Melanie Hibbert is the Director of IMATS (Instructional Media and Academic Technologies Services) & the Sloate Media Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. Since joining Barnard in 2015, highlights include serving as Co-Interim Dean of the Barnard Library & Academic Information Services (BLAIS) for 20 months during the pandemic, leading significant aspects of the shift to online learning for 3+ semesters; serving as a key administrator for initial operations for the Sloate Media Center, Design Center (Makerspace), Computational Science Center, and Movement Lab at the Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning; and currently she is involved with a number of Generative AI initiatives, task forces, and publications. Her video work has screened at places including the Harlem International Film Festival and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She has published in Educause Review, the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, the Journal of Online Interactive Learning, and authored book chapters related to social presence in online environments, video production in after-school programs, and VR/AR/360 media.

Hibbert holds a doctorate in education (Ed.D.), focusing on Instructional Technology and Media, from Teachers College, Columbia University.

The University of Florida launched the University of Florida Digital Collections in 2006. Since this time, the system has grown to over 18 million pages of content. The locally developed digital library system comprised an integrated public frontend interface and a production backend. As digital production processes changed, the system was modified to improve the backend, but the public interface became dated, and the technological architecture failed to keep up with system growth and the ability to present an adaptable and mobile-responsive user experience. In 2019, a decision was made to develop a new system, starting with decoupling the public interface from the production system. After an environmental scan of digital library technologies, it was decided not to use a commercial or open-source digital library system but to build our system in-house again. This presentation will examine our design decisions and experience in rearchitecting our digital library system and deploying our new multi-portal, public-facing system. A relatively new programming team, new to the library ecosystem, allowed us to rethink many of our existing assumptions and provided new insights and development opportunities. Using technologies that include Python, APIs, ElasticSearch, ReactJS, PostgreSQL, and more has allowed us to build a flexible and adaptable system that will enable us to hire developers in the future who may not have experience creating digital library systems.

This presentation offers a case study in building capacity around Advanced Research Services and Digital Scholarship in the university library using UVic Libraries as a case study. The UVic Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Commons (DSC) has developed a suite of workshops that attracts thousands of students year to year (in person and online), and we have recently joined the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities. Scaling this work has been a central concern of our team, and we have developed a group of instructors and methodologies that are new to traditional academic library instruction, which has allowed us to grow our services to the community. Moreover, our close relationships with colleagues at the UBC Research Commons and SFU, has provided us opportunities to create shared resources and GitHub templates to share our work and expertise. Three years ago, the DSC was incorporated into a new unit in the libraries, “Advanced Research Services.” This unit works independently under the direction of Lisa Goddard, Associate University Librarian, ARS, and Matt Huculak, Head, of ARS. The unit works closely with our Grants and Awards librarian to provide evidence syntheses, exhibit building, digital preservation, and other services to faculty and graduate students on campus. Thus, the DSC has taken on a new role of training librarian colleagues in tools useful to the grant-funded research enterprise. Our case study gives an overview of how these services have been developed, why they’ve worked in our local context, and how they might be implemented in other libraries across Canada. We examine both the successes and controversies that have shaped the DSC at UVic.

Maintenance of library technology systems is a continual challenge and not always front and centre in technology planning. We know each year that our various systems will require maintenance and upkeep, but our planning efforts may focus on the upcoming new projects, developments, and deployments as opposed to maintenance activities. This can leave technology units feeling squeezed and relegate the maintenance of existing systems to an afterthought. This presentation will discuss an analysis project we undertook to address this issue. 

To understand the existing ‘maintenance load’ of our library’s systems, we reviewed all past tickets in our JIRA tracking system over the course of a year. Tickets were grouped by system (e.g., institutional repository) and then roughly coded to see what percentage went to maintenance versus the development of new applications or improvements.  

This helped provide a clearer picture of the maintenance load of each system. Using that as a baseline, we were able to plan for the coming year’s general maintenance efforts and determine which activities should take place in each quarter of the year. By determining how much resources and time was needed for maintenance and when, we were able to better anticipate how much time was available for new projects and developments. We hope these planning efforts will reduce staff stress, project overruns, and provide a more accurate picture of our unit’s capacity over a year.  Additionally, this exercise highlighted how we track and document JIRA tickets, improving our categorization for future analyses.  

