Librarian on the edge

Shame on Google

2009-11-06T10:42:00.001-08:00

"Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." George W. Bush

In the spring I noticed that Google had added an easy input mechanism to its IGoogle themes that would allow anyone with even moderate computer skills to create themes and get them indexed in the directory. I had a decent library with thousands of pictures of Ireland and New York, so I started adding some of my own. It's so simple that it only takes about 5 minutes at most. Although you were only told when the subscriber count was over 100 for a given theme, I started seeing dozens of my themes go over that line at one time or another. One even attracted more than 10,000 subscribers. While this was developing, I had been haunted by another Google experience.

A few years ago they gave us another simple interface to create gadgets. I created a number of photo albums for that. They promised to get items into the directory after a vetting period of about two weeks. At first they did, and a handful of mine were subsequently listed. Then it stopped. You could still make gadgets for your own amusement, and the few gadgets that had been listed stayed there, but nothing new was ever added.

Then came the week of November 2, 2009. The themes that I had created were overnight taken out of the index, along with most of the themes in the index. The gadgets went away too. It's not just me they were picking on. For instance, in the past if you searched "Ireland" you got hundreds of hits. That went down to 8 this week. In the Theme-related Google groups, a trickle of people started asking questions. They got answers that I found chilling. A carefully parsed response from a Google employee said that "Changes were made to the search algorithm that might make it more difficult to find your themes." As far as understatement goes, this is like saying that the Mets had a less than ideal season in 2009.

My theory is that the bean counters came down on the good guys in Google and told them "Enough with this creativity and community stuff. This is taking up valuable disk space. Do something to discourage people from doing this." They then proceeded to earn their Christmas bonuses. It may seem like a small, trivial thing, but I just lost a ton of respect for Google.

Open Source

2009-11-02T13:25:00.000-08:00

I was just at a demo last week of Koha, an open source ILS. They've been having a lot of success marketing this to northeastern libraries through the Westchester County WALDO system. In all but one case, it has been the smaller liberal arts colleges who have given up their expensive ILS sites for Koha. The WALDO representatives went head on for the big drawback that I'd consistently heard - "You don't have to hire extra networking geniuses at your library to make open source work." We were told that the servers are operated off-site and everything is taken care of in the contract.

Looking at some of the web sites, Koha doesn't take away much functionality that the patrons would ever notice. The screens had facets on the left for users to drill down to a more specific search. It was attractive, with book covers displaying in the browse screens. The real differences are in the more technical services areas of cataloging and acquisitions. New customers take some of the considerable money they've saved and feed it back to the company to develop more functionality in these areas. We were told that more than 50 improvements were in the process of being dealt with. The tactic of funding development was a strategy for library directors who might have had some explaining to do when two thirds of their ILS budget suddenly disappeared.

I noticed that among the 20 or so local academic libraries who had migrated, there was St. John's, where I used to work. I called Charles Livermore there because he had been a valued colleague and somebody who was well aware of technology issues in libraries. He told me that Koha has gone over very well at St. John's. I asked specifically about the cataloging and acquisitions areas which seem less developed than the KOHA opac, but he said that those people were very sanguine about the future of this. They told him that every migration comes with an adjustment period and this one didn't seem any worse than the one they had before.

Because it is open source, libraries have the right to tinker and develop extra features for their catalogs, if they have the technical capabilities to do this. On the whole, I'm not sure this is entirely ready for prime time, but I can understand why this has become a factor to be dealt with. This is something to keep your eye on.

The Judge Judy Effect

2009-09-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

Last week, we were preparing for the arrival of the New York Law School's most famous alum - Judith Sheindlin from the class of 1965. Her bio says that she has written six books, so I did a keyword search "Judge Judy" and found two current titles displayed. However, when I did an author search of Sheindlin, three of her titles came up. It turns out that there was a variation in the author information, and one of the titles had no reference to "Judge Judy." We had just purchased Encore, so I used this as a test case for "Social Tagging." I called up the book that had not displayed in keyword and clicked on "Add a tag." I was reminded to log in. Once that happened, I got a data box to enter my own search for this title. I added "Judge Judy" and saved it. Then I searched in Encore and all of the titles came up. My understanding was that this would only happened when the machine was logged in to my account. My understanding was wrong. The extra tag was present for everyone to use in a search.
I soon found out that this technique could have a more serious use. My director recently complained that a student searching in Encore got no hits for the Supreme Court case "Pennoyer v. Neff." While this case is mentioned in many of our books, there is no chapter title for it in the catalog, so the user came away with nothing. Without at least one hit, the student could not follow a link into WebBridge to search the case in other sources such as JSTOR or Hein Online or even Google Books. To address this, I found a copy of the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court and confirmed that this contained information about Pennoyer, so I logged in, called up that record and added a tag for Pennoyer. Now when anyone searches the catalog for Pennoyer, they get references and links to other sources through WebBridge. A committee of librarians is being formed to strategize the appropriate use of social tagging here.
Did Judge Judy stop in to the library and look at the catalog? She did not. She was running a few minutes late so she raced through the lobby and up the elevators to give her speech. I did catch a glimpse of her in this run.

Encore, Encore: Or, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown

2009-08-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

When I was interviewing for my current position at the New York Law School, I was told that the library had just purchased Encore from Innovative Interfaces, but they hadn't implemented it yet. It probably didn't hurt my chances that I had already brought up an installation of Encore at my past library. Once hired, I explained to them that the decisions they had made in bringing up Webpac Pro would carry over to Encore, so they had already done most of the work. We wanted to install the server in May so we would have the summer to learn it and then show it off to the incoming students in August.

Unfortunately, this was also the time that we were moving into a new facility. Holly Murphy, who had given us our Encore training at Quinnipiac, was scheduled to fly out and do the same for us in New York. However, due to problems of scheduling and various uncertainties, we did not have a working Encore server when Holly was about to leave for the airport, so we had to take a rain check. Then came the actual move, the mind-numbing construction pounding around us and, finally, the American Association of Law Libraries conference in Washington. In the last of July, we finally got our training. I had been working with Encore for months, but I felt obliged to keep this away from colleagues, since I didn't want to spoil the kickoff session for anyone. During that time, I noticed a problem that had to be addressed before we went public. The location displaying on the left were in alphabetical order by their labels. Our main book location is Stacks, which means that it would almost never display without someone clicking on a dropdown for more locations. The solution - we renamed it Book Stacks, so it is always at or near the top. Locations like Administrative Reference had just enough titles to intrude where they didn't belong, so we gave them names like "The Administrative Reference Collection."

Christine Haggstrom was our trainer, and she came out from Boston. Since there was severe weather the night before, she had to take a 6 AM flight in, but she made it in plenty of time. She got to be the first person to try out one of our new electronic classrooms for the library. We know she was the first person ever to use the room for a web conference, because we soon found out that the phone did not work with the sound system. After a feverish visit from our AV crew, all was working. Holly was on the line, but Christine hardly needed her. Encore looked very impressive and our librarians peppered Christine and Holly with questions. At the end, Holly announced that I was the only person so far to bring up Encore in two separate libraries, and she dubbed me the "Encore King." I'm trying to keep from this going to my head, but it's tough.

A week later, we made our final presentation to the entire librarian group, came to decisions, and brought the service up live at encore.nyls.edu. For now, we are taking Innovative's advice and leaving the option for our users to rate titles and even add tags. We set up a usage report with Google Analytics, and note that people are already searching this. Book covers will be added within a few days. The only thing missing so far is the throng of students checking out their new library. That is just days away.

Themework - Google does it again

2009-06-25T17:08:00.000-07:00

I hated "themes" in high school English. I hated them so much that I opted out of senior English and took journalism instead. My classmates would expound "Moby Dick is an illustration of Man vs. Nature," while I am thinking "Moby Dick is a book about a guy that obsessed about catching a fish and went off his nut."

About 5 weeks ago, I had noticed that Google added a new interface on their Igoogle themes page that allows the rest of us to add new theme bars to the directory. This was in keeping with the easy interface that they added to Google Maps that allowed the non-XML programming people in their audience to add pages with useful and graphically interesting material. As someone who had an archive of many hundreds of images concerning Ireland and New York, I couldn't wait to get started.

They make it easy, yes and no. You start with a simple interface that says "upload a file" that allows you to browse for a directory of images on your hard drive. They don't tell you this in so many words (or actually, any words at all) but it won't take your file if there is a space or nonalphanumeric in the name). Then you get to the really hard part. They put up your image and you get to mark out the area to be covered, and then it shows you what you got. Then you find out that the picture of the bridge you thought you were loading shows nothing but sky. Get ready for some trial and error. The best technique, I found out after many, many errors, was to create your original file with the dimensions 1400X190, then use the entire picture. That will get you a banner that fills all of the needed area, but will also display in full wide-screen monitors.
Before that, I found that the picture you okay and allow to be added to the directory may have wide blank spaces to either side, and then it is too late to take it back. Your image is reviewed, and almost everything is chosen within a week or so.

When the themes show up in the directory, you will see that there are fewer than 100 subscribers. At first, I thought "Sure thing. Me and my dog." After a month of this, I found that four of them were going past 100 subscribers at one time or another, so these do get used. By October I had more than a dozen with countable subscribers, including one theme with more than 9500.

One final thought - avoid the natural instinct to make the center of attention display in the center of your theme, or you'll find it blocked by the search box.

Opus 100

2009-06-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Those of you of a certain age will recognize that title from the 1950's when Philip Wylie used it as the title of his 100th book. This is the 100th posting of Librarian on the Edge. It began on March 14, 2005 when I was automation librarian at Quinnipiac University. In the ensuing years, Quinnipiac would send me to Ireland twice, England, New Orleans, Nashville, San Francisco, Savannah, Cocoa Beach, Salt Lake City and Anaheim. Many of those trips involved speaking engagements. In 2005 I held faculty status and speaking engagements were counted as scholarship by the university. That changed abruptly a year later when the university president got rid of the faculty union and then declared that librarians were no longer faculty. Because he said so.
I still did the occasional speech whenever I had something to say.

