The famous (and famously reclusive) author J.D. Salinger died on 27 January this year, two days after the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns – a day which is celebrated across Scotland and in many parts of the world. Salinger and Burns are of course connected, since the title of Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is based on a mishearing of the Burns song Comin’ Through the Rye by the protagonist, 17-year old Holden Caulfield:

… I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.

Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22

The idea of being a ‘catcher’ struck me when I attended a conference held at the British Library last week, Subject Repositories: European Collaboration in the International Context. Neil Jacobs of JISC mentioned Glasgow University Library’s policy of seeking to ‘catch’ researchers close to the end of funded projects to ask if they would like help with their outputs. Certainly, it is easy to argue for libraries to be the ‘catchers in the rye’ when it comes to digital scholarly works and outputs – and the obvious place to deposit these materials is the institutional repository.

However, we were gathered at the BL to hear about subject repositories – including EconomistsOnline which was being launched during the event. And we heard about several very successful subject repositories in a number of very good presentations. The event left me reflecting on a number of things. For example, some subject repositories are success stories almost against all odds. Services like arXiv and RePEc have captured their respective corners of academia so effectively that they go on existing and attracting even without much resource (almost none in the case of RePEc), and their proven value is such that people probably would pay to maintain them (as arXiv is now proposing for its heaviest users). This makes them the inverse of many institutional repositories, which can’t attract content almost irrespective of the amount of resource invested.

The event inevitably had an economics flavour, and one of the most interesting presentations was by Christian Zimmerman, a Law Professor at the University of Connecticut, who does some of the management of RePEc. RePEc has established a unique role for itself in a field in which several subject repositories co-exist. Harvesting the Open Access corpus means that papers are re-aggregated on a regular basis (as Roy mentions in his post below), and we heard about the re-use of RePEc data in EconPapers, IDEAS, Socionet, NEP, EconomistsOnline, Inomics, Q-Sensei, Google Scholar, Econlit, and WorldCat (via OAIster). Another reason for RePEc’s success is that it maintains its own rankings – now with sufficient validity among economists that they are often taken into account when interviews are held for faculty positions. Christian Zimmerman put it this way: ‘Librarians can beat the bushes all they want. This works!’.

Clifford Lynch of CNI reflected upon the respective roles of institutional and subject repositories. Institutional repositories are necessary catchers. But subject repositories will be experimental laboratories for how we do peer review, attention-allocation, ranking, the building of collaboration environments and other innovative things as research domains make increasing use of the network level. He queried the binary argument that institutional repositories are a surer bet because subject repositories – floating freely with only the nebulous support of domain communities – may come crashing down if resource is suddenly withdrawn. And once again, there is a paradox in play here, with some of the most successful repositories being sustained on a very small resource base, but nonetheless likely to be guaranteed by their very success. The best subject repositories, because of scale and credibility, can develop sticky value-added services in ways that institutional repositories will find much more difficult. When you begin to look into RePEc for example, you see – beyond the ‘badly designed website’ which Christian Zimmerman seemed quite proud of (almost as a badge of credibility) - an intricate ecology of partnerships and providers, with records being fed into the main service from a large number of institutionally-based archives – of working papers and other series – around the world. Other partners provide statistical services, and there is also a variety of expressions of the same data, as the economics community is encouraged to take the base data and provide it in bespoke ways to fit different needs.

All of which leads me to wonder about the way libraries should be organised to play their role as scholarship’s catchers most effectively. We talk often about ‘new roles for librarians’, considering their retraining needs as data experts or informaticians, for example. But isn’t there a need also for libraries to organise as a community and step up to new roles in a reconfigured scholarship support environment? Certainly, all academic libraries should be collecting digital research outputs at the institutional level – and they should be doing this for the sake of scholarship first and foremost, rather than simply to meet research assessment requirements or tackle publishers over commercial journal prices. These institutional repositories should be archives in the sense that they catch digital outputs produced on campus. They may also be value-added providers to their own campuses, eg for research assessment. But services like arXiv, PubMed Central and RePEc are disciplinary venues. They may or may not be literal repositories (RePEc, for example, is not). What is important about them is that they are dynamic places for the sharing of scholarship – the places where our digital networked world allows the invisible college to become visible – necessary because the published literature system, the record of scholarship, does not have the functionality that scholars need. And for our subject librarian colleagues, they are also potential homes for digital collections. The scope for subject librarians working with scholars to support collaborative research is a fascinating one, touched upon by Clifford Lynch.

