This is how it’s done

Calling all library conference organizers!  Please look at this website:  http://thatcamp.org/

This is one of the friendliest conference websites I’ve seen in a long, long time.  Why?

The When, What, and Who are neatly laid out in the top navigation bar (as “Schedule” “Blog” and “Campers” respectively).

The conference’s name could not be clearer – front and center on the main page with the acronym spelled out and a very brief description underneath.  Wonderful!

The home page is simple:  navbar, info, blog and twitter.  That’s it.  The other pages are also neat and clean, with the schedule laid out in a simple table and the Campers all presented with little icons for eye-candy and plenty of white-space to make for easy skimming.

The only things I would do differently:

Put the Campers in some sort of order (!) … are they in any order?  I know the alphabet is arbitrary but it’s better than nothing.

Create a “Trends” tab that gives some auto-generated visuals of the current hot topics — such as a tag cloud from the blog or a Wordle cloud from the tweets.  Some sort of topic browsing somewhere would be nice as a way to filter the information from those lucky, enthusiastic campers. 

I must say the website alone makes me a little jealous, but the content coming out of THATCamp *really* makes me wish I was there.  All sorts of fascinating questions coming up!  I only wish I had time to follow it all.  Keep up the great talks, THATCampers.

irrational superstition survives in me

from Milan Kundera’s, The Joke,
Czech: 1967 / English: 1992, Harper Perennial

p. 164

“… I only asked with a calm (and well-rested) heart: why did I meet her? what did the encounter mean and what was it trying to tell me?
Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live comprise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.”

Me:  But more specifically, I want to decipher the now of my life as it is happening.  Some things I have deciphered – long after the thing passed and was just ready to be forgotten completely.  But that doesn’t satisfy.  I want the sense of right now, the meaning of right here.

Now for something random

The good:
…this quote from a news story I read this morning:

“The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become.”

The bad:
It’s from the S.C. governor who admitted to having an affair with an Argentinian woman.

The ugly:
Their emails to each other have been made into a news story ( http://www.thestate.com/sanford/story/839350.html )  and what sounded like a very beautiful relationship has come to an end because of politics.  I actually feel very bad for the man.  He certainly made a lot of bad decisions but I think the worst one was choosing to go back to the career and give up the love. When he says he spent a week crying in Argentina… I kinda believe him.

Walking the Tightrope of Multi-tasking

In a few moments I will attempt to juggle the following spinning plates:

- start preparations for cooking mini pot pies (leave the butter out to soften) while I…

- start importing recent photos, while I…

- get logged into the various websites I need for a work project, while I…

- listen to my “unrated” playlist in iTunes and add ratings.

On your mark… get set… go!

My Love Affair with Paper

This post has been in draft mode for a long, long time and resurfaced in my memory thanks to various conversations including this one at FriendFeed and this post on e-book reading.

It seems like a great way to get a bunch of librarians really going is to ask “Is paper dead?” and let them have at it.  For the most part, people immediately think of books and that’s how this post started, too.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my own personal paper-to-computer transition has been happening gradually for a few years and didn’t really involve the book aspect until recently.

I’ll start with music.  I’m including this in “paper-to-computer” because CDs are, after all, digital music so it’s not really “analog to digital”.  The change is really in packaging.  In 2003 I went from carrying CDs and a Discman to keeping all my music as MP3s on an iAudio.  Oh, the great magic of shuffle! And playlists that could be longer than a 70 minute CD-R! My listening habits started changing right away.  I eventually moved to an iPod after switching to a Mac and only in the last year have I started downloading a few songs off of iTunes and Amazon.  I still primarily like to own my music on CD because of the paper and physical media (or my perception of something closer to permanence than MP3s).

Gallery Leather

My calendar switch took me by surprise.  Before I started grad school, I used the same brand of beautiful little day planners each year.  In my first year of grad school I started using Google Calendar and within two months I wasn’t looking at my paper planner at all.  I was still optimistic that I would find some reason to use the paper planners (and still bought the same brand of beautiful little planner even last year) but found that I was adding events to my online calendar from too many different places (home computer, work computer, cell phone) to keep my paper calendar “synced” anymore.  For a back-up, I use iCal.