Also in this four year period my son went to library school, graduated, got a job as a reference librarian at the Queensborough Public Library, and seems to be on his way. Since my wife is a public librarian on Long Island, that completed the Trifecta. When we attended Book Expo last month, we noted that this was the first conference we'd attended when all three of us were certified librarians. After faculty status went away at Quinnipiac, I went through a time that I was happy to put behind me. Anyone who has lived through a situation of being treated like someone administration had to put up with knows what I mean.

I January I took an opportunity to work at the New York Law School's Mendik Library doing what I do best - systems librarian work. I've been like a kid in a candy store working through a vast backlog of problems that had built up in the months and years before a systems librarian arrived. This gives me one last chance to use the knowledge of Innovative Interfaces systems that I've built up over the last two decades. I may hold the record for being the first librarian to bring up Encore in two different libraries. Also, it doesn't hurt that I go to work in one of the most fascinating parts of Manhattan. The things we are doing here are interesting enough that I may be writing Opus 200 in another four years.

Saving a library

2009-06-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

Recently, Library Journal announced that the Queensborough Public Library had been named library of the year. That's not a surprising choice overall - in more than 60 branches they have an annual circulation that often leads the entire country. Their branches are thriving social centers - vital to their divergent communities for employment information, access to the internet, ESL and countless other services. One other important fact about the library - Mayor Bloomberg had created a doomsday budget that would eliminate most weekend service in Queens and force the library to lay off more than 200 employees. Many of those were young librarians hired in 2007.

In the news release announcing the award, Library Journal said they would fight to save the library every day. Now the fight seems to be over. The mayor and council worked out a plan this week to put back most of the money and save the library from layoffs and major service cuts. As New York librarians, we are grateful to LJ and to the mayor for seeing the light of day. As parents we are extremely grateful, because our son Bob was one of the young librarians hired in 2007. Unlike librarians who moved to Queens from other parts of the country, Bob would have been lucky enough to have a Plan B option on Long Island. More to the point, he works in a branch that serves a Korean neighborhood in Flushing, and he absolutely loves what he is doing.
I can't remember ever getting a better Father's Day gift.

Right back where we started from

2009-05-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

I was told by my new employers, the New York Law School, that I would only be sent to one conference this year. The choice was easy. The Innovative Users conference held in Anaheim the week of May 18 would be my 14th out of the 17 that have been held. My immediate supervisor, Paul Mastrangelo was there to accept an award for being present at 16 of them.

I had told my wife how easy it is to take the train to Queens and then the monorail to JFK. With an 8:10 flight, we felt confident that taking the 6:07 train from Merrick would get us there in ample time. The monorail, which supposedly runs every 6 minutes, took at least 10 to arrive. Then, at every stop along the way they waited for 2-3 minutes, even though nobody was getting on. Finally we got to the JetBlue terminal only to find out that they had moved into a new wing, and we had to walk a half mile to get to the ticket counter. Then security took forever, so we barely made our flight.

The flight across America was long but uneventful. There were low clouds over LA, so we could not claim to have seen both oceans before noon. We caught our cab easily enough, but the cabbie overshot, ended up miles south of Disneyland and tried to take us to the wrong hotel. At the right hotel, we got right into a room, but it was right over the swimming pool. No matter, because we were off to Disneyland and California Adventure for an afternoon of concentrated fun. Donna had read up on the system for getting advanced passes to the more popular rides, so we made out extremely well that first evening, finishing off with dinner at the much-sought Blue Bijou restaurant. This is a very up-scale restaurant, but it has to adhere to the strict Disneyland rule of No Alcohol. Otherwise, we were very happy with our meal.

After six hours of Disney fun, we were not only jet-lagged but exhausted. We always try to stay up until at least 9:30 or 10 on coming in to California, but I passed out at around 8. Later, Donna said something like - "Were you shaking the bed?" No. Back to sleep. That was that until the next day when somebody mentioned the 5.0 Earthquake that hit the LA area the past evening.
Just my luck, sleeping through the whole thing.

The next morning, I was walking down Harbor Blvd. to get to the Hilton in time for the opening ceremony. Jerry was polite enough to keep 1000 people waiting a few extra minutes until I sat down. This was the 17th IUG gathering, and awards were given to people who had made it to at least 15 of them. This was my 14th, so I just missed the cut, but they told me I may be in luck next year in Chicago. In spite of the economy, attendance was fine and the number of IUG institutions was growing slightly. Jerry then spoke briefly about the state of the company, which is doing quite well. Disclaimer here - in past years I was told not to report on anything at IUG that would be of use to their competitors, so I will not talk about any new III products or services, but rather concentrate on things like CSS and Javascript that are not unique to Innovative.

The keynote speaker was Michael Johnson, from Pixar, who is in charge of the development of new motion picture projects for the wildly successful company.

He said that they have a similar problem to librarians – providing analog materials in a digital world. He quoted a friend: “Pain is temporary. Suck is forever.”

He came into the company later and didn’t know the reason for the name. The most likely is a blend of pixel and artist. They merged with Disney in the 1990s when they had 800 employees. Takes about 3 or four years to go from an initial idea to a finished film.

Storyboarding is the art of story re-boarding. Movies are recorded before the visuals are created. “Do something so we can change it:” the story reel. B&W prototype of the entire film. Notes will go out about problems with the film. Solutions re proposed in a timely manner. In the case of the Incredibles they eliminated a pilot character who was killed off early in the original script. “Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity.” (I prefer my own aphorism: "Reality is only a theory"). Most of the early visual work is done without computers.

“An animator is an actor with a pencil.” Walt Disney

Did 125,000 pictures in storyboarding Wall-E. Johnson worked out way to get storyboarders working in digital format – easier to share, format. “Passion will get you through.”

The first program I attended was one I planned to see even before I found out that my good friend Karen Perone was speaking. This was an introductory course in CSS, which I sorely needed. I'd been able to manipulate a few of our CSS files since coming to NYLS, but it was trial and error, with an emphasis on the latter. With her usual calm demeanor and great command of the facts, Karen helped me along quite a bit. We saw her later, and I promised her that I would treat her like I do Bob Duncan: If I've hit an absolute brick wall and can't get anywhere with a file, I'll ask her to help.

She suggested the following tools for improving CSS files:

Firebug add-in from SitePoint. Tools.sideburner.com/codeburner gives an add-in to Firebug. CSS Validator: Jigsaw.w3.org

The next day I went to a program about leveraging online content into an opac. The presenter had added a lot of the obvious free marc sites like Making of America, but the thing he was most proud of was getting links to things like NASA records working when he had no specific informaiton about the web site - just the title and SUDOC number. He took the time to hand check each URL in his spreadsheet before generating a marc record and adding it to the catalog.

Next was the single most useful program I've ever seen at an IUG: Richard Jackson from the Huntington Library speaking about Regular Expressions - a shorthand way to generate massive searches of a catalog in list creation. The classic example is a search of the records for anything that has a check digit of 4, but the 4th digit is not a blank or a quotation mark. I tried this when I got back to New York and found a few dozen records that were lost to a title search because they were mis-tagged. This method is used in other systems, but Jackson was the first to realize the true potential of this for Innovative systems. You can see more at

sciug.ucr.edu/docs/sciug2007_matches.pdf . Strongly recommended.

The blur that is my life on the express train to Penn Station

2009-03-19T13:16:00.001-07:00

It's been two months since I began my new job at the New York Law School. This is a total change of lifestyle for me. I had a very staggered schedule in my years at Quinnipiac - a combination of very long workdays and some shortened to allow me to get home to Long Island before everything got crazy. Here it is 5 identical workdays - eleven hours if you count the time I leave the house for the train until the time I get back to my driveway. Between the walk to the train from the parking lot and the walk from the Canal St. station, I have walked at least a half mile. Depending on circumstances, I may have also walked up the equivalent of a five story building. This has made me a bit tougher over time, but at the expense of some very sore knees and hips.

On days that I drive to the station, I take the 7:32, in which Merrick is the third of three stops before going on to Penn Station. When Donna drops me off, I take the 7:43, in which Merrick is the first of three stops before the city. Either way, I get to the library before anyone else in technical services. Lately, I listened to a Philip Glass orchestral piece while travelling through the more industrial section of Queens and it was liking having a live-action Koyanasqatsi. One building between Woodside might be taken for a prison with its gray walls and iron fences, but it is a church with gold lettering from Lamentations: "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?" The rest of the passage is: "Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow, which is done to me, with which the LORD has afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger." Must be a lot of fun on Bingo night.

In my first week here, I was presented with a long document representing problems that they had been experiencing for months or worse. In the first week, when I should have just been listening to people and staying out of trouble, I started going through the list of problems. After two months, there is almost nothing left on the list.

One of the things my new library director asked me to look at was the way the library handled table of contents information to distribute to faculty. The way they'd done it for years was to make an image of each TOC as a new journal came in, save that as a pdf and put links to those on a long html page. I found that by saving the images as jpgs rather than tifs, you could cluster twenty pages in a pdf. As part of this work, I found out that many law journals place their TOC on a web page. Not only that, but most of these pages provide free access to the content. That led me to create a file that has dynamic links to 25 top law journals. This has now gone live at http://www.nyls.edu/library/research_tools_and_sources/current_awareness_sources/top_law_reviews_-_current_issues .
With the volume of journals we are cancelling, this kind of list will be more important in the future for tracking current content. One colleague suggested making this a graphic selection. The mockup for that is being tested now - see image on the right.

