Schedule

Wednesday, October 19th

1. 8:30 – 3:00

   Hackfest

   The Hackfest is an integral part of Access. This day-long event on October 19 provides an opportunity to work in small groups of like-minded people on interesting projects in a low-stress environment. Got an idea for a new service you want to flesh out? Have a tricky problem you want to get some more eyeballs on? Written some fledgling code you want to push out of the nest? All you need to bring is an open mind (laptop is recommended but not required).

   The ‘fest welcomes library staff of all backgrounds and abilities. It is not only for programmers and systems librarians. The most interesting projects involve these geeks _and_ people from all parts of the library, from tech services to preschool storytime. Managers are welcome too but be warned, Hackfest groups tend to stretch buttoned-down organizational hierarchies.

   Feel the need to hack, mash, parse, or purge with birds of a feather? Want to build a prototype for a computer availability QR code service? Develop LCSH Liked Data mobile app? Whiteboard a global weather modification machine?

   Got a hackfest suggestion? Enter your suggestion here!

    

2. 8:45 – 12:00

   Pre-Conference: Open Source for Library Decision Makers

   Simon Fraser University
   Room 1425, 515 West Hastings St.
   Vancouver, B.C.

   Registration fee: $50.00

   Open source software has made tremendous strides in the past decade with significant uptake in both academic and public libraries. Many of the new library-based applications and services — institutional repositories, ERMs, scholarly publishing, discovery layers — are primarily based on open source solutions. Similarly, there are open source solutions (Evergreen, Koha) that provide competitive alternatives to the long established commercial integrated library systems. Any library staff who are responsible for, or participate in software selection, decision, contracting, implementation, maintenance and evolution should be cognizant of open source options and how to determine if they may be an appropriate solution for their library.

   This half-day workshop will feature open source experts from both academic and public libraries and consist of a blend of individual presentations and a panel discussion. It will provide an overview of the current range of open source solutions available for libraries, and tackle some of the common misconceptions often associated with this software. It will address the following topics: are there criteria that help a library decide if open source software is a “good fit” for them? How does one evaluate and compare open source and proprietary software, especially in the context of traditional procurement processes? How can an organization effectively evaluate and/or plan the resources required for a successful deployment, including project management, data conversion, implementation, integration with existing or planned third party products, training, maintenance and functional evolution?

   Confirmed speakers include:

   • Ben Hyman, Managing Director, BC Libraries Cooperative. Ben has been involved from the earliest days in the province-wide implementation of Evergreen, an open source integrated library system, as a shared consortial instance called Sitka, under the auspices of the BCLC.
   • Tara Robertson, Systems and Technical Services Librarian, Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Tara was responsible for the ECUAD Library’s recent migration from a commercial ILS to the Sitka’s shared consortial instance of the Evergreen open source ILS.
   • Nina Saklikar, Web Librarian, Simon Fraser University Library. Nina is responsible for the overall support and planning for SFU Library’s website that uses Drupal, an open-source content management system, in conjunction with a variety of other open source and proprietary software tools.
   • Kevin Stranack, Coordinator for Community Support and Learning, Public Knowledge Project. Kevin has worked with numerous libraries and other sites to implement PKP’s open source software such as Open Journal Systems (OJS) and the reSearcher suite (GODOT, CUFTS ERM).

    

   A workshop highlight will be a lively panel discussion on these topics by two well-known and very articulate library industry experts — one from the open source community, the other from the vendor sector:

   • Mark Leggott: UPEI University Librarian and President/CEO of DiscoveryGarden.
   • John Richardson: Director, Library Partnerships, for Polaris Library Systems.

    

   Both speakers bring a wide range of experience and opinion and will be both informative and provocative.

   This will not be a technical session, instead it will focus on the evaluative, financial and organizational aspects of selecting, implementing, supporting, evolving, and sustaining open source or commercial software.

3. 6:00 – 7:30

   Registration Desk Open (Hyatt Regency Penthouse)

4. 7:00 – 9:30

   Reception (Hyatt Regency Penthouse)

Thursday, October 20th

1. 7:45 – 4:30

   Registration

2. 8:00 – 8:45

   Continental Breakfast

3. 8:45 – 9:00

   Opening Remarks, Housekeeping

4. 9:00 – 10:00

   Opening Keynote: From Access to Interactivity

   Jon Beasley-Murray, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia

   The issue of “access” is in the first place about providing the public with the goods generated by public institutions. This should be obvious: universities exist for the public good, and the knowledge and skills that they develop should be immediately available to the public. With the rise of digitalization, the Internet, and the various technical capabilities for almost unlimited reproduction and dissemination of information, this should be the heyday of the university as an organization oriented towards the common good.