Grad school also changed my reading habits to some extent.  Perhaps reading blogs paved the way, but I found myself reading most of my articles for class as PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro, where I could highlight, bookmark, and annotate very quickly and then easily search my notes during class discussions.  At ALA Midwinter this past January I used a friend’s iPod Touch rather than lugging around a laptop.  Out of sheer boredom I started reading an e-book (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) on the plane trip home.  Once I got my own Touch, I continued reading on the bus trips to campus each day.  It was just so darn convenient!  The downside for me, however, was the lack of a trusty paper bookmark that I’m accustomed to using for jotting notes and quotes.  Right now my bus trip book is a hardback paper book again, and the trusty paper bookmark is almost full.  I could possibly keep a scrap of paper with the Touch for such notes, but I usually use the book as support when I’m writing the note and I wouldn’t want to press on the Touch like that.  For the most part, I think I would just use e-reading for the kind of books I would check out from a library and not actually own.  In other words, fluff books for pure entertainment.  All other books, I will continue reading as paper for a while longer.

And now in the last couple weeks I’ve made the paper-to-computer transition that was the hardest but the best:  journaling.  I have a small chest full to the brim of paper notebooks I’ve used as journals from the past 20 years (what?? not going to think about the implications of that…) and I’ve been toying with the idea of moving this very personal ritual to the computer for over a year but kept resisting.  I was too attached to the physical act of using pen on paper to give up paper journaling until recently when I looked through my current paper journal and realized that in the last 3 months I’ve only written 11 entries, the most recent being a month ago.

The final push came from talking with a good friend who had been using Word as a journal platform for some time now and who was generous enough to show me how he set up his files.  He used a new Word document for each month, with many entries that were simply a line or two.  Some days had several of these brief entries, some days were skipped entirely, and some entries were longer, more reflective.  For some reason, I never gave myself this much flexibility in my paper journaling and that is most likely one of the reasons my journaling had become so infrequent.

VoodooPad Journal

So I started journaling in VooDooPad, creating a page for each month with links to the page for each day that has any entries.  Sure enough – in the month of March alone I had 21 entries.  The most surprising benefit to me was how much more easily (and flowingly?) I could write when typing than when writing by hand.  I also appreciate the ability to search all my entries at once and back up the journal in multiple places (a factor that worries me a little re: my paper notebooks).  I’m not convinced yet that I have the right structure going (year / month / day) but it’s working for now.

With such big parts of my life now in my computer, I wondered what paper habit might be next to make the transition.  I looked around my apartment and here are some of the paper things I found:
to do lists / grocery lists
checkbook (only used for rent, though)
hand-outs from presentations
concert programs / tickets / flyers
class hand-outs & notes
receipts
doodles / outlines / sketches
paper scraps from collage book workshop
coupons
greeting cards

I have a shelf full of blank notebooks of various colorful bindings and another shelf of blank notecard box sets, one of which I use each month when I send my paper rent check to my landlord.

And honestly… do I *want* all these paper things to turn into bits & bytes?  I have to say “no” because I do still have a love affair with paper.

From the Paper Archives

I fall prey to the New Year’s reflection & introspection tendency as much as anyone else. It’s been a strange week of having to look backward in order to look forward.  I’m applying for jobs and trying to beef up my resume and cover letters, but doing so requires going back through my scattered paper and digital memories to assemble a list of Great Things I’ve Done To Convince You To Hire Me.

But the memories are all mixed up, so with the records of job projects there are also notes from the personal side of life.  In my paper journal for last year, I found this entry:

—————————————–

Monday 29 October 2007

While waiting for a bus home, I imagined that aliens had asked me what I would like to see happen in the world, what would I want them to do if they were set on doing something to change us.

