What made it so?

Reno:

Reno is about 1,300m above sea level, which is a hell of a lot higher than the 80 or so metres above sea level that I live at, and believe me for the first few days I really felt that. If you add to that the humidity levels, which were as low as 4% some days. (I don’t think I saw a single cloud in 13 days) and you would think I would have hated it. But you would be wrong, it is really really really pretty, and the people (at least the ones I met) are really friendly. Heck, cars stopped (on 4 lane roads) to let us cross, in NZ they’d speed up.

Atlantis Hotel & Casino:

 Ok I admit by the end of it, I was sick of the lights, smokey atmosphere and noise on the casino floor. But the rooms were a lovely retreat away from that organised chaos. The bed was fantastic, the room was super clean and the internet worked well. I couldn’t have been happier with my room.

The conference venue was also top class, things went as smoothly as any conference I’ve been in and the layout of the room, with dual screens was great.

Washoe County Library System:

I want to extend huge thanks to Nancy and her team, who organised and managed a conference that ran without any major glitches.  But not only did they play a huge part in making Kohacon a success, but they also shared with those of us who stayed for the hackfest their self made self-check machines. The code of which is all open source of course, so you can do the same.

The Presenters:

As usual we had a great crop of speakers this year. There was only one that was a little bit vendorish, but the rest were great. Some of my highlights were the presentation about Koha use at Redeemers University in Nigeria. Their use of Koha helped them improve their ranking. Amber Hunt & Elliot Anders from Marlboro College talked about their use of CUFTS & GODOT, a way to free yourself from proprietary ERMS and Link resolver chains. Fred King who talked about using Koha as a citation manager. As well as pretty much everyone else except that Chris Cormack guy.

The Attendees

We had a wide range of attendees, librarians from all types of libraries, and developers from all over the world. People from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, France, Italy, UK, Nigeria, Barbados, Argentina, Germany and the other countries I am bound to have missed.

Lake Tahoe (and surrounds)

I’m going to let the photos speak for themselves.

Today was the first day of Kohacon13, it was a really good day, lots of great presentations. I’ll write up a bunch more later.