This was an excellent program that had a solid mix of speakers who could address the various aspects of Shibboleth, from the technical underpinnings to considerations for implementing it on a broad scale to perspectives of librarians on the types of changes to user behavior that Shib (for short) might require. The program allowed me to get a solid grounding in Shib without getting too technical or too theoretical. The audience was a good size and a healthy mix of techie and non-techie folks (in fact, at one point one of the presenters asked how many people in the audience were librarians from outside the systems department, and over half raised their hands).

Arrived a bit late because of the same old story, buses and lunch and tigers and bears, oh my…

When I arrived Keith Hazelton of Internet 2 was rolling along in his presentation of the fundamentals of Shibboleth and the ten main verbs to remember when thinking about how Shibboleth works. Hazelton’s main point was to bring home the fact that Shib is the “deliver” verb in the long chain of events involved in authentication (AuthN) and authorization (AuthZ). It is an open-source tool for facilitating identity management between institutions (universities and colleges) and service providers (JSTOR, EBSCO, etc.).

Hazelton discussed the problem of fragmentation, which occurs when multiple IT systems within the same institution have the ability to create a “person record”. At some point, all of those different person records have to be joined together to make one coherent person, a unified source of identity information.

Shibboleth is simply a means of moving identity information from an institution to a service provider. It is up to the institution to handle creating the person and defining who he or she is through attributes (name, status, dob, etc.) and up to the service provider to open the gate and allow the person is. Shib simply carries (delivers) identity information between the two.

Hazelton explained how this works by using the example of the three musketeers. The questions of identity are, What groups do I belong to? What roles am I in? One might answer, I am Porthos, a member of the musketeers. This would be my affiliation. On the other side of the equation, you have the privileges that are granted to persons of a given affiliation. Do you get to bear arms? Do you get to go into the palace? The privileges are easy to follow when there are only one or four people who belong to a single group, but the more people and groups you have, the more complicated it is to manage their privileges. The concept of affiliation is a nexus point to lump people into affiliations and lump privileges to that affiliation. Grouper is the name for what puts the people into groups, Signet is the name for the piece of Shib that says what groups get to do what things (who gets to go into the palace). Hazelton’s metaphor was interesting and, unlike some metaphors used at sessions that shall remain unnamed, seemed to carry through well down into the details.

Hazelton followed this metaphorical discussion with the concepts of how systems talk to each other to authorize a user’s access to a given resource. The “systems of record” (for example, HR and registrar databases) “provision” out information on a person (IAM information). This info needs to be delivered to services, which then make the AuthZ decision. Shib is the middle portion of this equation, delivering IAM information to services that are capable of making an authorization decision.

Hazelton concluded with the fact that not many people rushing to adopt Shib, in large part because it’s open source. In order to succeed, it needs partners. The move to adopt Shib needs to come from the ground up.

Hazelton also quickly flashed the ten verbs to know with Shib, upon which he based his presentation, so I’ll quickly capture them here:

Reflect
Join
Credential
Manage affil/groups
Manage privileges
Provision
Deliver authenticate
Authorize log

Next up was Chris Shillum talking about Shibboleth and ScienceDirect (Elsevier)

Shillum’s focus was on what Elsevier has been doing to integrate Shib into ScienceDirect. He showed screen shots taken earlier in the week from a live implementation showing how Shib looks to a typical user searching databases.

The first screen shot showed Science Direct. Clicking on a link took us to a WAYF service (where are you from), a simple application that provides list of all institutions in the “federation,” (a federation is the group of institutions sharing the Shib implementation). The WAYF knows where to send the user when they identify their home inst. The user selects their institution (identity provider) and then gets sent to their university’s login page (University of South. Cal. in the example). Then upon successful login, the user was sent back to Science Direct with the same rights and privileges as if they had been authorized by IP, etc.

Shillum reported that Elsevier sees this Shib as a win-win for both sides, especially since there is less administrative overhead involved. Shillum said the previous presentation gave all the concepts and ideas on the backend, demonstrating how Shib is making the delivery happen, but this example shows how simple and straight-forward this really is, how seamless.