I would ask the aliens for a moment which required a build-up.  For several weeks beforehand, people might find themselves planning trips, slightly adjusting their routine, changing their routes home from work.  Then one day, the Moment comes.  At this Moment, everyone in the world will turn and see beside them the person they will love all their lives, and they will recognize this person for who they are, what they will mean to each other.  All around the world, people will embrace, introduce themselves, or laugh to find they’re standing next to their spouse and had the right answer all along.

I don’t believe we each have one specific “true love” person out there.  I think each of us has the potential for lifelong happiness with a variety of people, but circumstances will only put us in contact with very few of them… hopefully at least one of them.

What the Moment would do is open our eyes and finally reveal to us something we might have already known, or something we would have never suspected and been oblivious to otherwise.

It’s the oblivious possibility that bothers me.  What if I’m walking by my person on the street and not even seeing who it is?

————————————————-

Now, over a year later, I would amend that wish just slightly.  I wish for a Moment in which we all have a eureka moment and realize what IT is that each of us are so gosh-darn good at, and we’ll be able to use that knack to be helpful, productive, and happy.  I think both wishes are pretty similar — they’re simply about finding some missing piece of information about ourselves.

One of these things is not…

… like the others.

The context: Christmas songs.

The exceptions: Songs that mention a winter holiday but are not in spirit, sound or otherwise, holiday music.  Some of these songs are downright beautiful and I have to stop in my tracks whenever I hear them (Hallelujah, River) but they certainly do not put me in a festive or celebratory mood.  In fact, they can be  downright depressing.  Yet they are included in “holiday” compilations and played in stores with the usual holiday music.

Do we have here a case of subject / keyword confusion?  You decide:

“Hallelujah” written by Leonard Cohen (my favorite renditions are by k.d. lang and Allison Crowe)

One of sexiest and saddest songs ever written, but this “hallelujah” is not the Christmas-Baby-Jesus kind of hallelujah:

well, maybe there’s a god above
but all i’ve ever learned from love
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
it’s not a cry that you hear at night
it’s not somebody who’s seen the light
it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

“River” written by Joni Mitchell

She just went through a break up.  She’s thinking of running away.  Not holiday music:

I’m so hard to handle
I’m selfish and Im sad
Now Ive gone and lost the best baby
That I ever had
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh I wish I had a river
I made my baby say goodbye

“New Year’s Day”  written by U2

Okay, maybe this one is just me, but every time I hear this song I think it’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and that doesn’t put me in a holiday mood either, as much as I adore U2:

And so we’re told this is the golden age
And gold is the reason for the wars we wage
Though I want to be with you
Be with you night and day
Nothing changes
On New Year’s Day

xx

Kindle vs. iPhone / Touch

A brain dump of recent posts I’m seeing about e-reader devices.  Full disclosure:  I totally lean toward the iPod Touch.  It’s small.  It serves many, many other functions.  And it doesn’t seem nearly as clumsy as a Kindle.   But I also like the Sony Reader.  In fact, it’s the Sony Reader that I’ve seen a couple times on my city bus.  I have yet to see a Kindle *anywhere*.  But don’t listen to me, see what other folks are saying …

Roy Tennant  http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/740036474.html?nid=3565

Sony Reader http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/12/sonys-new-reader-close-to-greatness-but-a-bit-too-dim/

iPhone / Touch app Instapaper: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/10/31/friday-favorite-instapaper-for-iphone-ipod-touch/

iPhone as eReader: http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/iphone-the-inci.html

Book Rituals

I’ve mentioned here before that I enjoy doing quick informal visual surveys on the city bus to see how many people are reading.  A person reading a book in public always catches my attention for some reason, maybe because of all the “book is dead” naysaying.  I’m a gadget freak who has a love affair with paper, so that might also make me more excited by the sight of someone holding a form of paper and giving their attention to it.

