This September 12 I will be giving a reading at the Babylon Salon in San Francisco. I’m so immersed in my day job that I haven’t sorted out WHAT I am reading, though I think it will be from the essay “Falling In” from the collection Powder. Then again, if the choice is open, maybe I should read from “The Outlaw Bride,” due out sometime soon in “The Best American Nonrequired Reading,” due out October 8?

Yes, I am bragging (again).

Anyhoo, ALA was wonderful as always, I am INSANELY busy, insanely! I say insanely!

If you are attending Evergreen training in Fort Worth next week, or WilsWorld in Madison the week after, then I shall see you. After that, I am due some quiet time and some of it will be writing time, and maybe some of that will even be blogging time.

Meanwhile, do not forget the Free Kittens! (The Free Kittens Are Not Broken?)

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This time we are being given a series of “discussion starter topics,” some of which read like subliminal sales fodder, but no mind, it’s interesting to be told what my trends are. My comments below.

LITA Top Tech Trends Discussion Starter Topics
ALA Annual Chicago, July 2009

~IT, the Economy, and the Environment
In five years, shrinking institutional budgets, shifting user needs, and heightened environmental awareness will create a library profession largely based in online and virtual worlds. A new Internet and rapid change in communication and collaborative technologies will bring about a new commodity information profession in which half of all librarians will be unaffiliated freelance professionals who contract their services remotely to multiple institutions. The conference model for professional development will be gone, and ALA and other professional organizations will serve the role of coordinating online tools and training for information service specializations.

Not that fast and not that extreme. These are all real trends but they will happen more slowly. As for “virtual worlds,” I think we’ve seen Second Life come and go. Fun experiment, now move along folks.

~Open Everything (software, data, systems, etc) and Network Effect
In five years, further consolidation and upheaval will turn the library software market on its head. The drive towards open source systems, open linked data, open APIs, and network-level data and services will have gained full steam as libraries come to own, develop, share, and manage all of their own systems and data. A few major players will provide the network and service backbone, but the majority of the vendor market will shift to providing contract consulting and development services along with offerings of plug-ins and modules that they have built to augment to the unified data / systems superstructure owned and cooperatively managed by library governance bodies and co-ops. [With their new-found unity, libraries will band together to force Elsevier to open it's article content and drop prices.]

Holy grammar, Batman! Never mind these exotic predictions. In five years librarians still won’t be familiar with Mr. Apostrophe and his twin cousins, the Parentheses. Call the copy editor, STAT!

There is indeed a trend toward openness and self-managed data and systems, and it is a trend that will grow and needs to grow, for the simple reason that it is necessary and healthy for us to build the tools we use to manage our content. How that fits into the cloud-computing model that is headed our way like a Cat 5 hurricane is unclear to me. I think it’s a good thing for vendors to get out of the proprietary-licensing business and into service and development — good for us, good for them.

~Mobile Computing, Virtual Computing, and the Cloud
In five years, handheld and mobile devices will outstrip desktop and laptop computers as the dominant computing platform, backed by an ever-present data and computing cloud run by private industry. Libraries will leave the storage and hardware business behind, abandon their one-stop-shop web sites and systems, and start profiling users based on their transaction and usage history, interests, social networks, and community/campus activities. Libraries will focus on two main areas: 1) Building tools and services that push content into the user’s personal and social computing environment, and 2) providing in their physical space for large displays and interactive peripherals that users can plug their own devices in to.

“In to”?

Anyhoo, I agree the desktop is fading and mobile/ubiquitious devices are on the rise, but what interests me here is that it seems to overlook what most public libraries do these days, which is transact huge quantities of physical materials. I think this the kind of trend it’s easy for academics to overlook, since behavior on campuses is so different. I spend a lot of time thinking about (worrying about, really) the fate of public libraries when physical media is preempted by whatever device(s) are imminent. The movement toward digital, on-demand reading/experiential materials has many ramifications, few of which any of us have explored.

