Access 2008 presentation: Project Conifer report

On Friday, October 3rd, I had the honour of presenting the progress of Project Conifer with my colleague John Fink to my peers at Access 2008. Project Conifer is the effort to bring the Evergreen open source library system to a consortium of academic libraries in Ontario (Algoma, Laurentian, McMaster, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and Windsor).

I'm just going to link quickly to the slides for now, as I'm a little bit brain-dead after the conference. John led off the talk with an overview of what Conifer is all about and why we were motivated to tackle such a large project - he has posted his slides via the SlideShare thingy. Editorial comment: I really enjoy John's presentation style and content. He's a hard act to follow!

And then I rambled on with an overview of the ups and downs of the project so far, the resources we have invested in the project, our progress towards our target go-live date (May 2009), and some sneak previews of the goodies that are included in the any-day-now-if-I-would-just-stop-going-to-conferences-and-apply-myself-for-a-few-days-dangit Evergreen 1.4 release. Well - they're not really sneak previews, because of course you could check the code out of the repository and built it yourself - but it's so much easier when somebody else already has it running, right?

Anyway, my slides are available in both OpenOffice.org Impress format and PDF.