Shillum cited the following benefits of Shib:
1) Shib could replace IP filtering. Removes administrative burden of maintaining IPs.
2) Shib decouples customer’s network architecture from authentication, allowing departmental purchases, which is very hard with IPs if a department doesn’t have its own range of IPs.
3) Also allows personalized access to remote resources using local credentials, instead of having to remember personalization passwords and logins for many different vendors, so the service system always remembers your customizations without you having to remember a separate password and identity.
4) Shib removes the need for users to remember different usernames and passwords and avoids problems of proxy servers for remote access. Bottom line: Shib helps provide the broadest access to the community.

Shillum then talked about some of the logistics and details of the Shib pilot project that Science Direct did with Dartmouth, Georgetown, NYU, UC San Diego, and Penn State.

He concluded with some of the issues surrounding Shib and vendor implementations. The technology is new, complex and rapidly changing. Federations of institutions are in their very early states. Uptake is key in moving to the next level of adoption and ubiquity. We are at a critical point. To make uptake work, we need to make implementation easier for smaller customers and vendors. Elsevier is committed to making access easier for users and will continue to support Shib.

The next presentation, more brief than the others, was by Chris Zagar, from Useful Utilities/EZproxy.

Zagar pointed out that Shib should eliminate the need for proxy servers sometime in the future, but this isn’t going to happen overnight, that everyone will be shibbolized. There will be a path where some are, and some aren’t. Zagar offered a roadmap for how to make the transition through a handout with the terminology of Shib and how it can work during a transitional period with EZproxy to make “shibbolized” and “non-shibbolized” resources work together in an EZproxy environment.

Zagar pointed out that many people probably have an environment with a variety of links to databases, etc., that point to an EZproxy server. During the transition to a Shib environment, users can use traditional EZproxy login methods that they are familiar with. This would be a transitional mode, providing a link where people can go to the Shibboleth WAYF service. Users would select an identity provider (their home institution), then use their standard netID and password. From the user’s perspective, they then just wind up in the database. To the user, this looks very similar to what they are used to with EZproxy, and they don’t have to see all of the intermediate, behind the scenes steps that go into making it happen.

Next up to the podium was John Paschoud of the London School of Economics Library, who talked about “Building a UK infrastructure for access management using shibboleth”

John brought a good deal of experience with Shib implementation from the library perspective, along with a dry British humor that lightened the mood and brought a little cadence to the afternoon. He opened with the observation that “Britain is just like America, but squashed into a very small space.”

Paschoud had a point in saying this, which was that America and Britain share similarities in the concentration of their academic activity, but the institutions are just very close together in Britain. Paschoud focused on a centralized identity management service that has been developed for British higher ed insitutions called Athens, which allows about 2.5 million users to authenticate into about 250 online resources. It is a national, UK-only system that accomplishes essentially the same thing Shib is meant to. The problem is that it is UK-only and that there is quite a bit of administrative overhead to a centralized authentication service.

The implementation of the Athens service gives the UK certain advantages in looking at Shib, particularly the fact that they have been working for 5 years on how to develop “federation” policies and practices. Federations
are organizations with a common purpose (e.g. education and research) who trust each other and sign up to a set of rules, for example who is authorized to access what resources. They also have an established body (JISC) with some centralized authority over an unruly community.

Paschoud went on to talk about what the timeline for developing a Shib infrastructure, look for institutions willing to adopt Shib, create a service for early adopters, work with publishers to make their products Shib compliant, and make national data services Shib compliant. Essentially, Paschoud was outlining a timeline going out to 2006-2007 for the whole project of “shibbolizing” the UK federations.

The big take away from Paschoud’s presentation is that identity management is happening at a national level (sort of) in the UK, but that it requires a large central database which everyone has to go through. Shib decentralizes the whole operation and puts the identity management and the authorization on the individual institutions, creating less overhead by eliminating the centralized service.

The last speaker was Mike Neuman of Georgetown University, whose presentation was “Shibboleth: Problems and Promise.”

Neuman is in the interesting but unenviable position of reporting both to the University Librarian and the CIO. His presentation was geared towareds the functionality of Shib for those in the library but not in systems.

Georgetown became involved with Shib in the fall of 2001, when it became involved in the Elsevier Shib pilot project with Science Direct.