(It’s so interesting to me, as a writer, how librarians forget how people actually use libraries — to like, you know, find things to read.)

~Current and Future Trends for the Library Catalog
In five years, the local catalog will join the card catalog as a thing of the past. The next-next generation catalog is no catalog at all. All content and data will reside at the network level as one pool that intermingles with the other major pools in the information string of “great lakes”–Google, Hathi Trust, Open Content Alliance, and a handful of Journal aggregators. The niche role of libraries will be aggregating and digesting information from diverse systems and custom-packaging it for their local audiences and local services.

Ah yes, the Haughty Trust (bad me, did I say that?). If we really do move to the all-important cloud (again, five years? I think not), we won’t be worrying about the Big O, or Hathi Trust, or anything else, because we’ll be out of business. The “niche role” won’t be enough to sustain a profession.

About to board, or I’d do my own trends. Thoughts? Additions? More typos to correct?

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As one poster speculated, “Controlling the ammo was a prerequisite for controlling Russia and China by the communists. Make ya wonder don’t it?”

There has been a run on guns and ammo ever since Obama was elected, despite no proof anywhere that the Obama administration considers limiting access to guns a priority even close to, say, propping up our failing economy or fixing health care.

The reality is that Obama is a citified intellectual who would die of exposure if left to hunt for his food, who wouldn’t know a brass casing from case law, and in any event has his focus elsewhere. He is furthermore surrounded by people like him who have no inkling of how strong folks in some parts of the country feel about their guns, and his people will occasionally judge wrong in their gun legislation, and then be quickly course-corrected.

But myths are more powerful than reality, and the central myth fueling the guns-and-ammo panic is an old and powerful story: A BLACK MAN IS TRYING TO TAKE AWAY OUR GUNS! Or perhaps that should be “guns,” since the symbolism wouldn’t be lost on a fourth-grader.

It’s funny (or not) how this ism has a parallel with marriage equality, in which, with no supporting evidence, the story is that GAY PEOPLE ARE RUINING MARRIAGE FOR EVERYONE ELSE!

Unfortunately, Obama has had far more impact in this area than he has on guns. It is Obama’s Justice Department that filed a bristlingly homophobic brief on behalf of DOMA, and it is Obama whose big gift to federal employees was to hand them a few ancillary same-sex benefits (because, we are told, DOMA prevents him from going farther).

Meanwhile, a shiny-pulpit minister on the west coast has been telling people — wink wink nudge nudge — that Obama will soon lift Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. A few months back, that would have excited me. Now I feel bored and appeased, as if the point of this rumor is to get me to stay quiet before I realize I’ve been duped again.

We have too many isms in America — isms that divide us, isms that we refuse to acknowledge.  White men aren’t emasculated if a black man becomes president. The sacred institution of marriage isn’t trampled upon if the doors open wider to let in more loving, committed couples. And these are all the same struggles, in the same direction.

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As I get ready, I’m enjoying ALA Connect, the new ALA social space. The site feels slow (ALA’s servers always feel slow) but I see the potential already — I used it to get a good view of what several divisions were doing at ALA.

Thursday, July 9

Arrive mid-afternoon, have dinner with friends C & L and see Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

Friday, July 10

Check out the booth, practice for Sunday’s demo (la la la la laaaaaaaaaah!) and then open.

4:00 pm - 5:30 pm LITA 101: Open House, PALM Water Tower Place

5:30 pm - 8:00 pm LITA Happy Hour

PUBLIB Happy Hour TBD (If it takes place)

Saturday, July 11

8 a.m. Summon preview breakfast

9:30 a.m.(ish) – 12:15 pm. KCLS/Galecia Group Open Source Unconference, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 South State Street, Room #3N-6. I’ll plan to be there at least 10-12.

3:30 - 5:30 LITA National Forum Planning Committee 2009, PALM Clark 07

5:30-6:30 Dinner with L

6:00 - 7:30 GLBTRT Social at the Sidetrack, 3349 N. Halsted St.