   But despite the best efforts of many within the institution, in fact the university’s reputation has reached a new low. In part this is because of the work of lobbies that struggle valiantly against access at every level (rapacious academic publishers, for instance). In part it is because of a new right-wing populism that denigrates the very notion of the public and scorns any effort of the state to foster or protect the common good. But in part is is also because the university has been slow to realize the possibilities enabled in this new information age.

   My talk will examine what I have elsewhere called “Knowledge 3.0” and outline the ways in which universities should proactively encourage engagement with the new forms taken by the public sphere and the common good in the twenty-first century. This entails not merely sitting back and allowing the public to access the halls of academia. It also requires an interactive intervention into the new ways in which knowledge is produced and disseminated.

    

5. 10:00 – 11:00

   David Binkley Memorial Lecture:
   Embodied Histories & The Weight of Data

   Jer Thorp, Data Artist in Residence, The New York Times

   Every day, each of us is adding to our own immense data inventory. Mobile phone records, social network conversations, purchase histories – all of these things are being stored, often without our knowledge or express permission. In this presentation, Jer will discuss how these data histories can be accessed, visualized and explored. He’ll show a variety of projects, including work from The New York Times R&D Group, the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan, and Popular Science. He’ll walk through collaborative processes, admit to a series of spectacular failures and ultimately show how custom software tools can be made to solve extraordinary data problems.

    

6. 11:00 – 11:30

   Break

7. 11:30 – 12:15

   Big Data in Libraries: Has Open Source’s Time Arrived?

   MJ Suhonos, Systems Librarian/Software Engineer, Artefactual Systems
   Peter Van Garderen, President/Systems Archivist, Artefactual Systems

   Libraries and consortia have a long history of managing millions of resources by their very nature. However, administering and maintaining such vast quantities of data has generally remained a task that was only achievable by large software vendors and research cooperatives that could afford the systems to do so. At the same time, technology has advanced exponentially in the past few decades while the nature and complexity of library metadata has remained relatively unchanged. Open Source software in particular has grown rapidly in less than a decade, and a number of free tools designed for working with humongous amounts of data have recently matured significantly. This presentation will share the experiences and lessons gained during a detailed technical analysis of software performance on a data set of almost four million archival records. Both relational (SQL) and document-based (NoSQL) software architectures are compared and characterized, and the results reveal a number of implications for institutions looking to manage, index, and search massive amounts of metadata. Especially given the recent rise in popularity of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud-based service offerings, has the time come for libraries to take control of the security and scalability of their own big data?

    

8. 12:15 – 12:45

   Hackfest Report 1

9. 12:45 – 2:15

   Lunch

10. 2:15 – 2:30

    Lightning talks 1

11. 2:30 – 3:15

    Tātou tātou: Caring and sharing in a Free and Open source Project

    Chris Cormack, Senior Developer, Catalyst IT

    Growing a Free Software community, lessons learnt from the Koha community. It is widely acknowledged that one of the most important parts of a Free software project is the community. But how does that community evolve? What dangers does it face? How do you deal with the multicultural and multilingual realities of a worldwide community? Koha is a 11 year old project to build a free software ILS. As the project has grown in popularity it has had to overcome several challenges. This presentation will cover how we have grown the community, how we have overcome these challenges and where we can go from here.

     

12. 3:15 – 3:45

    Break

13. 3:45 – 4:30

    Digital Preservation from Coast to Coast

    Geoff Harder, Digital Initiatives Coordinator, University of Alberta
    Mark Jordan, Head of Library Systems, Simon Fraser University
    Slavko Manojlovich, Associate University Librarian Information Technology, Memorial University of Newfoundland
    Bronwen Sprout, Digital Initiatives Coordinator, University of British Columbia

    Four panelists will describe digital preservation programs at their libraries, with a focus on practical activities. Even though all panelists are from academic libraries that produce similar kinds of content, the panel will showcase a diverse set of approaches to the problems of digital preservation, curation, and long-term access.