Neuman wanted to review some of the challenges noted by reference librarians as they considered how things would work with Shib as opposed to how they work now in an IP/EZproxy environment. Among librarians there is generally a feeling that change to the status quo is not a good thing, Paschoud pointed out. But he said that some aspects of the status quo maybe need to be eliminated, and Shib might be a good way to do that.

Challenge 1: library patron groups often differ from the University directory groups. Patron groups often include non-University members, and license categories can include non-university members who may not necessarily be in the authentication directory of netIDs. For example, EBSCO has language that allows “authorized users”—so who exactly is this? Are these people that have legitimate claim to privileges, but aren’t strictly university employees? Hospital staff at Georgetown are not university employees, but they have certain privileges in the library. Shib is a way to deal with this disjoint with the university scheme of groups by allowing each individual user to have a unique identity with attributes that indicate very specifically who they are and what they have access to.

2. Licenses complicate authN and authZ models by throwing in all kinds of exceptions and limitations, such as limits on simultaneous access, restrictions on use if you’re on campus as opposed to off campus, and licenses that limit access to specific libraries or departments. E.g., the Law, Health, and Engineering libraries could conceivably be getting the same journal from different vendors. Or all three libraries could be working with the same vendor, but getting a different package of services for each library.

3. Library gate keeping. For example, sometimes resource passwords are controlled for budgetary reasons, such as resources that are licensed on pay-per-view or pay-per-search basis. At end of semester, based on budget resources, a librarian may decide to not give out the password to a resource and point user to another database. Neuman claimed that retaining gatekeeping control such as this would be complicated in a Shib environment.

Neuman also, raised the problem of delinquent patrons, who can sometimes be denied access privileges. Here there is the need for an attribute to indicate a person is blocked from using a resource or all resources. AND librarians need to have access to place and remove these blocks.

4. initially patrons may feel inconvenienced by Shib on campus if they don’t have to log into resources from on campus because of IP authentication. Dual access procedures (Shib and non-Shib) could confuse patrons.

Neuman continued by saying that it might sound from the challenges like they have been discouraged at Georgetown, but this is not true. They are bery interested in continuing to explore Shib with other vendors as well as with Elsevier. In fact, Georgetown received funding from the Mellon foundation for a proof of concept project exploring Shibboleth and scholarly communication. This is still a conceptual project, but the funding is there and planning is moving forward. The project essentially will explore the ways in which Shib can be used to promote interlinkages among various resources (for example, from a professional society publication to related resources in other databases) that are exposed in different ways to users with different identities and attributes.

The program ended with an interesting head table discussion that involved some friendly debate on several points that Neuman raised in his presentation. Essentially Hazelton wanted to make the point that some of the concerns raised by the reference librarians at Georgetown that seemed to disfavor the implementation of Shib were less about Shib itself and more about the complex identity environments that we have to deal with. Hazelton reitereated that Shib is only, in essence, the delivery boy, and it will deliver whatever it is told to between the home institution and the service provider.

The final take-away was that Shibboleth represents a remarkable opportunity to simplify the tremendous overhead of authentication and authorization in today’s academic resource environment, where many shifting groups of users with complicated identities need to gain access to a bewildering array of licensed resources, all with different terms and conditions. There is a base of support for Shib among both vendors and institutions, but in order for it to succeed as a viable alternative to IP authentication and proxy services, there needs to be a bottom-up groundswell of interest from institutions and vendors alike.

Added lots more pictures to OCLC Bloggers post.

Didn’t blog the LITA awards reception earlier, so I’ll just post a photo from it here:

Apparently wherever there was free food, I was there with the camera

RUSA/MARS User Access to Services Committee

Do You Trust Your IT Staff? Do They Trust you?

Talk about a topic close to my heart! Though somehow, in thinking about it before the conference, in my mind it morphed into “Does Your It Staff Hate You?” In fact, around Wednesday, I had to talk to someone in IT via phone, and I asked him if he hated me. He said no. Do I trust him enough to believe him? /humor

This program was held on the fourth floor of McCormick, which had had a power failure. No elevators or escaltors, few lights, no A/C. I felt like I was in a Gibson novel as I traveled long, seemingly endless, dark service corridors and stairs. Maybe it was Stephenson? Heinlein? When my friend and I finally encountered humans, I said, “Our kind!”