7:30 - Dinner with friends

Sunday, July 12

8 - 9:30 Palmer House thingy

Noonish: booth demo (probably Open Source Jeopardy, Reloaded)

1:30 - 3:00 p.m. LITA Top Technology Trends, INTER Grand BR.

3:30 pm - 5:30 pm:

LLAMA SASS, Improving User Services Through Open Source Solutions: Potentials and Pitfalls — or –

You Got Me, Do You Like Me? Evaluating Next Generation Catalogs

5:30 - 7:30 Equinox soiree

6- 9 p.m. (arrive 8 p.m.) UIUC GSLIS reception, Harry Caray’s

Monday, July 13

8:00 am - 10:00 am LITA Public Libraries Technology Interest Group PALM Spire Room — or –

ALCTS CMDS Resuscitating the Catalog: Next-Generation Strategies for Keeping the Catalog Relevant

10:30 - 1:00 p.m.  GLBT-RT: Stonewall Book Awards Brunch (still don’t have a ticket)

3:30 pm - 5:30 pm PALM Salon V LITA Open Source Systems Interest Group — or –

NGCIG

7:00 p.m. Dinner with friends

Tuesday, July 14

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So I was really surprised by Marc Truitt’s editorial in the June 2009 issue, “ALA and our Carbon Footprint.” The title drew me in, but the disclaimer really made me sit up. “Before proceeding, I want to state very clearly that — as with anything else I write in this space that is not explicitly attributed to someone other than myself — the reflections that follow are my own thoughts and views.”

I thought that’s what was meant by “editorial,” but Truitt goes on: “They in no way are intended to represent the views either official or personal of LITA or ALA officials or employees.”

So what were these views so scary we needed a disclaimer?

For the first half of his editorial, Truitt argues that we in ALA are being piggish (to use my word, which does not represent the views of ALA staff, my next-door neighbors, or the cat in my lap) to meet twice a year face-to-face, something he demonstrates ably by calculating the metric tons of carbon dioxide produced by people flying to the ALA Midwinter meeting. Truitt recommends that ALA offer registrants the chance to purchase carbon offsets.

Well-put and fair enough. I think it’s simply a matter of time before cash-strapped libraries simply drop the hammer on meeting twice a year. What ALA will not do for itself — restructure its revenue model around modern business practices — the profession will do for ALA.

But in the second half of his article, Truitt takes on OCLC, not by arguing that with WorldCat Local it is overreaching, but that it isn’t extraordinary enough; and that (based on comments by a friend of Truitt’s) we needed to get out of the business of cataloging ordinary books, leave that to some not-quite-distinct Amazon entity, and focus on only cataloging rare and unique local materials.

I have wondered, while listening to yet another sales pitch, I mean presentation, about “the cloud,” if the triumphalism of OCLC wasn’t a day — or decade — late and a dollar short; if they weren’t in fact addressing yesteryear’s problem. (If you’re curious about the “cloud,” it’s the place you send your money and your intellectual property rights after you sign a contract with the Big O.)

If Truitt’s thoughts scared some ALA lifers to the point where he had to issue entirely pointless disclaimers, well, good on him. He’s not saying anything we all don’t need to hear.

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I only found one question ambiguous: “6. Due to the low numbers of PhD faculty, have you considered full time teaching as an alternative to your career as a practitioner?”

If that means have I considered working full-time as a contractor without benefits or job security in a position that is always second tier to the “real” faculty, then no. Teaching, done right, is a lot of work. Teaching occasionally as an adjunct, as time and life permit, is a joy (albeit an all-consuming joy). Doing that as a “job” doesn’t make financial sense.

If the question is asking if I’ve thought of a PhD, sure, and I assume many adjuncts have as well. In my experience in two programs — caveat, that’s close to five years out now, and both programs have changed a lot since then — adjunct instructors weren’t treated as a potential PhD/faculty pool. We weren’t grossly mistreated; we were just, by and large, ignored, even though the quality of our instruction had just as much impact on the students as instruction from the “real” faculty.

