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The pink mattress lay in the middle of the road, as unmistakable as a glass of Pepto-Bismol. I was rounding Highway 13 about 9 p.m. in early November, just a week after I had returned to California. The sloped, unlit road had no shoulder and my headlights bore on the mattress occupying the bulk of my lane as if it were my sudden, unfortunate, unavoidable destiny.

My hands jerked the steering wheel. Right. Left. Right. And my car floated magically up and around the mattress, skimming around it by the slimmest of margins and gliding back onto Highway 13, to safety and then to the temporary apartment that was my waystation home, where I buckled into a chair and just breathed for a while.

To this day I attribute my survival to one word: focus. If I had been chattering on the phone, fumbling in my purse for a mint, twiddling radio dials, or even scratching my nose, I would have died. But I was tired that night and aware of my unfamiliarity with the Oakland hills, so I had two hands on the wheel with my eyes on radar-lock on the road, my phone muted in my purse.

This is a bit of a preamble to say that from time to time I have major thoughts about interesting big topics, such as the future of OCLC, inter-ILS sharing systems such as Navigator and Fulfillment, the movement to centralized mass storage for legacy print materials, and of course, and most importantly, beer and homebrewing. I want to share these thoughts but am pulled under by the rip tide (however warm and inviting the water)  of the responsibilities of being a university librarian.

Then I am sometimes asked to write about new technologies, and a friend asked me if I would be writing about my iPad. Our head of campus IT gave iPads to me and to our sysadmin. (Yes, she is a marvelous head of campus IT.)

I have many thoughts about the iPad, but for now, with my focus on the pink mattresses in my life, my observation is that the iPad is a marvelous consumption device. It is a little awkward as a tool for engagement (tap… tap… tap…) and even more limited as a tool of creation, but let’s not hold that against it, because the book has the same limitations. The model I have is wifi, which has its own implications.The iPad easily fits in my purse, which also has  implications.

So far I use the iPad for these things. I catch up on email whenever I’m wifi-accessible (an easier screen than the iPhone, and far less clunky than maneuvering a laptop). Not good for long responses, but otherwise fine. I play Solitaire, which is really fun on a device this size–I admit to having become a bit of a junky. I browse social networks while I’m watching TV at home. I have purchased one book, Death of the Adversary, which is a great reading experience through the Kindle app.

Other uses crop up during my life workflow. Last Sunday I looked up my favorite Greek Salad recipe in the Epicurious app, then propped the iPad on the kitchen table (my case has a stand) and used it as my cookbook. Usually what I do with Epicurious is print out the recipe, but the iPad has such a large screen that this was unnecessary. Woodsman spare that tree!

Because the iPad fits in my purse, I always have it with me. This has turned out to mean, I can always read a book or play Solitaire. Without 3G, the iPad isn’t exactly a mobile device; outside the home, barring those rare moments when I am on a free public network (such as at Starbucks),  if I need a map or current information, I pull out my iPhone. Which brings up the over-obvious point that ubiquitous computing is really about ubiquitous connectivity. Nothing new for anyone who has grown up in the networked environment, but a continuous readjustment for those of us who still tend to think of computing as personal (versus cloud or web-scale) hardware.

Perhaps the most important role of the iPad in my university position is to generate excitement about emerging technologies. When I bring it out (in a cherry-red case I bought for $10 on Amazon no

One of the facts in life is that library administrators take the jobs they take (and this is my fourth head-of-the-whatever library job, not to be confused with my various military MFWIC positions) based on many, many things… and the integrated library system they will inherit is rarely if ever one of them. I just don’t know anyone who says, “Someday, if I’m lucky, I’m going to lead a triple-I library.”

(There’s ample room for a joke right there…)

I have inherited a library with great staff, serving a progressive institution committed to many great values, and it happens to be a Sirsi library. In fact, it’s going to be a Sirsi library for a while. A long while. And I’m not going anywhere for a long while, either, because the goals I have for this job require I stay here for at least five to seven years.

Stephen Abram, in his, um, “white paper” on open source,  has put me in a double bind. Unlike open source, where competing vendors can and do arise to offer better services — as is ably proven by the rise of Bywater Solutions and other Koha vendors following the egregious misbehaving of Liblime — as a traditional proprietary-software customer, my choice of vendor is Sirsi or… Sirsi. I can piss them off and undermine this library’s ability to do its job, or I can build and maintain good relations with the many fine people who work there, and by encouraging the best possible support from Sirsi, help  improve our library’s services.

We have a lot of challenges at My Place Of Work. Over half our print collection is still in a card catalog. (Yes. That’s right. And I keep finding warrens stuffed with more uncataloged stuff.)  Our small  mid-1950s facility is crammed to the gills with materials, many of which were selected in a pre-librarian era of this library, and our heavily-used computers  haven’t had a computer “refresh” in about 8 years. Most of the furniture predates even Mad Men (though I do have really cool chairs in my office, which I plan to redo on the cheap in Mod style).

But we have a lot of assets, too. We have great staff, and yes, there aren’t enough of them, but show me the library that has enough staff, and I’ll show you a place I don’t want to work.  We participate (”we” being one amazing librarian) in a marvelous faculty development program that is helping this library better integrate itself into academic activities. We have a pretty good database selection for a library this size, and it will get bigger. We belong to the absolutely fabu SCELC consortium, which has great leadership and great membership and super services.

And we have something that’s hard to explain or define, but it’s the sense that things will prevail. That may be because I am kind of dumb. I remember when I returned to California the LAST time, and the first bit of news I had was “welcome to California, by the way, we’re cutting your budget 40%.” I am stupid enough that I didn’t see this as a cue to fold my tent and go elsewhere, but instead kept improving services (to make a more compelling pitch for funding) and finding alternate revenue streams, where I was allowed to do so.  From what was shared with me after the fact, the project I managed apparently outlived many attempts to kill it.

My stupidity will help me at MPOW as well.  I am happily optimistic that the day I turn in my keys, I will look back and see how far we have come, and that will be a far way indeed.

(Of course we need more staff! I’ll take ‘em! But if I read one more library “strategic plan” that begins by complaining about staffing, I’m going to explode. Don’t start your “plan” by telling me what you don’t have — tell me what you do well, and what you can be!)

Finally, though thi

In short:

* Got an iPhone. Zero regrets. The Barbie Doll I never had. Going from a Blackberry to an iPhone has raised my expectations of mobile platforms and software in general. Already filling it with free apps. Keyboard is kinda lame, but I’m figuring out how to type on it.

* Holding off on the netbook until Windows 7 debuts. This is painful, because it means I absolutely have to finish my presentation before I leave next weekend, but I think it’s good advice. Couldn’t find an Acer with a coupon for a Win 7 upgrade or would have gone that route.

* GPS: between the Garmin with the Olde Mappes and the iPhone with its Kewl Apps, I’m fine for now.

* iPod:  will keep using the one I have until it’s time to get another, and then get something small, just a step above the Shuffle, for exercising. Don’t want to get all sweaty on my iPhone.  May store some podcasts on the iPhone — just enough for long trips, the only time I really get into that mode.

Thanks again for all the advice!

