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For the first time since 2015, the koha-US conference is being held east of the Mississippi River, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. What an opportunity! Earlier in the year I decided to revise the MedStar Authors' Catalog--Koha has changed since I designed the original, and I've learned a lot more about MARC records, Medline tags, and what would be useful to display. I submitted a conference presentation proposal and it was accepted. Then my employer agreed to fund me for the trip. They even let me drive there! I had a lot of PTO built up during The Pestilence, so I added on another week to go camping. I tried to include a broad range of people and presentations, but a lot of the pictures didn't turn out. Maybe next time I'll take a real camera, not just my mobile phone. You can find all the conference presentations here. |
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| Photo credit: Christopher Brannon | |||
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| No, the cat isn’t going on this trip, either. | This time we're going in the van, not by plane. No airport scenes for this trip. | First stop: Delaware! | Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. |
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| The rain stops on the second day, and we take a break from driving. | We stop for breakfast. I’m not sure about the reasoning behind the pricing, but the cashier assures me that it’s true. Maybe their supplier buys eggs in Malta for seven cents and sells them at a profit for five cents in Connecticut. And everybody has a share. | We arrive in Portsmouth | ...and check into our hotel room. |
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| It’s a bit fancier than we expected. | John Sterbenz handles the registration and check-in. Check-in, not chicken. I'm the one with the chicken. | We meet Lauren Denny (c) in person for the first time. She, the chicken, Jason Robb (l), George Williams (r), and I sit in the back row. | The conference begins! Christopher Brannon, koha-US president, addresses the room. |
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| Mindy Atwood, New Hampshire Assistant State Librarian, gives the keynote address. | The first day is packed with presentations. Christopher talks about QR codes… | Kellie Stephens demonstrates the McKinney Public Library's customized self-checkout system. Designing it themselves gave them extra functionality and lower costs. Yes, you can do that in Koha! It's infinitely configurable! | Rhonda Kuiper and Barbara Johnson talk about acquisitions, with three online colleagues contributing. |
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| Wally DesChamps, Bob Bennhoff, and Nick Clemens tell us all about Koha's development process. Koha is user-driven, so if you have an enhancement in mind, jump right in! | Did you know Koha has a Children's Theme plugin? Barbara, Jason, and Lucas Gass do. | We meet Wally after his talk. | Sekhar Mallampati and I chat in front of the library. He’s the librarian whose talk at KohaCon 2018 on cataloging a unique collection of Caribbean literature gave me the idea of using Koha, a Raspberry Pi, and Z39.50 to create a library. No, I’m not looking down my nose, I’m looking through my bifocals. |
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| Exhausted from the first day, we go back to our room, admiring the town as we go. | And return to the library for the second day. We find a shortcut. | The library has a set of tools next to the bike rack. This looks like a job for Bicycle Repairman! | We say hello to Sarah Cornell (l) and Laura Horwood-Benton (r) of the City of Portsmouth Library. Sarah did a wonderful job of hosting this year's conference. She even found some gaffer's tape for me when my laser pointer fell apart. |
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| We take a look around the library before it opens. | Have a magazine? Give a magazine. Want a magazine? Take a magazine. | The library has a cafe! | We meet another chicken in the children’s section. |
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| Christopher prepares for the start of the second day... | ...as Bob, koha-US vice-president, looks on. | Madge Boldt talks about long, long overdues and what to do about them. | We meet her after her talk. Madge used to work in a hospital library where residents had to be cleared by the library before leaving. Apparently I'm not the only person who has heard departing residents say "I didn't know the hospital had a library..." |
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| Christopher and George record one of their Terrific Every-Other-Thursday Videos. It did not go as planned. | Lunch time! This time we go to the Flatbread Company. In the interests of fairness and inclusion, we also ate lunch at the Friendly Toast and Popovers on the Square, as well as the Thirsty Moose, featured below. All were superb. | After which Georgette Rogers talks about circulation workflows | Wendy Hisko, Richard Pritsky, and Kim Peine talk about creating VOKAL, the first shared ILS in Vermont. Richard came up with a motto: “Screw it, just do it,” which I have adopted. Not as elegant as Grace Hopper’s "It is better to ask forgiveness than permission," but more pithy. |
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| It’s the Andrew and Nick show! This time Andrew Fuerste-Henry and Nick talk about CSS and jQuery. | Hanging out with the Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Library folks, Emily Lamancusa (l) and Felicity Brown (r), Full disclosure: I live in Montgomery County and I consider the library to be a splendid use of my hard-earned tax dollars. | Third day! We begin with the Jesse and Kelly show. Jessie Zairo and Kelly McElligott, both from ByWater Solutions, present "How to Get the Most Out of the Koha ERM Module." We try to understand, but we don't use Koha for electronic resources management, so most of it goes over our heads. | Sarah gives us a tour of the library. She’s explaining something profound here. |
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| We get to see what's behind the Staff Only door. | We meet Heather and Stacia. For catalogers, they seem pretty normal. | The Grand Stairway of the library. | |
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| Lunch time! I had hoped to go to a place that featured lobster rolls, but they had run out before we arrived. We go to the Thirsty Moose Taphouse instead. They have craft beer, but since I have a talk coming up, I had water instead. | I talk about modifying Koha to use as an authors’ catalog. I’ve given the talk before, but I updated the catalog structure earlier this year so I have more to talk about. (Reenactment) You can see my presentation here. | Lauren explains her consortium's Item Type cleanup. Like us, she's not supported by a vendor. Like our project, it was a learning experience. | By now we've figured out the best way to get to the library from our hotel. Too bad it's the last day. |
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| We visit Portsmouth’s African Burying Ground memorial along the way. | The last day begins! | Nick talks about elasticsearch. | And I do a live demo of how to install it. What could possibly go wrong? Well, pretty much everything. |
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| The conference winds down. | Jason, Lauren, The Chicken, and I walk to my hotel after the conference. | A final look out the window. | And we leave Portsmouth. Since we were in New Hampshire anyway and had a van, we head north... |
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| ...to Maine. Actually, this part of Maine is just over the river, but we're going further than that. | We stop at a well-known purveyor of boots and other items. | And keep going until we reach the campground at Acadia National Park. I was last there many years ago, so it was time to go back and spend a few days. I somehow forgot to take any means of making fire, so I borrowed some fire from a neighboring camper. | We go in to Bar Harbor to look for fire lighters. We weren’t in need of a lawyer, so we took our custom elsewhere. Good prices on lawyers, though. |
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| And we got in some hiking. Working in my basement during the Pestilence left me really out of shape, so it was more strolling than hiking. | We visit Northeast Harbor, a small town in the southwest corner of Mt Desert Island. | Time to head home. Along the way we stop at the Big Chicken Barn bookstore, the largest used bookstore in Maine. | First stop: the cartoon books! |
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| And we're happy to find the section on libraries | The store does go on a bit, doesn't it? It really was a chicken barn, though now it smells like old books. Fortunately. | We hope these are two different collections, but I have been reliably informed that this *is* a genre. Apparently I need to broaden my range of reading. Or maybe knowing it exists is sufficient. | We pay for our purchases and head south. |
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| It starts to rain as we get to Connecticut | The BBC's Breaking News app often has useful information. We're glad we got this one before we entered New York! The last thing New York City and I need is another vehicle on the road, so we look for a detour. | Ninety minutes later we get an emergency alert, complete with sound. The detour around wasn't bad. | We're home! |