But even adjuncts who aren’t potential PhD candidates are important to LIS programs. LibraryLand needs both kinds of adjuncts: the self-actualized practitioners who teach for the satisfaction of it and constantly infuse education with real-world problems, and the adjuncts who could be filling that PhD shortage.

(There’s a PhD shortage? Where have I been?)

And, if programs haven’t begun to do so already, they need to attend to their use of adjuncts a little better. I was a self-actualized practitioner when I was teaching, but I thought it odd how much the programs ignored adjuncts. (Yes, I am the one who on the survey mentioned the David Sedaris essay where as an adjunct he teaches his students to smoke.) I felt this particularly acutely when I had to deal with inevitable student problems such as absenteeism and plagiarism, but even in the “good times,” better integration into the program as a whole would have benefited both the program and me.

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I’ve spent close to a year circling around the question of documentation for an open source software project. Documentation is one of those maturational issues for open source software (and before we get too far, I will add that there’s no shortage of lame documentation in the proprietary software world — but that’s not the problem I’m trying to solve).

I know what doesn’t work, such as assuming documentation will naturally bubble up from the gift economy (the kind of woo-woo philosophizing up there with assuming an unregulated market will police itself). That approach yields at best a smattering of notes in a hodgepodge of formats. You also can’t just point contractors toward the project and say “write this.” I mean, you can, but it won’t work.

In the end, you need focus and direction — or as I put it in a talk a couple weeks back, some people, a plan, and a pickaxe.

The kewl thing about Evergreen is that the project is now approaching the critical mass required to support almost anything the community wants to do, including establishing a documentation project. (I don’t kid myself that a community documentation project could necessarily handle all documentation needs for an open source community, but without a project, we’ll never know what those needs are to begin with — and a community can bite off some chunks of the problem.)

Evergreen’s now got the people, and they are ready and willing to plan. But to give this project direction, it also needed the pickaxe, which is where DocBook XML comes in.

When you look at all the options for formatting documentation, and then look at the basic documentation needs of any project, you work your way to DocBook XML by process of elimination.  Assuming your project needs a single-source, standards-based, non-binary documentation format that supports translation, reuse, and other requirements, with an active user community, and strong fee-or-free toolsets, you end up with DocBook XML or DITA. The ramp-up for DocBook XML is much less daunting than DITA (though not without plenty of daunt on its own), in part due to a couple of excellent books (and though they are freely available online, it’s much easier to buy the print books and have them parked near your keyboard for ready reference).

DocBook XML is a lot like democracy (to paraphrase some pundit): it doesn’t look so great until you compare the alternatives. Nobody thinks writing XML is a walk in the park, and after you’ve produced lengthy XML documents, you still have to transform them into HTML (or PDF), and even at that you need to style the pages so they’re all purty, because plain HTML looks so 1993. But again, after close to a year of banging my head on the wall, I get it. DocBook. All righty.

But it’s one thing to suggest using DocBook XML — and building an entire project around it — and another to actually demonstrate it in action. So about six weeks ago I realized that if I was going to make a convincing, project-energizing argument for DocBook XML — an argument first made two years ago by others in the community and repeated several times  hence, with no objection but also no action — I was going to have to get serious about learning DocBook XML, if not to the level of expertise, at least to a minimal competence.

(It helped that I had been reviewing an intern’s beginning DocBook projects for a couple of months; as is often the case with teaching, I quietly absorbed more than I realized during the process of evaluating the student’s work.)

So in addition to working on the conference planning stuff, I got up at the butt-crack of dawn for weeks on end to review, validate, revise, tweak, experiment with, and otherwise produce real DocBook XML examples. After experiencing the pain of working at a DOS prompt with some free tools, I moved to a nice editor, oXygen, and that helped somewhat — but there was still much to learn (and I repeated all my examples with the free tools just to be sure they could be produced that way as well).

And then, of course, there’s the beer connection

When I started writing this blog post I saw a clear link between this and homebrewing. Circling back to that idea, I still see the similarities.

