Access 2007 draft program is online!

I had been getting anxious about the lack of news on the Access 2007 conference front, but just saw in my trusty RSS feed that the draft program schedule is now available. I'm already looking forward to Jessamyn West's opening keynote and Roy Tennant's closing keynote. They always bring interesting perspectives to the table.

I'm keenly anticipating (for obvious reasons) in the Open ILS, Web 2.0 and multitype provincial library initiatives in BC session -- the second implementation of a given application is always an interesting exercise, and it will be good to finally see the BiblioCommons social interface on a live system and find out how hard it was to write a BiblioCommons driver for Evergreen. I've had a chance to talk with Brandon Uhlman about some of the choices they've made for the hardware infrastructure and it should provide an interesting contrast to the Georgia PINES mega-cluster

The ILS Options for Academic Libraries session will also be interesting, although I'm a little worried about how well Evergreen will be represented. I know that Don Hamilton, from Wilfred Laurier University (WLU), has been working with Evergreen to a certain extent -- they have their e-book holdings loaded at Tamarak, although at the moment it doesn't seem to be responding. WLU is closely associated with the University of Waterloo and they collaborate on information technology, so I guess Allan Bell from WLU will be representing Evergreen on the panel. My worries are probably not warranted. And I find it both interesting and disappointing that Koha isn't mentioned at all as an option for an academic library. I suppose there are no Canadian academic institutions that have given Koha much serious consideration at this point; perhaps that will change once a Koha 3.0 release candidate becomes available and Koha will be better able to handle the volumes of items that academic libraries hold.

<rant>I don't understand why The Talis Platform gets a session. From the session description, it's purely a product presentation. Great, so the Talis Platform offers Web service APIs, and some people are building applications on that apparently. Yes, yes, you can share your data. What does it cost to store your data into the Talis Platform, and what other free or pay or income-generating features are Talis going to build on the back of all of that data they're hoping to attract, and why can't I simply get this information from the Web site, a product brochure, or a chat with a friendly Talis salesperson at a booth rather than taking up another valuable conference session?</rant>

Ah well. For one of the best library conferences, being held on Vancouver Island, I can deal with one off-key note. I already have my hotel room booked and I'll be keeping an eye on updates to the program schedule -- oh yeah, and registration is supposed to open up at the end of the week. Hope to see you there!