Traveling Again

Some musicians and bands have been a fleeting presence in my life, easily evoking a very particular time or experience whenever I hear their music. Others have stayed with me as lifelong friends, following me through college and grad school, into marriage and professional life. Here it seems appropriate to invoke Dar Williams, whose music has been with me for at least 10 years:

Have I got everything ? Am I ready to go?

Is it gonna be wild, is it gonna be the best time

Or am I just a-saying so?

Am I ready to go?*

Next month, I’ll be moving to Boston to take a position as Verde Implementation Librarian with Ex Libris. I’m happy about this move on so many levels: I get the chance to use my years of erm experience (that’s lower case for a reason–the system was in my head!) and combine that with interests in project management, training, and general rooting-around-the-system, and my spouse and I will get to live in the same city again.**

What will I miss, besides Binghamton’s housing prices? A stellar group of colleagues here, many of whom have played a major role in my professional growth and development, and who are always pushing the boundaries of what one person and one library can do within the parameters of state government. 😉 It’s been a pleasure to work with you.

How about the blog? I don’t expect it to change much, although my professional interests certainly impact what I write about. And things may be quiet for a bit as I wrap up at Binghamton, go apartment hunting, move, and start the new job. I think that will be enough to do for a while!

—

* “Traveling Again” from The Honesty Room. I should hasten to add, for those familiar with Dar, that most of the song’s lyrics do not apply to this situation.

** He’s been doing a fellowship at Johns Hopkins for the past 18 months.

Modular Is As Modular Does

We work with a lot of different vendors at MPOW (my place of work). Various parts of our e-resource administration and access are powered by products from Ex Libris, Serials Solutions, and III. (We are currently a development partner for Encore by III, but I can’t say any more about that or we’ll all have to spend the next few months quarantined in Emeryville, which actually sounds pretty good given today’s forecast.) We also just launched a Grokker visualization interface for some of our e-resources; you may be familiar with Grokker if your library licenses Ebsco databases.

It’s been interesting to work with all these different tools and interfaces on the one hand, and to hear talk about everything going modular on the other hand. We have a set up that works for us, but it just ain’t that easy to get all our systems talking to each other in the current environment. ILSs are from Mars, ERMs are from Venus. It’s challenging enough to get accurate information when your link resolver and the catalog it’s querying are made by the same company; start throwing other systems into the mix and everyone is likely to end up in counseling.

Everyone wants their products to integrate so that they can expand their markets; no one wants to share too much so that there’s an incentive to stand by your vendor. I’m curious to see where things are really headed.

E-LIS E-Prints for Library & Info Science

I had heard of E-LIS but forgot about it. From the site:

E-LIS relies on the voluntary work of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and is non-commercial. It is not a funded project of an organization. It is community-owned and community-driven. We serve LIS researchers by facilitating their self-archiving, ensuring the long-term preservation of their documents and by providing word-wide easy access to their papers.

If you publish, consider putting a copy of your pre-print (or post-print) into E-LIS so that everyone can have access.

How Do Tag Clouds Work?

Library Journal interviewed Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, for the January 15th edition. The interview includes Tim’s explanation of how tag clouds work. Tim talks about the relative size and bold-ness of the tags and how the software figures out what to display in very non-technical terms. It’s really interesting. He also tells about LT plans for the next few months.

Please Update Your Feed

Ab’s Blog is moving to http://www.abigailbordeaux.net/abs/. If you subscribe to my Feedburner feed your subscription will be updated automatically. Otherwise please update your feed or resubscribe, or there will be no more Ab’s Blog for you. 🙁

This move is prompted by the fact that the blog readership has expanded beyond the original audience (BU library staff), making it less than ideal to post on my employer’s site. I’m also a bit disenchanted with Movable Type–I’ve been maintaining another blog using WordPress for some time and just love the interface and features–and moving the blog gives me my choice of software.

Days 3 and 4: Sunny and Sixty

The Riverwalk was absolutely hopping Thursday night compared to the rest of the week! It finally warmed up and dried out (coincidentally on the day we got out early for lunch) and it was still warm enough to eat outside in the evening. Earlier in the day I visited the Alamo, which has very pleasant grounds for a stroll, and learned something about Texas history.

Not that I missed out on all the good stuff! The conference sessions were very research oriented and a lot of the content was, frankly, over my head. Several presentations were by PhD students in Computer Science and several more were by folks best described as “researchers” rather than practicing librarians, programmers, etc. I left with an understanding of what their projects are meant to do–in most cases!–but not exactly how they work.

For example, a method for web archiving for preservation was presented (mod_oai info), as was a tool that operates as a recommendation and migration service for digital preservation (CRiB info). You put in information about what you’re preserving, it tells you a range of options based on how you weight certain criteria. It also evaluates your original and migrated objects for any differences between the two. (I’m sure I’m grossly oversimplifying.)

