Librarian in a Banana Suit

Karen Schneider gave a lovely pragmatic talk on understanding open source at the Iowa Library Association 2009 Annual Conference (which was a welcome change from the sometimes cult-ish “Open Source is good, Open Source will solve all your problems” rhetoric).  I hope to be able to link to her slides on slideshare as soon as I can find them, but here it is in a nutshell:

I. What is open source?
Schneider started out with a definition of open source from Wikipedia (I love it when librarians aren’t afraid to use Wikipedia!):  “Open source software generally allows anyone to make a new version of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it.”  She pointed out that sometimes you don’t even know when you’re using open source:  Audacity, WordPress, Firefox, and lots of in-flight movies are just a few examples of open source software in action.

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Karen Schneider wore deer boots and turtlenecks circa 1975, and claims she can still be spotted wearing them to this day.  She learned what “going commando” means only recently.  She is also known as the free range librarian, a co-moderator of the PUBLIB public librarian discussion list, an Air Force vet, the newly appointed library director at Holy Names University, a published food writer and a beer home-brewer.

Schneider was also the keynote speaker for Friday morning’s session of the Iowa Library Association ’09 Annual Conference, where she gave her talk, “Waxing and Waning: Tech Trends for the Library Landscape.”  You can check out the slides from her talk here (via slideshare):

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(some good advice from Jessamyn West: “put bunny ears on your headphones so no one will steal them”)

It was so much fun to hear Jessamyn West, one of my all-time favorite library bloggers, give her talk on On-the-fly Tech Support at the 2009 Iowa Library Association Annual Conference in Des Moines.  Being the awesome techie librarian that she is, she has already made all of her notes and slides available on the internet, so all I have to do is tell you about how fun she was.

So way  back in 1997, Salon.com wrote up a neat feature called “Are We Ready for the Library of the Future?“, explaining that librarians have become “the general public’s last-resort providers of tech support.”  Yet twelve years later, lots of librarians still don’t have a clue how to troubleshoot.  Never fear librarians, Jessamyn West to the rescue!  Here are some key pointers for the on-the-fly tech support librarian:

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(presented by LITA)

Milton Wolf from the LITA Imagineering Interest Group introduced the speakers for this event, which ended up being primarily a publicity stop for Tor Books authors.  I was disappointed that we didn’t talk more about technology, metaphor and imagination — as the program guide had suggested — but what’s a girl to do?

Robert Charles Wilson began with a brief but eloquent talk about his new book, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22-nd Century America.  Set in America after apocalyptic problems such as environmental meltdown and a plague of infertility, this is a story about political reform and restoration ~ especially the restoration of a Free Public Library System.  Wilson argued that information and knowledge will always “want to be free.”  Julian Comstock sounds like an absolutely fantastic novel and I wish Wilson were more comfortable as a public speaker, because I have the feeling I could have listened to him talk about what’s on his mind forever (or at least a few hours).

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