Libraries/Info Sci

Thoughts and selected news updates on the Library Science/Information Science field(s)

There are 262 posts filed in Libraries/Info Sci (this is page 13 of 27).

ALA 2006 – Day 2

I’ve added pictures from today to the end of my Flickr set.

Another successful day! I actually got to a numer of sessions, so they’ll get separate entries. I spent the evening at the Google party at Muriel’s. This is how Google makes a Rum & Coke. With a plastic frozen ice cube that lights up on contact with liquid:

IMG_0503

Saw some more exhibitors today, and accumulated more swag. No celebrity sightings today, unfortunately.

I heard a story that the presenter for this morning’s event on podcasting had to cancel last minute. But a lot of people showed up not knowing this, and ended up forming an impromptu discussion group instead. All on their own motivation. That makes me smile.

I also finally got around to officially joining LITA. Yay!

I unfortunately started the day by oversleeping a bit, and missed the beginning of the Open Source Software session. But I picked up on most of it and look forward to investigating some of the software presented further.

ALA 2006 – Day 1

What an amazing day! I met Neil Gaiman! (Thanks for spotting his signing, Beth!) And oh yeah, other great stuff happened too 🙂

The trip here was relatively uneventful, thankfully! Some construction around Nashville’s airport had me worried, but I persevered. Kudos once again to Southwest.

Shared a taxi ride from the airport with a fellow attendee I met on the plane. Librarians are so very friendly!

So I checked in to the dorm I’m staying at, and caught a shuttle downtown. Picked up my conference materials (the gigantic book of events is the most intimidating thing ever), and hit the exhibit floor. Google had a much larger booth than last year’s table and a banner. And Elvis is there, too. Talked to a few vendors related to work, again everyone was really friendly. How does everybody have a connection to Huntsville? Completely randomly ran into Beth, after we both tried and failed to attend events that were overflowing out the door. We returned to the conference floor, where she noticed Neil Gaiman signing Anansi Boys! Not only that, but giving out free hardback copies to be signed.

Later, went to Membership Meeting I. It was… anticlimactic to say the least. Less than 75 people attended, which is less than the one half of one percent of membership necessary to vote on issues. Later more people showed up, but it didn’t matter anyway since nothing was even up for vote. But in the interest of public disclosure, here’s the notes I took:

-ALA 2006 official attendance: 20,843 attendees registered, and 4494 vendors. Less than 1000 fewer than attended the last event in Orlando, which isn’t bad considering the worries about New Orleans.

-The recent dues increase will be used for a number of projects as part of an overall grand plan for 2010. Some projects are more member input, a diversity web course, and the development of a full strategic/financial plan over the next four months will outline this in more detail.

-Amazingly, ALA has no demographic data on members for things like salary. This will be addressed soon and used to evaluate a potential tiered membership fee structure.

After that, I strolled over to the opening session. Madeline Albright was the keynote speaker, and did a pretty good job. She was interesting, but I question whether going as in depth on foreign policies as she did was relevant to the conference. Mayor Nagin also appeared, as did the lieutenant governor of the state and a videoed message from Winton Marsalis.

Next, I met up with Beth and her roommate Alyssa for dinner. Mmm po’boys! Got to see a bit of the French Quarter in the process.

And last but certainly not least, we attended the Bloggers’ Bash Leslie Berger threw in her Hilton suite. I put a ton of faces with blogs I read, and had some great conversations. Gulf Coast librarians were invited too, and they had some very moving stories to tell. One thing in particular they wanted passed on: Please do not donate any more books to them. They are simply out of storage space, and money is far more needed.

On that topic, it is very surreal to see the places featured in so much news coverage of Katrina last year. Most of the houses the shuttle bus and taxis took me by still have the spraypainted marks from search and rescue teams, and probably one in three houses has some sort of active repair going on (and many more need it). New Orleans has a long way to go. But even so, it is open for business. Everyone has been extremely welcoming, and my only real regret is that the St. Charles streetcar isn’t back in service yet. I would have loved to ride it from Loyola to the convention center.

For those I met tonight, I am horrible with names. Would you mind dropping me an e-mail to say hi and force my brain to make a connection? Haefele@gmail.com

All the pictures I took today are here.

I stayed out later than I intended, but it was worth it! Now: sleep.

And I’m off!

In the morning I will rise really really (really) early and head to New Orleans!

