My Experience at the North American Koha Users Group Meeting in Wenatchee

by Todd Goatley-Seals on Aug 12, 2014

What a great kickoff for the first NAKUG 2014 Conference. First, I want to say that even with all of the major fires raging around Wenatchee it did not seem to be affected one bit. While we were there the air was good, the sky was clear and the mountainous landscape was a wonderful backdrop for this quaint but bustling little town. And NCRL, what a cool library! Located in the warehouse district of Wenatchee in a renovated old Coca-Cola bottling plant, the NCRL library had lots of cool retro stylings that were reminiscent of early times. All this and situated close tothe Columbia River by great restaurants .. this conference was great!

NAKUGgot underway with about 40+- library folks, representing different libraries from various parts of the US andeveryone bringing their best interests in Koha at heart. The ByWater contingency was there to show support and to answer Koha development questions, do some lighttraining ondifferent system modules and, if needed, help with facilitating conference flow. But everything went off without a hitch and the NAKUGgot its legs and began walking!

As the conference progressed and the participantswarmed up to one another some took turns volunteering or being called upon to inform the group of a topic they were familiar with and though there wasn’t much in the way of “break out‚Äù group discussions this whole conference was like one big break out discussion .. so it was great! It was awesome being in a setting where people can can speak from the heart and everyone is bent onfinding positive solutions and offering positive feedback. Yep, Koha is a path for positive library people, looking for positive library solutions and finding positive library results .. man I feel like a hippie .. YIPPEE!!

Hot dang Koha’s the best! 🙂