Libraries in the aggregate have just about worked out what their role is in respect of the record of scholarship, but they have not as yet done so in respect of these new domain venues. Yet, however well our academic colleagues have done in setting up successful services for their communities, there are still risks whose management they would concede to their librarians and archivists (and the leadership roles of Cornell in respect of arXiv and the British Library and National Library of Medicine in respect of PubMed Central are instructive). The danger is not so much that a whole service disappears, but rather that someone’s wonderful outputs will dart out of the rye and towards the edge of the cliff. How does the library world collectively ensure that these vital services are sustained, that the necessary routes to institutional repositories exist and are maintained, that preservation is allocated somewhere, that no more time and money than is absolutely necessary is spent on quality control of metadata, and that reaggregation is increasingly rational and efficient? What is the role of the ARL, RLUK and equivalent communities internationally? Of national libraries? Where, indeed, will OAIster fit in as OCLC develops its role as an international aggregator of Open Access repository content? In what forum can we get the players together to ensure we do this most cost-effectively for the scholars who increasingly depend on these services?

Metadata harvesting (collecting metadata from others and aggregating it in a collection) is not new. Although there are any number of ways to do this, the OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting is often used and has been around for years. It defines a small set of actions that allows anyone to discover what sets of metadata are available for harvesting from a digital repository, which metadata formats are offered, and select and download those records. Thousands of repositories worldwide support it, sometimes even unknowingly, because many repository applications such as DSpace and ePrints come with OAI-PMH support out of the box.

This has led to a world in which there are metadata aggregators and even agreggators of aggregators. It has also led to potential confusion and difficulty. Records that are picked up from their “native” location and indexed and displayed elsewhere may not be depicted as the creator of that metadata intended. They also may not be refreshed in a timely fashion, thereby potentially leading to records that are out-of-date persisting in various corners of the Internet.

This is why when my colleagues on the services side of the house announced the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway I sat up and took notice. This heralds a new world in which those being harvested can exert some control over not only how frequently their records are updated, but also how those records are depicted in the aggregation — in this case, WorldCat. Through a simple web-based interface, you can provide your OAI-PMH base URL, have the Gateway test harvest some records, view how those records would display in WorldCat, and change the mapping if you wish. Another benefit is that your records will then appear in all of the places WorldCat is syndicated.

A pilot project to test the Digital Collection Gateway was just announced, beginning March 1, and we are seeking volunteers to try it out and provide feedback. During the pilot you will be asked to:

• Attend a two-hour webinar reviewing the use of the Gateway
• Upload a minimum of 500 metadata records to WorldCat
• Offer feedback and input on your experience with the Gateway to our support and product teams so we can improve the tool and workflows

If you would like to help us create a next-generation harvesting infrastructure, in which you control your metadata more than ever before, email us at oaister@oclc.org.

At recent meetings I attended in Washington D.C. there was significant hallway discussion about the Open Researcher Contributor Identification (ORCID) initiative. Given the science orientation of the meetings this initiative to resolve the problem of name ambiguity and attribution in scholarly publication was particularly welcomed. As you’ll see if you visit the ORCID site this is early days for this pre-competitive multi-publisher effort whose goal is to establish

“an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard.” Their mission is “to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual’s research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration.”

Meeting one was convened by Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing not long ago with the first meeting in November 2009. The roster of participants is impressive and the continued involvement of Elsevier made those with whom I talked hopeful that this would be as successful an effort as CrossRef has been. A recent editorial in Nature Credit where credit is due (pdf) is quite to the point about the implications of success.