Anyway.  This morning on the bus, I sat across the aisle from a young man holding a beautifully decorated book.  It looked like a Qur’an, and he was silently mouthing the words as he read.  I realized it must be prayer time.  Then a faster (or more direct) bus pulled up behind us so I dashed out and caught that one.  I took the first open seat I found, and the man sitting beside me was also reading a beautifully decorated Qur’an. This one was smaller, simpler, but the reader seemed to be really taking his time with it.  I didn’t want to be disrespectful, so I tried not to stare at the book, but I have to admit it was lovely.

But I was far more curious? interested? jealous? in the ritual than in the book.  This idea of having scheduled times each day for a brief spell of concentrated contemplation and quiet.  I remember being fascinated by it years ago when I read Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk, and again when I heard a story once upon a time about Italians using Virgil’s Aenid to turn at random to a page and divine some sort of answer to whatever was bothering them.

I don’t have a faith to follow, so I have no automatic community, no book, and no book ritual.  But when I have weeks like this one, and stressful days and frustrating moments, I wish I did have some friendly, familiar book that could offer nuggets of inspiration.

Wish List

Things I want someone to make for me:

Popabrella

1. a camera umbrella that attaches to the tripod mount but still allows me to attach any tripod, too

CHECK:  someone has already made this!

2. a program that gives me slick graph reports of my iTunes library, kind of like Trends in Google Reader or like this guy’s pie chart or something that combines all these programs together with easy GUI goodness.

Which artists do I have the most music from?  Which artists do I skip the most often? What are my top genres by frequency in playlists? I need to know these things.

Which class would YOU sign up for?

It’s my last term in library school.  It will be a term full of job hunting, packing, pre-moving, farewell-ing stress.  With that in mind, I’m conflicted about which classes to take in my last semester.  I will only take 2 in order to spare myself any sort of pre-graduation melt down.  But …

But …

But … which two classes?  This is where your outsider / experienced / ironic perspective comes in handy.

---

Class:  Understanding Multimedia Information: Concepts and Practices
Description:

Designed for those with an interest exploiting multimedia information in web and electronic publishing projects, students will be introduced to the theory behind, and the tools associated with, a wide variety of audio (e.g., MP3, WAV, WM9, RealAudio), graphic (JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc.), music (MIDI, GUIDO, etc.) and text information formats (e.g., PS, PDF, etc.). After completing this course students should be empowered to make intelligent choices in selecting appropriate multimedia formats to match particular design requirements. A mix of lectures, demos and hands-on work. Students should have access to a personal computer upon which they can experiment on their own with downloaded multimedia software tools. Students must be competent in basic computing including the installation and configuration of software packages. Must understand basic HTML and simple web site construction tools (e.g., FTP, text editing, etc.).

Pros:
It’s on-campus!  (as opposed to online classes, which drive me nuts.)
It will give lots of hands-on experience with cool stuff.
It’s visual.  I definitely think visually, that’s something I’ve learned in grad school.
Seems like it would be pretty good for any future job.

Cons:
It’s on-campus.  If I get a great job that starts before May, and I need to move early … what do I do?
I’m a little worried about downloading lots of programs to my computer.  My sole computer.  My must-last-for-a-couple-more-years-at-least computer.

---

Class: Administration & Management of Libraries & Information Centers
Description:

Designed to explore the principles that govern how organizations and institutions work, this course provides a foundation for and introduction to the theories, practices and procedures involved in the management and administration of libraries and information centers.

Pros:
It’s online, so I could move before the end of the semester if need be.
Administration is a necessary evil in libraries, apparently, so I suppose it would be good to know about it.
Other students have told me there is a grant-writing exercise involved, and that would be really, REALLY good to know, me thinks.

Cons:
It’s online.  Someone shoot me.
The very terms “administration” and “management” make me twitch.

