OLA Conference 2007, Day 2

I overslept and missed the breakfast, presentation, and first session. Whoops.

I looked in on the NWCentral session and the Picasso, Pollack & Programs session. I wish I had ended up attending the entire art session. It looked like they were having a really good time in there. I'm already a user and advocate of NWCentral, so it wasn't the greatest use of my time to observe that.

I ended up running into a few librarians from my home library system in Douglas County. They were really excited to see a product of their system entering the library profession. I was invited to give a talk to their board and county commissioners to tell my story of how I arrived at working in a library and attending library school. It was exciting.

For Friday PM I attended the Future of the Catalog session by our own Michael Boock. It was interesting to hear his ideas about the direction of the catalog and what other systems are doing. The idea of moving to an open source ILS is fascinating and sounds like something we should definitely be investigating (hint hint). What we think users want and what the users actually want still seems to have some disparity--reviews and comments and pictures of book jackets seem to be what they are after. Let's give it to them.

For the last Friday PM session I went to RFID: Before and After Workflow Comparisons. I didn't know anything about RFID going into this and was fairly amazed at the possible applications of this technology. I was also stunned by the practical nightmare it creates. The magic and allure were gone when the tagging methods for the transmitters were revealed and how users must position items on the sensor table to be properly scanned. Not to mention the cost of the transmitters, the labor cost of installing them, and replacement when they are damaged or worn out by rough handling. This conversion went hand-in-hand with a new check-in automation machine. As an outsider, it doesn't look like the cost benefits of this entire package was really a benefit--the manual check-in process seems to be more cost effective, though they're now stuck in automation because of the large initial investments.