My DIY book scanner at the OLA conference!

[Misty]

Last week, I had a poster session at the OLA (Ontario Library Association)'s 2010 conference covering our digital collections project and local history wiki. Since equipment and cost were a big point of interest for a lot of people, I made sure to link this site on the poster and talk up the community as a way to digitize with less expensive equipment. I also printed out a bunch of copies of the great article Dan wrote about me and my projects, at the request of our library's CEO who loved it, and we ended up giving out a lot to interested people.

It was a great session! We had a lot of people who are interested in doing this kind of digitization project, none of them big libraries; a lot of people wanted to know how this kind of project could be practical in a small library. We had a bunch of things to hand out; the postcards you can see in the photos were pretty popular, along with the articles.

I showed the article to our partners at Our Ontario too, and they ended up linking it on the internal communication site for Our Ontario contributors. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of librarians started showing up soon interested in trying to build equipment of their own!

(Sorry the photos are kind of bad. The lighting where we were set up was kind of problematic for taking photos.)

[daniel_reetz]

Total awesomeness. Sounds like your poster session was a complete success, and I'm (obviously) quite pleased to hear that librarian-types might be dropping by. I hope, over time, more members feel comfortable representing and recommending the project, like Wels did at 26C3 and now you, here. Great stuff.