Last week Cary and I attended Internet Librarian 2014 in Monterey, California. We spent 4 days meeting people, discussing projects, and promoting Drupal, Islandora, and open source in general.
Cherry Hill Drupal Workshops
On Sunday we gave two Drupal workshops to some very enthusiastic learners. The interest and excitement of the audience allowed us to be more conversational and less reliant on a script. We were also able to focus on specific topics people wanted to learn about. The attendees at the first workshop, Drupal Essential Tools: Beyond the Basics?(slides attached below), were so eager to learn more about what they could do with Drupal for their sites?that?it made presenting a breeze. After an overview talking about what Drupal can do for libraries, we demonstrated how the following modules work:
- Views
- Entity Reference
- Display Suite
- Features
For many beginner to intermediate Drupal users, understanding and exploring these foundational modules can boost their productivity with Drupal significantly. The feedback we received about how these workshops help to get people over the bumps in the learning curve really have really encouraged?us to continue giving similar?trainings.
The second workshop, Taking Your Site to the Next Level with Drupal (slides attached below), took place after lunch. I have to give a shoutout to our attendees who stuck it out and remained engaged while battling food coma and the deluge of demos we were throwing at them. This workshop dug deep into the decision-making aspect of building a Drupal site. The modules and use-cases that we looked at head-to-head included:
- Panels vs. Display Suite + Context
- Workflow vs. Workbench
- Field Collection vs. Field Group
The point of the session was not to pick winners and losers, but to examine how the modules are different and what factors to consider when choosing a solution. There are always multiple ways to solve problems with Drupal because with such a large and diverse community we all know that one size does not fit all. At the end of the session I was pleased to hear from one attendee that she thought Panels sounded like the perfect fit for the circumstances at her library, while another was very excited to try out Display Suite and Context together because they would work best for all members of his team. The biggest takeaway that I tried to emphasize was that everyone should take time to test out different solutions and see what they really do before making decisions.
Conference Sessions
After a full day of presenting workshops on Sunday, we were also able to attend a number of great sessions during the conference. Highlights for me included the Content Management track on Monday where a number of libraries showed off how they were managing digital collections with the fascinating material and unique workflows used to build and maintain them. The User Experience track on Tuesday really emphasized that cohesiveness among various library web properties ought to be a goal when thinking about user experience, as well as keeping website content fresh. Yes, that means weeding content. I remember my days of weeding the shelves as a library page. Now the process continues online.
I'm keeping my eye on http://www.libconf.com/event/internetlibrarian/il2014/ in case they put up any session videos for the ones I missed.
Dine-Around Dinners
The dine-around dinners were probably my favorite part of the conference (except for talking for nearly six-hours straight on Sunday, of course). Cherry Hill sponsored the appetizers and wine for the Drupal in Libraries dine-around dinner at Montrio's on Monday night. I really enjoyed hearing about people's roles in their libraries and how they are using Drupal. Plenty of tips and tricks were shared. The biggest ah-ha moment for a couple of people was when I explained what the Flag module can do for them on their sites. (In this case, it would allow a librarian a simple way to mark specific resources to be included in and ordered on existing resource subject lists.)
The Emerging Technology & Implications for Libraries dine-around on Tuesday was also filled with lively discussions. The iPad dispensing machine seen in the exhibit hall was a hit. I talked with a few people who have Drupal and Islandora projects going on in their libraries, and a number of libraries I spoke with are trying to make the move to more open source software.?Of course, we always encourage the use of open source and are happy to offer support to libraries making those moves. Open source and libraries go hand-in-hand, in my opinion, and I'm glad we at Cherry Hill can help implement those solutions.