A bunch of people are already there, and I’m very jealous. Blog posts are starting to filter in, and I find Andrea’s post over at the PLA blog to be absolutely adorable. A couple of kids came up with the idea of selling lemonade outside the convention, with profits going to local damaged libraries. The shots she put on Flickr are great as well.

Anyway, if all goes well (crossing my fingers after some of the travel horror stories I’ve heard today), I should hit the convention center mid-afternoon. See you there!

I hope to take advantage of the convention center’s free wi-fi and blog while I’m there, at least a little bit.

P.S. The convention even got a mention on Silicon Valley gossip blog ValleyWag today.

ALA Schedule

Here’s where I’ll be at ALA:

http://www.hiddenpeanuts.com/ALA_Schedule-1.xls (no, the colors mean nothing in particular)

Disclaimer: Everything is open to change due to unforeseen circumstances and plain old burnout 🙂 Some of the longer events in particular I just can’t see myself sitting still that long.

I’m still debating whether or not to buy a ticket to the scholarship bash Saturday night – anyone else going and want to meet up? Meeting up any other time would be great as well.

I was looking forward to hearing Chris Anderson of Wired magazine in particular, until I noticed he’s speaking on the exact same topic he did last year (The Long Tail). Oh well, that frees up time for the Professional Blogging topic!

E-Info Global Symposium

I’m going to go ahead and point to something I’ve been somewhat involved in since my first week of working here:

http://Symposium.UAH.edu/

On Friday, Nov. 30 & Saturday, Dec. 1 2006, we’ll be holding a library-related symposium here at the University of Alabama in Huntsville! The topics are loosely focused around transitions from traditional resources to electronic.

Speakers include:

Stephen Abram, VP of Innovation for SirsiDynix
Andrew Dillon, Dean of Univ. of Texas’ School of Information
Chris Jasek, manager of Elsevier’s User Centered Design Team
Danuta Nitecki, Associate University Librarian, Yale University
Bernie Sloan, Univ. of Illinois
Sue Medina, director of the Network of Alabama Academic Libraries
Mona Klausing, VP of marketing for Blue Mine Group
And more we don’t have full details on yet.

We’ll also have brief presentations from the CEOs of Kaplan, Auto-Graphics, SirsiDynix, EBSCO, and LSSI.

(of course, more details are either on the site now or will be going up shortly. The full PDF agenda is here.)

We also have a symposium blog, which I’ll be maintaining: http://symposium.uah.edu/blog/ (hooray! our first official blog!)

One of our main concerns has been to make the symposium accessible to everyone. Until September 8th, registration is $99 (including a Friday night buffet/reception). We’ve also struck a deal with a few local hotels, including one that is campus-run and directly next door to the symposium site, for around $60/night. More details on hotels will be online pretty soon. We’re also in the process of arranging free registration for some library school students.

I’d be glad to answer any questions I can, or point you to those more in the know than I!

Government proposes libraries block MySpace, social sites

CNet article

Proposal text

I learned tonight through the above CNet article that a proposal in Congress would force libraries and schools to block minors from any “commercial social network sites and chat rooms”. The text defines a commercial social network site as any site which lets users create a profile and communicate with other users.

To me, that would include pretty much any method of online communication except e-mail.

Am I misreading this?

Second Life Library

The Second Life Library 2.0 initiative really fascinates me. Second Life is a free online role playing game. Unlike most games of this type, there are very few limitations on what you can do in the game world. The official site does a much better job of explaining the concept than I can.

So what is the Second Life Library 2.0? A bunch of librarians and organizations like OPAL and the Alliance Library System are building a library inside the game world. They play on offering reference service, instruction programs, and pretty much anything else possible in the game.

There’s a couple of reasons I love this idea. It definitely accomplishes outreach to an unserved population. At the same time, there’s a definite Cool Factor that libraries can sometimes lack. Thumbs up to all involved!

I really want to help out with this project, but unfortunately Second Life will not run on my aging computer. I’m hoping to get a new system later this year, so maybe I’ll join up after that event.

Weather Maps as Complex Visual Interfaces

I spent a lot of time last weekend watching the weather radar on TV. Friday night was my first Big Southern Storm, and let me just say: I’ll take a good ‘ol northern blizzard any day.

Anyway.

During a break in the storm, I was struck by how complicated a modern TV weather map is. You’ve got all those colors to take in and synthesize, geographic references to match them up with, a time scale, spinning refresh line, and sometimes even wind speeds or other situational data. Yet somehow everybody can take it in. You never hear anybody complain about the weather map being too complex.