---

Class:  Document Processing
Description:

An introduction to XML-based document processing technologies and standards appropriate to electronic publishing. Leveraging descriptive encoding in standard formats (XML, SGML, HTML), industry-standard styling and transformation technologies (XSLT, CSS) can be deployed within layered systems to create and maintain formatted publications on and off the web (in HTML, PDF and print). Course participants will build such a system on an open-source platform. Issues to be covered include processing architectures (batch, server-and client-side processing); “vertical” publishing formats such as Docbook, DITA, NLM/NCBI, TEI; validation and quality-assurance methods and technologies; ancillary production pipelines (SVG graphics, RSS/Atom feeds, “galley proof” versions); document metadata and aggregation; and the role of proprietary publishing applications.

Pros:
It’s online, so I could move before the end of the semester if need be.
Lot’s of techie acronyms, which come in handy for impressing people.
I’m even interested in these acronyms!  I took a weekend TEI workshop and loved it, so many of these things sound really interesting and useful.

Cons:
It’s online. Someone shoot me.
I know myself well enough to know that I bore easily with techie acronyms. Especially if I’m just doing the same thing with them over and over again.  But if the activities in the class are varied and challenging, I’ll have a better chance of staying engaged.  But I won’t know till I’m in the class, of course.
I want to work with training people more than training programs, so is a class like this really up my alley?

---

Class: Library Buildings
Description:

Studies the library’s physical plant in the light of changing concepts and patterns of library service; analyzes present-day library buildings (both new and remodeled) and their comparison with each other as well as with buildings of the past; examines the interrelationship of staff, collections, users, and physical plant; discussion supplemented by visits to new libraries and conference with their staffs. A two-day field trip is required.

Pros:
It’s on-campus!
I’ve been interested in this class since my first semester but never fit it in.  I could feasibly fit in next semester.
Architecture! It doesn’t get much more visual than that.  I love, love, love the nuances of buildings.

Cons:
It’s on-campus.  If I get a great job that starts before May, and I need to move early … what do I do?
Will I really have a need for this kind of information?  I’m going into special libraries, not public or academic.  Is that short-sighted of me?

Insert Next Post Here

Okay, so it’s been – what – over a month? since my last post.  I could open a new tab and find out for certain, but I’m trying something out here … just writing for the sake of writing.

Or it might be more accurate to say I’m writing for the sake of letting anyone out there who only knows me through this blog know that I am indeed still alive.  Just very, very busy.

These two months – September and October – are the Run For Your Life Non-Stop months at my job.  I find this time exhilarating, challenging, breath-taking and exhausting. And my classes this term are dynamic, fun and  well-balanced.  It’s actually a very good term on the whole.

But, as you might have guessed from my last post, I’ve been thinking a lot about personal expression.  This includes a lot of different things for me — everything from individual style to creative outlets to one’s writing voice.  I’ve had some great conversations about this with various people this semester, giving me plenty of food for thought.

From an art student friend, I’m learning about using the influence of the great masters in your craft as a process toward finding your own voice.  I had always been frustrated by all the influences on me, feeling that I would never know what *I* wanted to say, because I have so many other writers buried in my sub-conscious.  But this friend has pointed out to me something rather obvious — that these influences blend together and form a mosaic that becomes a part of your voice.  That those masters had mosaics of their own, going back farther than we can see.

From a kindred spirit with a love of words, I’m rediscovering the subtle power of poetry.   My study of poetry has been  varied but rather lazy up till now.  I’ve always shied around the science of poetry, never really delving into the mechanics too much for fear of tarnishing the enchantment of poems with the nuts and bolts.  But this friend has shown me and reminded me that, linguistically, the careful and deliberate construction of poetry is key to its power.

So with all this in mind, I plan to steal away some time for myself to revisit some familiar and unfamiliar masters, unlock some favorite and foreign poems, and allow this mosaic I’m sitting on to show itself bit by bit.

The Unbearable Lightness of Everything Genius

book cover

Three books have been spinning in my head for a little while now — especially since last Friday, when I bought a copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being in an airport bookshop on my way home.  I thought I had read it a few years ago, but it was not the same book. I was confusing it with Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, which – strangely enough – takes its title from a line in the Milan Kundera book I bought.