There were four panelists. If you want the names, see Genny’s post. Two were from Chicago Public—their IT director and a public services person. They pretty much love each other. Basically, they feel they are entering a much more comfortable period, where the pace of library technology change is not as overwhelming as it was just a few years ago. Kareem, the IT guy, talked about how IT must service needs, like a utility. He talked about taking out the human element when it doesn’t add value; but when the human element does add value (i.e., reference work), honoring, respecting, and supporting that. <3

The next speaker was an IT director from an academic library in WV. He felt the tension between IT and public services is improving, in part because newer technology is more reliable.

The A/C started working–hurray! I still haven’t gotten over the trek up, though.

The last panelist was from an academic library. She was a techie before she went into public service, which has been useful, as she can translate between the two languages/cultures. She said that the PCs belong to the users–the users are the focus. The relationship with IT has a push me-pull me quality. The tension between security and access; standardization vs. creativity. The planning process needs to be intertwined. Active partnership. However, there does need to be work around IT accepting anecdotal information from librarians. The reference interview as a usability test.

There were good questions and comments. The topic obviously resonated. Librarians still primarily deal with users F2F. It’s not as sexy as digitzation, or chat, or RSS. But IT needs to be reminded to treat public service staff as important customers.

I loved some of the ideas: librarians as translators; user needs as primary focus; bulletin boards for public service staff to discuss technology.

I still feel the “tension”, such a nice word, dealing with IT. My feelings were a bit hurt by Kareem saying that librarians shouldn’t do any troubleshooting or anything on PCs. I have years of experience. I can take apart a CPU, a printer, I have little screwdrivers, tweezers and needle nose pliers; I know what proportional versus fixed means in a variety of settings. These aren’t my primary skills, but still. Now you don’t need or want me involved?

Our staff PCs are so locked down–as much as the public–seems like someone doesn’t trust me. I have come a long way since I threatened an PC/LAN technician with a paring knife if he tried to touch “my” PC (long ago in a distant land; believe me, I had my reasons.) I’ve learned that the best way to deal with IT is to bake them brownies and offer personal interest. I do not hate IT staff–they are among my work friends. But can I tell you about the last IT committee I was on? No, I won’t, but trust me; I do not trust IT. Do you?

Awards and Speakers
The 2005-2006 President-Elect, Camilla Alire, was introduced. She noted marketing and advocacy to be her passions and priorities for the upcoming ACRL year. Awards were presented to libraries and librarians who demonstrate excellence and employ best practices. A humorous video created by Pierce College Library followed and introduced the members of their 2005 Excellence in Academic Libraries Award-winning institution. The Time for a Reality Check: Academic Librarians in a TiVo®-lutionary Age program speakers presented next as a panel.

Beloit College Mindset List
Tom McBride, Keefer and Keefer Prof. of Humanities, Beloit College
Ron Neif, Director of Public Affairs, Beloit College

Tom and Ron complemented each other well as joint-presenters, which is not surprising since the duo has represented the Beloit College Mindset List in various forums since the project’s inception in 1998. Ron clarified that the purpose of the list is not to provide a historical chronology of adolescents’ lives (or to insult students… or to make us feel old), but rather to raise awareness that students entering college today have been influenced by a society different from our own. Generational differences create unique reference points. Tom shared anecdotes of reactions and criticisms to the project, while emphasizing its usefulness. The Mindset List can be an interest-grabbing marketing tool that let’s the public know what institutions of higher education are good at. That accomplishment, Tom asserts, is “clos[ing] the intergenerational caverns that can hinder education in colleges and libraries.”

Some predictions for the Class of 2024?

Libraries are thriving institutions of vital knowledge and information

Thousands of requests to use the list are received each year from organizations like NBC and MTV, clergy who work with youth, U.S. Armed Service recruiters, institutions of higher education and even other countries (e.g. New Zealand).

Here and There Simultaneously
David M. Silver, Assistant Prof., Dept. of Communications, Univ. of Washington and founder of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies

David described himself as a teacher first and foremost, which came across in the thoughtful nature of his presentation and the easy relationship he quickly developed with the audience. As a library advocate (my descriptor of choice), David sees technologies like DVDs, TiVo, mp3s, and cell phones as a part of college students’ cultural reality. Like the facts and figures organized into Mindset Lists, such realities influence the relationships students have with their libraries and vice-versa.

