About 40 of us were in Kingston, ON last Friday for Code4Lib North.  It 
was a great day!  I had a really good time and I hope everyone else did 
too.

Thursday there were about twenty people hanging out in the afternoon, and 
most went off for dinner and some ended up at the Sleepless Goat for 
dessert.  I don't think much hacking went on, but the hanging out was 
good.

Friday we started at 9.  There were 10 twenty-minute talks, and before 
lunch we did an Ask Anyone session (like Dan Chudnov did at Code4Lib in 
Asheville).  Queen's University generously provided lunch.  When we came 
back we had nine or ten lightning talks, the last three talks, and then 
broke up and some BOF sessions happened.  The library shut at 4:30 and a 
group headed out for dinner while others went back home.

I knew some of the people there but there were lots of new faces.  The 
talks were all very interesting.  I went first and was, I'm afraid, 
insufficiently awake.

Walter Lewis spoke for himself and Art Rhyno about linked data and old 
Kingston newspapers in Our Ontario.  MJ Suhonos's location-aware mytpl.ca 
had people oohing and ahhing when it showed that the nearest copy in 
Toronto of a certain book was at a branch in the very east end of the city 
(Kingston being 250 km east of Toronto).  Alan Harnum talked about Toronto 
Public Library's use of Endeca, and attributed some of its features for a 
level 20 wizard.

Glen Newton's visualization of domains of knowledge in scientific journals 
was eye-opening.  John Miedema gave a summation of OpenBook, his 
WordPress plugin that he's weaning from development, and Eric Palmitesta 
gave a great tutorial on XQuery and Exist.  Nasser Saleh talked about 
Coagmento (www.coagmento.org), a collaborative browsing/research tool.

I don't have the details of the nine or ten lightning talks, though people 
here will be glad to know Ed Corrado plumped for the Code4Lib Journal and 
encouraged us all to write for it.

Anyone who spoke Friday---can you please edit the wiki to add a link to 
slides or a web site?  Lightning talkers too, or just give a name to your 
talk, so everyone knows who spoke about what.

Thanks again to Queen's University and Wendy Huot for organizing 
everything there.  I think it was a really fun and informative day, and I 
hope everyone else felt the same.

One last note:  we decided to delete the code4lib-north mailing list and 
have any future discussions here on the main list.  If we need to, we can 
make a separate list again, but there's no demonstrated need.

Cheers,

Bill
-- 
William Denton, Toronto : miskatonic.org www.frbr.org openfrbr.org