That session got me thinking that preservation was largely absent as a topic at the conference. That’s fine, but that in turn got me thinking that while an open source system may be an important component of preservation (if you’re trying to keep something usable for many years, it may not make much sense to embed it in a proprietary system), you can’t assume that just because a system is open source it is therefore a good preservation tool.

One of the final sessions, on Friday, included a presentation on adapting FRBR for repository metadata. The adapted model uses terms like “scholarly work” in place of “work” and “copy” in place of “item,” which I particularly like since many copies are not, in fact, physical items.

It was interesting to hear someone outside the serials/cataloging community describe the FRBR model. Seeing the adapted model helped me understand the difference between expression and manifestation better. The speakers I’ve heard tend to say things like, “An expression is, you know, an expression of a work.”

Bookbinding Exhibit at Bryn Mawr

If you are in the Philadelphia area between next Tuesday and June 3rd, may I suggest checking out Bryn Mawr College’s exhibition on bookbinding, curated by the College’s honorary curator of bookbindings, Willman Spawn?

I was lucky enough to work as an intern in Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections department, full of beautiful bindings, and to learn a little from Willman (all, alas, now forgotten). The combination of Bryn Mawr’s collections and Willman’s curation should make for an exhibit not to be missed. The focus of the exhibit is 18th and 19th century bindings, but the Library also has a stellar collection of incunables, which are in the exhibition area, unless things have changed since I was there last.

If you go between March 30th and May 11th, you can see a companion exhibit of contemporary artists’ books in the Canaday lobby.

Details at the BMC website

Day 2: No Lines at the Bathroom

Quick facts about Open Repositories: there are about 350 people here, but no lines at the women’s bathrooms; many PowerBooks are in attendance; use of PowerPoint is considerably above average; number of cell phones ringing during presentations is considerably below average; and “continuous partial attention” is highly evident in the presentation rooms, where there is free wireless.

Yesterday morning brought the last of the user group sessions. I went to some talks about DSpace, including one about a study done at Cornell to evaluate participation and growth of their DSpace implementation and to determine why scholars do not use it. Based on comments made after the presentation, the study confimed previous findings and experience at other institutions.

One big concern was the practice (now maybe less widespread?) of institutions populating a new DSpace installation with communities, even if there are no documents associated with it. Consensus is that this is not good marketing and makes for poor end-user experience. It’s kind of like social networking sites: if lots of people are using one, more people want to join; if no one’s using it, it’s must be uncool, a bad idea, etc.

Later in the day, James Hilton, the CIO at University of Virginia, gave the first keynote address. Hilton is a dynamic speaker; he used to be a professor of psychology (not sure if he still teaches at all), and he must be very engaging in the classroom. He related his favorite feedback that he ever received from a student: “Breathe occasionally.” Hilton discussed the pros and cons of using open source software and dwelt on the idea of inter-institutional collaboration in developing new applications and tools. He talked about what collaboration means and contrasted it with cooperation. Collaboration involves shared purpose and vision, while cooperation can be as simple as not actively harming the other party.

Hilton digressed (his word) into the danger of the “pure property” concept of ideas and how it may paralyze and cripple creative and intellectual development in the future. Rules about what can be copyrighted and patented are expanding and threaten what the university is all about.

Hilton was a great after-lunch speaker–I definitely recommend you take the opportunity to hear him if it comes along.

Day 1: Commotion at the Menger

I came back from dinner tonight to find a large fire truck, ambulance, and police car pulled up in front of my hotel. My first thought after, “Oh no, my Mac!” was that if something involving fire trucks happens at the Menger, they can just blame it on the ghosts and be done with it, without any negative impact on business. I haven’t seen any ghosts yet myself, although the water did sputter a lot when I first turned the tap on. In any case, as you may have surmised, the hotel was not, in fact, on fire and my Mac is fine.

The Open Repositories sessions have so far been pretty interesting. Since Binghamton doesn’t actually have a repository, I was hoping concerned that the user group sessions, which comprise the first day of the conference, might be over my head so I could go to La Villita. Some of the details in the presentations were pretty specific, but one theme has quickly emerged: taking repositories beyond being, well, repositories and developing them to actively support the research process and provide an interactive and social environment.

Examples:

  • The National Science Digital Library’s Fedora platform works with WordPress, MediaWiki, and Connotea to create a “living library” for science, technology, engineering, and math.
  • The eSciDoc project of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe supports collaborative authoring.
  • Rice University has adapted DSpace for its digitized collections, as well as using it for “born-digital” stuff, so they can provide unified access to various types of digital materials. See their digital collections.
  • Coming up tomorrow Georgia Tech will discuss its new services that are associated with DSpace; you can read about it today at DLib.