Midwest Library Technology Conference 2008, Macalester
College, St. Paul. MN

On Thursday morning I attended a session titled
"Creating and Sharing Local Digital Collections" which included
presentations from Carleton College, Macalester and the Scott County Historical
Society. All them talked about various projects built using OCLC's ContentDM
product. I was a little disappointed because the preliminary program claimed
there would be some information about the newer Omeka software but I discovered
when I asked about this during the Q & A that the planners decided to move
that piece to a different session
(which was occurring simultaneously).

Following lunch there was an entertaining and informative
plenary session featuring two VPs from the New Media Consortium talking about
the 2008 Horizon Report.

I also attended an afternoon breakout session called
"Interface 2.0" which featured presentations on Primo (the
Encore-like product adopted by the U. of Iowa), Library Thing for Libraries
(used by a public library) and Macalester's implementation of WorldCat Local. I
also attended (actually am attending right now) a lengthier presentation by Mac
people and an OCLC Senior Implementation Project Manager on Friday afternoon.

[Regarding WCLocal: a search for "mandolin" in the
current Macalester catalog and the beta Macalester WCLocal non-catalog produce
significantly different results. The WCLocal results seemed much less useful to
me. A comparable search in our Magnus and our Encore produces a much more similar,
and useful, set of main results.]

Finally I also attended an interesting session on the KOHA
open source library system that is in use at the West Liberty, IA public
library. This included a good discussion of both KOHA and Evergreen and the
LibLime company that supports both of these.