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Note: be sure to read this post if you AREN’T going to ALA Annual — because there’s some free (as in zero-cost) participation opportunities here.  For this conference’s LITA Top Technology Trends, I am part of an online team honchoed by Cindi Trainor that will facilitate a concurrent online discussion. I will post to here, Twitter, and Facebook when I know the URL.

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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When I noted that I had been busy with conference planning, one angle to that I had left out is my crash education in DocBook XML, a markup language used for technical documentation.

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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Need a funny icebreaker for your next “info literacy” workshop, class, or discussion? I laughed with recognition at PIL InfoLit Monologue #2, which is about what students say about procrastination, course-related work, and conducting research in the digital age (2:10). This two-minute video comes from Project Information Literacy (PIL), a national research study led by Alison Head and Mike Eisenberg of the University of Washington’s iSchool and supported with a gift from ProQuest.

PIL InfoLit Monologue #1 is about what students say about Wikipedia — which is more nuanced than you might expect!

Are you hotter than a Brazilian librarian? Probably not — but see these collections (gents, ladies) and decide for yourself. I think it may be a bit biased toward the young and pec-ful, but at least it’s gender-balanced.

My sister and I are really the country mouse and city mouse, so this blog from writer-fiddler-mom Debi Lewis and her countrified colleague Stori Thompson thrummed for me.

At last, play is found to be good for work. I knew it all along!

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Roy Tennant observed that Google hadn’t bothered exhibiting at ALA Annual 2008. I think Roy has a “game over” feeling about that — like we’re finally irrelevant enough for Google to ignore.

I have another take on this, bolstered by Joe Nocera’s article in the New York Times about Google’s deteriorating daycare options. Google has proven itself to be just another aging company where common sense and sincere dedication to human need have yielded to impatience with employees who want, of all things, day care for their children, a need the company has likened to free M&Ms.

Obviously, one point is that the United States still doesn’t have its act together about daycare. Not long ago I worked with a smart, dedicated woman who had grown up and been educated in China, and she observed that our large state university completely fell down on childcare options. In China, her kids would have had childcare. Period. Here, childcare was dangled as an option, but her kids would have been in middle school by the time they moved off the waiting list.

But I’d like to repeat a point I keep making while big universities fall over themselves to participate in Google’s digitization projects. Google is a relatively young company (though aging rapidly, if Nocero’s story has credence). Everyone assumes Google will rule the world forever. But we have thought that about a lot of companies.

In the end, if we really care about our software and our data and our materials, we have to fight to keep them open, to keep them available for use, and to preserve them — on our own, not through the secret back-door doings of a company too young to drive.  We keep re-learning this lesson. We learned it when we privatized library software, and we learned it when we privatized library data, and sooner than later, we’ll learn it with Google.

And yes, I’m holding off on comparing Google to a library software company recently in the news for its draconian personnel policies — because others wrote that story for me. (It’s funny how LJ’s correction only dug the hole deeper: “Oh, only TWO years! I feel SO much better!”)

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The personal detour

I’m back from giving the closing talk at SOLINET’s annual membership meeting, where I was well-pampered by all involved. I also rented a Prius for the trip, and it was quite difficult to return this lovely car to Avis. I had wondered how I would like driving a Prius, and the answer is “OMG ponies!” Smooth ride, the joy of watching myself save fuel, and pride of (temporary) ownership of a green vehicle… ’sall good.

I didn’t sleep well for two nights running (no fault to anyone except my over-active brain working on issues completely unrelated to SOLINET, speeches, or cars), so during my talk I felt under my game. I can always feel the difference between “they liked my talk” and “I shot them over the moon with numinous insights.” I’ll make a point of sleeping better before I teach “Writing for the Web” at TBLC next month.

The when-ness of tagging

Now I make a sharp right turn to discuss tagging in workflow context. Over on Thingology, Tim Spalding discusses user tagging of Godless, Ann Coulter’s latest screed book, pointing out that on Amazon the shouting match is unrelated to book ownership:

But while, on LibraryThing, where you have to have a book to tag it, Godless has a fairly unremarkable tag cloud, touching on its subject matter and point of view, on Amazon, the tagging has devolved into a shouting match.

For some time I’ve been pondering tagging in the context of a user’s workflow. Tagging in library catalogs hasn’t worked yet for a number of reasons, such as these rather obvious points:

• John Blyberg has noted that without critical mass, tagging is useless. I’d go farther and say without critical mass, tagging could backfire, because only the most determined cranks and pranksters might actually use it. A local library catalog is not beefy enough to build critical mass on its own; I don’t know how big or how heavily-used a catalog needs to be, but “a lot” is my guess. (Then there is the issue with the silo-like design of most library software, which keeps social data imprisoned behind proprietary walls.) That is yet another reason I like “LibraryThing for Libraries“: it’s an enrichment service to salt a catalog with an initial mass of high-quality tags built by passionate readers (and also provides that spookily-marvelous if-you-liked-this functionality).
• Some systems that claim to offer tagging make it so high-pain to tag that it works against adoption. I am thinking of the system where to merely SEE the tags a user must log in, and where tags are only searchable in “Advanced Search.” (Carl Grant, if you’re reading this, I owe you a citation on people-don’t-use-advanced-search… you have been very patient.)
• Also, on several occasions I have observed conversations about tagging between vendors and customers where the first words out of a customer’s mouth are “How can I control tagging?” and the vendor then responds in kind. If your primary objective is to “control” tagging, rather than make it work (that is, at minimum, to encourage users to provide quality tags), then the system design, to borrow youthful jargon, will be a FAIL.

But I have also pondered tagging in workflow context and feel this has not received adequate discussion. I’m guessing (based on Tim’s comments) that Librarything users are predominantly tagging when they add books or when they return to their collection for maintenance/grooming activities, such as cleaning up entries, fiddling with their default display, or examining the community discussion around books. Tim is also suggesting that on Amazon tagging appears to be less related to activities related to the workflow of book acquisition and ownership.

So I again mull over the library catalog and tagging workflow. Most catalogs are designed to help users find books or book-like items — known items, or items found through discovery. (Well, that is the claim, anyway.) You don’t return books through a library catalog (at least not yet). So when would tagging happen?

My guess is the best tagging would happen when the users returns the catalog to find more items. I say this because in some respects, a library catalog appears to be remarkably similar to Netflix in workflow, where I (again, out on this limb!) presume user reviewing (similar to tagging?) happens when a user logs in to refresh his or her queue with yummy new titles or simply get a reminder of what’s in the queue (in my family’s case, this happens after we receive some bizarre movie that sorta-looked-good that stealthily crept up to be #1 in one of our queues).

If I’m not going to tag when I find a book (why would I, if I haven’t read it, Amazon notwithstanding), and I’m not going to tag when I check out a book (an unrelated physical activity), and I’m not going to tag after I read a book (because that would mean the sole reason I’m returning to the catalog is to tag an item, which feels low-gain), and I’m not going to tag when I return a book (can you see me at the circ desk, reciting tags I want added to an item — or perhaps shouting tags into a book drop? Or I guess I could write them on a p-slip)…

Seems to me that tagging workflow in a catalog should be “gamed” so that the next time I visit the catalog to find something, the catalog entices me to tag. That would also be when I’m motivated to tag the book in a way that describes it well for my own bibliographic reuse, and also for others. (It could lead to opinion-tagging, though maybe that is always inevitable.)

