RE: check it out

["Frumkin, Jeremy" <frumkinj@u.library.arizona.edu>]

OK, let's see how well the faulty memory is working....

The Open Source program at ALA was extremely well-attended and
well-received. We had somewhere around 250 people attend the session. In my
not-so-unbiased opinion (IMNSUO?) it was an overall excellent program that
really provided a lot to those who attended.

Tim O'Reilly spoke first, and he did an amazing job of linking open source
and the open source 'attitude' to libraries and the library community. Tim
was very entertaining and I don't think anyone was disappointed in his talk
(I personally could have listened to him talk for another 2 hours). Dan
followed Tim's talk (thanks Dan for stepping up top the plate and speaking
after Tim) with an excellent presentation on Jake, which generated a lot of
excitement from the audience (as displayed by the questions after Dan's talk
and the people coming up to speak to Dan at the O'Reilly booth).

Peter spoke after Dan, and did a great job of presenting a technical topic
(Avanti and API's) to an audience that had a mix of technical and
non-technical interests. Peter's concept of an API for a circulation system
opened up a few eyes, I think. Finally, I spoke (you've heard the best; now
here's the rest) about implementing OSCR at the University of Arizona, and
also about a new open source project we are doing, called the Tree of Life
(http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree).

Tim mentioned during the session that he would mail out copies of 'The
Cathedral and the Bazaar' to anyone who left their business card or address
(from those who attended the program). We had about 60 or so people do just
that. A couple of other highlights:

- Fred Kilgour attended (and stayed the entire 3+ hours). (Someone should
ask Dan about his dinner with Fred)
- Dave did an excellent job of facilitating the talk. Many, many kudos to
Dave for helping make this happen; without his knowledge of LITA and program
planning, all of this never would have been possible. Thanks Dave!
- The people at O'Reilly were all really happy with the program and our Open
Source presentation in the exhibits area. The whole thing was win-win-win
all around. We even have a good chance of getting a big-name O'Reilly author
to talk at ALA-San Francisco (stay tuned for more details)
- The exhibit area turned into an excellent venue to demo and talk to people
about open source and libraries. We had numerous people come to the O'Reilly
booth just to talk to us about open source. O'Reilly was also kind enough to
bring and let us pass out copies of 'Linux in a Nutshell' to people who came
to our OS demos.

I'm sure there's much, much more I'm leaving out. The whole thing was a huge
success and a great leap forward in promoting open source in libraries.

-- Jeremy 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Chudnov [mailto:daniel.chudnov@yale.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2000 1:28 PM
> To: oss4lib-list@BIOMED.MED.YALE.EDU
> Subject: check it out
> 
> 
> 
> i'm on vacation (and currently in the UWisc libraries 
> checkin' email for
> emergencies :) after ALA and just happened to check slashdot 
> for oss4lib
> news items when i stumbled upon this:
> 
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/10/2015237&mode=threa
> d&threshold=1
> 
> ...that's right... we've finally got picked up by /..  and 
> even tho the
> thread's about bsd i guess this still means we're officially 
> something or
> other. :)
> 
> unfortunately i don't have time to write up anything from the 
> conference
> yet (rumor has it madison traffic cops mean business) but i 
> hope to when i
> get back home next week.  in the meantime maybe some of the other LITA
> OSSIG event attendees can tell us a bit about their great 
> session (hint,
> hint)?
> 
> 
>   off to the lakes for now, -dc
>