While students may be physically rooted in one spot, their minds are often focused on happenings elsewhere (e.g. communicating with friends across campus via text-message while studying). Students are comfortable living “here and there” simultaneously and academic libraries need to adapt to users in this TiVo®-lutionary age. (TiVo® is a television accessory that automatically finds and records programs you want, as the online ad states, “all while you’re out living life.”)

Although we cannot directly instill curiosity or a desire to know more in students, libraries can work to create a public space that encourages contemplation, provides room for questions and promotes active learning. “We are living in an age of annotation,” David said, where cultural history is constantly being “reconstituted and redistributed.” Libraries can encourage student participation in the growth of cultural memory by acting as, or contributing to, the “information commons” on campus. Such public places offer a crossroads where students check email, study, meet friends, mingle with faculty and perhaps learn something new from a display of art or academic work.

At the University of Washington, for example, the library used public space to display of political cartoons from around the world after 9/11 where individuals could write notes and follow threads of commentary. In addition, libraries offer reading materials that can transport the inquiring minds of adults and children alike to distant lands and new realms of thought ripe for exploration. Libraries can indeed become a “pinnacle of the simultaneous ‘here and there.’”

Additional Notes
David is also co-director of The September Project, a grassroots effort that looks to community organizations like libraries- academic and public alike- to plan engaging awareness events on the weekend of September 11.

In the abundance of information sheets, books, pamphlets and vendor give-aways collected over the course of the conference (FYI, I am now the proud owner of little red object that enables me to open, clean and write on CDs), this session distributed two handouts I feel are note-worthy for their content and simplicity:

1) a 10 page program brochure including the President’s Report to Council- an asset for ACRL members in attendance, and

2) to-the-point evaluation forms (which I saw being returned!)- a great tool to further future program planning.

Overall, an interesting and inspiring program. I walked away with a better understanding of student library users and their expectations based on culture and circumstance. Librarians will do well to ponder the sometimes weighty, but often quite enlightening, realities of generational change and cultural evolution when reflecting on how to provide more effective services.

Overview of digital initiatives @ brown. The CDI was created in Oct. 01; metadata specialist position (Ann’s) created October 2002.

Brown metadata model: Ann’s position includes all metadata, not just descriptive. Using METS to package, chose MODS over DC. Their model enables both shallow and deep discovery. For example: an art image can be searched in native VRA format in Luna, but in central repository as MODS. Everything has a MODS record.

Early projects. Were at first only delaing with library materials – sheet music, etc. Used existing MARC-MODS tools. Still have no metadata creation staff but got interns from Univ. R.I. Library school. 150 hours/sem = 3 credit hours. Many students are on second careers and very focussed on their work. Began using NoteTab Pro, which they had also been using for EAD-creation.

Broadening the base. Word got around campus very quickly that this was going on. Faculty and other groups began coming in with very creative projects, some hybrid of own materials and library materials.

CDI dropped their current work to help faculty. The Scholarly Technology Group (part of IT) were contacted to be sure the CDI was not duplicating their efforts. They weren’t, STG wasn’t doing any metadata work to speak of.

Ho to build MODS records. Some from MARC, some from scratch, some extracted from other dbs (FMPro) to convert to XML.

NoteTab Pro: cheap. Downloaded the EAD “clip library” and modified it. Very flexible. All MODS, all METS records build in NTP. Programmed it to prompt the user through a series of templates. Constantly making changes to this.

VRA & EAD records mapped to MODS transformed with XSLT. VRA records exported from image cataloging system (FMPro-based). Not all elements retained from VRA -> MODS. “subjects in VRA get a little squishy” EAD component-level content captured and converted to MODS on a 1-1 basis.

What’s in the records? Have established a bare minimum, every MODS record validated against stylesheet for minimum and also certain local requirements. Don’t have subject analysis on all records.

Storage and display: records mapped into PHP/MySQL (homegrown). All mapped into relational tables to enable the cross-collection searching. Records retrieved through search are displayed with stylesheets.

