My contribution this year took the form of co-presenting with a colleague from UBC on an initiative to scale up a regional digital preservation network. It's not every day you get to subject 200 people to a half hour or so of talk on what some might consider a relatively obscure topic, and it's even less often that you can do that in a venue where you're pretty sure a reasonable number of those in the room will in fact be interested. And for me, that's probably the biggest draw here: a chance to meet with peers and colleagues from across the country, many of whom are working through the same kinds of problems I am, and have lots of interesting experiences and hard-won wisdom to share.
Of course, having attended for as long as I have, it's interesting to think back over previous discussions, and contemplate the various themes that have come and gone over the years, or else matured and morphed into something else. When I started going it was the early days for libraries on the web, and we were still working out really fundamental things like "how do we provide access to databases from home," or "what's a good programming language for web development". Those topics have more or less fallen off the table because, guess what, we eventually found some pretty decent answers to those questions. In fact, most of the topics that were on the program at Access 98 wouldn't get much airplay these days, although they were the focus of much debate back then.
Following on from the very early nuts and bolts days, the rise of open source and open content in the late 90s and early oughts gave the conference a somewhat different spin for a while, introducing a lot of new blood and new ideas, including the perennial Hackfest, which has been a fixture since the first one was held informally in the conference suite back in Windsor in 2002. Those ideas have most definitely not gone away but I think it's safe to say they've pretty much been mainstreamed now; just another aspect of our technological environment, albeit still important. "Here's a new open source development project that we're doing" sessions now have to share airtime with "how can we sustain and enhance these mature opens source projects" sessions.
It's interesting too how topics seem to cluster around particular themes each year. Part of that might have to do with the particular interests of each conference committee (and they change from year to year) but I think a lot of it has to do with how conversations in the broader areas of technologies and libraries are themselves moving forward. If I had to pick a theme for this year, I'd nominate "opening up libraries to under-served groups." Whether that involves driving a Maker Bus around to different communities, or partnering with community groups to deliver open data hackathons, releasing our own data sets as linked data, or developing better usability and accessibility for library websites, there are a lot of ways we could get better at reaching out and making things work better for people. In that context our presentation was a bit of an outlier, but there are always a few of those too.
One of the other great features of the Access conferences is how they travel around the country. It's been a real privilege to visit parts of Canada I likely never would have seen otherwise, and re-visit places I go to far less often than I'd like. In the former category are cities like Saskatoon, Guelph, Hamilton, Charlottetown and Windsor. In the latter are Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Calgary. And of course I hope other folks feel the same way about Vancouver and Victoria, both of which have hosted in the past. In fact Vancouver's done it three times, starting with Access '96, and then again in 2003 and 2012. That may be a record.
Not surprisingly, the cast of characters has changed a lot over the years. Many of the first generation who became identified with the conference have either retired or moved on, and sadly a few have passed away. Even the second generation types, of which I'd consider myself to be one, either have stopped attending or don't attend as often as before, and there are a few noticeable gaps in that department this year. But a certain amount of turnover can't be a bad thing; new people often bring new ideas, and that's what keeps it all interesting.
For the record, here's a picture taken by Dan Chudnov at the first Access hackfest in 2002. That's me leaning against the cabinet with my arms crossed.
(It was a somewhat less homogenous group than this photo might suggest, see the Flickr album for a better sense of who was there).