I'm also working on a Google Map of the world that has placemarks that link to our library's holdings on each country or state. This is open for view at Once we've completed the catalog link for each country we can go back through and add new layers of country information. A few weeks ago, I was reminded that the library had purchased PathFinder, the Innovative Interfaces product that can take a search in the catalog and rerun it in selected databases. Getting to work on this, I created a web page with links to law libraries that had also purchased this. That is at http://www.terryballard.org/nyls/lawlibswb.html We were surprised to see that many libraries had made a very small number of databases available here. We went the opposite direction and added more than 20. You can see the results by going to lawlib.nyls.edu and making any search, then choosing the "Other resources" button at the top of the results screen.

On lunch hours I am able to pursue a project that I had envisioned for my retirement - walking every block in Manhattan and taking a picture of each one, adding those to Google Earth and blogging each entry. The only rule is that each block has to border one that I had covered previously. This work is also covered in different degrees in Google Maps and my PBase account at http://www.pbase.com/terryballard . Working in this historic and important section of Manhattan is a dream come true.

The end of spin

2009-02-07T17:31:00.000-08:00

I've had the sneaking hunch for some time that the DVD is fast becoming obsolete, along with the CD-ROM, cassette tapes, VHS and the phonograph record. Fuel was added to this when I started my new life as a Long Island Railroad commuter two weeks ago. My wife checked me out something from her library - a device called a "Playaway." It is an audio book on an ipod-like device that is devoted to that single title. No moving parts. Just hit the play button every morning and it picks up where it left off on the 5:19 train the night before. For the record, my initial book was "Marley and Me."

Nine years ago when we first opened the Arnold Bernhard library, our reference desk was famous for a box of floppy disks which were freely distributed to students who forgot theirs. It was not a unique experience to hear from a student holding up a floppy disk, saying "My whole semester's project is on this, and now I'm getting an error message." By the time I left, floppies had disappeared in favor of flash drives carried on keychains or worn around the neck. They may fail someday too, but I haven't heard about it. While I'm at it, I should throw in a plug for my favorite future improvement in computers: get rid of hard disks. When a computer boots up today, it does the same thing that it did in the 1980's - checks the hard drive, loads a number of processes, and finally lets you do something. The main difference is that the number of processes has increased exponentially. I've never heard anything that explained to me why a computer can't start up like an Ipod: power it up and it's ready to work.

Ipods are an insidious system. My Nano has done something that would have seemed impossible a year or so ago - it has moved me into the world of Apple. For decades I have taunted my Mac-loving friends - "Buy a real computer." Now Apple is becoming a surprisingly large part of my life. I hardly ever buy CDs any more - just go to the ITunes store and pick out a song or even a whole album. When I found out that my new library is not outfitting me with a laptop, I made the plunge - ordered a Macintosh notebook. It's on its way. The first day it went from Shanghai to Anchorage and then to Indianapolis. The second day it went to Newark, and there it has sat all day. After sitting in Newark the entire weekend, the message changed two minutes after I left for my train on Monday. The laptop is on Long Island and the truck is on the way to my house. Way to go, FedEx.

Changes, Changes

2009-01-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

After more than eleven years of living on Long Island and working in Connecticut at Quinnipiac University, the time has come. I have just been hired by the New York Law School as their Assistant Director of Technical Services for Library Systems. My last day at Quinnipiac will be January 23rd. This means, among other things, that I will be in my Long Island home 7 nights a week. When the weather is nice, I will be able to pack a sandwich and eat lunch, watching boats drift by the Statue of Liberty. Two hour drives to work will be replaced with train and subway rides.
In the transition period between interviewing and being asked to accept the position, I enrolled for another session of teaching library science to new students at the Southern Connecticut State University. My new library director, Camille Broussard is working out a way for me to work half days on Tuesdays to facilitate this. This will mean that I can also make a brief appearance at the Side Street Cafe in Hamden where my four friends, the Wing Nuts, have been gathering on Tuesday nights for all of this century.
When I started changing my details in MySpace and Facebook, it started to occur to me that Facebook has become a viable community for me while MySpace has not. Every time I log in to MySpace I see ads that tell me that young women in my town are looking for older men. Sure thing. Most recently, I have a new "Friend." I never okayed this friend who has filled my page with pictures of hot young party girls from the next town. Even though I have MySpace friends that I actually like such as Steve Earle and Barack Obama, it looks like time to shut down that account.
Eleven years is the second longest tenure I've had at a job. My first library job was at the Phoenix Public Library, where I served 24 years and seemed to be on track for a gold watch. Instead, I got my MLS and have had an amazing career. I don't intend to slow down now. Like Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long, I'm ready to keep climbing to the next branch to see what I can see.
Finally, take a look at this clip from Lindsay Anderson's 1973 niche classic "O lucky man!" -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXjeJSsjcxw&feature=PlayList&p=7A11713A8B423961&playnext=1&index=60

Deja Vu all over again

2009-01-01T08:08:00.000-08:00

The economy is collapsing and the government keeps affirming their commitment to free trade - "Sure it hurts, but we'll let the market decide." Then things get even worse. Families have to decide to eat or pay the rent. Even so, massive evictions are set up sending families into the cold. Their world is collapsing around them, and yet the government agencies address the problems in the language of normal times. They hold regular meetings and take careful notes as the problems mount. Massive public works programs are set up, but the problems just keep getting worse. People start to suspect that the government doesn't really know what to do. The newspapers are filled with stories of mounting crimes by desperate people. Welcome to Ireland in 1848.
I have to make a disclaimer here - I am not a scholarly expert on the Irish Famine. However, since 2000, I have been living with a collection compiled by Quinnipiac University concerning that time. Since 2003 I have been working with the Kerry County Library in Tralee on a project to digitize their source materials about the Famine years and publish them online. Last May, I was in Ireland pursuing that project and visiting mass grave sites in Kenmare and Listowel. Also in the Spring, the library added a collection of Parliamentary papers concerning Ireland in the 19th century. As far as we can tell, we are the first library in North America to own a collection of original documents like this. In the Fall, we hosted a Southern Connecticut State University library school student for an internship. She was given the task of reading some of the government reports and abstracting them for our CONTENTdm site at http://cdm266702.cdmhost.com/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fp266702coll6 . After a few weeks of this, she told me that she was getting angry at the attitude of the government officials. Working with this material always leads to an emotional response.
In the events of the last few months, I began to get the feeling that I've been here before. All of the assumptions that we lived with are now invalid. As in 1845, the mechanisms that have worked for us before are piling up in a massive train wreck. Once again, we see the final results of Laissez Faire economics - the philosophy that allowing the rich and powerful to do whatever they please will result in happy times for everyone. Even though that theory has been tried to disastrous effect time and again, it remains hugely popular with the rich and powerful. Like in the 19th century where the landlord bore no malice to the people they were evicting (the better ones even helped pay passage to America or Australia to the dispossessed), our banks don't like the process of throwing people out of their homes, but they are caught in the middle of a system that is suffering a massive chain reaction.
I'm not sure what to suggest. Eventually, the Irish Famine played itself out and people rebuilt. The people of Ireland eventually shook off an occupying government that did not always hold their best interests at heart. Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead once wrote "Keep an eye to the future, an ear to the past, but after thinking things over notice nothing much lasts."
However, perhaps the last word on this should be given to the great Irish playwrite George Bernhard Shaw who said "We learn from history that we've learned nothing from history."

Reclaiming our past

2008-12-16T13:29:00.001-08:00

Some months ago, the longest-serving employee of the library retired. She was an accounts clerk who had joined us in the early 1960's. Our senior librarian joined the staff in the early 1980s. Otherwise, we were at a loss for an institutional memory of how this library started, who ran it, or how it was used. We still keep books on our shelves that were bought in 1937, but knew really nothing about the people who put them here. I went through the college catalogs, beginning with the 1935 edition. That volume had a picture of the library - complete with a fireplace, leather chairs, and a moose head on the wall. The catalog mentioned that the library had about 4000 books, and subscriptions to 40 magazines. The first librarian was mentioned in 1947. The second librarian, who began in 1950, served out the rest of the decade. I looked up her name in Google to try and get a lead on what she did after leaving here. I found to my amazement that she was still alive and had an email account. She was, to say the least, surprised to hear from us. She did then proceed to write a long statement about the earliest days of library service at our college.

The gentleman who followed her only served one year, and I found out that he is still living in the area. We established contact with him as well. By this time, the library had about 12000 books and 120 journal subscriptions. In the early days the library followed the college to various locations in New Haven and south Hamden, but by 1967 it was in its current location, although the library was completely rebuilt in 2000. Finally, I had enough material to create a document and put it on the web at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/archives/quinnipiachistory/library%20history/history%20of%20the%20arnold%20bernhard%20library.pdf . The document will end with 1995 - the year that our current director, Charles Getchell, came on board.

