play the wii", maybe somebody should tell Emily.

METRIC - Sick Muse - OFFICIAL VIDEO from Metric Music on Vimeo.

Neko Case, Middle Cyclone. I liked her earlier records okay but went a little nuts over this one. Still can't get enough of it.

St. Vincent, Actor. I first heard/saw her in a take-away show but was a bit disappointed by the production choices on the first record. I love her sound stripped down with just a guitar. This came out and grabbed me from the first "paint the black hole blacker" backing vocal and I've been hooked since, elaborate arrangements and all. It also made me hear the previous release with new ears, and I like it a lot more now too. Still, love that tight feel of just her and her guitar.

St. Vincent Tour Videos // 01 from Alan Del Rio Ortiz on Vimeo.

Those are my favorite full records of 2009.

I also really liked Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, particularly "Summertime Clothes" and though it's cliche to say it, "My Girls". The video does the song justice.

Animal Collective "My Girls" from Chad von Nau on Vimeo.

I liked the new Akron/Family, "Set 'em Wild, Set 'em Free" a lot, too, particularly "River". We saw them at the Rock and Roll Hotel, another great show there.

KEXP Session 16.1 - AKRON/FAMILY from More Dust Than Digital on Vimeo.

We live just 5-6 blocks from Rock and Roll Hotel, this tiny little place so many of my favorite bands play. We also saw Apostle of Hustle there, which was a great show with only maybe 40 people in the crowd. They put out a new record this year but I somehow never did hear it. If I did, though, it might be more prominent on this list since I like the earlier ones so much.

I like the latest Dirty Projectors record a lot, too, but none of it as much as the track they did with David Byrne on the Dark Was the Night charity compilation, "Knotty Pine".

Some artists I like a lot came out with new records that never quite stuck for me. A.C. Newman, M. Ward, the Dodos come to mind. I'll give them all another shot, though. The new Fiery Furnaces convinced me that I will just never like them.

There were a few year-old records I listened to a lot more in 2009 that seem worth mentioning again: Joan as Police Woman's 'To Survive', Juana Molina's 'Un Dia', and Deerhunter's 'Microcastle' all stuck in my ear repeatedly.

The National (#1) and Spoon (#6) didn't release records this year, but they are both at the top of my last.fm charts for 2009. Good money's betting on their new records to be my favorites for 2010, easy.

I spend a ton of money on music all the time, and I also download a ton of music all the time for free. Usually I find a way to spend money a "legit way" on artists I spend the most time with, either by buying their records or seeing their shows or, preferably, going to their shows and buying their records from them at their shows. Sometimes I look back and see that I haven't spent a single dime on my very favorite stuff, and this year I want to correct that.

I have never "purchased" a Neko Case or St. Vincent record, nor paid to see either of them perform. I might see St. Vincent in a few weeks, but I might miss her. In any case I don't like not supporting artists as directly as I can.

So: the first five people living in the US or Canada who read this and write me privately (not in the comments! use my email address, i'll use my inbox to judge who's first) with their snail mail address will get a copy of the new St. Vincent or Neko Case records sent to them by me, purchased from the most obviously preferred sales venue available on the artists' own promotional websites. Say which record you prefer. Limit one per person, and I'll do three of one, two of the other, so if you're the fourth person to ask for one you'll be out of luck.

...still you're surprised, 'prised, 'prised, when I eat ya...

Funny how sometimes the story of a year plays out in the photos you choose to share.

This is how it started.

Happy new year, indeed. This is what I'd done:

Broken fifth metacarpal. It healed okay, I think.

I spent the better part of January and February healing up from the hand and serving on a DC grand jury. No pictures of that. There was one major highlight in that period, though:

What a day! Broken as I was (the hand, and my back had gone wonky a few days before inauguration) and cold as it was I'll never regret being there, it was one of the most exciting things I've ever seen.

I must've started feeling better by the end of February.

Though maybe I was just being foolish.

Manon caught in the act, with her new camera:

I've grown to prefer shooting black and white film. Here's the red filter in action:

And again with the red filter. It's still hard sometimes for me to believe these places are so close to where I live. We're half a block from the park, and we'll probably move before long, but while we're here, it's wonderful.

Due to additional broken bones in my family, passover was just the two of us. I think we've perfected the meatless seder, and next year maybe we'll have a big group. Here's what I look like with a mouthful of horseradish - the good kind.

In April a very cool project I'm lucky to get to work on sometimes launched a major rewrite. You can do weird mashup stuff with it now like this:

Springtime also means baseball season. The Nats weren't very good but did show signs of life, especially Zimmerman's hitting streak, and the Six Weeks of Healthy Nyjer Morgan. We saw Randy Johnson's 300th win this year, which was fun despite the deluge in which it occurred. The Nats might be actually competitive next year, we'll see. I still haven't had a chance to see the Tigers in DC yet, though, maybe they'll come one of these years.