Then again, what if at the beginning of a new discovery session the catalog recommended books? Prompted me to add reviews? Suggested I queue items? But I get ahead of myself…

All I’m really saying is that the very primitive tagging workflows I’ve seen so far in library catalogs aren’t designed to encourage tagging. (I am not referring at all to LibraryThing for Libraries, which at this point is a one-way enrichment service.) In fact, I don’t see much attention to tagging workflow, period. It feels very random and first-gen — a tacked-on service to allow a vendor to say “Yes, we offer tagging.” If you care at all about engaging users in catalogs and building user-contributed data, or for that matter leveraging social data period, that is simply not good enough.

Thoughts on tagging? Do I have this all wrong, or is there a nubbin of sensicalness here? Have I missed or misinterpreted/misrepresented some tagging behavior?

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I’m hustling to get out of town in three hours for the SOLINET Annual Member Meeting, and I have slides that need updating and tweaking, but I heard something last week I need to nip in the bud.

Linkedin is not a Facebook alternative. Linkedin, for those who do not know, “is an online network of more than 20 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.”

I have an account on Linkedin, and I dutifully update my “network,” approving requests and making sure my profile is up-to-date. But I’m really only on Linkedin just to keep my eye on it.

I am aware that some librarians have proposed that Linkedin is an “alternative” to Facebook. In other words, Linkedin good. Facebook bad. Ok to let librarians and library users on Linkedin. Not ok to let them use Facebook. On the Kubler-Ross social software acceptance scale, for these librarians Linkedin factors in at the “bargaining” stage… they’ll “do” social software, as long as it’s not Facebook (or heaven forbid, MySpace or Livejournal).

(I know libraries that block Facebook. My favorite example is the library that says “no one uses Facebook” and then blocks it anyway. Well, they are correct that their users don’t use it in their library…)

I know professionals who give Linkedin a workout and find it professionally beneficial. But in my book, Linkedin answers the question, “what would Facebook look and feel like if Microsoft had invented it?” It’s chilly, picture-less, and spectral. It feels like some people want work to feel: a disembodied place where Labor is Performed. That’s a soulless way to treat the place we sock away people for 40-80 hours a week.

I realize Facebook has its silly side. After all, I just started a group called “Over Fifty is Facebook-Fabulous.” That’s trivial fun. I also don’t spend a lot of time in Facebook. I ignore actions on Facebook such as sending me “beer,” karma, stuffed beers, or the same dumb video. Once in a while I’ll play a game, but I won’t forward it to my 300+ “friends.” I check in, I tweak my profile, check messages, send a couple out, but I’m not Facebook-obsessed.

But in many ways Facebook feels a lot more like my daily life than Linkedin ever will. On Facebook I can give myself personal context — pictures I like, what I’m doing, my latest blog posts, websites that interest me. I can also see that context. I can share websites and ideas with small and large groups. I can introduce people who can find out much more about the people I’m connecting than Linkedin presents.

I also like that silly stuff happens. It happens at work, doesn’t it? We are a playful species. Adulthood involves knowing when to work and when to play and how to mix the two.

Not everyone I know is on Facebook… but I’ve connected with professionals, family members, and even someone I knew in elementary school. It’s a full environment, not just a slice of Serious Professional Life.

To the librarian who opined that I was unusual for being on Facebook and many of our users aren’t, well, but many of our users are. The fastest growing demographic is users over 25, and I guarantee you that most people I know on Facebook are not high-tech.

I once described two conferences by saying that one had more content but the other was more fun. That wasn’t to dismiss the second; just the opposite, in fact. I would learn more at the second conference. When I am relaxed, happy, and engaged, I’m a sponge for knowledge. Think about your favorite teacher: this person probably had a playful side, or at least radiated joy in his or her subject.

Anyway, to those librarians (and yes, they really exist) who have proposed Linkedin as an “acceptable” alternative to Facebook, ol’ FRL was going to find out sooner or later, and I’m slapping your wrists. Cut it out. Ignore Facebook or jump on board, but I recommend you go directly to the Kubler-Ross “Depression” stage and get it over with.

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A long-overdue post about the best of the best from Connecticut Trendspotting, NISO Discovery, a Kent Campus visit, and Computers in Libraries. (I have since attended IA Summit and Florida Library Association…more about them later!)

Quick Takeaways:

Clearest tech trends rippling through the presentationsphere: mobile interfaces, intelligent folksonomies, open source

Favorite presentation: Helene Blowers, Computers in Libraries, “Innovation Starts With I”

Most significant ah-hah moments: grasping the implications of FRBR; hearing Blowers talk about how to strategically “sell” innovation in a library organization

Best casual conversations: John Ockerbloom & Peter Murray (FRBR and system design); Alane Wilson and Cliff Landis (benefits of 2.0); John Blyberg (SOPAC)

Best late-night rant at the hotel bar: Marshall Breeding and Roy Tennant (I would tell you all about it except it was a rant)

Best conference trend: “Lessig”-style PowerPoints– heavy on graphics, light on bullets, plain backgrounds, kewl fonts

Social Software du Jour: “Tweeting” (using Twitter) to microblog conference presentations

Noticeable travel trends: fewer flights, more airports with free wifi

Best meal: Allen & Sons Barbecue, Chapel Hill, NC

Best tourist side-trip: A Southern Season (cookware store), Chapel Hill

Best travel moment: finding a pair of courtesy slippers in my room in the Holiday Inn Crystal City (even if they were more like skis for me)

Say Whatta?

Computers in Libraries 2008 featured a “Pecha Kucha” (peh-chak-cha, more or less) — a fast-paced session with six presenters, each allowed 20 slides to address a topic (such as podcasting) and a theme (such as creating content), and 20 seconds to display each slide.

Many CiL presenters at Pecha Kucha and elsewhere used the “Lawrence Lessig” presentation style I began using in my own talks after attending Defrag last fall and watching Dick Hardt from Sxip do his thang -a move away from page after page of PowerPoint bullets on Microsoft-generated backgrounds toward image-heavy screen shots and graphics and single-word slides. In addition to being visually pleasing, this style of presentation makes the presenter look in command of her topic.

I Iz Somebody

Helene Blowers did such a fabulous job at Cil2008 with “Innovation Starts with I” that I really hope she gets tapped to present in these parts. The wifi worked well in that room and I heavily Twittered her main points. Some key points:

• Creativity is about ideas. Innovation is about doing new things. (Theodore Levitt’s distinction)
• Workers are responsible for doing the initial legwork and tying new ideas into the MVV - Mission, Vision, Values
• Sell your vision personally
• Managers are responsible for creating an environment where mistakes are welcome and even encouraged

Social Skills

SOPAC is the Social OPAC - software John wrote last year, when he was at Ann Arbor District Library. I learned all about it at Connecticut Trendspotting, a one-day conference in Hartford, focused on open source… not in the morning’s talks, but that afternoon, when I had a long discussion with John Blyberg and Kate Sheehan of Darien Library about SOPAC version 2. It’s their beans to spill, but I look forward to hearing more about SOPAC.

