I disagree about the random registration concept. As long as the time
is announced in advance (which was done this year) people should plan
accordingly. You didn't need to register the first minute this year. I
registered an hour after registration opened and while I was initially
on the waiting list, I eventually got a slot. If I ended up getting
locked out it would've been my own fault. I could have done what
others did and purposely avoided scheduling meetings around that time
and rescheduled the one that was but I didn't. Yes, I have bazillions
of other things to do and the registration time wasn't convenient for
me, but everyone else has bazillions of things to do as well. It would
not have been luck that got the people in who registered before me a
slot - it would have been a combination of their good planning and my
poor planning. Yes good people miss out when registration fills up and
maybe the library world suffers, but a random process would still have
good people miss out -- including those who would make the effort and
adjust there schedules accordingly -- which I think would lead to the
library world suffering more.

Edward

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Karen Schneider <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I was really hoping that our Associate Director for Library Technology
> could attend Code4Lib. She did her best, but didn't make it. She was then
> pushed hard, early on, to drop her hotel room, which she did not do (good
> for her) though I'm guessing she has by now. We're a 5-person library and
> it's amazing to have someone with her expertise (IT tried to steal her
> before I arrived, but I took her back), and we wouldn't be what we were
> without her. I felt I owed her Code4Lib, but busy with my own distractions
> I hadn't been on this list for a long time, and didn't tune in to the fact
> that registration for C4L has become so nutzo that either she or her proxy
> needed to be sitting on the reg process the very minute it opened, not a
> few minutes later. She was probably doing one of the 8 bazillion things she
> does every long day that help keep us going and differentiate us from all
> the other teeny-weeny uni libraries out there.
>
> The library world will be a little less than what it could be because she's
> not at Code4Lib.
>
> My idea: registration should open for two weeks, close, and then assign
> spots randomly (and if it's too hard to think how that might be done, I
> have a few thousand old catalog cards you can toss in a bucket).
>
> FYI, I know what zoia is, and I even know WHO the real Zoia is, but
> invoking that super-secret-stuff is just icky. Maybe she doesn't need your
> super-secret decoder rings anyway. She does want to stretch herself beyond
> what we can make possible. We'll keep looking.
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> Director for Library Services
> Holy Names University
> http://library.hnu.edu