hangingtogether.org

On Monday and Tuesday close to 200 people (online and in person) gathered together to consider the topic of collaboration at our forum, Yours, Mine, Ours: Leadership Through Collaboration.

• Powered by 22 speakers
• Planned by 15 people
• Aided by 4 sponsoring organizations
• Hosted by the Smithsonian Institution

View from the podium

If you glanced at the agenda and the lineup of speakers and topics, I’m sure you thought, “Wow, that must have been quite an event.” You would be right. I was one of three people asked to summarize the event (and was given only four minutes to speak!). It was tough to take two days of content, especially such rich content, and boil it down to something succinct, but I think I did a reasonably good job, so I’m sharing it with you all.
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Tomorrow Bruce Washburn and I leave from the San Mateo office of OCLC Research to help run the WorldCat Mashathon in Boston (well, Cambridge, really, but you could toss a rock across the river and hit Boston). I really enjoy these events, since it is a couple days of helping library programmers learn about OCLC Web Services with a good chunk of time set aside to play with them. We’ll have all day Thursday and Friday to devote to learning and playing, which can be time difficult to come by when under pressure to deliver at your place of employment.

Previous Mashathons have yielded a number of new mashups, many of which have ended up in our Application Gallery. Previous attendees have also integrated a number of service improvements in their local systems using these APIs. Mashers are not limited to OCLC APIs by any means. We take pains to point out a list of library-related APIs that I maintain over on my TechEssence.info site. Any API is fair game. Or linked data, or what have you. Whatever developers can use to improve their local services is fine with us.

So why did I title this post “Monster Mash”? Why I’ll be there…why else?