This presentation will discuss this method of project planning, how it has been working so far, and anticipated future improvements for next year.

This session will explore the creation of the Technology, Discovery and User Experience unit to manage library technology at the University of British Columbia where systems support is provisioned by a centralized IT department. In exploring the organizational structure and roles, participants will gain insight into the possibilities of technology governance in a complex university library environment. We expect participants will have similar and different technology landscapes and will value reflecting on what is working well or could be improved in their own libraries.  

In our context, technology management includes user experience, digital accessibility, discovery, metadata creation and oversight, rigorous demand management processes and abundant documentation. Centralized IT support includes technical support to create/install, maintain/develop and troubleshoot applications and systems. After a two-year pilot, the Technology, Discovery and User Experience unit was established and a fresh compliment of roles were developed and hired. With this structure, we use technology management as a layer between IT requirements for system support and end user (patrons or library employees) technology needs. This session will showcase our process for demand management by sharing a single project as a case study. We will also dive into the need for retroactive examination of legacy systems and approaches, the extensive role that consultation plays in our approach, and how we are leveraging this structure in support of a future-oriented set of priorities that include: 

1. Supporting a transition to a new library management platform 

2. Taking a holistic approach to re-envisioning our web infrastructure, with user experience as a leading imperative  

As many other Canadian libraries are organized with centralized IT support, we expect our model to offer reflective insight and curious questions from the participants. 

Soon after web technology allowed for it, libraries began building and hosting digital exhibitions, collections, and research websites: the Library of Congress, for example, launched its first digital exhibition, Revelations from the Russian Archives, in 1992. Early iterations of such projects, frequently developed as independent sites, are now decades out of date. Decreased library budgets and staffing, increased security concerns, and developments in software have seen many libraries abandon or migrate legacy digital collections and exhibitions, moving instead towards centralized collections repositories and exhibition content management systems. However, there remain myriad technical, curatorial, and institutional factors that can delay or derail this work, and as a result, many libraries continue to support legacy digital collections and exhibition sites developed on aging infrastructure.

This panel looks at three different Canadian academic libraries in various stages of addressing the technical debt they have accrued in building and hosting digital collections and exhibitions. It brings together a group of libraries with distinct collections and communities facing similar challenges to discuss what kinds of legacy digital collections they have and what they are doing with them. The panel will take the format of a moderated Q&A structured around issues and themes that have emerged across these different institutions. Panelists will discuss the types of digital content they have historically been supporting, their collections and communities, and initiatives and approaches to their legacy digital content, as well as feedback received from user communities and emerging topics like the collections as data movement.

A recent accessibility services request for a screen-reader ready version of a 16th century, handwritten, Latin-text book, forced us to rapidly engage with and explore optical character recognition (OCR) and accessibility software solutions which ended with a disappointing realization that despite great advances in AI recognition technology, the determining factor in producing accessible documents is still tremendous human labour. Experimentation revealed that AI-made OCR outputs from tools like Tesseract, Google Vision, Amazon Textract, or Transcribus, may be more accurate than ever, but are fundamentally incompatible with PDF authoring tools like Adobe Acrobat, or OCR verification tools like Abbyy Finereader, and cannot be integrated into a useful accessible PDF creation workflow.

The PDF format is critical for disseminating digitized archival content online. A PDF can retain the visual properties of the physical source object while simultaneously providing a digitized textual overlay (the OCR layer). PDFs also contain a lesser known hOCR (HTML OCR) layer which acts as a coordinate system, linking recognized characters to the portion of the image that they represent. Most commercial AI OCR tools produce extracted text, not an OCR overlay. Simply copying and pasting extracted text into a PDF with OCR authoring software breaks this coordinate system. The popular, open-source Tesseract OCR can create PDFs with an hOCR layer, or output hOCR as a separate file, but lacks the ability to embed TrueType font information. Therefore, the PDFs it produces cannot be opened with PDF editing or verification tools. Many independent developers are working to create tools that edit or correct hOCR files, but effective solutions for large scale projects do not presently exist. This incompatibility between OCR generation and editing means that without laborious manual human processing, our digital archives continue to not meet basic accessibility standards and lack meaningful discoverability.

