LTC2015: thoughts on a great conference + keynote & slides

This past Wednesday I had the honor of being the opening keynote speaker for the 2015 Library Technology Conference, held on the Macalester College campus in St. Paul Minnesota.

I cannot say enough good things about the conference organizers, the event, the attendees, the programming. It’s wonderful to attend a conference small enough to feel like a community yet large enough to introduce some diversity of interest … one where admitted goals of the organizers are to “make every attendee feel special” and to keep registration costs as low as possible to remove financial barriers to attendance. I so enjoyed meeting and spending time with them. Furthermore, the food was excellent, the campus is charming, they did a bang-up job with their social media, and the video crew was top-notch. Even better, they archive all the content on their DigitalCommons site going back to 2009. It’s a treasure trove of great content.

The standout session for me was probably the presentation by Amy Drayer, Wayne Schneider and Phil Feilmeyer of Hennepin County Library on Lessons Learned In Building a Catalog from Scratch (slides available at link). Wow! I was so impressed with what they’ve done – building a catalog is really hard, yo? They made it look easy.

This year it filled up in something like a day – so be sure and follow them on Twitter @LibTechConf so you won’t miss registration next year.

Since the talk was streamed live (!) I even got to wave at my mom at the beginning.

The LTC Ustream channel has the archived recording of my talk – along with Bohyun’s keynote & keynote talks from 2014 by Mita Williams & Barbara Fister.

The slides are available via my slideshare