In both cases I have been learning a fairly arcane skill through books, websites, discussion groups, and iterative practice. There’s a geek level to both I enjoy; I’m not ever going to be a truly yee-haw XML/XSL cowgirl any more than I am going to open my own brewery, but I admit that the first time I got a reasonably long document to not only transform but to get styled with CSS, I did feel a wee spark of pride — similar to the first beer batch I made where I actually, and successfully, “mashed” (that is, converted malted barley into wort, the liquid that when boiled with hops and activated with yeast, eventually becomes beer).

Plus in both cases, by mastering some fundamental skills (and a domain vocabulary), I can now communicate within their respective communities. I understand terms such as single-source, transform, validate, XSL, stylesheet, FO, FOP; sparge, pitch, vorlauf, lauter, rack, mash, tun. (And to my delight, there is an XML schema for beer called, of course, BeerXML, proving that all roads lead to London.)

The ability to communicate is key; getting past that initial hurdle is crucial for learning. (Remember Helen Keller, spelling out “water”?) I may not understand every question that flies past me, but my feet have some purchase in the loam of their fields.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just in it for the language. But these processes happening in parallel have me marveling at our capacity to keep learning, sometimes when we least expect to.

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Harvey Milk’s Birthday, 1979

Originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian

Last night the news that New Hampshire had passed a marriage-equality bill to legalize same-sex marriage in January didn’t even lead the stories. This turn of events — the sixth state to pass this historic civil-rights legislation — is now just part of the rolling stone of social justice happening in our country and worldwide. I can’t think of a better present for Harvey Milk — late by a few days, or several decades, depending on your point of view, but a lovely gift all the same.

I have several copies of this flyer in my personal collection; I vaguely remember handing out this flyer, back in 1979. (I don’t remember the actual celebration, though I did read about it when I did primary research for my essay, “David, Just as he Was,” published a couple of years ago in White Crane.) I was reminded of it when I heard that there is a move afoot to make Harvey’s birthday a holiday. I heartily support this idea — but for me, it always has been one.

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Maybe it’s all cyclical? I spend some time on Facebook, a little on Twitter, and a lot more offline. I am refocusing on neglected personal-writing tasks that took a back seat to conference and travel activities. I have my taxes (yes, I filed an extension). We have also been organizing things.

Speaking of organizing things, sometimes people ask me how Sandy is doing. She’s doing very well (except for a bad cold) considering that she’s been out of work for a year. The process of finding a new church job is always slow, and even slower in this economy. Profiles get sent out, church committees meet… and meet.

Some of the well-intended approaches people recommend don’t really work. For example, she needs to stay in her denomination, which will mean we move somewhere at some point.  (This is something we hadn’t factored in when we moved here: there are almost no UCC churches in this area, and by that I mean a very broad geographic area.)

Prior to our move here, she had a series of successful jobs, so I am sure she will land another. It may take a more creative approach, and we are being very careful about the “where,” but it will happen.  We do think about issues such as indefinitely living on one income, COBRA running out, etc. — we have to.  Our heads are not in the sand.

I have a telework job; will I be able to stay in this job if we move? It all depends. Teleworking a short hop from Atlanta would certainly work. Teleworking from Juneau might not. (No, there is no chance we are going to Juneau.) Honestly, I don’t worry about those issues. I am too busy!

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We have mortgages and car payments to make, and jobs to keep, and we don’t want to be seen as so Uppity that giving us rights is a scary proposition. Or we have children to worry about, or neighbors we don’t want throwing rocks in our windows.

We also know that things have improved from the days when we could be arrested, electroshocked, split from our children, or left to die in an alley with no-one caring.

Yet (to paraphrase myself from Twitter a few minutes ago) why is it I’m a full-fledged citizen when it’s time to pay taxes, but a second-class citizen when I want to marry? Why do I have the obligations of a member of a democracy, without all the rights?

And why again are we so patient?

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