In my project with geotagging, I had been trying for some time to save the KML coding that is created by Google Maps when I make a multi placemark file. It turns out that Google gives you a way to save the coding, but it has one big problem. No matter what geography the file covers, the map always opens up over Kansas. Then I got the idea to go with the flow and make a map that would show places all over the country - but what? I had two ideas. One was to map the route that John Steinbeck took in 1960 in his travels with Charley. The second, and more ambitious project was to show a map of America with all of the places strongly associated with Mark Twain. His appetite for travel was legendary. By the time he was 20, he had already left home and travelled to Philadelphia, New York and Washington. The placemarks are added in Chronological order. I now have him up to the Hartford years, where he was basically a homebody. The last section will have dozens of marks - he rented at least 3 homes in New York City that we know about. There is a very active online forum of Mark Twain scholars who peacefully coexist with Mark Twain enthusiasts like myself. When I wrote about this project to the forum, I heard plenty from both camps. The quickest way to see these maps is to visit my Gadgets blog at http://terrysgadgets.blogspot.com/

Now hear this

2008-12-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I'm amazed at what is out there for the taking. This morning I was in Delicious and noticed that one of the most popular bookmarks was concerned with turning your blog into a podcast. Sounds intriguing. A company called Odiogo.com could activate text to voice technology to make every blog entry playable, and downloadable to MP3 players and I-tunes. The page gave a fairly long list of steps to follow, starting with getting a free account with Odiogo. Unlike most of these accounts, they only wanted two pieces of information - the url of my blog and my email address. Within seconds I was in my blog's edit mode and they automatically populated it with the code. After five minutes I had "listen to" capability in this blog, an RSS feed to audiocasts and links down to MP3 and I-tunes.

The voice is vastly better than the famous Steven Hawking computer drone. At its best it sounded like a perfectly normal human voice - it reminded me of Defense Secretary Gates. At its worst it tended to speed up at times. You can help the final product by adding lots of commas. I think for the most part, it sounded better than I would have. The first time I played it, it helped me to find a typo. Maybe there is a down side to this, but I haven't spotted it yet.

Surprise! Google just gave your library millions of books for free

2008-11-18T11:50:00.000-08:00

The Association of Research Libraries has done us all a big favor by creating a web site that explains the major points of the legal settlement between Google and the publishers and authors. Check it out at http://www.arl.org/pp/ppcopyright/google/
Go straight to the PDF guide for the perplexed at the top of the screen. The news is better than anything I could have imagined, and I've got a pretty good imagination. Here are some of the headlines.

The biggest shift in access comes with the books that are still in copyright but out of print. Now, although they are fully indexed, you can only see snippets of text. After the new plan goes into effect, you can see 5 page blocks of text, up to 20% of the book. Considering that this accounts for 70% of their online collection, this is a massive increase in the book data available online. Google has added some interesting exceptions. For instance, dictionaries and encyclopedias will be locked down. Those will show a set number of pages and will not allow you to cherrypick information. Same with books of short plays, stories or poems. Books that are still in print will lose their snippet capability, but this is only 10% of the collection.

Books in copyright but out of print will be available for sale by Google, giving the buyer lifetime electronic access to that title. The pricing for most of these books is ten dollars or less.

Books in the public domain will continue to be made available to all users. One question that I have is the great number of books that were published later than 1923 but whose copyrights have lapsed. For the most part Google Books has not been displaying these. Adding those titles to public domain would mean a major increase in access. I checked with someone I know at Google and got an answer that, while not giving a timeline, implied that Google has a database showing which post-1923 titles are in public domain and that they intend to open these up to us the viewing public.

Then it gets really interesting. Any public or academic library that requests it can apply to make one terminal a special machine that can have full access to the universe of books that are in copyright but out of print. From the numbers I've heard thrown around, this means that your library just increased by about 5 million books, and you don't even need to buy new shelves.

Making our mark

2008-10-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

It has been a four month odyssey - learning to add placemarks to Google Earth and Google Maps that point back to our original content. To achieve that goal, I had to learn how to create KML files - XML files designed to work with geotagging. Along the way, there were countless failures. There was hair-pulling. There was inappropriate language. One night I decided that KML stood for "Kan't make landfall." Then there were the occasional successes. I could make KML files that would hold water. I had files that were "accepted" in Google Earth Gallery, after which they disappeared into hyperspace. I created simple placemark files in Google Maps that were "Publicly viewable," although almost nobody ever looked at them. Then I signed up for Google Earth Community and began sending the KML files up where instant icons were created to link to my placemark in Google Earth and Maps.

My sidebar article about the matter appeared in Library Journal a couple of days ago - you can see at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6602836.html . The main article by Illinois public librarian Mikael Jacobsen is well worth reading. On Sunday, I noticed that files I had submitted to Google Earth Community were appearing in Google Earth all by themselves. Anyone who has checked Gallery/Google Earth Community in their Google Earth layers will see my files. This is what I call "Mission Accomplished." The exposure so far has led to a noticeable increase in the traffic to our original content, and it's just going to get better.

I just got to the point where I have so many KMLs and gadgets out there that even I am losing track. To that end, I am developing a blog to add links to everything I've created lately. You can see it now at http://terrysgadgets.blogspot.com/

Playing Devil's advocate, or, Ruminative Deficit Disorder

2008-09-10T09:30:00.001-07:00

About ten years ago, an English professor at Quinnipiac gave me the best backhanded compliment of my whole life. "I don't like what you are doing with these computers,"he told me. I asked what it was he didn't like. "You make all of these web options too appealing." Yesterday, my friend Rich, a biology professor, was railing about how computers are making research too easy, and fostering a generation that just gets a quick information fix and then heads off to the party. He kept a wary eye on me for fear that I would get mad and hit him with my lunch tray. The problem was that to a great extent, I agreed with him. He said that people can skip from thing to thing on the web, but there is no depth. Years ago, I described the web as an ocean that is a million miles wide, but only a foot deep.

In serving my time on the reference desk, I am seeing more and more students finding articles who cannot get the concept that these articles started as research which was written up, turned in to an editor who then sent it out for review to subject experts, and finally printed in a journal with a year, a volume number and a page number. To them, it is just stuff that they get off the computer to fill up their research papers. Last week, when I explained to a student that the article she was looking for was in a paper journal downstairs in the Periodical room, she said, "Do you mean that the files are down there?"

Information on the computer is perceived as more real than other kinds of information. My classic example of this came when I took out a weekend subscription to the New York Times a dozen or so years ago. I gave the agent our address on Narraganset Avenue in Seaford - a street that is only two blocks long. I was informed that my street doesn't exist because there are 18 Narragansett Avenues on Long Island, but they all have two 't's at the end. I was the first person on my street to ever get the Times. If that agent met some of my neighbors at the time, he'd understand why. He asked a series of ever more idiotic questions, but the best one was "There is a Narraganset Avenue in the Bronx. Could that be associated with your street." Basically, he just wanted to know if Narraganset Avenue crossed over or under the Throg's Neck Bridge, traversed 15 miles of Queens, went under the Long Island Expressway, the Northern Parkway, the Southern State Parkway and the Seaford Oyster Bay expressway, then the answer was an emphatic No.

My friend and colleague, Joan Bombace, a psychology professor wanted a name for a new breed of students who spend so much time plugged in to their cell phones, IPods, handhelds and laptops that they seem incapable of reflective thought. They can only react to outside stimuli like white mice in the lab. She wanted to coin a new term that is not yet in Google. I suggested "Digital Overload Syndrome," but she thought that put too much emphasis on the technology rather than the grey matter. After several attempts to find a new phrase, we got "Ruminative Deficit Disorder." Google - pay attention here. Quinnipiac has just planted its flag on that term.
Later in the morning, Joan wrote:

"I think the digital overload can also reflect volume- blasting loud and slamming of the keys and the mechanical aspects to the extent that there is sensory overload and a failure to use internal and external cues properly.
Rumination DD reflects a failure to think, to spend time alone with ones thoughts due to sensory overload from mechanical objects (cell phone, CD player, Instant messaging activity, e-mailing. surfing and digital games) that shuts down the brain and the senses that also causes a failure to use internal and external cues properly!!"

On the other hand, we are giving people all over the world access to source documents that they never could have seen without us and our computers, so it's not all bad.

Raiders ot the Lost Archive - SAA conference in San Francisco

2008-08-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

The transportation for this trip was a replay of what happened to the OCLS - take the train to Jamaica, the monorail to JFK and then fly nonstop to the West. There was some issue with the weather, so they flew us further north than usual - starting with Buffalo, I got great views of all of the Great Lakes. Made me wish I hadn't left my camera at home, but it's a digital SLR and wouldn't fit with my plan of getting everything into a single carry-on bag.

Now BART goes right up to the SF airport, so I got into that and saved Quinnipiac a good $30, and had a more fun ride to boot. I had to go on memory getting from the Powell Street Station to the Hilton but made it without a single lost step. The room was elegant but tiny, and the first big laugh of the day was the room service menu. This is home to the $42 continental breakfast. It lists for a modest $29, but if you read the fine print they charge you an extra five for the privilege and then a 15% service charge, plus whatever you tip the server yourself. That puts it well over forty bucks. In contrast there' s a donut shop across the street that will feed you just fine for three dollars.

Since I was hungry from the trip, I walked up Geary to Tommy's on Van Ness - one of those wacky San Francisco places that appeals to city insiders and tourists in equal measure. I've been coming here since 1972 but never tried their specialty buffalo stew. At 3 PM it looked like an impossible task to stay awake until 9 and avoid the dreaded jetlag. I decided to take to the road and go shopping. I walked up to Union Square and then turned left at Grant. Before the walk was over, I had found gifts for my family members and bought a cheap camera that I could carry in my pocket. After a light snack at Foley's across the street, I had met my goal of 9 PM, and was asleep by about 9:05.

Woke up at 6 on Wednesday. A huge plate of corned beef hash and eggs at Lori's diner was considerably less expensive than the Hilton's continental breakfast, and it was also delicious. There wasn't much to do at the conference until 1, so I went down to Powell Street and bought a 3 day pass that gave me unlimited rides on all cable cars and buses - everything but BART. It was a beautiful morning at the Wharf - I walked around for a few minutes and got an Irish coffee at the Buena Vista, the pub known for bringing the drink to America.