But at the same time, I kept mixing these titles around in my mind with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, which – as far as I can tell from the jacket summary – has nothing in common whatsoever with the Foer or Kunera books.

Why?

That is what I aim to find out.  So I’ve been reading Kundera all week, almost done.  Perhaps I was confusing this book with the one by Dave Eggers because this book by Kundera is, in fact, heartbreaking and has many moments of genius.   The way he plays with language, the reality he gives his characters. It’s Prague in the 1960s but it might as well be today, you and me.

[ spoiler alert! ]

Vicky Christina Barcelona poster

But for the purposes of this blog post, let’s pretend the story can be summed up thus:

Love triangle
wife is a photographer
mistress is a painter
mistress coaches wife on her art

Compare that to the very simple summary of another story this week, from Woody Allen’s newest movie (go see it) Vicky Christina Barcelona:

Love triangle
ex-wife is a painter
mistress is a photographer
ex-wife coaches mistress on her art

A lot of reviews for the Woody Allen movie said it was about love and sex.  I didn’t see that.  And I don’t see it in Kundera’s novel either.  I see in both Allen’s film and Kundera’s novel a struggle for expression.  Personal expression. Creative expression.  What have you.  The characters are all struggling to figure out how to SHOW something, anything to other people and be understood.  Love conveniently figures into the stories because it is one of the most misunderstood expressions humans deal with on a regular basis.  But to confine the tension of these stories to love is to be too simplistic.  In Kundera’s case, especially, there are themes of stifled expression explored on numerous fronts: sexual, sensual, political, familial, artistic and patriotic.

Am I projecting?  Well, sure, I’m the reader.  That’s what I get to do.  It’s my role as the reader to project myself onto the characters and into the story.  None of us know how to read any other way.

Expression, as I was saying, is the crux.   At one point in Vicky Christina Barcelona, Scarlett Johannson’s character blurts out that she has no talent.  That she has ideas, she has feelings she wants to express, but she can’t because she has no talent. The film’s tagline:  “Life is the ultimate work of art.”  The Unbearable Lightness of Being has so many examples, I don’t know where to start, but I’ll give you one of my favorites:  Tereza, the wife in the fore-mentioned love triangle, has a habit from childhood of staring at herself in the mirror, willing her soul to show itself in her face, searching for some sign of the soul in the body.  The only time she is truly happy is when she takes photos of the Russian tanks invading Prague.

Both stories end without conclusion.  No one ever really gets what they want because they never actually know what they want.  In order to express something sufficiently, wouldn’t you have to already know what you want to express?  Kundera’s answer:

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

and

“Einmal ist keinmal … what happens but once might as well not have happened at all.”

IFLA Day 4 and 5

Old Quebec

Wednesday, 13 August 2008

Wednesday was primarily a day of walking around and being a tourist, but I did go to two things at the conference as well.  It was the last day for poster sessions and exhibitions, which created a strange atmosphere of farewells that gave the sense of the conference ending already, when in fact it was still going for another couple days.  In the afternoon I went to a session on Emerging Technologies, where I heard a lot about tools I already knew, for the most part, but the presentations were valuable in that they presented case studies of these tools actually *applied* to specific library environments.  Bob Glass of Manchester Metropolitan University (link opens PDF) in the U.K. showed us how his students have been using Blogger for class projects.  Wun Han Chow from the National Library of Singapore (link opens PDF) walked us through their work-flow using QuestionPoint, which was actually the best demonstration I’ve seen of that service.

yes, I'm a tourist

In the evening, I walked around a bit more but was feeling symptoms of Conference Exhaustion so I went back to the hotel early for a good night’s sleep.

