Ab’s Blog

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.”

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

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.

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.

I highly recommend Karen Schneider’s TechSource blog post about IT planning. If only for reading the first couple paragraphs that aptly describe what library IT operations are likely to have on their plates. Next time you see one of your library’s IT professionals, thank them for all their work!

A couple choice quotes:

If idle hands are playthings of the Devil, we’re the epitome of virtue. And this is a fairly calm period.

Find five technologies you like; focus on three; implement one…. The less-is-more approach also introduces newer librarians to the radical concept that a really good idea should be honored with the time, training, tools, and attitude it deserves.

It’s a good post for reminding us that, as fast as things are changing, we still need to plan and that sometimes the things we need to do the most aren’t the sexiest or most exciting.

I’m in the Atlanta airport for a good while, waiting for my flight to San Antonio for Open Repositories, so I shelled out for wifi access. And now that I have, I’m going to find things to do online until the last possible minute or until my battery dies!

One good way to pass time online today is to head over to the Ann Arbor District Library’s fabulous catalog, which is newly enhanced with the ability to tag, review, and more. John Blyberg describes his work on the development here. Be sure to look at the catalog cards, too, if you haven’t yet, and at their website in general, which won LAMA’s 2006 Best in Show award for library websites in its budget category.

Boxes and Arrows, a web zine about design and information architecture, has two articles about making career choices in its current issue. The first offers some tips for deciding whether or not you want to manage and the second looks at the “three-pronged fork in the road,” reminding readers that managing isn’t the only option when it’s time for a change (”guruhood” and reinvention are the other two). While some of the content is design-specific, both articles are worth a look, and while you’re there you can ooh and aah over the brand new site design, also definitely worth a look.

It’s easy for those of us who use a mouse or trackpad on a daily basis to forget that many people use computers without them. If you maintain web pages and are still looking for a New Year’s resolution, please consider working to eliminate “click” from your lexicon.

In most cases, you will find that it’s pretty easy to substitute “choose” or “use” for “click.” For example, “To look up an electronic journal, choose ‘metaLINK’ on the Libraries’ home page, then ‘Find e-Journal.’ ”

In other cases, no substitution is needed at all. Instead of, “Click here for more information” you can simply drop “Click here for” and make “More information” your link instead. Besides making your pages more inclusive, they will instantly look like they were created sometime after 1999, even if the content has been around a while!

I know I have pages out there that still say “click” and I’ll be trying to eliminate it from them all in the coming weeks.

OK, OK, I haven’t been especially inspired to blog for a while, but this is an easy one.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me

1. The first thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a veterinarian.
2. When I was in first grade, I had a lot of warts on my face. I went through a lot of traumatic procedures to have them removed, but what finally did the trick was Jafra’s Malibu Miracle Mask.
3. I was once almost charged with stealing an air conditioner. It’s a long story. (For the avoidance of doubt: I didn’t steal the air conditioner.)
4. I share a lantern color with Katharine Hepburn.
5. I am from the East Side of Cleveland, which is the best side, as all reasonable people know. The quiz below is right on, except that when I got to college I quickly switched from “pop” to “soda.”

I finally started cataloging my books on LibraryThing over the holiday break. Two things struck me immediately.

1. Library Thing is better than any other website I have ever used. Why?

The sign-up process is identical to the sign-in process! What a concept! Reason enough to upgrade to a paid account and support them! No e-mail address, no birthday, real name, state of residence, areas of interest, name of pet, or favorite color! I’m way over my personal quota for exclamation points. The only hitch in the sign-up proceedings was me pausing to read the text several times and thinking, “yeah, right, I wonder what will happen once I click submit.”

Of course, once you have an account, you can provide more information, including an e-mail address, which, as LT points out, may be useful if you forget your password.

2. On a more sobering note, there is no comparison between the search results for the two most prominent data sources in LibraryThing, Amazon and LC. Search for 1984 and 8 of the first 10 Amazon results are for the book by George Orwell (the other two are for Cliffs and Spark Notes). Even after viewing complete information for the first 10 LC results, I couldn’t always figure out why the item made the list. There was nothing by George Orwell on the first page. At the other end of the spectrum, a search on “lear nonsense” (without the quotes) brings up a relevant but solitary result in the LC catalog, while Amazon’s first 10 results are all–surprise!–Edward Lear’s nonsense poems and drawings. Guess which source I try first?