     

14. 4:30 – 5:00

    Lightning talks 2

15. 5:00 – 5:30

    Birds of Feather break out groups

16. 7:30

    Social Event

Friday, October 21st

1. 8:00 – 8:45

   Continental Breakfast

2. 8:45 – 9:00

   Opening Remarks, Housekeeping

3. 9:00 – 10:00

   Open to the Public: Indigenous Collections and the Ethics of Openness

   Kimberly Christen, Associate Professor, Washington State University
   Alex Merrill, Digital Initiative Librarian, Washington State University

   In the last twenty years collecting institutions have heeded the calls of Indigenous activists to integrate Indigenous curatorial models and knowledge systems into mainstream museum and archive practices. Web 2.0 technologies grounded in user-generated content and bottom-up exhibition and display modes have aided in producing a dynamic platform for sharing materials. This newly animated digital terrain, however, poses both possibilities and problems for Indigenous peoples as they seek to manage, revive, circulate and create new cultural heritage on their own and in collaboration with collecting institutions. While digital technologies allow for objects to be repatriated quickly, circulated widely and annotated endlessly, these same technologies pose challenges to Indigenous communities who wish to maintain traditional cultural protocols for the viewing, circulation and reproduction of their cultural materials. In these cases it is precisely the celebrated ease of circulation and lack of control that intrudes on and erases many Indigenous models for the circulation, reproduction and preservation of cultural knowledge and materials. Librarians are especially attuned to the nuances of collections materials as they seek to make resources available for multiple publics with oftentimes-divergent interests. Issues of access are paramount to librarians as they seek to make collections available in both physical and digital form. This presentation engages with engrained assumptions about the general public good of making collections accessible and the ethical dilemmas facing information specialists as they seek to negotiate the variances between Indigenous knowledge systems and their professional imperative to make collections “open to the public.” Specifically we will discuss the creation of the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, a reciprocally curated online archive of Native collections. We will discuss the projects goals, its technical foundation and its ethical underpinnings and provide a framework for ethical curation models and practical digital asset management in collaboration with Indigenous communities.

    

4. 10:00 – 10:45

   Softly, Softly, Catchee Monkey: Successful Development and Implementation

   Matt Carlson, ILS Administrator, King County Library System
   Grace Dunbar, COO, Equinox

   Matt Carlson from KCLS and Grace Dunbar from Equinox Software will guide attendees through the seedy underbelly of the open source software development process. They will deconstruct the process of creating and following through with an outsourced development project from both the client and vendor points of view. This session will cover the basics of identifying development needs, creating a scope of work, implementation, training, and, most importantly, keeping your eyes on the prize. The presentation will end with a recap of best practices and lessons learned from the recent development partnership between KCLS and Equinox.

    

5. 10:45 – 11:15

   Break

6. 11:15 – 12:00

   Canadiana Discovery Portal Metadata and API

   William Wueppelmann, Manager, Information Systems, Canadiana.org

   The Canadiana Discovery Portal was launched in the spring of 2010. By the end of its first year, it had indexed the metadata for about a million digital objects from a variety of libraries, museums, archives and galleries. Its goal is to be a centralized metadata repository for all of Canada’s digital content, accepting metadata from anyone who wants to contribute it, and exposing that metadata both interactively and through a Web service API. We’ll look more closely at the metadata ingest and normalization standards we’ve developed as well as the public Web API for searching and retrieving the collected metadata.

    

7. 12:00 – 12:30

   Hackfest Report 2

8. 12:30 – 2:00

   Lunch – No Host (Birds of Feather)

9. 2:00 – 2:45

   If you ain’t failin’, you ain’t tryin’

   Amy Buckland, eScholarship, ePublishing & Digitization Coordinator, McGill University Library
   Scott Hargrove, Director of Information Technology and Support Services at Fraser Valley Regional Library
   Declan Fleming, Director of IT, University of California, San Diego Libraries.
   Nick Ruest, Digital Preservation Librarian, Repository Architect and Digitization Coordinator, McMaster University

   Amy Buckland facilitates this panel discussion about failing: projects that went nowhere, sideways, or just combusted and what was learned from the experience. These panelists, experts on the topic, will convince us that failing can be fun and worthwhile.