Thursday, 14 August 2008

My last day at IFLA was one of the best, I’m happy to say.  I attended two sessions in the morning and they were both very informative.  The first:

Enabling access to the global library – small is beautiful: distributed deployment of library services for small and special libraries

• Case study: The Evergreen Open Source Integrated Library System; its origins and significant implementations in the USA and Canada
  BEN HYMAN (Public Library Services Branch, Ministry of Education, Government of British Columbia, Canada, Victoria, BC, Canada) and JULIE WALKER (Georgia Public Library Service, Atlanta, GA, USA)
• Archon: facilitating global access to collections in small archives
  SCOTT W. SCHWARTZ, CHRISTOPHER PROM, KYLE FOX and PAUL SORENSEN
  (University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois, USA)
• Punching above our weight: a small Scottish Library Service joins the global community
  ANTHONY BROWNE (East Renfrewshire Council, Community Services, Scotland, UK) and CHRISTINE ROONEY-BROWNE (Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK)
• Digital archiving of e-journals for Special libraries
  EDMUND BALNAVES and MARK CHEHADE (Prosentient Systems, Sydney, Australia)

For the Evergreen case study, we actually heard from David Singleton of Georgia Public Library Service rather than Julie, as listed in the program.  He went over the transition of Georgia’s public libraries to the Evergreen Open Source ILS and the reasons they chose Open Source.  He had a great analogy that I hadn’t heard before (but I suspect it’s a common one) – when a library chooses an ILS, do they want to “rent an apartment” or “own the house”…?  If they rent, they don’t have the responsibility of upkeep but they also don’t get any return for their investment.  If they own, they do have more responsibility, but they can also customize and develop the “house” to really suit their situation.

Before Open Source, the libraries had been using a commercial ILS, but found that the “limitations of the software were determining policies” and they didn’t want that, of course.  When the staff across the libraries were asked what they *wished* the software would do, they could only think in terms of what they were familiar with.  David said they had to present the question in terms of “magic” … encouraging the staff to imagine that the software could do anything, anything at all. With Evergreen, they’ve been able to start tweaking and look ahead to potential … uh… tweaks.

Georgia will be having its first Evergreen conference the Spring of 2009 in Athens.  Evergreen also has a group on Facebook.

Next up was my last session of IFLA:

Knowledge Management with Information Technology and Library and Research Services for Parliaments

Social computing tools and knowledge sharing
DAVID GURTEEN (Gurteen Knowledge Community)

Panel Discussion with the following panellists:

• MARY LEE KENNEDY (Harvard Business School, Knowledge and Library Services, USA)
• MOIRA FRASER (Information and Knowledge, New Zealand Parliament, New Zealand)
• PATRICK DANOWSKI, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Germany

I had never heard of David Gurteen before this, but sort of felt like I should have.  It was also the only session in which I saw an audience member twittering the presentation.  His slides gave some really good illustrations of the difference between “KM 1.0″ which was techno-centric, built on command and control of information, and “KM 2.0″ which is people-centric, built on storytelling, community, and collaboration.  Information about his articles and presentations is supposed to be on the IFLA KM section website at some point.  I’ll be looking for them.

Moira Fraser gave a whole slew of examples of government agencies using blogs, twitter, or facebook to reach out to voters.  Parliaments from New Zealand to Chile to the UK all had social networking presences of some kind.  Mary Lee Kennedy also took us through some interesting sites, one of which was “Tomorrow’s Challenges” at the IMD in Switzerland. The color and size of each headline represent how “hot” that topic is, according to clicks it’s receiving.

Lastly, Patrick Denowski of Berlin had three quick tips for us when it came to choosing and using online social tools:

1. Make sure you can get out the information you put in — export options, link options, something.

2. Share it.  Use a Creative Commons license.  Look for existing big communities in order to have critical mass.

3. Training.  Teach yourself if you have to, and then teach your colleagues or at least encourage them to play and learn, too.

Even if the tool isn’t used after all, you will have the experience of using it, which you can build on for other tools.

John Pollinger of London’s House of Commons library was in attendance and asked one of the first questions:  “How do we define and measure success of these tools?”

Mary Lee:  Define your idea of success beforehand, so you know what direction to take.

Moira:  If you’re using it as a pilot study, then the learning is the success.  Treat it like a birthday party – let it run and if good things happen, encourage more.