I think the success is due to a combination of familiarity and a highly visual representation. After you see enough local maps of any kind, you get an idea of what towns are placed where. Once you gain that sense of location, the town names become almost unnecessary to even read. Then the colors: again, no reading necessary. Red bad. Green not so bad. That’s about the extent of knowledge required.

So if this kind of visual representation of highly complex data can be so successful, why can’t the new crop of visual search engines?

EBSCO recently added the feature to their databases, and I’m not really impressed. Sure it looks slick, but I just can’t be nearly as efficient with their expanding connected bubbles as I can in traditional searches.
Perhaps I haven’t given myself time to gain that critical threshold of familiarity. But I’d love to try some sort of visual search system based on a weather map’s amorphous blobs and see how it compares. Maybe the years of honing that system can be drawn upon.

Google’s Related Links

I’m still alive! Just very busy.

Today Google added a “Related Links” box that anybody can embed into their site. I’ve added it down near the bottom of my sidebar (for now) if you want to check it out.

Mostly I was just curious what Google would pull up as recommended from parsing my site. Right now its one news story about national library week and a couple of random library-related blogs.

I guess you can think of the service like the Adsense program, only you don’t get paid when people click the links. But on the plus side, these are ‘real’ links instead of ads. And meanwhile, our Google Overlords get to harvest even more data 🙂

A Digital Ownership Society

A few days ago, I read this horror story from a blogger who lost his entire Gmail account with no advance notice. I shrugged it off as an isolated incident and moved on. Then, yesterday afternoon, I was welcomed to my own Gmail account by the same error message that user saw.

I’d encountered it before, but only for a minute or two each time. Yesterday, it stuck around for almost six hours. I spent a good part of that time freaking out, my imagination instantly informing me that I’d never see any of my crucial emails again. When the error eventually disappeared I let loose an audible sigh of relief. I immediately proceeded to back up my account, something I shamefully had left undone.

With the advent of “Web 2.0”, users suddenly have an explosion of hosted services available. Gmail, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and countless others. We flock to them, eager to deposit our hard-created content. And why not? The best of these sites offer amazing functionality and communities with very little time and money invested.

But as much as I love these sites, deep down inside I do not trust them. My Flickr account contains almost every digital photo I’ve ever taken, but I’m not about to delete them from my hard drive. My Del.icio.us account has a number of my bookmarks, but I still keep a local copy in my browser. You get the idea. I’m not sure how Gmail escaped my attention in this area for so long.

Don’t get me wrong, hosted services are wonderful. They drastically lower the entry threshold for what were once very complicated projects. But by using them, especially in official capacities, users place a lot of trust in what might not be the most worthy hands.

What does this mean for libraries? Like anyone else, be sure to back up often. If there’s a lesson to be learned from the deleted Gmail account, it’s that not even giants like Google are infallible. Running a Blogger-hosted blog for your institution? Don’t trust that it will be there forever. It may very well be, but a little paranoia never hurt anyone.

As I was learning to use computers, I remember my dad telling me that “There are two kinds of users. Those who have lost data, and those who will lose data. It’s just a matter of time.”

Most people I know back up the important parts of their hard drives regularly. The omnipresence of USB thumbdrives has made the task easier than ever. But why do so many ignore their web services? Data there can be just as irreplaceable as any Word document. Of course, we hope that if any business went under it would at least give a grace period of some sort of ‘please download your data’ notice, but that isn’t a certainty.

Unfortunately, backing up any sort of online storage account can be iffy. If the provider does not have a preset method to download all your data, you may have to resort to copy/pasting or even screenshots. Not exactly ideal!

One way to get around this is to host your own service. Granted, this isn’t always feasible. For example: Flickr is so intricate and deeply community-driven that any attempt to duplicate it would be a waste of time.

But in the case of a blog, try setting up your own WordPress system. Thanks to open source and freely available software, it will cost you very little. If the blog is for work and you already have a web server there, then cost is only the time involved.

As an added bonus, your blog’s look and feel will be much more customizable than any hosted solution. In the process, I guarantee you’ll learn something about web servers, PHP code, or both.

Once you really own your blog, backing up is a snap. Any number of database backup tools out there will work, or even just use WordPress’ built in utility.

This kind of setup isn’t for everybody. As an individual, sometimes you just don’t want to pay a hosting fee or put the time in when so many free robust options are out there. But on an institutional level, I really think owning your digital content and its delivery system is the way to go.

And either way, don’t forget to back up.