I had the pleasure of attending Library Camp a couple of weeks ago at Ann Arbor District Library. I thought it was a great event. As a student, it gave me a great, low-cost way to go to a conference (or “unconference”) and talk to other librarians—as well as patrons. I think it was great to get really interested non-librarians (like [Superpatron Ed Vielmetti], the instigator of the whole event) in a room with a bunch of librarians and just hash over issues.

You can get good summaries of what went on elsewhere (the L2 wiki, Ryan Eby, John Blyberg among other places), and my memory is fuzzy at this point anyway. But I do have a few thoughts to share:

• I thought the unconference format worked well. Basically, there’s no preset schedule or speakers. Everyone shows up, talks about what they’re interested in, and a schedule gets created. I think it’s a great, low-cost way to get people together and talk about something, and it can easily be replicated.
• The Ann Arbor District Library is wonderful! Full of people, especially kids, and lots of interesting stuff going on. The day of Library Camp there was also a video game tournament going on.
• One of the issues I started to get really jazzed about was the idea of a Netflix-style queue model for borrowing. General consensus was that the current holds models in ILSes and the business processes of libraries don’t support it very well. I’ve been cooking up some ideas in this area (and another little Ruby on Rails project). More on this coming soon in a post.
• Most of all, it was great to meet people and just talk about libraries. Check out the photos on Flickr.