Archivist's Toolkit new version released last January- 5 or 10 copies downloaded every day. Putting on workshops in various locations, including New York in January. Partially funded by NYU. It an open source content manager, or as they call it a collections management database. Content entry can be set up for various levels depending on the status of the inputter. Speaker was archivist at California Academy of Sciences. Managed 2500 cubic feet of materials. Used AT at a basic level. Used for name auth control, usage stats, and generating EAD finding aids. Helped her manage her collections. In both of her institutions, Excel spreadsheets were used for most tasks. Clunky - had to do the same things in triplicate. Had to spend time creating formulas in Excel. Didn't have time to design a new program. Used the original release of AT in November, 2006. Worst
part was getting her IT people to cooperate.
NYU archivist worked on the Washington Square Park image project, hoped to prove that you don't have to have a grant to begin a major project. The collection totals 1200 images of the park. Lots of aerial views.
Copyright notices were added to metadata when NYU did not own the image. Her colleague created manuals for workflow using the toolkit.

Archival history Roundtable. SAA had invested in stocks and lost more than 30,000, so they are looking at new ways to invest. They should probably buy stock in oil companies. First speaker runs a photographic archive of records of Australian aboriginals. She maintains the papers of Mr. Neville, who "protected" the aborigines from 1915 to 1940. His impact on the natives was measured by the fact that they noted that Neville rhymes with Devil. On the other hand, he kept fantastically detailed records. Different parts of the records were split up - not good. Speaker found that the records aren't as good and thorough as was thought. Big problem is there is evidence that money was stolen from the natives, but the records aren't good enough to prove who needs to be paid back.

Second speaker from UNLV, which has developed a special collection on the history of gaming - beginning with European books from the 16th century, books about mathematical probability and lots about the history of Nevada. Not much collection of artifacts. "What happened in Las Vegas stays at the UNLV archive." They set up relationships with casinos, that can be particularly valuable if the casino closes. They have a lottery ticket from the 1700s. World's largest collectoin about Whist. Gaming trade periodicals date back to very early 1900s.

2nd day

DAY 2
Got up at 6 and headed for breakfast at one of the many good diners on Mason Street. Today's omelette was made of shrimp and avacados - very good and different.

Lena Zentall from the California Digital Library. Untitled. [Snappy title with journey metaphor] was the title of her talk. A loittle humor goes a long way with me. Rows of archival boxes - Final resting place? No way. From archives to web. Collection begins with stuff in a box. Then archivists then made finding aids to let others know what was inside. Then they added the finding aids to the web. "Chinese in California" has homes at CDL and the Library of Congress. CDL starts with image and works back to finding aid. OAC is the reverse. Also links back to contributing institutions. More than 40% of users start with Google. They "Reel users back from Google."

Also align with other aggregators. Open Educational Resources site one good example.
They cherry-pick the standout items and get them on Wikipedia. They found out that after they had added 30 pictures to Wikipedia that others had already selected more than 50 of their pictures and added them. Will soon develop a blog to tell the story behind some of their better pictures.

Helena Zinkham from the Library of Congress. Added first 2 collections to Flickr Commons.
Most people find images on the web - we have to add content on their terms. LOC had already done a pilot project of images from the 1930s and 40s. Makes images more accessible and useful to users. LOC agreed to sign on to the Web 2.0 approach. They found that this was extremely valuable because users added tags and other accurate information to the photos, including the identity of the photographer.

Benefits.

Make collections available.
Gain new info about the collections.
Increase the visibility of specific photos.

Risks.
Smart aleck remarks
Loss of meaning
Reduced revenue from photo sales
Excludes undigitized collections.
Less opportunity for us to have fun as history detectives.
Flickr developed the Commons in response to the needs of LOC. Launched in January 2008. In first 6 months LOC collections got 8 million views. Got 5000 comments. Added 20 % to LOCs regular image archive. Most viewed photo has been seen 75,000 times. She considers Flickr members valuable volunteers. For instance, a picture labelled something like "Street scene in Alliance Ohio," would bring comments from someone who knew the exact address, the year, and the family history of the store owner. George Eastman House just added pictures to the commons, but they have blocked printing.

Cost - $24.95 per year for Flickr Pro account.
They have to patrol comments each day for at least 10 minutes.
Project has added interactions between citizens and archival staff. New feature is "Then and Now" pictures.

OAC is for power users - links to finding aids, etc. Calisphere is more for the general public. Same content but two different views.

The keynote speech that evening was John Dean. After his Watergate days, he pursued a successful career in investment banking. After his retirement, he began a writing and speaking career. While expressing his admiration for archivists who have been a major help in his writing career, he gave us the tag line, "Archivists make it last longer." Dean feels that the abuses of the Bush administration put Nixon to shame. He said that he considers himself an independent, but admitted that he isn't invited to many Republican functions lately. He maintains close contacts with Washington insiders on both sides of the aisle. One of them recently told him that while jogging near the Vice Presidential mansion, he observed trucks leaving the facility with the panels labelled : "Document destruction company." Since the administration says that they have done nothing to be ashamed of, this seems curious.

Where in the world?

2008-08-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

The title of this blog has a double meaning, as you will see. At ALA during a session about OCLC's ContentDM, I was intrigued by something that was said about an Iowa librarian who had figured out a way to put placemarks in Google Earth that linked back to their original content. I've spent the last month or so wading through confusing and sometimes contradictory instructions about the care and feeding of KML files - these are specialized XML files for adding placemarks to Google Earth and Google Maps. I had worked with XML before and had a sense of how unforgiving the format is for any kind of sloppiness. Still, the goal seemed worth the trouble - nobody is going to go broke betting on Google in the future, so I wanted to be part of the revolution.

I had already got involved in adding simple pictures to Google Earth. That is just a matter of uploading files to a web site called Panoramio and flagging the location on a map. After a few weeks, Google evaluates the pictures - nearly all of mine were approved, but that doesn't mean they'll show up in Google Earth any time soon. In some cases such as very popular locations like Central Park, they may be approved but never added. For reasons that elude me, some of these pictures also show up in Google Maps.

All I wanted was a template - a recipe for creating a page that had a picture, a space for text describing our work, and the ability to create a link. I wanted too much. I had to cobble together a file that incorporated bits and pieces of what Google had put in their tutorials. The main lesson I got from the initial read was that I needed to create the files and mount them on the web as KMLs. Since their spider doesn't look for KMLs, I had to create a second KML file called a sitemap that described the location of the other files that I wanted Google to see. That one was fairly simple to create. For some reason, I couldn't get this to work from the Quinnipiac pages, so I added the sitemap file to my Geocities page terryballard.org.

To further muddy the waters, Google Earth has a Gallery with a form for quickly adding KML files. They only insist that the file as an author and description. However, if you have an author line, you also have to replace the first two lines of the standard KML to add coding that invokes Atom:Author. Then, when you do that, the Gallery program will not accept your file. I found out later that the KMLs will not really work unless you have the Atom line. There is a KML developers online group run by Google that is well-patrolled by experts, and that helped me over a few rough spots. I did manage to find a balloon template that I was able to integrate with a stripped-down KML file that is everything I hoped for. You can see a sample of the results at http://www.terryballard.org/glendaloughbyfinerty 2.kml . If you have Google Earth loaded on your machine, that should start it up and automatically go to that spot. It looks fantastic, but I'll need to wait weeks before I find out if it gets added to Google Earth on its own.

Actually, after collecting numerous bumps on my head from hitting the wall, I came across the best answer. There is a site called Google Earth Community that has a quasi-official relationship with Google. You can post KML files there in unmoderated groups. If your file is noticed by a moderated group administrator, the message is moved up. On Sunday, August 24, my 62nd birthday, I made a posting to the Community (seehttp://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/1223296/an/0/page/0#1223296) . In a half hour it was moved up to the History moderated forum. In the first day, it was seen by a hundred people, and 25 of them followed up with clicking to see the placemark in Google. In a month or so, it should be added to Google Earth for people who have opted for Gallery/Google Earth Community. By now, the message has been visited by nearly 700 users. There have been a number of surprises on this journey, but the good ones make up for everything.

Cuil

2008-07-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

Cuil is a new search engine developed by a few people who left Google. It's always been my fondest hope that someone would come along and give the Big G a real taste of competition. I don't have anything against Google - I just think that competition will help bring out the best in them. Naturally, when I heard about this on the morning news, I couldn't wait to try it out. It looks really slick on first impression. Their "about us" page got my attention by adding a picture from the prehistoric stone circle on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland - I had been standing on the same spot 2 months ago. The searches go quickly and produce "big number." Here is where they start acting similar to Google - a search for my name and Quinnipiac produced more than 6000 hits, but when I tried to see them, there were only a few hundred. There is an attractive drill-down feature on the right, but the entries seem somewhat incomprehensible. For the search I just mentioned, the only suggested subtopic was "People from St. Louis." I don't come from St. Louis, so I'm not sure where that came from.

Most amusingly, they add pictures to each page description. In the case of my entries, there are dozens of pictures of somebody else named Terry Ballard. Their formula really should ensure that the picture comes from the page they are describing. Enough other people were interested that their servers were swamped in the afternoon. My verdict is that I love the concept but the product isn't quite ready for prime time.