Watch out, it’s a Brontosaurus in the 500s

Kate Sheehan, new head of public services at Darien, had been the innovator who had led the first implementation of Librarything for Libraries. Kate told me that when she saw the video for the Borders Concept Store she said to herself that they must have read her mind, because this is the design, more or less, for public services at Darien, which is building a new library right now-a place not only for traditional library services but also a place where patrons can mix/remix/download/create. She plans on having mixing stations and “knowledge glades.”

You Give Me FRBR

NISO Discovery and FRBR. NISO had a two-day conference in Chapel Hill about next-generation discovery tools.

For me, the “discovery” for that trip happened on the flight to Raleigh, when I read Robert Max

well’s FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed, and through this short, clear book I really “got” FRBR-strengths, wea

knesses, implications for system design–and then at the conference I went out to dinner with John Mark Ockerbloom, a PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and active participant in the Digital Library Federation, and we talked about developments in library software. (We were joined by Peter Murray, who did a nice job of summarizing many open source library projects related to opacs and ILS’s; see http://dltj.org/article/niso-discovery-presentation-links/ As you can see, his content on SOPAC was a little stale-gotta pick up the phone, dude).

This discussion with John prompted me to download and read the DLF ILS and Discovery Systems Draft Recommendation (https://project.library.upenn.edu/confluence/display/ilsapi/Draft+Recommendation ) which has been discussed at some recent conferences.

The Whiteboard of Your Dreams

The day before I taught a writing workshop at NEFLIN in March, I visited with Billy Thomas, director of Learning Services at Kent Campus. Wow! Billy has some amazing ideas. He walked me around the library and talked about something that sounded very similar to Kate Sheehan’s “knowledge glades.” We also talked about alternatives to library classification, student work/meeting areas, etc. In one area he plans to make the walls giant whiteboards, and comments that students do this already with paper-they then take pictures of their work and upload them.

Library Spin the Bottle

In their Computers in Libraries co-session, Michael Stephens and Michael Casey had slide shots of librarians playing “library spin the bottle”–not a kissing contest, but a brainstorming exercise. Spin the bottle, share an idea!

You Wish You Were Amazon

Cindi Trainor’s talk at Computers in Libraries (part of a two-session, four-speaker series I emceed) compared four popular websites (Amazon, Pandora, Flickr, and Wikipedia) with library software, using a scale she had developed that measured a number of quality variables. The top score was a possible 32 points. Here’s how four products stacked up:

• Encore: 10
• Libraryfind: 12
• Scriblio: 14
• WorldCat Local: 16

Cindi will have more data up later this month, after she finishes a round of speaking engagements.

Other speakers included Kate Sheehan, now of Darien Library, who demoed LibraryThing for Libraries and showed how at some sites OPAC users could now add reviews into LibraryThing; Roy Tennant, who did a walk-through of open source ILS software such as VuFind, Blacklight, and LibraryFind; and John Blyberg, who got all mystical and theoretical in a great way about data architecture.

From Tool to Benefit

Among the many good hallway conversations and gabfests I had, in one we talked about the recent “social software” classes, such as the popular model 23 Things, and how these classes (however useful they are) miss an opportunity to educate librarians about the benefits of social software. Maybe that’s something we could address here at CCLA-perhaps hosting a regional unconference on how to tie in social software with your MVV?

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Some post-Computers-in-Libraries reactions are floating in about SWIFT, the conference software purchased by ITI. (Note: before I get into this, I want to underscore what a fabulous time I had in my drive-by attendance — trip report forthcoming, I promise! — and I bow and offer my humble thanks to Cindi, Roy, John, and Kate for putting on “a really good shew.”)

Jason Griffey summed up my conclusions almost to the letter. See, there was this meeting with the Otter Group. I was only at the meeting with the Otter Group for twenty minutes, since I had to catch a flight, but it seemed o.k., as far as meetings go.

I’d add that at the end of a long day at a conference, trooping into a classroom setting with no food or beverages didn’t improve anyone’s opinions of the software, but then, it really takes more than that. If DRA came back from the grave with shrimp and steak, would we love them? I hope not.

Then again, what was the point of that session? If you have to explain what your tool is really supposed to do, then your software is broken. Stop talking and stop making excuses. If you are the developer, go fix it, and if you are the customer, check your deliverables and ask yourself if you need to choose another product — or if you need the product to begin with.

I’ve been at IA Summit 2008 since Friday, and here’s the difference. The Crowdvine software actually works (and I could see how it worked BEFORE I signed in). It allows me to connect with other attendees, view sessions, and follow the zeitgeist. I didn’t have to sign a crappy term of service. It wasn’t broken the first time I logged in. The interface is pleasingly pulled together, the fonts are not squinchy-tiny, and yes, rumors to the contrary, it “interfaces” with Facebook–and with RSS, Flickr, and other social software.

Deep down, I don’t care about Crowdvine, but I care a lot about how well I can function as a conference attendee, and from that standpoint, it works. Also, Crowdvine isn’t perfect, but I suspect if I had to give this product grief, ASIST would take it in stride — because they too aren’t invested in Crowdvine. They’re invested in making IA Summit a success.

Not only that, but the wifi access at IA Summit has been fabulous. They don’t have the electricity thing down — people huddle around outlets, and the small power strip I tote with me (an idea from Cindi Trainor) has been a smash hit — but wifi has been consistently fast and smooth. ASIST realizes that a conference hosted by an organization with “Technology” in the title needs to deliver the T.

I’ve stoutly insisted that ITI puts on good conferences. But I’m going to qualify that now, and I have the credentials to do this. ITI puts on really good conferences… for LibraryLand. Grading on that curve, they’re an easy B+. Compared to conferences that serve technology communities outside of our profession, ITI conferences are a D, and that’s a kindness grade.

That doesn’t mean I won’t attend ITI conferences; the content is often worth it. But I feel so bad when LibraryLand makes do with crappy technology. It’s like we’re living out our own worst stereotypes.

Now someone might bring up how broke we are as librarians. Fair enough. But we’re talking here about the difference between one conference software and another, and the difference between burpy or nonworking wifi and wifi that is “just there” when I open my laptop. We don’t want cheap stuff that doesn’t work. I am better off “off the grid” or using a simple wiki than I am trying to cope with broken tools.

Which brings me back to my original suggestion. Given limited resources, I suggest ITI focus on providing incredibly good wifi and encouraging us to live blog conferences with the slides posted to slideshare.net or other high-traffic sites.

If ITI can’t afford truly functional conference software that meets the needs of the people who would actually use it, then you know what? Don’t trouble with it. A factoid from today is that when people like a product, they tell three people, and when they don’t like a product, they tell seventeen people. I would update that to “seventeen bloggers.” Why not focus on the happy 3? We’ll all be better off for it.