My colleagues, Thom Hickey and Janifer Gatenby, have been involved. OCLC has much to contribute here given Thom’s leadership of the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) effort and Janifer’s in the development of the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). The scope of ORCID is narrower than ISNI as the latter is intended for the identification of “identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains.” This goes across all fields of creative activity not just science. As Janifer said,

“ISNI could become a cross domain identifier so that a researcher who also plays in a rock band (and wants it known that he is one and the same) can be identified.”

Obviously there isn’t going to be just one name identifier but if there are only a few and they aspire to comprehensiveness then mapping and cross-domain identification can happen. This will advance enormously the ability to discover, manage, and aggregate researcher/creative outputs. My colleagues, John MacColl and Ricky Erway, are working to scope the challenge and opportunities for research libraries in managing the research information of their home institutions. They’ve spotlighted standard name identification as one of the biggest missing pieces. With ISNI, VIAF and now ORCID there is real promise that this gap will be filled.

So about the taxman, swineherd title - It comes from a lattice of coincidence moment that occurred as I was preparing this post. I thought Janifer’s researcher and rock band comment was a little farfetched but then closed the book I was reading only to see this author blurb:

Ian Rankin has written seventeen other novels, and has also worked as a grapepicker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher, music journalist, and punk rock musician. He lives in Edinburgh…etc.

And the second-level coincidence is that my colleague, John MacColl, works out of St. Andrews University and lives in Fife where Ian Rankin was born.

In September I hired a firm of environmental impact consultants, California Environmental Associates, to conduct a three-month study of interlibrary loan processes, with an eye toward lowering the carbon footprint of resource sharing operations worldwide.  Affordable best practices was our goal.  OCLC Research and OCLC Delivery Services co-sponsored the study.  Together, the consultants (Aarthi Ananthanarayanan and Laura Keller) and I visited two academic libraries in the San Francisco Bay Area and initiated telephone interviews with staff at a dozen other libraries of various types and sizes across the country.   

For years ILL practitioners have been streamlining their processes for efficiency and sustainability.  So, happily, we found many amazing best practices already in place.  The key contribution of the consultants was to determine the carbon emissions, per book loaned, per mile, for several of the libraries in the study.  Then, by analyzing the processing, packaging and shipping practices of those libraries, Aarthi and Laura were able to determine which practices had a positive or negative effect on the emissions numbers.  The result is a list of recommended “green” interlending practices that are finally as scientifically quantifiable as they are common-sensical.

The first thing that jumps out from the data is that when a library uses primarily new packaging material for sending out ILL items, the packaging material itself accounts for more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions per package for that institution.  Thus, right off the bat, an interlibrary loan unit can cut its carbon footprint nearly in half by re-using packaging material whenever possible.

There were a couple of surprises among the findings, at least for me.  One, padded mailers are vastly less harmful to the environment to manufacture than corrugated cardboard.  (This doesn’t mean that using boxes to ship ILL materials is bad, only that boxes should be used only when extra protection for the material is required.)  Two, paper with 30% recycled content is usually available at approximately the same price as virgin paper, and functions just as well in copiers.  So why should any interlending operation be using new paper?

Other best practices were easy to predict, the surprise being only in the magnitude of their impact on the emissions numbers:  digital is better than print; near is better than far; ground is better than air; local/regional couriers are preferable to national/international shippers (because they often supply reusable packaging); aggregating items going to the same destination is better than sending one at a time; nylon bags are better than plastic bins (unless the bins are always full).

The point of issuing these recommendations is that benefit accrues each time such practices can be utilized.  The practices outlined here are not always possible, or even appropriate.  But if many libraries across the entire system conduct the bulk of their routine interlending business along the lines recommended by this study, Mother Nature will breathe a little easier.  And that’s always a good thing.

You can see slides containing some of the data here.  A detailed written report containing all the data, the study methodology, and lavish thanks to the generous folks and institutions who participated in the study shall be forthcoming.  In the meantime…have you hugged a tree today?