Gone Hollywood

2008-07-02T16:46:00.002-07:00

We debated for some time about going to National this year - after Midwinter, ACIS in Savannah, and Ireland, our dog was starting to get separation anxiety, but my director encouraged me to go, and I put in a proposal to speak (rejected, alas - breaking a streak of proposal acceptances that stretched back to 2005). On the positive side, we hadn't been to Anaheim since our son was 4, and he's now grown up and working as a librarian in Queens. Having now been to both Disneys, I was interested in confirming the notion that Disneyland was superior to its Florida imitation. Also, there were plenty of worthwhile programs.
On Friday, we caught the direct flight on Jetblue from JFK to Long Beach - Jetblue
still doesn't fly to John Wayne. We registered for the conference and then cashed in our advance ticket to California Adventure, a new theme park that seemed to have been carved out of the parking lot to Disneyland. There were a number of excellent things here, but the standout to me was a short 3d experience based on A Bug's Life. This is obviously the newest of their 3d works, and the technology was breathtaking. Another standout was the hang gliding over California ride that took you to Yosemite, over the ocean, and atop the Golden Gate Bridge.
Saturday was the sort of day that was so tightly scheduled that we were afraid to wake up in the morning. We got to the convention center in time for the opening of the exhibits. This one was, oddly, shorter on showmanship than past ALAs - no barbershop quartets or buskers this time. Just straight ahead librarianship. Also, there were no Clark Gables or Elvis' roaming the aisles - just a big exhibit room and a lot of cloth book bags and automation vendors excited about their new interfaces.
I went next to the OCLC ContentDM session, where I met several OCLC staff that I had worked with online. I was afraid that everyone else would be from a library that was thinking of buying the product, but it turned out that almost everyone was like me. They have it, but they want ideas on how to expand it. They mentioned that one of the librarians in the audience had worked out a way to interface listings on their ContentDM with Google Maps. We'd like to do that too, so I'll get to work on it when I'm back in Connecticut.

I then went to the Sheraton to attend the EBSCO lunch. They are rolling out a host of new things, including their first substantial new interface in more than 5 years. Watch for it in the next few weeks. You'll hear this from vendors a lot in the future - "Our new interface is more like Google." Also, like other vendors, they realize that they need to expand their service beyond that of providing journal articles online. This means adding some sort of original content. In EBSCO's case, they have hired content experts to write guides to research in specific areas such as business and sociology. They are also digitizing quite a bit of source documents in American history. Most impressively, they are publishing a database of more than 600 newspapers in America from the 1600's to the late 19th century.

A program put on by WebJunction looked scary enough that I almost turned tail when I saw tables covered in white paper and marking pens for brainstorming. The plan was to work with a group, talk about our experiences with Library 2.0, and then move to another table and another for 15 minutes sessions to spread the synergy, then end up back at the "Home" table to generate some sort of conclusions. Althoug I am usually too shy for such things, in this case they couldn't shut me up. The main theme seems to be that libraries will resist 2.0 tools until the day comes when they solve a particular problem at the institution. A good example was the Smithsonian Institute, where people are spread all over the world, so they used YouTube type 60 minute presentations to introduce themselves to the rest of the remote co-workers and speak briefly about their job responsibilities. Another library used a blog to replace their printed library newsletter. Then it was a night of vendor parties, followed by the Scholarship Bash. Disneyland was so mobbed that it was hard to tell there was a library event going on here.

Sunday was another major marathon day, including a breakfast for Daniel Ellsberg, hosted by Alexander Street Press. Ellsberg began by reminiscing about his days of being a fugitive from the FBI while dozens of newspapers were getting copies of the Pentagon Papers from a network of anti-war volunteers. On one of the days when he was being sought by the government, he was on television for a half hour being interviewed by Walter Cronkite. He then went on to give his views about our current situation. He said that the framers of the constitution specifically did not want a monarchy, so they set up a system with checks and balances. Ellsberg said that the current administration, in concert with a spineless congress has crossed the line and allowed tyranny to take hold in America. Very heady stuff.

We went to the exhibits for a time, and then I headed over to see the Sally Ride speech. I got there 10 minutes or so early, and that was good enough to get me a seat in the front row. America's first female astronaut from the early 1980's, Ride is now developing an educational book program to break the barriers that keep women from living up to their potential as scientists. Her latest project is aimed to getting young people more involved in the issues of climate change. Her talk was interesting enough in itself, but she also enhanced it with stunning pictures from space.

At a Gale luncheon we learned that they, too are getting their product more in line with Library 2.0 principles .One of their new projects, an international information site, has a built in interface that allows the user to get involved - write a congressman or an embassy. Their all-new interfaces will start to come out in July and August. Interestingly, they will start allowing users to create their own logins and passwords while in the library that will be valid after they go home - much the same way that RefWorks is set up.

Later that afternoon was the Top 10 Tech Trends panel that is a must at any ALA. This time, the media was the message as the room resembled a 3 column web site. At the left was a display of a chat room set up for librarians out in Cyberland. In the middle was the normal array of panelists. On the right was a projection of two blogging librarians, Sarah Houghton-Jan and Karen Coombs. The whole thing looked vaguely Orwellian to me, but it mostly got the job done. I felt bad when one panelist was giving it his all and a chat room comment flashed "Make this more interesting." Karen Schneider mentioned that open source was becoming entrepreneurial as a nation of libraries finds that the free ILS software they just loaded needs somebody to come around soon and make this all work. Small literary journals are contributing to the open access movement - they weren't making money anyway with printing paper journals and mailing them out. She hopes that the next big trend will begin on January 20, 2009 - a remark that got considerable applause. One of the bloggers mentioned that API is becoming important to libraries. That made me feel SO 20th century, because I didn't even know what API is. Another interesting concept to come out of the panel was "The semantic Web." This is a way for web pages to automatically improve themselves. Sounds far-fetched, but who knows.

One of the video bloggers mentioned that there are a lot of dormant library blogs out there. Library blogs can fall prey to bureaucracy. Libraries in general are not innovators. She said this, not me. Clifford Lynch is waiting for the backlash against open source as libraries realize what they've done. I particularly appreciated Roy Tennant's remarks. He wants to get out of the trendspotting game because he has been wrong too many times. "look for an age of game changing surprises." You can't argue with that.

Sunday night is often taken up with vendor parties, and tonight was no exception. The highlight was a concert by a "Library-friendly" indy band called the High Strungs. I can mention that Gale threw this one because we found it later on the open Web. The highlight was when they created a song from scratch, blending quotes supplied by the audience. When they were ready to perform, they added more audience participation by getting volunteers to work simple instruments such as tambourines and cymbals. I found myself on stage somehow with cymbals, trying to look cool. Actually, it was a lot of fun being in a rock band.

Monday was mainly made of revisiting the vendors. Later in the day, I met up with several of the most active members of the library typos group - Tina Gunther and Wendee Eyler. Tina has been the heart and soul of the group for years, maintaining the list of typos found in opacs all over the world Wendee has helped with the grueling work of writing the Typo of the Day for Librarians. Appropriately, we met in front of the OCLC booth.

As far as L.A. goes, I'd often found myself on the opposite side of the fence from Randy Newman, but this time I had a very enjoyable conference. You never know.

'Tis grand - part 2

2008-05-30T08:18:00.001-07:00

On Sunday, we were faced with an entire day to do something different. I had looked at the map and found that the Beara Peninsula had a road around it in the way that the Ring of Kerry does, and it is easily accessed from Kenmare. At Kenmare I bought a nifty new cap to replace one that I had lost in London years ago. Then we went to a coffee shop for coffee and fruit scones with cream. I had heard that Kenmare had a mass grave and memorial to Famine victims, but there was no sign of that, so we moved on. The Beara Peninsula is scenic but very underdeveloped - you don't see a real town until you've gone to the south side around Bear Island. There was a park that they put up signs for, so we headed for that on a road that was about 6 inches wider than my car. Fortunately, we did not have to encounter any other car going the opposite way.

The park includes a waterfall and a trail up to a stone circle. The ground was so marshy that it was a real challenge to make it up the hill with dry feet. The trouble was worth it because the stone circle was magnificent and there were only a few other people there. We could have driven to get a better view of the waterfall, but the road back was making me nervous so we headed on.
We had planned to lunch at Castlemainbere, but the restaurants were mostly closed due to Sunday and/or off-season, so we headed on. I stopped for deisel and paid the approximately 8$ per gallon - fortunately, the Toyota was really easy on fuel. We found a thriving shopping street at Ballylicky, and stopped at a hotel there for an excellent carvery lunch.

We got as far as Bantry, and walked around the docks for a time. We wanted to get back at a decent hour because I would be cooking the boiling bacon and would need some time. By the time we got back to Kenmare, the town was completely overrun with Ring of Kerry tourists, so I followed directions on a map to take a road that circled around to the east of the mountains, and got us back to Killarney in a way that would avoid the nightmare mountain road and downtown Killarney. I had a few tense moments, but the strategy worked perfectly. When we got to Tralee, we stopped by TESCO for a second round of groceries. I found my favorite Irish beer, Curim Gold, and we also picked up everything we'd need for a spaghetti dinner later in the week. I also picked up some reasonably priced steaks - we later found out why they were so affordable.

Back home the boiling bacon came out fantastic, and we got ready to go to work at the library the next day.

We were up at 7, so both of us got dressed and walked down to the beach. It was a beautiful sunny day, but we had the entire place to ourselves. When the tide is in (it was for our entire time), you had to walk east to the pedestrian bridge and cross the dunes. Once there, we could see down to the houses at Castlegregory and across Tralee Bay to Fenit. Then it was off to Tralee to turn ourselves in for digitizing work. We first had the pleasant surprise that if you get to the library as they are opening there is plenty of street parking. We went straight to the local history room and checked in with the two Michaels - Lynch the Archivist and Costello the Local History librarian.

The scanning equipment was ready to go except for the fact that the computer was not connected to the network. Michael could have plugged it back in, but there was a big switchboard device with 30 openings, and he didn't want to risk it. A call to our old friend Declan from the county produced a promise to come by soon and straighten it out. In anticipation of the expected delay we went out to the bakery for scones. Afterwards, we set out to find our old friend Brian, who had worked for the Quinnipiac Tralee Facility when there was one. When last I saw him, he mentioned to check at the Sportsfield Bar - I had the impression that he lived in the overhead apartment. After some confusion, we did find the bar at the end of the street. I tried to open the door, but it wouldn't budge. Seconds later a man rushes out - it was Brian himself. Not only that, but he was wearing his old Quinnipiac t-shirt. Pretty good coincidence when you consider that he did not live there, and hadn't visited in weeks.