McMaster Experts is a platform created for faculty, librarian, and researcher profiles, promoting areas of expertise, collating academic contributions, and allowing for data gathering and modeling across the university. It is based on VIVO, an open-source platform developed at Cornell University. In the past, the data from McMaster Experts was added to the library catalogue through a local note. This method does not provide much interaction between the two systems and has not been complimented with authority control as McMaster does not have staff dedicated to this role. Like many open-source initiatives from Cornell, VIVO allows for linked open data requests and responses, but McMaster has not taken advantage of these features thus far. I will be presenting a project to improve the integrations between VIVO and Alma, hoping for better results than examples of Victor Hugo the Venezuelan salsa singer being associated with Les Misérables. With a new bibliometrics librarian in place, we hope this project will improve the impact of researchers, build connections on campus, and improve our data in Alma. This presentation will go over technical details, project goals, failures and recommendations.

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, libraries must ensure their online resources are accessible to all patrons. In this presentation, I will share insights on how we used design thinking and web accessibility tools to 1) increase our understanding of library users with and with no accessibility needs and 2) highlight the bond between web accessibility and user experience.

Design thinking was instrumental in empathizing with our users’ experiences. By understanding their needs, we identified pain points in their interaction with our web interfaces. Web accessibility checkers, meanwhile, provided us with a technical perspective, highlighting areas in our website that were not compliant with accessibility standards.

The combination of these tools allowed us to see the challenges faced by users and the means to correct most of those errors. The tools also allowed us to see the surprising relationship between web accessibility and user experience. We realized that an accessible website is not just beneficial for users with accessibility needs, but it enhances the user experience for all library users.

The presentation will delve into the relationship between web accessibility and overall user experience. Participants will understand that improving web accessibility is not just about compliance with standards, but it is also about enhancing the user experience for all users.

By the end of this presentation, participants will understand the importance of considering all users’ needs in the design process and how this inclusive approach benefits everyone.

Our institution’s digital library appears from the outside to be a single unit, but in reality, our structure comprises two distinct entities: the discovery layer and the web infrastructure, which are managed by distinct administrative units, the Collection Development Department and the Information Technology Services, respectively. Despite their separate management structures, users perceive them as a unified entity, complicating their navigation and interaction with our services. We address this issue by adopting a proactive approach, fostering regular communication between the Discovery Systems Librarian and the Curator of Digital Experience Librarian. At the heart of our approach lies a commitment to agility, empowering us to break down barriers, drive innovation, and create a seamless user experience. Through weekly meetings, we discuss ongoing and proposed changes, explore possibilities for seamless transitions between systems, and identify opportunities for improvement. This collaborative effort enables us to anticipate challenges, preemptively address issues, and develop user-driven solutions that transcend the technical limitations of each individual system. In our presentation, we share insights gained from our agile approach, highlighting the pain points, opportunities, and lessons learned along the way. From subverting existing structures to fostering collaboration across teams, we demonstrate the power of embracing flexibility and innovation in library technology management.

The University of Alberta Library now has a user experience team! The establishment of our new User Experience (UX) Design & Planning Unit represents a strategic response to the evolving needs of our students and faculty. This presentation explores the challenges of implementing a UX unit – detailing the rationale behind its inception, the methodologies employed in its development, and the transformative impact we hope to have on our library services. We will highlight the collaborative efforts required to foster an accessible and user-centric culture within our library organization. Our unit consults with leaders and subject matter experts from across the library and engages with patrons to co-create solutions. To support the library’s digital user experiences, we also work closely with developers, system administrators and other technical teams. Our UX unit will play a central role in guiding the upcoming migration from a legacy system to a new service platform. This ambitious, multi-year project will require input and ongoing participation from our entire library community. By sharing our experiences, successes, and challenges, this session aims to inspire and empower fellow librarians and information professionals to embark on their own journey towards prioritizing user experience within their institutions.

There is more to IKEA, the Swedish furniture behemoth, than flat-packed tables and chairs and delicious plant, veggie, and classic meatballs. No, really. Hidden (in plain sight) are nods to design thinking, an iterative design process that serves to better understand user needs and conceive solutions in novel ways that meet and exceed user expectations.

In this lightning presentation, I highlight the simple ways IKEA uses design thinking (often scattered across its maze-like stores) and how libraries can follow similar approaches to shape digital and physical user experiences.