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“At other conferences I’ve attended, I’ve had many moments–including during actual presentations–when all I’ve wanted was to get online to check my email and feeds. Not today.”– Joshua Neff, from The Goblin in the Library, reporting on his experiences at Library Camp Kansas

I know there was one a year ago in Niceville, and it sounds as if that was a splendid start. (How could anything go wrong in Niceville?) But I could also see a conference that’s slightly looser in its format: fewer speakers, or at least less pre-planned SDL (that is, “sit down and listen”), with more breakout sessions selected earlier in the day and even prior to the conference.

I see a lot of topics at these unconferences, from customer service, gaming, and web 2.0 to improving the circulation experience. I would like to see at least one very geeky track — like “trickle-up standards,” “How to UnFUBAR FRBR,” “open data knowledgebases,” or “Metasearch that doesn’t suck” — or even a strategic session, such as “How to sell open source to your boss” — but really, if someone can just get me hands-on with a Wii I would consider it an event worth attending.

Of course, maybe other local folks are thinking along the same lines. (If you think I’m looking at you, you’re right.) Yes, it’s a ghastly budget year. But that makes it a superb year for regional unconferences — the ultimate stone soup of event-planning.

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Mild post updates:

First, if you are attending Midwinter and want to see the LITA Trendsters in action, it’s Sunday, January 13, 2008, 8-10 a.m., LOEWS Congress B. The session will be recorded, but we’re so much more fun f2f.

Second, under interoperability/open data I’d add NISO’s ballot item to establish a working group on serial knowledge bases. Kudos also to NISO for being so open about its documents and processes.

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I had to miss LITA’s Top Tech Trends panel at Annual 2007, so it has been a full year since I have really engaged those rusty parts in my brain. And what a year it has been!

Hardware is becoming smaller, larger, and wider. TVs, laptops, and iPhones are now designed around 16 x 9 — a display shift gently pushing its way through our culture. Meanwhile, the cell phone is that “ubicomp” (ubiquitous computing) device talked about twenty years ago, while HDTVs keep getting bigger and cheaper; the 32″ we bought last year looks positively petite. (Thanks to Richard Madaus, the Boss of Bosses at My PLace Of Work, for pointing out the 16×9 phenom.)

The path to interoperability

For the I-Heart-Standards crowd, we had several interesting pops that point to a possible trend. It only took two years for SUSHI to debut, which is like a nanosecond in the standards community. Also, the NCIP discussions may or may not lead to fruition, but I like how they are trying to build in flexibility.

A very smart co-worker has been observing for a while that LibraryLand needs an “ISWN” — an ISBN that colocates items at the work level. Apparently great minds think in parallel: by mid-2008 several large publishers are planning to implement ISTC — the International Standard Text Code — which is an ISBN-like number that collocates items at the expression level.

This NISO-approved standard does what xISBN attempts to do but much more cleanly: as it says on Laura Dawson’s wiki, ISTC “identifies the intellectual property that could be manifested in any number of ISBNs. For example, the book ‘Moby Dick, Or the Whale’ would be identified with an ISTC; the Bantam edition, the Barnes & Noble edition, the Signet edition, the Norton Critical edition would each be assigned a different ISBN.”

Not only that, but as Dawson explains, the ISTC goes even farther: “ISTCs are not limited to books. They can be assigned to poems, articles, essays, short stories – any written work. So an ISTC can identify the poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath, and another ISTC can identify the collection ‘Ariel’ in which it appears. A third ISTC can identify the unedited ‘Ariel’ collection that includes poems the original publication did not.”

This has so many possibly wonderful implications my head is exploding — the smallest of which is that finally, I could add single essays and short stories to LibraryThing. In any event, it’s interesting that such a key standard has bubbled up so quietly and yet in parallel with the ideas brewing in the brains of other smart people.

Open the door, see all the data

Design concepts such as open source and service-oriented architecture continue to mature, and these ideas percolate in new and interesting ways, such as:

• Evergreen’s success in Georgia and continued growth
• Continued success for Koha
• WoGroFuBiCo’s recommendation to put authorities on the Web

In winning its first public-access mandate, SPARC made AAP throw a clot, and I admit enjoying the spectacle. Who will win in the short run may not matter as much as who wins in the long run — and the the open-access crowd (largely) seems to grasp that right now it’s about hearts and minds. I warn the open access crowd to walk lightly in this area and be respectful of disciplines where mandating open access would be counterproductive. “‘Shoot if you must this old gray head, but I get paid for my work,’ she said.”

To open source and access you can add, “open data.” Profession-wide, we’re asking the right questions — are we best served by a model where our de facto network catalog data is proprietary? — and the conversations about open data knowledge bases are also heartening. Even more interesting is that discussions that would have been pooh-poohed a decade ago now have serious traction.

Some LibraryLand types actually understand the phrase “service oriented architecture.” For those who don’t, Eric Schnell spelled it out for us in a fabulous five-part series. Go Er-ic! Go Er-ic!

One interesting phenom, first observed with Endeca’s penetration of the library market, is that librarians appear more open to non-library software. Two non-library software products, Jive and LivePerson, have passed the selection process for large virtual reference networks, and AskOntario will debut its LivePerson-based VR service on January 15. Jive is based on Jabber, an open source product, demonstrating that all roads lead to London.

Overall librarians appear somewhat savvier about software selection. Maybe it’s just who I speak with, but increasingly I engage with colleagues who are familiar with terms such as as “deliverable,” “critical path,” “stage-gate,” and “project management.” Awareness of user needs is also on the rise.

Blogging is mainstream. People understand the implications of maintaining a blog, and the field is shifting to a focus on either the well-written niche blog with something new to say and specific audiences to serve, or the group blog. On LITAblog, Eric Lease Morgan talked about the “abandoned” blogs, but I’d focus on the blogs that have become very big.

The LibraryThing for Libraries service points to a growing awareness that population density is key for social networking, that simply adding a tagging function to OPACs is not adequate, and that libraries are small and the Web is large, which is a strategically healthy point of view. This ties into experiments such as WorldCat Local, which is designed around luring library users from the wild and placing library services squarely in the user’s web workflow.

Ships That Sailed By

I noted in July that not one but two libraries in Arizona had implemented BISAC identifiers (the subjects established by the Book Industry Standards Group), one for their physical organization and the other for their OPAC’s facets. Some folks really got their shorts in a bunch over this, and the PUBLIB discussion list appears to harbor quite a few Dewey fundamentalists (leading to my other conclusion, which is that the old-style massive discussion list may be on the way out).

One boat we have pretty much missed as a profession is mobile device compatibility. By the time most of us catch up with it, it won’t be needed any more. Can’t win ‘em all.

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I’ve been watching for about 18 hours, and I think my email is fixed. Who messed it up? I believe I did, unwittingly, in the middle of resolving another problem, by unknowingly pressing a button that deleted my MX settings and restored Dreamhost as my email provider. Dreamhost Support tried to suggest this was the problem but (not too surprisingly) I didn’t receive the message. I found their support message in their reporting system when I logged in to report another small problem unrelated to email.

 The interesting part about a problem like this is that the email just vanishes. It doesn’t bounce, it doesn’t arrive, it’s not sitting in a spam filter. Email becomes unmail.  

 All those correspondences, neither here nor there; trees falling in a forest, a trumpet player in the attic, the disappeared.