Ann had several examples of table displays and a schematic diagram of the system [see her ppt.] She demo’ed searching the Brown repository.

Current status. July ’04 added 1.66 professional position and some additional paraprofessional staff (didn’t catch the number). Still no additional staff for the metadata component. 20+ active projects now. Have started to work with audio and video. Audio hasn’t been a problem but video serving is still being addressed at the university level.

There are now some main Technical Services staff generating MODS.

Future directions: NoteTab works OK for some but some users (particularly outside the library) really want a web interface. The scientific/medical communities at Brown are very interested in adding content but don’t have time for description. Looking at TEI this summer; the STG group have had great success training students to do TEI encoding. Looking at the overall staffing, looking for efficiency opportunities. Digital backlog is now larger than the analog backlog.
Brown digital library site.

DEMO: NoteTab Pro. Showed MODS tools (building MODS through prompts), using NTB to create METS record and package. THIS WAS A VERY COOL DEMO! Can’t really do it justice here in the notes.

Speaker 5 (second speaker from second half): Terry Reese, Oregon State University

Terry is the Digital Production Unit Head @ OSU and was named a 2005 “mover and shaker” by Library Journal. Terry has a software dev. background.

Started by giving some background on metadata interoperability and metadata tools: proliferation of metadata schemes; differences in best practices is also a source of some problems. Cited the Indiana study that showed metadata creation costs of about $3/book for copy cataloging, $27/book original, $20/these .

In some cases, things are being cataloged more than once: things that go into DSpace or ContentDM. Now, they only create one record and derive/repurpose for other uses.

Challenges of interoperability: one-to-many, many-to-one transformations (this is the problem of going from less to greater semantic richness, or vice versa, same problem Moen touched on in his talk). Other problems include different hierarchies and “spare parts” – leftover content that doesn’t fit anywhere. It may be better to discard than to try to make non-fitting data fit?

MARCEdit crosswalking tool uses MARCSML as control schema to facilitate transformations. Due to the nature of its design (network, or star), no more than two tranformations will take place (looks like a wheel).

DEMO of MARCEdit. Transformed an EAD record to MARC. It also has a MARC editor for people who aren’t comfortable editing MODS directly.

Also has an OAI harvester built in to grab OAI records and transform them into MARC. They use it at OSU to grab DSpace records and input into the library catalog.

This was a great Demo and there is a lot more to Terry’s presentation than I’m reflecting in these notes. His PPT will have more detail. It was a very impressive tool and a wonderful way to end this long session; it gave me the sense that non-programmers could get their hands on some tools and actually do some transforming. A great way to become familiar with these various schema. See Terry’s site for links to MARCedit and other goodies.

Description from LITA site: Libraries face challenges in integrating descriptive metadata for electronic resources with traditional cataloging data. This program will address the repurposing of MARC data and metadata interoperability in a broader context. It will then introduce the Library of Congress’ Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) and present specific project applications of MODS. Finally, the program will offer scenarios for coordinating MARC and non-MARC metadata processes in an integrated metadata management design and introduce tools for simplifying interoperability.
Speakers: Dr. William Moen, University of North Texas SLIS; Rebecca Guenther, Library of Congress; Ann Caldwell, Brown University; Marty Kurth, Cornell University; Terry Reese, Oregon State University

This was an extremely dense but immensely useful session; PowerPoint presentations will be available online at the ALCTS site some time soon (as of June 28 they are not yet linked).

Speaker 1: William Moen, Texas Center for Digital Knowledge, University of North Texas
Summary from Claire: Moen put into very succinct and very clear language the reasons why we (librarians but more specifically catalogers) have to begin to know standards other than our own.

Speaking on metadata interaction, integration and interoperability

Problem statement … is there a problem? We used to think of interoperability as a systems problem; we now understand that there are different levels to the problem. There are many metadata schema, some well-documented and well-known (AACR2), others less so. Ditto for content standards. There are also a variety of syntaxes (MARC and XML, for example). Lorcan Dempsey calls this our “vital and diverse metadata ecology.” We don’t really have a problem UNLESS we expect these various standards to interact, which of course we do.