This presentation will cover our ongoing work investigating and deploying generative AI technology in the context of libraries and memory institutions. It’s not novel that libraries provide online human or machine-based chat services, but taking advantage of generative AI requires new technical approaches and considerations around the ethics and usefulness of conversational agents. We will discuss our development of a chatbot configured for delivering academic library information services. This includes defining a protocol for assessing and guiding implementation decisions as well as evaluating the tool’s utility.

Our initial step in developing the chatbot involved building a knowledge base (stored on an in-house metadata management system), which could be connected to generative AI technology. Next, we experimented with a variety of open source and proprietary language models to understand how each performs. We are testing the following approaches: A closed source large language model (Bing Chat / Gemini / ChatGPT) prompted to act as reference personnel; a context-aware closed source LLM (OpenAI GPT); and a context-aware open source LLM (Llama). We are testing with questions that a useful chatbot should be able to answer. The chatbot’s responses for each approach are evaluated comparatively.

A key objective of this project is the testing protocol and evaluation framework. Reference questions often require a dynamic conversation, iterating on the direction of inquiry. This makes it challenging to evaluate outputs as merely accurate or inaccurate. Our study builds on Lai (2023) to develop a testing protocol, incorporating multiple dimensions of user interactions. Our protocol will support the interrogation of ethical concerns around these technologies and their application. We are operationalizing aspects of the LC Labs AI Planning Framework (Library of Congress, 2023) to define use cases for generative AI in information services and ethical criteria.

Funding agencies and academic journals around the world are increasingly requiring that researchers deposit and share their data in order to maximize the benefits of open science and to support goals of research transparency and reproducibility. The FAIR principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability, which aim to enhance data reusability, must be supported by sustainable infrastructure and ongoing digital stewardship that will ensure that research data can be found, accessed, and reused into the future. Preserving research data to support these principles reveals a number of challenges, including developing policies and procedures, determining the various roles of the researchers, libraries, institutions, and service providers, exploring considerations for the heterogeneity of research data (e.g., big data, data with sensitivities, discipline-specific practices and protocols), as well as managing costs associated with curation, ongoing preservation management, storage, and more.

This presentation will outline a case study of the ongoing preservation activities of Borealis. In addition to outlining the preservation-friendly actions built into the repository software, we will also describe the additional preservation strategies developed by the Borealis, including ongoing backup processes and monthly fixity checks of all deposited files. We will also highlight the development of a process for fixity remediation following best practices in the field, detailing the different workflows for when tape backups do or do not exist. To support institutional libraries seeking to perform additional preservation actions, we will share our ongoing investigation of current options for export and pipelines for advanced preservation processing beyond the repository infrastructure.

Overall this presentation will demonstrate the extensive behind-the-scenes work involved with ensuring long-term stewardship and preservation of research data, including detailed coordination of various roles in the ecosystem such as systems administrators, programmers, collection administrators, curators, and depositors.

Repositories are fundamental infrastructure in academic institutions as a means of holding, disseminating and storing digital content. Fedora is an open-source repository system that supports long term digital preservation. It has become one of the top open-source solutions for digital resource management, in use across hundreds of organizations across the globe.

Unlike typical academic repository use cases, data repositories are fundamental infrastructure in the open science ecosystem, and the traditional repository systems now face the challenge of keeping pace with the ever-growing and exponentially increasing scale of modern research data production. Currently, there is limited understanding of how an implementation involving Fedora 6.x in a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment may influence data scalability and functional efficiency of the repository.

This presentation will provide a look at an on-going collaboration between the open-source program team and data intensive computing and cloud developers at a community stakeholder institution, to address the performance and scalability limits of Fedora 6.x in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. Results of this collaboration will provide both the Fedora users and the repository community at large, with a better understanding of the scalability of a repository environment and how to assess it systematically. These crucial performance metrics will allow data repository technical, curatorial and administrative staff to understand how to optimize their infrastructure to meet the demand for management and access of large open data.

Join us to learn how our GLAM organization improved its collections and reference services thanks to digital asset management (DAM). We have come a long way and we look forward to sharing our story, the resources we’ve developed, and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Digital Asset Management (DAM) refers to the process of managing digital media files (3D scans, animations, audio files, photographs, graphic design files, and video content). Assets may be born-digital creations (e.g. oral history interview), digital reproductions of analog materials (e.g. a digitized photograph), or a blend of both.