The final report of the Museum Data Exchange grant will be released on the OCLC Research website later this month. As a first impression of key outcomes, I’ve posted the executive summary below. Stay tuned!

The Museum Data Exchange, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought together a group of nine museums and OCLC Research to create tools for data sharing, build a research aggregation and analyze the aggregation. The project established infrastructure for standards-based metadata exchange for the museum community and modeled data sharing behavior among participating institutions.

Tools
The tools created by the project allow museums to share standards-based data using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

COBOAT’s default configuration targets Gallery Systems’ TMS, but can be adjusted to work with other vendor-based or homegrown database systems.

Both tools are a free download from here.
Configuration files adapting COBOAT to different systems can be shared here.

Data Harvesting and Analysis
Harvesting data from nine museums, the project brought together 887,572 records in a non-public research aggregation, which participants had access to via a simple search interface. The analysis showed the following:

Significant improvements in the aggregation could be achieved by revisiting data mappings to allow for a more complete representation of the underlying museum data. Focusing on the top 100 most highly occurring values for key elements will impact a high number of corresponding records, and would be low-hanging fruit for data clean-up activities.

For further analysis, the research aggregation will be available for 3rd party researchers under the terms of the original agreements with participating museums.

Impact
In its relatively short life span to date, the project’s suite of tools has catalyzed several data sharing activities among project participants and other museums:

Participating vendors contributed to the museum community’s ability to share:

An increasing number of projects and systems using CDWA Lite / OAI-PMH as a component (for example OMEKA, Steve: The museum social tagging project, CONA™) can be seen as a leading indicator for the future need of data sharing tools like the ones created as part of the Museum Data Exchange. When there are applications for sharing data which directly support the museum mission, more data is shared, and museum policies evolve. Conversely, when more data is shared, more such compelling applications emerge.

Last month I mentioned the publication of A comparative review of research assessment regimes in five countries and the role of libraries in the research assessment process, which had been produced for us by Key Perspectives. It is a detailed report, and I also said that we’d shortly issue a companion report with some background information on the question of research assessment – ie the system by which universities are evaluated for their research performance by the bodies that fund them, with some of the key findings for each country, and with some recommendations for research libraries. That companion report, Research assessment and the role of the library, was published yesterday, and I thought I might draw attention here to the recommendations for research libraries that it makes. These are:

These challenges are easy to state, and most of us would readily assent to them. Some academic librarians may even claim to be doing several of them already – particularly in the operation of repositories, and in the provision of expertise in bibliometrics in some cases. But how many non-library organisations would recognise these as library roles? Would our funding bodies? The President’s or Vice Chancellor’s Office? Our research councils? Research publishers? Our politicians? Until these roles can be seen from the outside, we have not ‘claimed our territory’.

Although the focus of both of these reports is research assessment, it is clear that we are often talking about more than just that. Much of what is revealed in these reports relates to the presence of libraries within the culture of research excellence in their institutions. Or rather, their absence. For example, last November the UK government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – which covers universities – issued a higher education blueprint for the UK: Higher ambitions: the future of universities in a knowledge economy. It includes a section on how the government intends to develop its research capacity. I searched for references to libraries, and the only one retrieved related to plans to make the UK a leader in online learning under the chairmanship of Lynn Brindley, CEO of the British Library. A very worthwhile initiative, but what about libraries in research? What about the contribution of university libraries to the UK’s higher ambitions? In a 115-page report, why don’t they feature even once? An even more recent report has just appeared (December 2009) from a grouping of new, ‘business-like’ universities in the UK, the University Alliance, Concentration and diversity: understanding the relationship between excellence, concentration and critical mass in UK research. References to libraries in this 28-page report? None.

Perhaps we dare not speak up because there is still so much to do to be present within the culture of research excellence. A hundred university libraries pointing at their institutional repositories is a dissipation of energy. Libraries need new aggregated structures in order to deliver real service benefits to their universities, the cross-institutional research centres that are beginning to appear, and their countries as a whole. Considering how to develop these, I recalled the recent Distinguished Seminar presentation by Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell University, Anne Kenney, in Dublin, Ohio, on radical collaboration. Anne quoted her opposite number (and now collaborative colleague) at Columbia, Jim Neal, who points out that the boast of research libraries about their tradition of collaboration can in fact impede the new kinds of collaboration we need for the challenges we face today.