So we are moving from a systems-oriented definition of interoperability to a user-oriented definition, Moen suggests a preliminary framework to help scope the work. Look at communities of practice: who is our community? Libraries, archives and museums are fairly tightly-knit communities with a good understanding of standards. As we try to cross into other communities, however, the costs of interoperability go up.

Communities of practice, two types:
-Networks of professionals (librarians, etc.) have similar language and shared meanings
-Information communities are looser organizations , and include the creators of information, managers of information (librarians/catalogers), and users.

Godfrey Rust (complete citation for this and other references will be in Moen’s ppt preso when it goes online) divides things into: PEOPLE, STUFF and AGREEMENTS.

Interoperability cost vs. functionality. William Arms’ curve of cost v functionality (graph & cite in ppt). OAI harvesting, for example, has lightweight requirements, so it is easy to implement but less functional. Federated searching/Z39.50 is highly functional but more costly to implement.

The library has developed very sophisticated structures over time. In the larger scheme of things, over time, probably these structures will not be as broadly adopted. The time is now: this is our opportunity to act if we want to try to see our standards adopted more broadly.

There probably will never be ONE canonical metadata scheme BUT we may all be able to agree on XML, which is a great step forwards. Some apparently simple schemes like Dublin Core turn out not to be so easy to implement in actual practice. We do not want to be further marginalized, we want to (have to) learn to play with others and have to get over the “not invented here” syndrome.

Mechanisms to address interoperability (with the fundamental assumption that there will NOT be one basic standard):
-Crosswalks/mapping
-Application profiles
-Registries
-RDF

Crosswalks and mapping. Mapping is the intellectual process of analyzing the standards and making matches. The crosswalk is the instantiation of the map. 1998 NISO white paper on crosswalks. This activity is successful when accomplished by someone who really knows the standards on both ends of the map: catalog librarians who know AACR2 will be responsible for becoming knowledgeable about other standards so that they can lead the mapping/crosswalking activity.

Difficult decisions to be made while mapping include: should it be one-way only or reversible? Reversible/round-trip: MARCXML < -> MARC. MARC -> MODS, however, is not round-trip, there is some loss of data, albeit perhaps slight. So is the mapping one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, etc.? Other difficulties include vocabularies: how to go from controlled to uncontrolled? For example, how does one indicate in Dublin Core that the subject is an LC heading?

Mapping to an interoperable core. OCLC is working on this problem, trying to come up with something rich enough to act as a core: all things map to the core and then out again to other forms. They’ve been looking at MARC as the possible basis [note: see Terry Reese's presentation on MarcEdit; he was the last speaker in this program]

Application profiles: same elements used in different ways, and with different meanings. These uses can refind the standard definition of the element as long as the fundamental meaning is unchanged.

Registries are necessary for application profiles to be successful. Ex: UK Schemas, EU Cores, others (see ppt)

RDF is the foundation of the semantic web and is a grammar for expressing terms, semantics. Moen admits his difficulty with RDF. Is important, but struggles to explain it.

Conclusions: Libraries are just ONE of the communities, we do not have a central role, but we may have a priveleged role thanks to our long experience. Some librarians continue to think that cataloging is different from metadata generation. We have to think about interacting with other communities. The challenge is to develop tools to hide the differences between formats (hide them from users of our systems). See Roy Tennant’s recent article about transparency. Moen demoe’d an SRW search on LOC which can show the data in MODS format or in XML, or in DC, etc. This is a good example of transparency: give the data to the user in a format that they can use.

Speaker 2: Marty Kurth, Cornell University Metadata Services

Provides services to faculty and others on campus. Interested in repurposing the library’s MARC. Metadata management design. What does all of this metadata mean for our shops and how do we set up systems and services that support interoperability over time? His preso is based on an article for Library HiTech that he co-authored 2004 (22:2).

Explains what is meant by ‘repurposing MARC data:’ being able to reuse MARC outside of the library catalog. Example collections: Making of America (MOA), Historical Math monographs, HEARTH home ec. collection, May anti-slavery, Historical literature of agriculture. All 5 of these dl projects had print counterparts and thus MARC to build on.

Metadata processing involves: mapping, defining relationships between schemas; transformation, the process of moving between schemes; and management, coordinating the tasks and the resources.

