Robin's Wednesday

After the opening session, with remarks from Patrick Sommers and a very honest appraisal of the 8.x development process (including the problems) from Talin Bingham (I believe his name was), Mary and I went to a session on 8.x serials. It looks like it's closer to what we currently have than what we've seen before, with some cool new functionality. After lunch I attended Melissa's session on disaster recovery. She did a good job, gave a nice overview of the process. During the break, a guy from another consortium said she gave him some good info. The second presenter from her panel was from Jefferson Parish in Lousiana and had some harrowing stories about Katrina. One interesting note he had was that when they went to do payroll, the direct deposits all went through fine, but people who depended on paper checks couldn't get paid.

I missed the second half of Melissa's session because I checked in with Amy's ILL network consortia panel. It was interesting to hear the different ways people have approached the ILL process, and the different levels of support they get from their counties, states, etc.

My last session was on 8.x acq, which covered some of the same ground as an earlier session, which I believe Mary attended. They do seem to have some cool consortial functionality, and a lot of settings that are network-wide now can be set n a library-by-library basis, although some of them Mary may decide to keep the same anyway. At least we'll have a choice :)

The internet in the hotel is a little slow, possibly because everyone is on at the same time, but I will try to post some photos too. The 70s party is in an hour, so I'd better go get ready!