Thanks to everyone for participating in the first Code4Lib Virtual Lightning Talks on Friday. In particular, my gratitude goes out to Ed Corrado, Luciano Ramalho, Michael Appleby, and Jay Luker being the first presenters to try this scheme for connecting library technologists. My apologies also to those who couldn’t connect, in particular to Elias Tzoc Caniz who had signed up but found himself locked out by a simultaneous user count in the presentation system. Recordings of the presentation audio and screen capture video are now up in the Internet Archive.

Lessons Learned

Second, some comments I got were about cranky Java applets and applications. LYRASIS has two conference tools at its disposal — Java-based Centra and Flash-based Acrobat Connect — and I chose Centra because running Flash on LINUX is an issue. Maybe this will need to be revisited (or maybe there is another Java-based conference system that can do better).

Third, since we were not limited by space and other timing constraints, can the five-minutes-per-presenter limit be relaxed? I have mixed feelings about this; I think defined time limits promote better presentations, but the four presentations this first go-around went to the end of the five minute time limit and there was no opportunity for questions or audience interaction.

On the whole, it seemed like a positive experience from my perspective and from that of the feedback I’ve received so far. I’m going to start a conversation thread in Code4LibCon (where all of the Code4Lib meeting planning discussion takes place) to see if it is worthwhile to do again and to identify what should be done differently. If you are interested, please consider joining and contributing to the discussion. Or e-mail me privately and I’ll reflect your comments into the group discussion.

In March, I gave a presentation at the NISO forum on Next Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards. For those that were there, you may remember the bulk of the presentation was in the screencast tours of the functionality of 10 OPAC enhancement tools. Topping out at over 750MB, the presentation file was too big to share, but I promised to put together a combination of the presentation audio and the screencast videos in a much more manageable size. That video, along with a cleaned up version of the audio, is posted below.

For more information about the presentation, including links to the 10 tools that were demonstrated, see the previous DLTJ post on the topic. Lastly, here are some links to the downloadable form of the presentations:

• Presentation video (same as above, in Flash format, 90MB)
• Presentation audio (MP3 format, 49MB)

Thank you to the NISO staff for making the audio available.

Update