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For the last three weeks I’ve been the perfect candidate for a high-quality ebook reader, such as the Kindle that Amazon debuted today.

As I crisscrossed the country — Tallahassee/NorCal/Tallahassee/Denver/Chicago/Tallahassee/Atlanta/Panama-City — I lived in the rarefied world of the highly-connected business traveler, my small body bristling with smartphones, Bluetooth headsets, teensy high-powered wifi-enabled laptops, iPods, cellular PC cards, and several other devices, most of which require long black proprietary cords.

And I also lugged good old dead-tree reading. So much so that I checked my carry-on bag in order to carry on my hefty old-lady bag that holds all necessary hardware (as well as wallet, keys, license, cough drops, and empty pretzel bags), plus a well-stitched reinforced tote bag (thank you, OCLC!) bulging with several books, a pile of magazines and journals, printouts of stuff from work, and the day’s newspapers.

I always tuck a couple more books in my suitcase, because there is absolutely nothing worse than facing a long plane ride without reading material. I once stood up on a Southwest flight and yelled, “Does anyone have something to read? Please?” At which point two frightened guys immediately handed me their Wall Street Journals.

So the Kindle might seem to make sense for me. It’s got that all-elusive screen quality — and when you enter the Trifocal Years, trust me, it’s all about the screen quality. Thanks to Amazon’s decision to use cell phone technology (versus wifi), you can download books in a minute just about anywhere you are in the U.S. You have access to over 80,000 books, including 100 of the 112 best-sellers — a better batting average than most airport bookstalls. You can subscribe to newspapers cheaper than you can get them in paper; you can read blogs; you can even load your own documents on the reader. You can make notes! You can annotate! And it’s only 10.3 ounces — half the weight of a small box of powdered sugar!

Let’s shrug off the $399 price tag — I’d save enough on Times subscriptions to pay for the Kindle in a year — and note that at $9.99, best-sellers would suddenly be accessible to me.

So, nu, I hear you ask? Is it not good for the readers?

Well, not quite.

First, as Jason Griffey points out on Pattern Recognition, the Kindle reinforces the idea of one owner per book, period. Fair use? We don’t need no steenkin’ fair use. If the Kindle’s DRM model becomes standard, you can kiss libraries goodbye.

Second, it’s a proprietary format. So when Kindle loses its spark and is replaced by the Apple iReader (yes, I made that up), your Kindle books are lost. Sometimes I misplace my books, and once in a while I lose one; but I don’t go to sleep at night worrying that in ten years I won’t be able to access what I can see on my own shelves.

Third, Amazon picks the blogs you read. Yes. They do. Several hundred of them. The world of blogging becomes commodified and stilted and squinched down to the same airport-mall collection. And — sit down — you have to pay for them (”Get blogs wirelessly delivered to your Kindle for as little as $.99 per month”). Yes — you heard correctly — pay for blogs. Anil Dash sounds a twee hesitant when he says, “I don’t think they should be charging for blogs that are distributed to Kindle users.” Let me be man enough for both of us: that blows chunks. Amazon. Stop. Now. Insane.

Fourth, unless you transfer documents via cable, you are charged every time you transfer a personal document to your Kindle. Yes, Kindle burns your own money to move documents from one device you own to another! It’s just a wee micropayment — ten cents per document — but like felling fair use with a death blow, that strikes me as a very bad precedent (though a pretty slick trick; I’m trying to think of a few businesses I could “repurpose” along those lines — perhaps that plate-to-mouth thing that happens in a restaurant? Call it a “prandial usage” fee, perhaps?).

The most enthusiastic reviews on the Amazon product page come from testers who got free access to the Kindle and authors who were caught on tape rhapsodizing about the glorious new flying machine. (Nabokov is dead, or he would no doubt point out that his own works aren’t in there.) Which reminds me of the last three weeks: fun, interesting, mind-expanding — but also, in its way, terribly cloistered, a world circumscribed by other highly-privileged people laden with technology and advanced reading. For three weeks, it didn’t cause too much damage; but if I lived in that strata, me and my old-lady bag and a Kindle, eventually I would see the world as a place defined by Starbucks lattes, carefully-selected hotel mood music, all the other people who think a lot like me, and that thin slice of the reading world afforded by Jeff Bezos and Co.

I believe we are moving to a networked future. I just hope this isn’t it.

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Note: as a reminder, my email to bluehighways.com and freerangelibrarian.com is still very screwed up. I have had any number of people tell me they sent me email; I’ve participated in small threads where other people see responses that never arrive. I’ve sent myself email from other accounts that get there. And of course, I keep having conversations with people (through means other than email) that invariably begin, “I sent you a message…” (No, it’s not in junk mail, and it doesn’t bounce.)

The ongoing problems I’m having with with my email — I’ve now begged Fastmail to undo subdomain mapping and as soon as I’m not on the road I’m going to find a new email provider — remind me of one of the silliest arguments for open source: that people want to be close to their software.

Understand, there are many good arguments for open source, and there is obvious value to the “many eyes” approach to software development.  (No, Fastmail is not open source. That’s not the point.) But as an end-user, if I have to get close to my software to make it work well, something’s very wrong. Yes, there are forums for Fastmail and I could “engage.”  But I don’t want to “engage” in this issue any more than I want to figure out why the handle fell off our six-year-old refrigerator.  I’m busy; I’ve got other things to do. I’ve “engaged” for a month and that has been more than anyone should have to get involved with making a tool work. I just want functioning email.

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Email you send me to my personal addresses ([email protected] and [email protected] ) may be going into the bitbucket. So if I don’t respond, don’t assume I didn’t see it. Post here to the blog or IM me at either of those addresses or freerangelib, or email me at work.

I’ve recently had tussles back and forth with Fastmail, my email provider. The latest is too complicated to go into but involves subdomain mapping which was set up when I established Mailman lists for a couple of purposes and then found I couldn’t post to them from any of my addresses hosted by Fastmail. Back and forth for five days… gruesome.

(There’s also one small list I’m on that blocks me entirely, due to identifying Fastmail as a spam provider. Un-fun, though when that was my only problem, I lived with it.)

I’m now seeing only a fraction of list traffic, and for my personal mail, I have that peculiar feeling that people are responding to email or sending me new messages, and I’m not seeing what they sent  me. I’ve repeatedly sent myself email from work and watched it simply vanish into the ether. Doesn’t bounce, doesn’t show up, doesn’t go into the junk mail folder — just never arrives. Sandy sent me something this morning… never appeared… I asked her to resend it… same thing. Didn’t bounce. Not in junk mail. Just vanished.

Dreamhost works fine for hosting, but their email sucks. I’ve been very happy with Fastmail, but it may be time to say goodbye.  If you know of a good email provider — intelligent mapping, strong spam support, reasonably priced, does IMAP well, has a good webmail client, supports PDAs and whatnot — I’d be grateful for a referral.

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Thing is, sometimes I think we don’t know what business we’re in.

A couple weeks ago, while I was in the cornfields discussing library software, the National Book Critics Circle had a panel discussion in New York City about the fate of small print-based literary journals. This grew out of writer Kevin Prufer’s plaint that his library had dropped subscriptions to several such journals, followed by my guest post to Critical Mass discussing the fate of these journals and the disservice that is done to the international canon when librarians drop subscriptions to literary journals with the justification that they are “online.”

