Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Code4Lib conference taking place in Raleigh, North Carolina. To quote from their website, Code4Lib “is a volunteer-driven collective of hackers, designers, architects, curators, catalogers, artists and instigators from around the world, who largely work for and with libraries, archives and museums on technology stuff”. The conference lasted four days in total and was highly enjoyable from start to finish. The most striking feature of the conference is the community nature of it – the program is largely selected online by public vote, and the sessions are hosted by community volunteers, as are any social events. The majority of attendees were north american as you would expect, but there were a small number of international attendees.

At a technical level the conference reflected modern themes, particularly User Experience. At least three quarters of the presentations featured Javascript (apologies for lapsing into techie speak).

On the social front there was a visit to the NCSU Hunt Library. I went expecting to be underwhelmed and was stunned by what I saw. This is a purpose built modern library incorporating all the modern features you could imagine and plenty more besides. The first thing you notice is that there are no bookshelves, all access being taken care of by a robot! But perhaps most impressive are the various multimedia rooms and open spaces. Worth noting that much of the software for these spaces was developed by students at NCSU. Here is a little taster but please do check out the website https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary.

Robin Taylor – Library Digital Development