After the OCLC event ended, I attended an open meeting for the PLA Technology Committee. I’m not a member yet, but they were very nice in allowing me to sit in and participate. The chair is Bill Ptacek, director of the King County Library, and there were about 10 others present. They covered a lot of topics and got a lot accomplished. The discussion was good throughout and I found myself very engaged in the whole thing. The first order of business involved figuring out what topics to add/revise/delete from the PLA Tech Notes list. This is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in libraries and technology. Also, the discussion about the open-source ILS, Evergreen, was especially interesting. LJ had an article about it in their recent December issue and here’s another article. It’ll be very exciting if this really takes off and libraries across the country start using it. Oh, and I also heard of groovix for the first time…very cool stuff.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with the folks from APALA (Asian Pacific American Librarians Association). I’m not a member of this group yet, either, but one of their board members whom I met during the EL dinner reception invited me to join them today and I’m really glad I did. We started off at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in the International District (aka Chinatown) in Seattle. It’s the only pan-Asian museum in the entire country and they do a really nice job with their exhibits. We followed that with a tour of the International District led by a man who’s known as “Uncle Bob” in Seattle. He’s known as the unofficial mayor of the International District and has spent most of his life fighting for the people there. You can read more about him in this article. Uncle Bob was hilarious and very knowledgable. We ended the day with an incredible feast at a Chinese restaurant. Yum!