10. 2:45 – 3:15

    Ask Anything: The Human Search Engine

    Brian Owen, Associate University Librarian for Processing and Systems, Simon Fraser University

    Adapted from Dan Chudnov @ code4lib 2011: A chance for you to ask a roomful of savvy library technologists anything that’s on your mind: questions seeking answers (short or long), requests for things (hardware, software, skills, or help), or offers of things. We’ll keep the pace fast, and the answers faster. Come with questions and line up at the start of the session and we’ll go through as many as we can; sometimes we’ll stop at finding the right person or people to answer a query and it’ll be up to you to find each other after the session. Questions via Twitter or IRC will also be accepted. First time at Access!

     

11. 3:15 – 3:45

    Break

12. 3:45 – 4:30

    Gardening the Wiki, Growing the Web: Transforming UBC Library’s approach to content management through UBC Wiki

    Paul Joseph, Systems Librarian, University of British Columbia
    Will Engle, Wiki Administrator, University of British Columbia
    Julie Mitchell, Learning Commons Coordinator, University of British Columbia

    Over the last two years, UBC Wiki has transformed UBC Library’s approach to content management. Working in conjunction with multiple WordPress websites as delivery tools, UBC Library staff are able to use the wiki as an open space to collaborate and build online content that is automatically republished across multiple UBC Library and University websites. This process challenges previously locked-down content management systems, and empowers staff to edit and share content to benefit the campus community. UBC’s Centre for Teaching and Learning Technology (CTLT) are driving this innovative approach, providing several web publishing services to the UBC community, including WordPress (as UBC CMS) and MediaWiki (as UBC Wiki). Multiple faculties, departments, and individual users, including UBC Library and the Learning Commons, have been adopting the wiki as a convenient centralized repository for web that offers the capability to seamlessly push content to multiple websites. This session will feature a panel of four speakers who worked collaboratively on this innovative approach to content management at UBC. Two CTLT staff members (Novak Rogic, Manager, Web Strategy, and Will Engle, Wiki Administrator) will speak from their perspectives of building and administrating the UBC CMS/Wiki service. Two Librarians (Julie Mitchell, Learning Commons Coordinator, and Paul Joseph, Systems Librarian) will address how the UBC Library is effectively using the system as a shared knowledge base and publishing UBC Wiki content to various UBC CMS websites.

     

13. 4:30 – 5:00

    Lightning talks 3

14. 7:00

    Social Event

Saturday, October 22nd

1. 8:00 – 8:45

   Continental Breakfast

2. 8:45 – 9:00

   Opening Remarks, Housekeeping

3. 9:00 – 9:45

   Open research data: fun, important, and in need of librarians

   Heather Piwowar, DataONE Postdoc, UBC, NESCent, and Dryad

   The results of research studies are communicated through conference papers and journal articles. The datasets behind the results — spreadsheets containing collected data, for example — are usually hidden from view on investigators’ hard-drives.  Thanks to the wonders of the internet it is now possible to host academic research datasets online, thereby making research data open and widely available for confirmation, reanalysis, and integration.  The revolution toward more efficient and inclusive research progress through data access is just beginning.  This presentation will highlight the promise of open research data and why academic (and public!) libraries and librarians are necessary as advisors, educators, and data hosts.

4. 9:45 – 10:30

   Evergreen ILS undressed

   Ben Hyman, Managing Director, BC Libraries Cooperative {Presentation Slides}
   Jed Moffitt, Director of Information Technology Services, King County Library System (KCLS)
   Steven Chan, Sitka Project Team
   James Fournie, Librarian/Developer, Sitka Project Team
   Matt Carlson, ILS Administrator, King County Library System
   Grace Dunbar, COO, Equinox

   Join panelists from KCLS, Sitka and the larger Evergreen community as they share their implementation and development stories; hear hot tips and learn about exciting development in progress.

5. 10:30 – 11:00

   Break

6. 11:00 – 11:45

   All together now: creating software ecosystems from open, interoperable components

   Bess Sadler, Software Engineer, Stanford University
   Marty Tarle, VP Engineering, Bibliocommons {Presentation Slides}

   Marty Tarle (BiblioCommons) and Bess Sadler (Stanford University Libraries, Blacklight, Hydra) will discuss various patterns for combining software components together into larger software ecosystems.  We’ll discuss distributed development, open systems and APIs, test driven development, continuous integration, and playing nicely with other software projects.

7. 11:45 – 12:30

   Closing Keynote – Open Data Policy

   Andrea Reimer, Councillor, City of Vancouver

    

8. 12:30 – 12:45

   Closing Remarks