Back at the library, the machine was working, so we got down to scanning - first, scanning some missing weeks from Killarney. The machine worked well, but it made a slapping noise with every image that I didn't like. After an hour of that, it was time to go to my favorite Tralee lunch spot - the Grand Hotel. Even though they are twice as elegant as anything else around, their lunches cost about the same as any pub. Unfortunately, that's now 10 Euro ($15.90), and go from there if you get a pint. At least at the Grand you could get 2.50 knocked off for taking a "half portion," which turned out to be almost more than I could eat.

Then we headed over to the shopping pedestrian mall and bought an Irish pay-as-you-go cell phone for a modest 49 Euro (with a thousand minutes pre-loaded). By the time we had it charged that afternoon, we were back in communication.

We kept scanning until closing time. Donna was my page turner, and sometimes she would get completely caught up in the drama of what was being written. That would really make a difference the next day when we started scanning weeks from Kenmare.

Months before we left, I got an email from Mike O'Neill, proprietor of the Railway Tavern in Camp. In 2004, my Irish friend Padraig Kennelly had taken me there, and I took pictures in and near the pub. These were found on Google Earth by O'Neill, who had forgotten my connection with Padraig. We made a note to revisit the tavern and reconnect. We did more reconnecting than we had bargained on - Mike called Padraig to let him know we were here. Padraig had been fighting some major health issues, so we were thrilled to see him, as he came into the tavern with his long-time friend Michael. We talked some old and then very old times. Then the pair took us to a nearby seafood restaurant called the Seven Hogs, named after the Magharee Islands. A wonderful dinner and unbeatable company. Among other things, Padraig gave me an excellent lead. He mentioned that the Kerry Library had at least one newspaper that covered the Famine events. Padraig's favorite saying is that "A day out of Kerry is a day wasted." We can't argue. Padraig is a highly successful newspaper publisher, but he has been known to tell people that his main occupation is that of rainbow chaser. We hope he chases many, many more.

On Tuesday we asked for copies of the Kenmare Minute books beginning with 1845. We noticed immediate differences between the two towns. Killarney Guardians met every week and took very detailed notes. The Kenmare people had only been meeting once a month and took fairly sketchy notes - no details about provisions for the workhouse like we used to see with Killarney. In the early fall of 1845, the sense of absolute panic was more evident here. The first problem they noted was not an increase in inmates (that would come later), but the fact that the potato failure had caused the price of all food to spike. They couldn't afford to feed the paupers they already had. By October they were meeting once a week or more, and trying to devise some sort of creative financing to do the work they needed to do.

We left somewhat early in the afternoon and headed back along the Conor pass road to revisit some of our places from years past. On the way back from Cloghane, we stopped at another ancient burial ground with unkempt stones going back to the Famine era and sweeping views of the bay and Mt. Brandon. On the way back, we did something we always do here - visited the cheese shop on the hill between Cloghane and Castlegregory. This is run by a couple from France who make homemade cheeses and pates. If you want to try seaweed cheese, this is for you.

On Wednesday, we scanned more of Kenmare. By this point, they were dealing with the double bind - rising food prices and hordes of people wanting to come in. They had taken out loans to buy the extra food, and now the bank was losing patience with them. At one point they were threatening to close down the workhouse. They also decided to forego elections and just keep going as a group. The descriptions of the conditions in the workhouse were much more direct and brutal than what we had seen in Killarney. Almost everyone in the workhouse was sick with fever, and the floors were so porous that they soaked up the considerable body fluids that were spilling over, ensuring that there was scant chance of anyone getting better.

On a lighter note, we had heard on the radio that Tralee would be the scene for the m

ajor Irish bicycle road race that afternoon. We took time from scanning to head for the center of town to watch that happen. I'd never seen a European bike race, so this was exciting as the motorcycles and police cars raced through the streets ahead of the stage leader who was wearing the recognizable colors of the Irish team. Minutes later we went to the platform and heard the speeches as the stage leader was given the yellow jersey, roses and a kiss from the pretty girl.

After finishing off the days' scans, we headed back west and stopped again at the Railway. As we sat down and enjoyed our Guinness and Carlsbergs, we continued our conversation with Michael about the Well of the Mad. A Dutch couple at the next table was soon in the conversation as well. Michael looked around to find his wife, and set her up to run the bar. "Finish your drinks," he said. "I'm going to take the lot of you to the Well. Somehow, we all fit in his car and headed up the road from Camp to Dingle. At the first right he turned down one of those roads that are barely wider than the car. The well was just as we remembered it from 2004, but this time we had expert help. Michael had phoned Bridget who lives nearby and acts as the guardian of the well. She gave us a rundown on the history of the well, which had been tagged as a cure for madness many centuries ago. Later, people came from the university and analyzed the water, which turned out to contain a high proportion of lithium - the substance that is commonly given to the chronically depressed. Afterwards, we went home and cooked the steaks from TESCO. I had forgotten a rule that I had formulated years ago - "Stay away from the beef here." It was tough as a boot.

'Tis grand: or, In the Footsteps of the Famine, part 4

2008-05-28T11:30:00.001-07:00

Day 1: The arrival

This was the fourth in a series of business trips to the west of Ireland on behalf of Quinnipiac University. The usual nonsense of checkin, luggage and security seemed almost routine by now. When we got to the international gate, I looked at our plane to see which saint it was named after (each plane in Aer Lingus' fleet is named for a saint - in this case Aoise.) The takeoff took us over the rockaways and out to sea for 6 hours.

I tried all the usual tricks to get to sleep, but nothing worked, so I was faced with a day that would be about 27 hours with no sleep. The first of many happy coincidences came when the first sighting of Irish land took place, I saw an island out the window and thought "This looks like the Blaskets and Slea Head." It was - proof came seconds later when Castlegregory appeared with its tonsil shaped peninsula going down to the Magharee Islands. Once off the plane, the line for passport check was torturous, but it didn't matter because the bags also took forever once we were past that. On arriving in the lobby, we spotted Des Kenny, Quinnipiac's official Irish bookseller, who had graciously offered to get up at 5 AM and pick us up and take us to Galway.
At one point in the past, I had bragged to Des that I could talk digitization in a coma. He happily put that to the test by lining up three meetings with librarians and booksellers on my arrival day. Along the way, he stopped at Yeats' Tower, which we had never seen. It was an absolutely stunning sight in the midst of a dense forest and flowing stream. All I could say was 'Wow' as I wandered around taking many pictures. It was a fabulous reception for the returning eirophiles.

As we arrived in Galway, Des figured out a way for us to take showers at a local fitness club, using a bit of influence. Afterwards, we had a wonderful buffet breakfast at a hotel in Salthill.
Then it was off to the first meeting of the day - a nice chat with the County Librarian of Galway, Pat MacMahon. The only thing worse than Galway traffic is Galway parking, so Des was having fits by the time that we got a spot near library headquarters. Pat was a very soft spoken librarian who was proud of what his library had accomplished in preserving the county's heritage. He had heretofore been completely unaware of Quinnipiac, so the first job was to fix that. After a slow beginning, Pat got to the heart of the matter. He told us that he supports all of the new technologies because they lead people to old and valuable holdings that they never would have encountered without technology. His antiquarian-looking office, lined with shelves overlooks at peaceful river scene. McMahon's inspiration was Galway's first county librarian, Samuel Maguire, who had the foresight to develop a substantial collection of books in the Irish language. In the 1950's, he also published a journal of local history that is an enduring resource for the area. I brought up some possibilities for cooperation that I hope will bear fruit someday.

Afterwards, we went to Kenny books headquarters on Tuam road and looked at the Kenny operation. One part of his second floor is an archive of pictures of every famous author who had walked through their doors when they ran a ground bookstore in downtown Galway. He reached in to one rack and pulled out a picture saying _"Here is a famous librarian for you - Sister Marie Melton from St. John's." I said, sure thing, she was my boss in the 90s when I worked there as a part-time reference librarian.

We were then led to the boardroom where we were shown a major collection of letters from an Irish landloard during the Famine years. This is the kind of collection that anyone would kill for - absolutely one-of-a-kind source materials. The kind of collection that would make us a major player in Irish scholarship. I'd recommend buying it, but I'm not the one to make the big decisions. We then walked a block over to the workshop where Des' brother Gerry does rebinding. We were prepared to give them some business - a pair of Mark Twain first editions in terrible shape that deserved better. We're looking forward to seeing them in their new finery.
Des then dropped us off at our hotel so I could check in, change shirts and lie down for 5 minutes before moving on to the University of Ireland Galway campus to talk with librarians in their special collections department. They have just bought a very expensive scanner, but are still in the process of determining how to proceed with digitization. I explained a bit of what we are doing, and mentioned that when they put things up, we will be happy to link to what they are supplying.

Des took me on a tour of Salthill (where we had stayed in the 1970s as tourists), and then it was on to Tom Kenny's art gallery on High Street. This was in the location that had been, for many years, the Kenny book store. They were preparing for a major opening, so there was much excitement and moving of art objects. By now I was starting to see double or maybe triple after 26 hours without sleep, so Des got me back to the hotel so we could have a blessed hour or two before dinner. We quickly got a wakeup call that we're in a foreign country. First there was the power - nothing was on. They told me that I had to put my key in a key-slot near the door. This got things going, but they went off again after 5 minutes. Then I was told that I had to keep the key there until I left. Then we found out that the TV remote didn't work, and our adapters were only for the UK. After all this waqs settled, we took a brief nap. I woke up not knowing who I was, what time it was, or where I was. Once we sorted all that out, it turned out that we were right on time to change and meet the Kennys' at a bar next to the art gallery. There we sat down for brews with Des and Tom and a sculptor who had produced some very innovative Famine images - he said that the point he tried to make was that the Famine hit all levels of society, not just the poor.