It’s seventh-grade English all over again to observe that form is content, but apparently it’s a point worth repeating.

As I have noted before, full-text databases are marvelous, even indispensable research tools, but they are not an acceptable substitute for print literary journals. Online databases generally suck in some but never everything in a journal, and they extrude its content in half-right, disembodied, grossly fleckerized electronic format, ignoring the journal’s integrity of place (each journal issue has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and everything in that issue is there for a reason) and time (an issue is an ensemble performance, with a cast of poems, essays, short stories, reviews, and artwork that appear all at once; the journal’s serial nature is part of its whatness).

For a print literary journal, that integrity is key. I’m intimate with that integrity. I was a serial junky from childhood, when nothing made me happier than a fresh stack of Highlights and Consumer Reports, and for years I have read more serials than monographs—um, in Muggle-speak, I read more journals than books.

So I know that an issue of a journal is its own special experience, from its cover to its fonts to the arrangement of its pieces, with the editors’ loving attention to pull quotes, widow lines, and the like. The audiences for these journals—writers, readers, readers who want to be writers, professors, lecturers, and all fellow travelers—seek and even crave the formalism of the genre, perhaps because in a world that at times feels disembodied and fleckerized even when we are fully in it, the corporeal trueness of a journal is comforting.

A librarian first and foremost understands appropriate formats. Print is print, and digital is digital. To take a print object and make a digital copy is to create a surrogate object of the original, not to duplicate it with fidelity. As noted in my post on Critical Mass, you can’t replace the statue on the campus green with a microfiche of the statue; it’s not the same.

The surrogate copy may have its purposes; in some cases it may wildly improve on the original (as with some scientific content which is better off searchable); it may even be interesting in its own unexpected ways. But the original has meaning and purpose in itself, just as a slice of cake has meaning and purpose, and cannot be replaced by a picture of a cake and a food pill.

Writers (and some librarians) also know that journals also have a tremendous amount of incidental information. I have spent many hours researching advertising, photos, and notes in journals in order to recreate a time and a place, as I did for my essay “David, Just as he was” published this summer in White Crane. That incidental information is both part of the pleasure experience of a small literary journal and part of the stuff making up its whatness.

By small literary journal I mean both readership–Pleiades and The Missouri Review and Tin House are wonderful, but you won’t find them on most newsstands or for that matter in most public libraries—and, even more so, price. When Prufer asked why his library had stopped subscribing to journals, a librarian told him that funding was the issue. I’ve danced around the money issue before, but since librarians use that as a reason to stop subscriptions to literary journals, I need to tackle this head-on.

A comment to the blog post summarizing the NBCC panel discussion noted that science journal subscriptions can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and some academic libraries buy buckets and buckets and buckets of them. A Library Journal article from earlier this year demonstrates that average subscription costs for scientific journals are ten times the average cost of journals in the humanities (approximately $1000 to $100)—and that’s taking a very broad swath through the humanities, where some of the peer-reviewed titles extract more than their fair share of the budget, and not focusing on the literary journals.

Most literary journals run about $20 - $50 a pop per year–enough to give casual readers pause, as Stephen King recently observed, but far less than the titles that librarians are talking about when they say serials are expensive. A fairly comprehensive subscription to the Canon could be had for a couple thou a year, which is chump change against the scale of most academic serial budgets. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’m confident you could go hog wild and subscribe to everything on the newpages.com list of print literary mags and still spend less than you would for one of the top ten high-priced journals at Williams College.

God forbid I should ever suggest a university should deprive its scholars of access to a $25,000 journal on brain research, but it is worth observing that $25,000 could buy 568 subscriptions to ZZYZVA, or 694 subscriptions to The Sun, or 836 subscriptions to Tin House, or 1,041 subscriptions to The Missouri Review, or 1,136 subscriptions to White Crane. Plus—though admittedly I’ve never seen Brain Research—I’m guessing the artwork in the lit mags is prettier, and the poetry has to be for-sure better.

The panel in New York offered some excellent advocacy tips, and I would only add “follow the money.” Librarian Susan Thomas of Susan Thomas of the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY waved the flag of common sense with her suggestions that writing and humanities departments “[l]obby the librarians. And lobby the provost, the dean of humanities, the vice president, the president. Ask them to keep literary magazines and small press publications on the shelves.” But in that “lobbying” all of us should note that the average cost of one chemistry journal— $3,429—would fund approximately 100 subscriptions to literary journals.

It bothers me that we even need to make these points — and I worry that it’s just conference-panel-talk, where we all tsk, tsk and move along, move along.

Sometimes I think we librarians are so busy doing scholarly communication and gaming and blogging and getting NCIP to connect the hip-bone to the thigh-bone and on Dasher and Prancer and Donner and Vixen that we forget some basic stuff. Like how every issue of a journal has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and how the ink and paper smell when you crack the spine of a new issue and bury your face in the middle, and what it feels like to let your purse drop on the floor and slide into a chair and read Sascha Feinstein’s poem, “Shook Up,” and have that double shock of a good poem seeping into your mind as your eyes are feasting on the font, the order of words, and the faint orange margin lines on page 66 of the Spring, 2007 Missouri Review, so that even a lunk such as I, with my tragically unmusical ear, can almost grasp the beauty of this experience.

We think that if we can get a vendor to take parts of a thing, and jam those parts into a new format, and then stuff the sausage in a database, and link to it through our website, then our work on that boring subject is done, and we can go back to scheming about how we can get to the next fancy-schmancy conference to hear the same talks by the same pundits we heard at the last fancy-schmancy conference.

Because we have forgotten, if we ever knew, what it meant to slog across the lawn at the end of a long day and pull open the mailbox and have the sun come out shining all over our brain because there it was, the latest issue, with pages rough or smooth, deckled or razor-sharp, fragrant with fresh ink, just waiting for our touch.

And we have forgotten, if we ever knew, about the outlaw sensation of reading the best parts of a journal first, fanning the pages back and forth to shop, like running a finger across the back of a layer cake to get a heap of icing to lick while no one is looking. (Not that I have ever done either dastardly deed.)

Or perhaps we’re a little embarrassed by the topic, as if to advocate on behalf of something as humble as a $40 print literary journal read by that small rag-tag band wandering in from the English department meant we were low-tech and square. As if advocating for the statue on the green meant we were of a kind with the librarians who have mulishly resisted all good uses of technology, and our peers could now condescend to us for not “getting it.”

I do not exactly live on the Web, but I spend an unholy amount of time visiting its condos. So as a reader, a writer, and a true-blue digital librarian, I know I’m correct on this issue: ignore me or condescend to me, but when someone says a database is “just as good” as a print literary journal, I immediately see that emperor sashaying buck-naked down the street, his dangly bits swaying in the breeze.

Frankly, it irritates me, like a poppyseed caught in my bridgework, that I can’t get enough interest on this issue in LibraryLand.

