Our thanks to Siobhan McGuinness, who kindly accepted to offer a review of the New Professionals Day Ireland that took place on 7 March in Kildare, Ireland. Siobhan is from Waterfront City in Ireland and she graduated from University College Dublin with a MLIS in 2013. She is currently an intern at The Heritage Council Ireland as a Library Records Management Assistant.
New Professionals Day Ireland took place in Maynooth University Library, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland on the 7th March 2015 #npdi15
The theme on the day was The Open Source Library, which featured a live presentation on 3D printing in an academic library, two presentations followed featuring;
Koha, the web based open source library management system.
Omeka a free, open source content management system for online digital collections.
3D printing according to Pryor 2014 is as follows:
“Three dimensional (3D) printing is a technology by which a machine builds a physical object from a digital model”
The live presentation showed just that, the physical object being an elephant and the digital model of this elephant is stored on a SD card that is inserted into the 3D printer.
The raw material being plastic, fed into a nozzle which built layers on layers and in four hours produced a blue elephant!
It was super to watch in action and as the day progressed all attendees were able to watch as the printer built each part. The enthusiasm was visible among everyone as many questions were asked however the end discussion being what we would call the elephant! (He has been named Koha and now lives in Cork)
The next session began with the ever funny David Hughes, from Dublin Business School, (DBS) here David spoke about Koha the web based open source library management system.
As this is freely available for anyone to use I was interested in how challenging or easy it would be to implement within a library big or small. The questions that I had in my mind going in, David answered them all, the context of your library is crucial to implementing such software. Who are your users? What material does it hold? What are its lending polices? These exact questions David had outlined in his demo handout.
In an academic context this is an outstanding resource to have where for example in DBS you can forecast the most reserved titles in the last 6 months or see how library usage and exam success is analysed.
Networking revolves around lunch, which is great as you get to catch up with previous classmates and mingle with new LIS students, I always feel refreshed after these chats as everyone is readily giving advice and reassurance for the next stages in each person’s career.
Lastly it came to the afternoon presentation with Padraic Stack on Omeka, the free, open source content management system for online digital collections. This I was familiar with as I had used it in my MLIS module Digital Libraries. The assignment let me create my own account in Omeka and build my own digital collection, which was exciting. However in 2013 the software was very basic and as I was a student there was no need to upgrade to a costly package, so it became frustrating as I built my collection.
Having said that the software today has been updated and it is a lot nicer to use, the example Padraic showed of his digital collection was very impressive. This featured a collection called The Teresa Deevy Archive.
Omeka had crossed my mind before when I was researching digital collections and I quickly said no to it. After this presentation I am reviewing this decision and I do hope someday soon I may get to use it.
The event was a great day, Maynooth is a wonderful place to visit and their library is outstanding, thank you to the NPD Ireland team , once again you have created a wonderfully informative day.