We met Des' wife Anne at a nearby seafood restaurant, and were treated to a fine meal indeed. I had heard from my director that Anne was an absolutely delightful person, and she did not disappoint. Des is a major local celebrity in Galway, and well known at the restaurant. After dinner we went to one more bar for one more drink. At this point, I think I was babbling about my love for Ireland, when Anne asked me to repeat "'Tis grand." I did and knew instantly that this would be the title of my blog for this trip. Thanks, Anne. Des got us back to the hotel where we found out it was now 11 PM. The best thing you can do is to stay up to a normal bedtime, so we were looking perfect. What a day.

Day 2: The Jet Lag

Incredibly, we woke up when we should have. I looked over at my Verizon cell phone. They told me it was activated for foreign travel, but after 12 hours, it was still searching for a signal. The hotel breakfast was surprisingly good - I don't know what is different about eggs in England and Ireland, but theirs are way better than the American egg. Donna had porridge which turned out to be fabulous. Afterwards, we had just time enough to pack up and wait out front for Des to pick us up and take us to the Galway regional airport to pick up our car rental. Our first stop was Ennis, where we would be talking with Maureen Comber from the Clare County Library. Unofrtunately, I did not secure directions, so we parked near downtown and asked at the tourist information booth in the museum. Turns out that we were only a couple of blocks away. This would be a brief visit because Clare has already done a fantastic job in making their historic materials available on the internet. I still think it is valuable to check in with others to make them aware of what we are doing.

Next stop was the town of Doolin on the Northwest coast of the Burren. This was the departure point for a ferry that would take us to the smallest and southernmost Aran Island - Inisheer. We got there early, hoping to take an earlier ferry than the 5:15 passage we'd booked. We found that not only is there no previous run, but ours would be an hour late, so we settled in for relaxing and hiking in a rugged Burren setting. I could see a ruin on the shoreline north of us, so I headed for that. Donna found a flat rock and was soon napping.

After delays piled on more delays, we finally saw our boat, the Happy Hooker, pull up to the dock. There were just 5 or 6 other people going to Inisheer for the night, and the ride out was smooth and brief - just about a half hour. Our host was waiting at the dock, and we were at the guest house within minutes. The lodge had just been built so everything was clean and new. We were at the edge of town, so we soon were working our way up the road to enjoy the beautiful desolation of the Aran Islands. At eight we sat down at the Fisherman's Cottage, a fine dining restaurant that was part of the Slow Food Movement (the opposite of fast food - part of the credo is that they know where all of the food came from), and had a wonderful dinner. Quite a pleasant surprise in an island that doesn't even have a grocery store. Enda and Maria, the owners, are as interesting a couple as you will ever meet. Among other things they owned the beautifully outfitted B&B where we stayed (built by hand by Enda), worked as life counselors, and ran seminars on the slow food movement. Enda also mentioned that he was a licensed chiropactor. As we were walking out of the restaurant, I got out the camera because the sun was setting over Inishmaan and Inishmore. No phone or internet in the guest house, so we walked down to the dock and found a pay phone at the newer pub, so we could check in with our son.

Day 3: On the road

The next morning, we were up bright and early and ready to explore. The ferry back to the mainland wasn't scheduled to pick us up until noon, so we had time to go explore. I started up the hill to reach the castle, but it turned out like Kafka's castle. The more we walked up the hill, the further the castle became. We went all the way back down and tried again. We got directions from the man at the older pub, and headed up the right way. Donna was joined by a Jack Russell Terrier (Irish Rent-a-dog), who followed us up the road but turned back then the going got steep. The view from the top was well worth the effort of getting there. When we walked back down, the gate to the castle was open so we walked up to it.

Sursprise! The ferry was running late, so we had time to make a bonus trip to the graveyard. Our host dropped us off and we walked back and got one more fine meal at the Fisherman's Cottage before heading back. I found on the map that one could avoid a detour to the awful roads of Limerick by taking a ferry across the Shannon, so we headed for that. According to their posted schedule we should have missed the 4:30 ferry, but it was running late, so we drove up just as they were unloading and got right on. Then it was a straight shot down to Listowel and Tralee. When we hit downtown Tralee, I wasn't sure where I was until I saw the cathedral, and then I knew exactly where I was and where to go next.

After a mixup about the location of our landlady, we headed to the Spar grocer in downtown Castlegregory and stocked up with Irish dairy items and boiling bacon. Across the street was our favorite eating place on the peninsula - Phil's Cafe. Since this was off-season, Phil gave himself some generous time off, so we determined that we could have scones there on Thursday. Then we found our landlady and went down the road to our cottage which was, as advertised, a five minute walk from the bay. We were surprised to hear that the cottage was more than 200 years old - the only immediate giveaway was the thickness of the walls - more than two feet. It was perfectly comfortable and more than enough room for the two of us. An hour later, we went to the front and got another sunset shot.

OCLS Day 3

2008-04-30T05:55:00.001-07:00

This day was necessarily short because the conference ended at noon. Ronda and I met for breakfast and then went to two sessions in the Topaz Room. The first was from Mona Florea about her use of WebCT, Wiki Spaces and ePortfolios in teaching information literacy. This detailed her work at the Three Rivers Community College in Connecticut. She developed a library module to be used in teaching nursing students online. She also used blogs as a tool inside of WebCT. She also used wikis to help guide the students through group projects.

The second session was by Susan Shepley from the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology. She described how librarians were added to teams of instructional designers and technologists developing coursework for their Virtual Campus. This helped to develop a stronger relationship between the librarians and their instructional development colleagues. I then had to go back and get ready for checkout since the hotel would only grant me one extra hour. Since my flight wasn't until 5, I had several hours to make up for the pictures that I hadn't taken of Salt Lake City. While the downtown area was surrounded by spectactular mountains, it was hard to get a picture because of the buildings. I walked East for many blocks and found out that I couldn't get far enough on foot to get a really good shot.

Then I found an ad for the Roof restaurant, on the 10th floor of an office building next to the Temple. When I got there, I found out that the restaurant was only open for dinner, so I went to the Red Rock brew pub for lunch. Then I found out from the concierge that I could go to the Roof anyway and take pictures. This turned out to be true. By now I had walked for about 10 miles, so I was ready to go back and get to the airport. It turned out that the best pictures of the mountains were taken at the airport itself. I had about a half hour, so I tried the wi-fi and found out that I'd have to pay $6 for the privilege, so I passed on that. The one hour flight to Phoenix to visit my parents for the weekend was easy to take. You can go home again, but it's weird. Phoenix has changed a lot since I moved East in 1990. I'd go through intersections and remember the terrible accidents I'd seen there in the 1960's and 1970's. Still, it was good to reconnect with my family and re-discover real Mexican food.

OCLS Conference - day 2

2008-04-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

I'll write more later, but I am absolutely delighted with the way things went in my talk - we had an audience of 20-25 people who were deeply interested in this topic, laughed at my jokes and gave me 15 minuts of great questions and suggestions. Altogether, one of the best presentations I've ever given. You can see the PowerPoint at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/saltlake.ppt. I told the group that I'd consider this a success if somebody went back to their library and created their own VERSO. Perhaps this will happen.

Afterwards, I joined Ronda for a workshop on Elluminate - a program that facilitates web conferencing. I had used this more than a year ago for an ACRL webcast that reprised a very successful presentation at ALA in 2006. I found it a bit bewildering at the time, so this program helped me to gain a bit more of a comfort level. Afterwards, we went to the conference buffet luncheon, which was actually pretty good.

The first afternoon session was presented by Jane Hutton from West Chester University of Pennsylvania: "Academic Libraries as Digital Gateways." She is concerned with the fact that millions of books are available online but the libraries are falling behind in providing access to this. In extreme cases, the library's opac has a record for a microfiche book title when the same book can be found online. She did some excellent research by picking 10 titles of classic books that were known to be freely available online. This access was rarely reported in university online catalogs. Sites such as the University of Pennsylvania listing and OAIster did much better, but no one site showed everything. She also mentioned an encounter between a Serials Solutions executive and a Google Books manager where the Google manager was asked about publishing a list of everything they were providing so Serials Solutions could generate marc records. They were told in no uncertain terms that Google will not provide such a report. Hey Google - here's an idea. Make your own marc records and market them to libraries - "Google book collection about the Italian Renaissance," etc. Maybe you already have enough money.

After that, we went to a session about the creation of quick tutorials for distance education students by librarians at SUNY Plattsburg. This turned out to be a popular topic, judging by the fact that I nearly had to sit on the floor. They found that these tutorials are a great investment in time because they can be reused in many ways after their initial creation. Curiously, these are visuals only - they are just starting to experiment with narrated tutorials.

We visited the poster room for the final session of the day. Highlights included a presentation by Todd Quinn from Northern State University in South Dakota who is using Web 2.0 tools in the teaching of information literacy at the library. Also, librarians from Appalachian State University have created a virtual library that resembles Second Life except for the fact that they are delivering actual useful library information. They divide the library into "Information Gardens," navigated by the use of avatars.

Ronda and I walked 5 blocks west to the Gateway center - a sort of open air mall that looks like it was designed by Dr. Seuss. Five blocks doesn't sound like much, but a block in Salt Lake is the size of entire villages elsewhere. The day's finale was a birds-of-a-feather gathering of 11 librarians at the Market Grill which was, thankfully, only one block away. Their specialty was seafood, but I went for prime rib instead, following that best stuffed mushrooms I've had in ages.