The opening session of LCOW08

Library Camp of the West 2008 (LCOW08) was Friday at the University of Denver. I helped organize it along with Laura Crossett of the Park County Library System in Wyoming, and Joe Kraus of DU. It wouldn’t have happened without both of them, and I agree with Laura that Joe deserves special thanks for just making everything happen from start to finish at DU.

Here are some impressions:

• As I noted in a comment on Library Stuff, this was a conference where I personally chatted with library school students, the director of a large suburban public library, people from small rural public libraries, library staff for whom this was their first conference, and long-time professionals. I suppose all those categories are represented at traditional conferences too, but I don’t know they get a chance to talk to each other directly as we did on Friday.
• I don’t know that everyone had as good a time as I did, but I think the fact that people keep updating the discussion session section of the wiki on a Saturday is a pretty good sign.
• Repeatedly throughout the day I heard people say things like “you are interested in such-and-such? Then you really need to talk to this guy…” or “when you are ready to do that, please give me a call and we can help you with that.”
• My friend, roommate, and fellow carping nerdboy, Josh Neff mentioned that in a traditional presenter/audience conference session, he often ends up twittering or IM chatting on his computer while keeping one ear on the presenter. With the library camp discussion format, it didn’t occur to him to do that once.
• Kieran Hixon, of the John C. Fremont Library in Florence, CO told great stories about setting up their Koha catalog. They hired a 14 year-old kid to help set up the catalog, so he could only work 9 hours a week because he had to go to school. (Now the kid apparently works for LibLime and works with Koha full time). They tested it on a laptop, then ran it on a Pentium II as a production server. When asked about the migration from their commercial system to Koha, Kieran said “It was Saturday afternoon, and we’d told the library we’d roll it out on Monday and I totally forgot about it until I got a phone call, ‘aren’t we going to do that migration today?’. Got there around 11, we ordered pizza, and had the data migrated by about 3.”
• In the session on IM reference, I mentioned David Lee King’s post about putting a Meebo chat widget on the “no results” screen in the library catalog. I got a Twitter reply from Jill at Pikes Peak Public Library today saying “PPLD added it on our pages by 2:30pm Friday :)” (The fact that they may have had a temporary setback doesn’t make that any less cool.)
• Photographic evidence of the event is collected on Flickr under the tag lcow08. This one of Joe, Laura, and me is wonderful. Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
• On a more personal note, it was great fun to see out-of-towners Josh Neff, Laura Crossett, and Kaijsa Calkins again, and to meet my Tweeps jezmynne, brewinlibrarian, and jobill face-to-face for the first time. Of course, we all wished Iris was there.