Patrick:  If Library of Congress just has photos of its collection on the LOC website, a lot of people won’t notice or care.  Now that LOC has photos on Flickr, people from all over the world are paying attention.  Be open to unexpected successes.

IFLA Day 3

poster session

Tuesday, 8 August 2008

The morning was spent at the GSLIS booth in the Exhibition Hall.  UIUC and San Jose State were the only schools represented, that we knew of.  Unlike the vendors, we didn’t have a lot of flashy stuff to give away … none, really, besides the light-up pens that were all given away within the first two days.  We didn’t have bags or posters or cute pins.  Yet we still managed to have our fair share of visitors.  Many were alumni, some were friends of UIUC people, and many others had questions about our programs.

I was pleasantly surprised at how many visitors had questions about the Mortenson Center, or knew of it in some way or other.

The Cataloging Librarian stopped by to say hi, and we chatted a bit about the conference.  It’s wonderful to hear about the conference from a completely different perspective, with a different emphasis.  We were both planning to visit the New Professionals Discussion Group, and decided to meet up then.

I went from the GSLIS booth to the Poster Sessions.  Several poster slots were blank – indicating that those presenters were not able to make it to the congress for some reason.  Nevertheless, there were more than enough posters to make the session a crowded cacophony of conversation.  I haven’t attended a true Pecha Kucha myself, but the poster session looked to me like a Pecha Kucha (each speaker has 20 slides, 20 seconds for each slide), but in this case, all the speakers present simultaneously and the audience is able to follow-up immediately with more questions.  Having all these visual presentations of various library projects was also a wonderful way to check the pulse of the library world, in a way.  And some posters clearly garnered more attention than others.  Sure, much of that can be the poster’s design, but I noticed people really reading the titles, not just quickly glancing over the pictures.  Posters about new libraries, or rural library projects seemed very popular from my observations.

Next up: the New Professionals Discussion Group.  This was the description in the IFLA program:

New Professionals Discussion Group Mind the gap: bridging the inter-generational divide Panel discussion with the following panellists: SUE HUTLEY (Australian Library and Information Association, Australia) BARBARA SCHLEIHAGEN and SUSANNE RIEDEL (German Library Association, Germany) KEITH MICHAEL FIELS (American Library Association, USA)

From this description, many so-called “new professionals” thought this would be a session for us, with us, and we filled up the room fairly well — this assumption is based on my own look around the room, scanning for young faces, so who knows how many “new professionals” there really were, across all ages.

But the session was a huge disappointment for me.  Even though we – the new professionals – were a clear presence in the room, the speakers had, apparently, been instructed to talk about recruitment.  So most of the presentations were not directed to us at all, but were about us, talking about us in the 3rd person as though we weren’t there.  And a couple were pretty darn patronizing to boot.   The presentation from ALIA (Austrailian Library and Information Association) was the only one to openly acknowledge that new professionals could be from any generation, often on their 2nd or 3rd career.  But that point seemed to be completely ignored by the following presenters.  Keith Fiels actually had advice for new library professionals (I think he might have been the only one to offer us any advice, in fact):

1. go to committee meetings

2. take on work

3. do the work

Between the speeches and the questions, the conversation of the session seemed to constantly go between an inclusive dialogue, in which new professionals were “us” and “you”, to an exclusive conversation where new professionals were “them”.  I very much wanted to ask “who is this session for?” but other questions were ahead of mine and no one else seemed to have the same frustration I did. In fact, the questions just emphasized the empty rhetorical nature of the session.  I left early.

library rave

That evening was the Cocktail Reception – which was enormous.  I imagine the largest of mafia weddings would look something like this reception.  A few other GSLIS folks and I went out for dessert instead.  As I’ve often found before, these simple small group conversations are often the most enlightening parts of a conference like this.  We had a long talk (over delicious sweets and lattes) about i-schools and library-schools.  One of the women from GSLIS knew some of the history behind the i-school migration in the U.S. and hearing that background was eye-opening for me.