Let’s think about what radical library collaboration means for the culture of research excellence. We have territory to claim.

A smaller number of us than usual will be going to ALA Midwinter this week, as we are cutting back on expenses just as is everyone else. But we will be there, if in fewer numbers, so I thought it would be good to highlight the most important events for you. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I clearly mean those events at which food, drink, and informal conversation are paramount. What did you think I meant? So here goes:

Saturday, January 16

5:30 - 7:30 - RLG Meet and Greet, Westin Waterfront, OCLC Red Suite (ask at the hotel desk for the room number)

This is a good opportunity to not only have informal conversation with myself, Dennis Massie, and Karen Smith-Yoshimura, but also other colleagues from the RLG Partnership. As usual, we will have some drinks and nibbles.

Sunday, January 17

7:00 - 8:00 - OCLC Update Breakfast, Westin Waterfront, Grand Ballroom (please sign up for this event)

This well-attended event is where you can have a great start to the day with plenty of food and coffee and a rundown of what we’ve accomplished recently.

12:00 - 1:30 - Developer’s Network Luncheon, Westin Waterfront, Webster Room (please sign up for this event)

This is where you will get to see what people are doing with OCLC Web Services and what’s up with the OCLC Developer Network. If you speak Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, or any programming language, or manage those who do, this is the place for you.

5:30 - 8:00 - OCLC Blog Salon, Westin Waterfront, Stone Room

Always a good time, with plenty of cool people showing up, this is not just for bloggers but for anyone interested in the use of the latest technologies in libraries. Be there or be…well, you know.

Of course OCLC has many more events at Midwinter, including several other important RLG Partnership events, but need I repeat my criteria? I hope to see you at one or more of these in the upcoming days, hopefully in a situation and a time when we can have an informal chat.

Best wishes to our readers from all of us at hangingtogether and OCLC Research. We’re grateful for the attention you give our thoughts and hope to continue contributing to the design of the future library, archive, and museum.

As a final thank-you for the year I urge you to install Readability in your web browser. It makes reading on the web much more comfortable by removing all the clutter from those crowded web sites that studiously avoid everything Jakob Nielsen has tried to teach web designers.

I’ve promoted it before in the commentary of our Above the Fold newsletter (to which you should subscribe; we work hard to find relevant articles that you might not see in the ordinary course of professional reading).

I was motivated to offer it up here because it made David Pogue’s Best Tech Ideas of the Year 2009 column in today’s New York Times. Here’s what he said:

READABILITY The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.

You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business.

You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.

Go forth and install it.

Here’s to a clear-eyed and comfortable time in 2010!

Research assessment is a very big deal in some countries. Countries whose university systems are largely publicly-funded routinely check up on the research quality of individual universities to ensure that they are squeezing the best possible performance out of their systems. They do this because they see a link between high-quality research and economic development. The economic potential of research is growing in importance as national ‘knowledge economies’ recognise the need for international research excellence, and see universities as a key driver.

We have just published a report which reviews the research assessment regimes of five countries, and the role of libraries in the processes of assessment that exist. This report was produced by Key Perspectives Ltd, a UK consultancy, and it surveys the research assessment situation in the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK, Denmark and Australia. We chose countries that we knew were doing interesting things in assessment - or in preparation for its introduction. The high political stakes involved were evident even as the report was being written. In the UK, the pilot exercise for the system that will replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ditched one of its proposed new thrusts (bibliometrics) and found another (economic impact) for the country’s universities to stress about. In Australia, a recent change of government led to temporary abandonment of a system that tied assessment outcomes to government funding, and arguably lost the country some ground in the international scramble for both reputation and economic advantage.