Our DAM journey started ten years ago, when our digitized collection and corporate assets were scattered across numerous digital repositories, lacking organization and description. Employees struggled to find the assets they needed. Staff also didn’t know if they were allowed to re-use or share the assets, causing confusion and lost time. Today, we have a central solution containing over 400,000 collection items and corporate assets (and counting!). The solution includes standardized metadata schemes, guidelines, and a training program.

Since our assets are both digitized and managed, we can use them effectively for programs, education, display, projects, and research. For this session, we propose a demo of our DAM, where we share insights such as our initial roadmap, our pilot project, where we are today, and how we use the DAM for reference and research in a variety of situations. We will touch on some special initiatives, such as how we use DAM as part of digital preservation, and as part of a harm-reduction project to address assets in our holdings that contain harmful language and/or imagery. We will wrap up the discussion by showing some of the outputs made possible by the DAM, such as our online public image search portal.

Across the university, artificial intelligence is being popularized for tasks ranging from the completion of routine assignments with generalized AI to the creation of novel research with customized narrow AI programs. As we develop ways to learn, teach, and engage with these new technologies though, how can we ensure these new methods are consistent with our values, such as information equity, community engagement, and environmental sustainability? While recognizing the rapidly evolving improvements for AI across applications, vendor products, and programming techniques, and the need to regularly assess the available options for new developments, are there tasks for which we should prefer existing methods on the basis of efficacy or ethics? And if the answer is yes, how can we best communicate these considerations as we continue to teach and innovate with artificial intelligence in libraries?

Canadian Resource Sharing is in the midst of a tectonic shift. For years, our academic libraries loaned to one another peacefully, using familiar interlibrary loan (ILL) management systems, abiding by the terms of the inter-consortial resource sharing agreement, and generally not requiring a lot of attention from decision-makers or from library technologists. We didn’t think we were living on a fault line. But now the earth is shaking. Legacy ILL systems are being discontinued. A new ISO communication standard to handle requests for library items is being adopted very slowly. Cloud-based next-generation Library Service Platforms integrate seamlessly with the ILL management system provided by the same vendor, but have trouble communicating with other systems. Living through the seismic event is challenging on its own, but it also makes us wonder how different the landscape will be when the earth finally settles. Will new crevasses separate us from our historical ILL partners in Canada and bring us in closer contact with international libraries who happen to use the same systems? Do we risk cutting some libraries out of ILL networks entirely? Have we irretrievably outsourced some of our ILL decisions to the hands of our vendors?

This panel will bring together ILL experts from across Canada who use different ILL systems to discuss these issues and how we’re collaborating to maintain the efficiencies, cost effectiveness of, and cooperation in Canadian resource sharing.

Effective utilization of large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) is crucial for maximizing the potential of AI technologies across various domains. Prompt engineering is a critical skill that enables precise and efficient interactions with AI systems, facilitating improved performance and productivity. Educating the general public in prompt engineering is essential for harnessing these benefits and making AI tools more accessible and effective for various applications.

This project details the establishment of a prompt library specifically designed for academic libraries to collect and share effective prompts. The library features a user-friendly web-based interface that simplifies prompt submission and retrieval, ensuring accessibility for users from diverse backgrounds. It aims to store well-crafted prompts and prompt templates developed by the community through prompt engineering techniques. These resources provide high quality and relevance, significantly benefiting academic research and broader library operations and tasks.

This prompt library serves as a collaborative platform, facilitating knowledge exchange among librarians, educators, and researchers, thereby advancing AI and its application in various academic and operational contexts. By bridging the gap between theoretical insights and practical applications, the library supports intuitive and efficient management of prompt resources. This approach reduces the learning curve for newcomers and enables effective utilization of AI technologies. This project aligns with the ongoing evolution of digital repositories, positioning academic libraries at the forefront of the AI era. This initiative underscores the importance of shared knowledge and collaboration in the rapidly evolving field of AI, highlighting the significant role academic libraries can play in enhancing AI’s practical applications and benefits in academia and beyond.

