EndUser 2006 photos and other impressions [Updated]

Yesterday I managed to take some photos at EndUser 2006. Here is a photo set on Flickr. Lots of friends and acquaintences were there and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing them. I also got to meet a few new folks including one who introduced himself to me as someone who enjoys reading this blog. (It’s kind of nice but also odd when this happens.) I spent some time talking to Ross Singer and enjoyed our conversation about the state of ILS vendors and relations with their library partners. Some of the Library 2.0 oriented sessions were extremely popular with standing room only as well as an overflow into the hallway outside. I particularly appreciated meeting up with my old classmate, Amanda Xu. We were in library school at UIUC together and were in many of the same classes.

The evening finished up with a nice customer reception. I was able to spend more time talking to friends such as Gaele Gillespie from the University of Kansas, Kevin Randall from Northwestern University, Beth Holley from the University of Alabama, and Kat McGrath from the University of British Columbia. [It was also great to meet up with Wayne Jones, from Queen's University, under whose editorial direction I am currently working as part of a group of people writing about the management of e-journals for a book to be published by Haworth Press.] NASIG was well represented! All in all it was an eventful day.

Some interesting sessions at EndUser 2006

I may work for Endeavor but I do not intend or want to be a free cheerleader for them here. Yet I can’t resist mentioning a list of presentations planned for EndUser 2006, Endeavor’s upcoming user group conference, that are squarely in the “sweet spot” of discussions that have been going on about social software in libraries (a.k.a. Library 2.0), making library data work harder, and using the ILS in new and innovative ways:

  • Ross Singer (well known as maintainer of the Dilettante’s Ball blog, frequent speaker and commentor on library/systems issues who works in library technology at Georgia Tech) will give a presentation on “Declunkifying your Z-Server: Implementing SRW/U, OpenSearch and other web services to your Voyager server”
  • “Social software (instant messaging, RSS, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, social bookmarking) and libraries” will be discussed by Edward M. Corrado of The College of New Jersey, and James Robertson of NJIT (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
  • Daniel Forsman of Örebro universitet will talk about “Extended features in webvoyage – forwarded searches and RSS feeds”
  • Adrienne Butler from Oklahoma Dept. of Libraries is going to give a presentation on “Writing A Search Plugin for WebVoyage”
  • “Mending the Gap between the Library’s Electronic [and] Print Collections Using [the] Semantic Web” will be the focus of a talk given by Amanda Xu, Andrew Sankowski, and others from St. Johns University

I am really looking forward to these and other presentations.