The Wings had a good run, and even though I saw them lose in person twice (Caps, Preds) it was still a great season for them. They came oh so close:

With the Wings ultimately losing, the highlight of the hockey season for me was seeing the playoff game when Ovechkin and Crosby had matching hat tricks. Probably the most exciting thing I've ever seen at a live sporting event, and that's saying something. I don't have a picture of all the hats on the ice after #8's third that night because I was deliriously screaming at the time. Imagine a lot of drunk people in red hugging and screaming a lot, and hats flying everywhere for ten minutes.

We started ordering local vegetables from a CSA-like service, and it immediately changed how and what we eat, both for the better.

Not that I'm a strict vegetarian, though, or strictly kosher, just mostly both. A highlight of visiting my brother in Austin in June was a trip to Cooper's BBQ:

Another highlight of visiting Austin was visiting my favorite Ben Shahn painting again:

Eastern Market, which burned up shortly after I arrived in DC, reopened after reconstruction, with a big ceremony and big crowds. Strong neighborhood, here.

I even got to say hello to Mayor Fenty that day, and shook his hand just after taking this. Seemed genuinely amicable.

After fourteen years of disuse I started studying Japanese again. I have a long way to go but it's been interesting firing up those language-acquisition and mid-deep-memory sections of the brain again.

We saw Jandek! Seeing the Corwood Rep in person made us want to take things back up to a meta level.

After a few years away I was able to return to my favorite professional conference, Access, in Charlottetown, PEI. It was a great time, though things get kinda rough there sometimes.

At that event I met a very cool librarian who skates on a roller derby team in Toronto. I was in Toronto for another event a few weeks later and got to see her and her teammates and a roller derby bout for the first time. Bill took a picture of us. I love the positive energy, collective/DIY feel, seeing women in a contact sport (which I mean literally... as a boy I did everything, soccer, football, basketball, baseball, street hockey, dodgeball, "indoor nerf soccer with combat", etc., and my sister realized she loved contact sports the first time she tried one in *college*. not fair! girls can/should kick ass, too, and all power to them when they do, whether they're 4, 14, or 44.), and seeing a reinvigorated sport gain popularity. There's a small but growing league here in DC, too, and they skate right down the street from us at the Armory. It's been great fun to watch them, and almost as much fun to learn a few things about sport photography.

I was pretty excited to see their bout today, in fact, but it got canceled due to a blizzard.

...which brings us up to December 19.

Thanks for reliving 2009 with me. There's lots left out, here, namely pictures I should have taken of family and friends who visited us, several more xrays and injuries of various levels of acuteness that made it a fairly painful year, and any of the shots I somehow never took during a fun vacation in Ottawa and Montreal. Oh well, next year.

Another THATCamp has come and gone and it was, again, a lot of fun. I've grown used to the dynamics of an unconference in the past five years or so because that's the kind of event I attend most of the time, now. JCDL 2009 was the first academic conference I'd attended in years, and though I enjoyed it as well and met a lot of interesting people and learned some useful stuff, it was missing the energy the mix of people at a good unconference can generate. And, though I feel like a self-important prig as I write this, I hated that though I'd made the effort to attend, there was no chance for me to get up and show off some stuff I'd worked on in front of the group. I use software that lets a user to become a committer; I value friendships that let a student become a teacher; I attend conferences that let an attendee become a presenter. Take out that dynamic and it's nowhere near as compelling.

Because it features this principle, as any good unconference does, the best part of THATCamp is the people. Both years I've met so many fascinating people and learned about so much amazing work that it's taken the whole week following for my brain to settle back down and follow up on all the threads left dangling on sunday afternoon like so many thesis topics. There's talk of franchised THATCamps to be staged in Austin and London among other places, and that's exciting. There's a #thatcamp channel on freenode that threatens to become a regular hangout. I've got about 50 more people I'm following on twitter all of whom already fill my screen with fascinating stuff to read and look at all day and some of them are even following me, too. What more could you ask for?

Well, there are a few things. I think there are a few tweaks to the formula that could improve the event a bit. I offer these only in the hopes of making THATCamp even better, not to complain or kill anybody's leftover buzz.