The proposed conference presentation will introduce the Webster Library’s Visualization Studio and how this space is supporting a broad range of Concordia University’s forward-thinking research and pedagogical activities. While the presentation will introduce the studio’s technologies (immersive displays, a 27-speaker (SPAT) audio system, tracking technologies, VR equipment, and a host of support services), it will focus on the past academic term’s faculty and student activities as a series of mini case studies. The presentation will culminate by looking at the role libraries can play in providing centralized access to immersive technologies for a broad range of interdisciplinary activities. Access will serve as the backdrop of the presentation as the Visualization Studio introduces many faculty and students to immersive technologies. The presentation will propose the idea that access goes beyond putting hardware in a room. It must include a high level of support, a collaborative approach to working with faculty and students, and the development of introductory workflows and software templates to facilitate first-time users with thinking in new, spatial modalities.

This presentation will focus on a curriculum mapping project that applies the Quebec Digital Competency Framework to the programming offered by an academic library makerspace, with the goal of improving and enhancing our existing workshops. This framework was identified as appropriate to our context as an academic library makerspace in Quebec because of its local relevance and its holistic approach to digital and critical thinking skills. The topics of the workshops offered in our makerspace range from electronics and programming to crafting and VR. Our assessment looked at workshop descriptions and slides and matched their content to competency levels for each element of the framework. This allowed us to identify existing strengths in our workshops, as well as opportunities to link broader discussions about society and technology to our skills-based instruction. We will describe our assessment process, highlight some of the key data collected, and identify important themes that emerged through this data collection. We will close by sharing the ways that we have modified our own workshops based on this research.

This presentation showcases how a social science librarian successfully combines active learning with educational technology to incorporate the Framework for Information Literacy in library instruction. The presenter was repeatedly frustrated with providing unengaging library instruction to bored students who were unable to make the connection between library resources, course assignments, and their topics. This frustration was a catalyst to evolve beyond the traditional, passive point-and-click library database demonstrations using canned search examples. The presentation outlines how to move beyond ineffective past instructional practices by utilizing Google Slides to serve as both the lecture material and as an interactive digital worksheet. These digital worksheets dramatically transformed the presenter’s library instruction by increasing active learning and facilitating meaningful conversations with students on the different facets of the Framework for Information Literacy. These worksheets bridge the gap between abstract knowledge and practical application by underscoring the importance of library instruction and resources for students, who actively engage with the literature of their individual topics during class. Having students explore elements of the Framework in the context of their own research topic empowers them to apply these concepts to their own research process. This innovative approach to library instruction enriches the learning experience and empowers students to take a more proactive role in their research process. Using digital worksheets in library instruction has led to students leaving an instruction session having discovered existing literature on their topic, explored relevant databases, identified keywords and related concepts to their topic, and at times, better refined research topics.

Outreach is a key component of archival work, yet it is often overlooked in professional discussions on web archiving. This presentation describes the development of an in-class web archive research activity for undergraduate students in a Spring 2024 history class at New York University. Using the results of this assignment and the responses submitted by students, this project addresses solutions for improving technical literacy in the humanities using archived websites as primary sources.

With TikTok and Instagram becoming the first place students search for information, it’s a great time to explore how short-form video (with reels being the most engaging content on social media) can be leveraged to teach bite-size research concepts to students. This lightning talk will present a brief summary of the content trends on social media and the types of IL concepts that fit well with this concise format.

Large Language Models have exploded in popularity in the past 2 years prompting the creation of new and exciting ways to do research. It is now possible to use AI to gather insights and develop rich insights into data without being a full fledged data scientist. This workshop will begin with a tour through the Library Carpentry Machine Learning for Librarians curriculum before delving into the hands-on portion where learners will experiment with running different models and environments on their own computers. Participants will learn about the wide variety of options that exist outside of the narrow range of popular tools that find themselves in the news, and learn about the wide world of machine learning, from edge computing on microcontrollers to sophisticated language models running on supercomputers.

Join us at the Open Hackfest—an exciting opportunity to engage with other Access attendees!

Here’s what you can expect:

Collaboration: Work together on projects, share ideas, and explore new concepts. It’s a chance to combine your expertise with others and create something new.

Brainstorming: Let your creativity flow! Discuss topics of interest and propose solutions.

Project Exploration: Dive into existing projects or start something entirely new. The choice is yours! There will be facilitators, but the heart of the Hackfest lies in your contributions.

Find Your People: Got a challenge that needs unraveling? Bring it to the table! Whether it’s a coding puzzle, a design dilemma, or thoughts about AI and new technologies, this is an opportunity to connect.

Remember, the Hackfest is what you make of it. Sign up, share your project, or throw out that intriguing idea!