San Diego State University hosted Islandora Camp 2018 at the first of November. Unlike my last conference, I did not have to travel far for Islandora Camp, just simply walk a few doors down from my office. Islandora is an open-source software framework designed to help institutions collaboratively manage and discover digital assets.

Everything started beautifully. Melissa Anez, from the Islandora Foundation, introduced herself and explained the idea behind Islandora. We soon introduced ourselves to the room. We stated which institutions we represented, explained what we wanted to accomplish during the camp, and enjoyed a moment of levity sharing who our favorite cartoon character from our childhood is. Mine is Batman. Melissa continued explaining resources and community groups available for help. Later on, Mark Jordan from Simon Fraser University and Jared Whiklo from the University of Manitoba talked about CLAW, the next version of Islandora, and where it stands in development.

The next day, we broke into different groups to cover different roles. I went into the developer group and we discussed Islandora with Mark and Jared leading the group. Topics discussed throughout the day ranged from content models, the stack, Tuque and Hooks coding, and changes to be expected in CLAW.

The last day was filled with demos of sites and features. San Diego State’s own Katie Romabiles presented our Islandora site. She was excellent! I was also impressed with David Bass’s presentation on his batch uploader desktop application. As they do, the conference left me in information overload, but I walked away with many new understandings, ideas, connections, and professional resources. I am only six months into learning Islandora so I cannot wait until next year when I will be more knowledgeable and native to the discussion topics. The conference was a great wind down for my first semester at SDSU. I look forward to being a part of many more.

Happy Holidays to everyone! Stay safe. See you all in 2019!