The Review provides a fascinating account of different cultural understandings of the purposes of assessment, and a glimpse of the trend of concentrating research excellence in a small number of top universities that is now taking shape in many countries, as the competition for research income, top faculty and students becomes one that occurs within a single international marketplace. We found countries that tied research assessment to large amounts of government funding, and others that did not (yet); countries that operated systems based on bibliometrics and others that mistrusted them; countries that devised league tables of journals and awarded points to researchers on those they published in - and others that assembled national panels of experts to determine the rankings.

Libraries are involved in these assessment exercises in a range of ways, from the clerical (data entry) to the highly strategic, and from the specialist (bibliometric expertise) to a role as providers of general infrastructure (institutional repositories). Whatever differences there may be in the assessment systems adopted by different countries, they all share a focus upon the research outputs produced by their researchers and faculty. These outputs are managed by libraries - both indirectly (via publications) and, increasingly directly (via arrangements with the authors themselves at pre-publication stages). Does this suggest that libraries play a central role in research assessment within their institutions? Or that they should? At the very least, shouldn’t libraries seek a shared view on this question?

I’ve recently returned from the Netherlands (Holland as the locals call it and Rotterdam to be more specific) where I attended the 2009 Digital Strategies for Heritage Conference (DISH2009). The main organizers of the conference are the Netherlands Institute for Heritage and the DEN foundation. The latter organization, Digital Heritage Netherlands is the Dutch national knowledge platform for information technology and cultural heritage run by my long-time friend and colleague, Marco de Niet. I was on the advisory board for this biannual event and chaired a panel during the conference.

It was very well-done. I believe that this gathering has now become the most important heritage conference for Europe (it would be the equivalent of a combined WebWise and Museums on the Web in the United States). There were over 600 delegates from twenty-three countries in attendance. They were a good mix of digital heritage practitioners, project leaders and administrators and they approached the conference from a shared vision of mobilizing heritage materials on the web that doesn’t exist in the US.

There were a small number of American attendees most of whom had keynote or other significant roles on the conference program. I think that some of them didn’t understand the extent of the investments that have already been made in the Netherlands and more generally in Europe nor the extent to which a shared motivation has taken hold. This was not an audience that needed to be hectored about the need to present their collections and their institutions on the web or the imperative of a user-centric perspective in doing this work.

All of the conference presentations are available from the DISH slideshare feed. I particularly commend to you the keynote offered by Josh Greenberg of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at New York Public Library about staff expertise and digital strategy. I thought he effectively demonstrated the impact that staff use of existing web tools and interaction opportunities can have on an institution’s profile via the creation of communities and networked interests. The problem is that this kind of use isn’t deeply embedded in our expectations of staff nor is it native to existing skill sets. Both gaps can be addressed with management attention and investment. Ross Parry of the Museums and New Media group at the University of Leicester delivered a closing keynote that provided a nice framework for thinking about digital heritage efforts and the end points of the evolutionary path created by this work.

A keynote on business model innovation that was very popular with the delegates was delivered by Alex Osterwalder, an unaffiliated author, speaker and consultant. Check out his presentation which was delivered with good stage presence and considerable audience management skills. It gave me pause. I’m afraid it re-ignited among many the notion that if they only thought about it differently their digital objects would yield a new and important revenue stream. I fear the effort that will be poured into this bottomless well which has yielded very little for any but the very largest brands in the heritage domain.

He and his colleagues had just released a book on Business Model Generation which a group in the Netherlands had used to create a series of scenarios and business models for Dutch digital heritage. This group’s work was pulled together into a book that was distributed to the delegates (Dutch only - English version coming soon). I’m looking forward to seeing their work. Perhaps it would allay my concerns about unreasonable expectations.

Overall an important and satisfying conference.

P.S. The conference organizers made the experience interesting and pleasant with a variety of extra gestures - all the conference bags contained light bulbs that delegates could put into patterned light boards, three small dishes to be used as voting tokens for research projects that presented, and bits of colored ethernet cable which could earn you chocolates if you matched the color up with another delegate. None of this was overdone and it seemed very effective at creating a cordial group feeling.