1. Shorter sessions. This year the sessions were 1:15 long; for intense topics that engage everybody in the room that's what you need to give everybody a chance to go deep. But for open-ended discussions where there's as much airing of concerns about how "this needs to happen" and "we have to do that", 1:15 is about 25 minutes too long. It might have just been the sessions I chose this year, but it seemed like I was in more of the latter type sessions than the former, and that was a bit of a let down. Also, there were as many as five or six sessions running concurrently in several slots on the first day, any three or four of which I would've liked to sit in on. Tightening the schedule could allow for more time blocks and cut down on the number of simultaneous tracks.
2. More hacking. When you go from having Bill Turkel teaching people how to fire code into an Arduino and the Omeka developers teaching how to write plugins and even me doing a simple tutorial on how to make little colorful balls dance around on screen with Processing one year to basically none of that the next year, it's a bit of a drop off to somebody like me who likes to learn by doing, especially in realtime at a moment when I'm jazzed up by all the amazing people and ideas in the air.

   We talked about this a bit in #thatcamp on IRC last night - maybe if the sessions were a bit shorter and there were fewer concurrent tracks, one of the extra rooms could be a "hackin' room" or some such. Sorta like the chillout room at a rave with plenty of water and comfy couches where people can take a breather but, er, well, the exact opposite of that.

   It might just be that I'm a little bit disappointed in myself for not prepping a hackier topic myself. I put a lot of time into hacks just for THATCamp last year and it was great fun pulling them off. I'd like to think that it was fun for the people in the room with me, too, and either way I learned a lot from the experience and I hope that was mutual. This year I was burned out on conference travel and work and didn't have the extra cycles to put something fun and new together, and I'm sorry I didn't. If I get to go again, I promise to do whatever I can to bring the hackin' back in!

3. Let us do our own scheduling. This is probably the biggest one. At the Foo Camp I went to the intro evening session ended with everybody mingling around big schedule boards where times, topics, and rooms get worked out among the attendees in realtime. It's messy and takes a while but it ends with drinks and everybody's just happy to be bumping into all the other fascinating people around them anyway so it serves as a nice icebreaker, too. At THATCamp, CHNM staff instead comb through ideas posted in advance to the blog and group and sort and lump and split topics into sessions with titles that don't necessarily match what the idea-posters had in mind. I wanted to talk about improving web sites with linked data but where do I go to talk about that in this schedule? "Standards"? "Publishing"? "Software Development"? "Libraries and Web 2.0"? (that's where I went, and did a bit of the talk, but I'm not sure my topic was what everybody else there had in mind, and I know I wasn't alone in this mode of confusion).

   By cutting out this dynamic let-the-people-do-it-themselves step you minimize opportunities for catchy titles to draw people in, for people to negotiate whether or not they should merge their own topics, and for people to simply get to know each other and decide which other people they want to be sure to hear from and hang out with right off the bat. And imho you maximize confusion about which sessions to go to and where you can find the people you want to hear from.

   I'd advocate for filling out a big whiteboard with a schedule with people putting the names of their talks and their names with it and leaving a good 60-90 minutes to work it all out. On a real board or on paper (vs. online), so we'd have to occupy the same physical space. With drinks nearby.

   I know Jeremy put a ton of work into scheduling because I caught him in the act when I arrived late so I know it was no trivial feat. I just think opening it up would be easier on @clioweb and @digitalhumanist and better for the rest of us too.

4. Three word intros. Another nice thing they did at Foo was *very* brief intros of everybody in the room: your name, your affiliation, and *just* three words about who you are or what you're into. Mine would be: "Dan Chudnov, Library of Congress, One Big Library". It's a chance to put names to faces, it's another friendly icebreaker, and it's a chance for all of us 140-charsmiths to be clever.
5. The schedule. Maybe it might help to have an evening meeting the night before for the welcoming session, the scheduling, and maybe one or two lead talks to kick things off. Then everybody can go get dinner or drinks and talk and think about what's coming the next morning and maybe work on their slides or demos or whatever overnight. You'd know when your slot is the next day, and which sessions you want to be sure to get to.

I don't want to be all "they do it better at Foo Camp" but these last few points really do reflect things that Foo Camp does a little better that I think THATCamp could adopt to make it just that much better.

And not to repeat myself, but I offer all this up with the hope of leading folks to think about various ways to make a great event even greater. I ain't complaining - the organizers do a great job making a lot of people with diverse backgrounds comfortable in a terrific space with plenty of coffee and wifi and surprisingly good food and nicely designed t-shirts and as long as they'll have me, I'll keep applying to attend again. It's just that I'm a bit of a hacker at heart and I'm always thinking about little optimizations, so take this as nothing more than that.

I hope to see y'all again next year, or even sooner - and next time you're in DC please stop by LC to say hi if you like.

Books read in 2009, most recently completed listed last.

• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. by Jaffe and Sherwood
• The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
• Rainbow's End, by Vernor Vinge
• Making Sense of Japanese, by Jay Rubin
• Spook Country, by William Gibson