Oh yeah, so true (yawn), too bad about that (yawn), tough about those journals, but I’m…

a) Running off to a conference on cataloging in Second Life

b) Working on my Farsi translation of Dance, Dance, Revolution

c) Drafting the NISO standard for Library 3.0

Then there was that sparkly young thing who said none of this mattered because We’re All Going Electronic Anyway, which is what I suspect everyone is thinking. Well, that takes care of that, then!

Yes, of course, we’re moving to a networked future. I read online literary journals (which, of course, are ignored by most commercial aggregators, since they aren’t a source of revenue). Hell, I even write for them. By gum, I’ve been known to blog.

But I’ve said it before about another, not-too-distant issue: as librarians, it’s not our job to engage in social engineering, and it is our business to advocate for our users; as that great librarian Marvin Scilken said thousands of times in his long career, the bottom line is service. If a community is best served by print literary journals–at least for now, and to a reader, now is what matters–then it’s our job to go to bat for them. That may mean pausing long enough to learn just what it is we’re delivering, but that’s our job, too.

I’ve been blogging every month at ALA Techsource for two years, and have decided it’s time to move on. Here’s my last post.

It was a good run and I look forward to seeing where it goes (just as I was pleased to see Joe Janes step in as the Internet Librarian, a column I started and wrote for seven years).

I feel a little scared, in a way, because I stopped writing for Techsource in order to give myself time for other writing — both other types of technology writing (feature articles, writing outside of LibraryLand) and literary writing. Techsource was fun, but I need to push myself — and to be pushed by other forces.

One of those forces may be about exploring other genres. I had always thought I didn’t have to write fiction because when I come up with ideas for stories they are always bits of scene, sometimes just brief gestures, and I assumed real fiction writers were driven by Plots and Narrative and Aristotelian Unity.

For a couple of months I’ve been haunted by two images: a woman sitting down in a pew after making an announcement at church, and a minister slipping on a mess of beans spilled on the floor. But I just assumed it would pass.

But two nights ago I finally picked up Stephen King’s On Writing, and he blew that excuse to bits. He poses”what ifs” and scenes and images; writing for him (as it is for many of us) seems like a game, a marvelous puzzle, a personal challenge.

On to the next personal challenge. On to the game.

dweinberger posts this today: “stopped by a fruit-sniffing beagle at US customs Confiscated my apple, a well-known gateway fruit.”

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I baked it just for you. As the title suggests (”Wikipedia’s Awkward Adolescence”), I tried to hit the middle ground; like Google and the Big O, Wikipedia isn’t going away any time soon, so I’d rather be constructive than dismissive, especially for a tool I use every day.
Wikipedia is a hugely fascinating culture; to my mind — though this wasn’t the article in which to spell this out — the editorial culture reminds me most of church groups that have developed extralegal rules. Squint just enough, and it’s just St. Margaret’s Guild all over again. (All religious organizations have these guilds — usually women’s groups or men’s groups, though sometimes organized around other themes. Some religious leaders speculate it’s just one organization busing the same two dozen people between churches, temples, and mosques.)

This isn’t criticism; it’s an observation about human behavior. We seek structure. Everything is not miscellaneous. We want to alphabetize, we want pecking orders, and every organization coalesces into leaders, followers, and (where the writers sit) kibitzers.

But for fifteen years I’ve been under strict orders not to write about church life (something that makes me wonder if it’s time to try fiction), so we’ll let it stand right there. If I wrote a book about Wikipedia, though, I would insist on having a chapter called St. Margaret’s Guild, editor permitting.

(Oh, and there’s a glitch in the article I’m trying to get fixed; Clay Shirky suddenly pops up sans attribution.)

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Note: over on Techsource, I wrote about open source OPACs this month — worth reading if you’re thinking about OPACs and such. Also see Marshall Breeding’s Library Technology Reports on Next-Generation Library Catalogs.

A week from Friday, I’m giving a talk in Illinois called “The OPAC sucks” at at the Symposium on the Future of Integrated Library Systems (yes, I’m getting a little tired of the “suck” meme, but it’s my fault for starting it).

I’d like your input.

Last year I discussed some of problems with OPACs in a three-part series for Techsource, in which I described problems with ranking, spell-check, display, and other issues. (Here’s a follow-up post that links back to Techsource while correcting one point. In fact, if I could rewrite the original posts I would say “ranking” rather than “relevance ranking.”)

Has your OPAC unsucked, even a little, or are you planning to unsuck it? Are you more aware of your OPAC’s limitations — perhaps through usability studies, user focus groups, or search log analysis? Are you thinking about substituting your OPAC with something else? Are you putting your focus (and your resources and money) elsewhere? Are you thinking about open source solutions?

What about some of the bigger issues, such as data formats, invisibility on the open Web, etc. — do you see solutions for these problems? What about the idea of getting out of our “institutional silos” and becoming part of one massive database — a la OCLC’s WorldCat Local? What are the threats and opportunities?

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Note: the URL for this survey has changed.

I’m on an ALA LITA Committee that is trying to design better technology conferences. We want to know what you liked, did not like, or would like to see at a technology conference in the future.

If you have ever attended a technology preconference, session, conference, or you simply have an opinion, please take this survey. Feel free to spread the survey far and wide. We would like to have feedback from as many people as possible so that we can create something that will serve you better.

(Thanks to Wandering Eyre for the wording. Yes, we’re both on the committee, though she’s being too modest — she’s been one of the driving forces, and I’m just one of her willing minions!)

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Quite often, I really love librarians, and this is one of those times. The Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan Library has ported the intriguing Ithaka Report into CommentPress to make it easier to engage with the text.

In the words of the authors, “this paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs.” We welcome you to engage in that argument in this space.

(Also q.v. my slant on the Ithaka report — and my take on the impact of library acquisition decisions on the fate of small-press literary journals, which was on my mind when I wrote that post.)

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Over at ACRLBlog, Steven Bell fressed that “library resources” got the big ignore on a list of “top 100 e-learning tools.”

My first bit of advice (which I also shared on the blog) is that when we see this happening we should skip the hand-wringing and take action. Why not pull together a dozen librarian e-learning types and bullet-vote for one tool, such as SFX? There’s room for more input, and the more folks they hear from the more likely they are to include their voices. Note also that many of the “experts” don’t really work hands-on with e-learning. It’s a very slack rope, and they seem open to input.

But it’s also hard to market something as amorphous as “library resources.” After all, nobody listed “personal computing resources” or “Web resources” — the contributors listed specific tools, such as PowerPoint and FireFox. So rather than say “We librarians are bad at marketing” (true enough as that is), stand back and observe that as a profession we don’t have that many tools we can specifically, clearly market to people.

When it comes to “library resources” (a word that rolls around my mouth as uncomfortably as a half-off cherry), exactly what can we peddle? WorldCat — an incomplete, socially backward, stiff-looking sort-of-universal catalog? SFX, which is really one company’s flavor of link resolvers? (If we called them text-retrievers, maybe they’d be easier to sell..?) “Catalogs?” Don’t think so. Not databases, either; that forces us to leap from the over-broad (databases) to the overly-specific and library-conditional (ProQuest Literature Online) … nope, nope, nope.

People want to solve for X, whether it gives them FireFox, a Mini-Cooper, or a Krispy Kreme donut. What is our X?

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