So I didn’t do a full post for all the sessions, but the live notes that were taken and presumably, video recordings will later be posted on the Access 2011 website.
Data Visualization
Jer Thorp gave a great talk on the data visualization work he’s done and has been working on at the New York Times. I couldn’t really take notes since so much of it was visual, but he blew a lot of minds with his work, so check out his blog.
My Lightning Talk
What really excited me beyond the work itself was the fact that he mentioned he was doing it all through Processing, so I decided to do a lightning talk to introduce everyone to Processing and more importantly Processing.js.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, Processing is an open source programming language primarily used for dynamic and interactive graphing and data visualization. Processing.js is the sister project which brings processing to the web. What’s the greatest part of processing.js is that a developer can start doing the same sort of thing but from the JavaScript side.
Check out the demos to see what kind of things you can possible do. I am particularly interested in the educational applications, such as giving students interactive graphs to see how mathematical functions work (see the Bezier Curves tutorial).
Added value: web accessible, Drupal plug-in, WordPress plug-in, fun games like a remake of Asteroids on the exhibition page.
See Access Live Notes for Lightning Talks and talks about other tools.
Digital Preservation
- what does digital preservation mean? preserving more than objects and items
- think on scalability
- preserve what matters
- start with policy and practice, not a platform
- library can’t do it alone, partner with IT, Archives, etc.
- need to think strategically
- no one answer
- some good tools
- get started
- think about what we can do with partnership
Fail Panel
The fail panel was great, because there were a lot of great stories by the panelists and others. Here are some of the lessons learned from the fail stories.
- bleeding edge is not always great
- good escape clauses to get out of bad situations
- make sure company is stable
- don’t make thematic websites – not scalable
- don’t be working on original records or have a backup
- never trust a tech
- if you think it’s a bad idea, speak up
- don’t have a project driven by one person
- sometimes there isn’t a tech solution
- make sure you press the right button
- need to make sure
Share your own stories at failbrary.org
Thoughts
This was actually my first conference, but I think (and I’m clearly not the only one) it’s been really well put together and the food has especially been awesome, many within great socials. There’s been some tech fail, but that’s expected at every place I think.
I have particularly liked this conference because rather than simply having speakers talk, everyone has been highly encouraged to participate in some way (i.e. hackfest + presentations, lightning talks). I never though I’d be speaker at a conference, especially my first, but with the nature of the talks and encouragement of people got me to do a lightning talk. I think that alone speaks loads to the community.
It’s been an awesome experience, I’ve learnt a lot, and met a lot of great people. I really hope to be able to attend the next one.
Access 2012
Sad to see Access 2011 end, but for next year, a site will be set up to see who will host it, and the planning of the conference will be continued code4lib style.