The date for your diary is Tuesday 7th July 2009 and the event will take place in a large studio space in the Creative Arts Building at the University of Huddersfield. The online registration form should appear before the end of April.
If you want to keep up-to-date with the event, then make sure you join the mashedlibrary group on ning.com. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed from the event blog and the Twitter hash is #mashlib09.
The planning for the event is very much a group effort with seven of us having semi-regular meetings in pubs: Zoë, Lisa, Bryony, Tanya, Iman, Graham and myself. Although there’s still plenty of logistical stuff to figure out, it feels like the event is coming together nicely and hopefully we’ve managed to incorporate most of the feedback and suggestions from the first event.
The event will mostly be an unconference and we’re aiming to create an environment that will encourage networking, creativity and fun. Ideally, we’d like to attract a good mix of developers and tech-savvy librarians, and we think we can probably fit around 50 people into the studio.
The plan is to kick off with a couple of structured sessions, which will include an introduction to using Yahoo Pipes for those of you who’ve never played with mashups before (courtesy of the one-and-only Tony Hirst). At the same time, there’ll be a more techie session for the developers.
After those sessions, we’ll move to a more informal unconference style event. You’ll be encouraged to network, to get creative with the various available data sources, to brainstorm new ideas and to come up with prototypes.
If you’re a librarian with ideas, then Mashed Library is a fantastic opportunity to meet with techies who can turn those ideas into working prototypes and services. And, if you’re a techie, this is a chance to brainstorm with librarians and write code that’ll provide cool new services to library users!
We’d also like to encourage student librarians (and any other students who love libraries) to come to the event. We’ll shortly be announcing how you can apply for sponsorship to attend for free and to have your travel costs covered.
Speaking of sponsorship, we’d like to thank Talis for stepping up to be the main sponsors of the event. Talis have a long history of helping sponsor developer events (e.g. Code4Lib 2009) and they’ll be ensuring you don’t faint from lack of nourishment during the day!
We also like to attract sponsorship for prizes. If you’re an organisation who can make data available for the event, we’d love you to sponsor a prize for the best use of your data on the day (please get in touch with me if you’d like to discuss this)
Throughout the day we’ll be running short 5 minute “lightning talks”. Who’ll be giving those talks? You will, of course! The talks will be your chance to pitch an idea, show off something you’ve done, talk about your favourite web site/service, or to just rant for a few minutes. The talks will be optional, but we’re sure they’ll be something of interest to everyone.