Observations and Ideas

A group of GPLS staff was invited to Windsor to speak at the Future of the ILS Symposium. In attendance from GPLS was David Singleton, Deputy State Librarian; Julie Walker, newly appointed Assistant State Librarian for Technology Services; Mike Rylander, database guru extraordinare; and myself. Of course, the most difficult part of the entire trip was the security at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. Yes, yours truly must look suspicious and shifty, so I was given extra special attention by the TSA folks.

The symposium itself was wonderful– good meeting space, good food, and good company. Our presentation was about 1.5 hours, and we covered a whole lotta material in that timeframe. We started off with a background of PINES and Georgia before moving into the Evergreen ILS material proper. Oh, I’ve uploaded a copy of our powerpoint presentation, for interested folks.

It looks like our presentation was well-received, based on the blog postings popping up:

• Peter Binkley wrote up a concise synposis.
• Ryan Eby posted his thoughts.
• Dan Scott also commented, but also went about installing Evergreen on the train home!
• Also refer to the symposium’s blog for more.

Thanks to Art Rhyno for putting this all together and for the invitation.

The whole 2.0 meme tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth, and when used by the more — shall we say, vociferous — proponents of the principles behind the title it has been known to cause me to suffer a bad case of the dry heaves. That being said, and noting that he is certainly not one of those that cause me convulsions, I think the OpenILS/Evergreen project owes John Blyberg a very big thank you for explaining, if offhandedly and by accident, exactly what we are all about.

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