Metadata management challenges: workflows are not yet well established. Mapping and transformation is not happening all in one place, it is happening all over the library and may not be well documented, or if it is, the documentation may be scattered. Goal was to move from projects to process.

Why is repurposing MARC a logical place to begin? Firstly, we’ve got lots of it. Allows them to maximize the potential of the data. MARC mapping can be expensive; cost goes down as tools are developed. Typically this work is done by specialized staff for whom opportunity costs are expensive. It can be messy and difficult, it probably will generate multiple versions of data and records, etc. Thus, a good challenge.

Collection-specific mapping variations are inevitable. MOA, May, HEARTH all involve TEI. Handling of date transformation between MARC and TEI, for example, varied between the MOA and the May collections. The mapping was further complicated because each project was delivered with a different platform (DLXS, EnCompass, and DPub). Each project had slightly different needs. Work was performed in different areas of the library.

MARC mapping models. How to deal with the collection specificity? Looked at LOC MARC-> DC, but made local decisions on additional fields. Sought feedback on this library-wide.

Managing transformations. Transformations also vary from collection to collection. Some were performed by vendors. Scripting and XSLT trans. were later implemented. The library catalog is still the database of record. The scripted approach to transformation extracts the MARC, transforms it into XML, and combines it with other data including admin and technical md, OCR’ed text, etc. The XSLT approach involved writing transformations to accomodate the possible entirety of any MARC recrod; the metadata staff then customize the XSLT for their particular collections. It is easier to tweak and modify as the project unfolds. Documentation is critical and had been lacking in the past. It is a key component in management of metadata over time.

Metadata management: coordinating the intellectual work AND managing the tools and files that are products. The tools and process are resources to be managed. Important to know the user community for these tools and their needs for using and accessing them.

Strategies: inventory existing relationships and processes (this is not something Cornell has specifically done). Identify the staff who will be responsible over time and who will mentor. Requires strategic buy-in. Important to communicate the importance of this more than once. [Marty's ppt. here gives a useful example of such an inventory]

Concrete next steps: how do we build a culture to embrace this? Develop reusable transformation tools. Build library consensus on mapping. Create a culture and a practice of sharing and revising. External stakeholder discussions, library-wide. Talk about the risks of NOT managing tools. Think about creating a repository for metadata management tools that is searchable.

Speaker 3: Rebecca Guenther, Library of Congress

Rich descriptive metadata in XML: MODS. Overview: background on MARC & XML, MODS intro, MODS’s relationship to other schemes.

MARC and XML. We have large investments in MARC. Cataloging is an early form of metadata. Trying to retool to exploit flexibility of XML. Also trying to anticipate receiving metadata in other formats in XML or as part of a digital object.

Evolution of MARC21. Until now, MARC has been both a syntax and an element set. In current environment, XML is being used more and more and more tools are available. Diagram shogin transformation from MARC21 to XML. First transform to MARCXML in order to be able to do other things (validation, etc.)

MARC 21 in XML. MARCXML is lossless and capable of round-trip to MARC. Once it is in XML, we can then use stylesheets/XSLT to present in different environments/interfaces.

MODS is a derivative of MARC. It uses XML Schema. It was initially thought of for library applications, but they are seeing other uses and implementations.

Why bother? There is an emerging initiative to reuse metadata in XML: SRU/SRW, METS, OAI, etc. Looking for something richer than Dublin Core. Before MODS, not much in between MARC and Dublin Core. MODS is a core element set for convergence between MARC and non-MARC XML.

Advantages of MODS: it is compatible with existing library database descriptions. Richer than d.c., simpler than MARC, partly because the language is more readable than numerical tags. The hierarchical structure more readily supports rich description of complex objects.

Features of MODS. Uses language-based tags which share definitions with MARC. Description is rul agnostic. Elements are reusable and not limited as to number of sub-element. For example, the name tag can be used throughout the record, in author fields but also as part of related item-subject. Redundant elements can be repackaged more efficiently [Rebecca's ppt will be useful here to clarify these points]

Status of MODS. Started a MODS listserv in 2002. #.0 has been stable for about a year. 3.1 is coming out soon, doesn’t change anything in 3.0 but has been reordered to be compatible with MADS (Marc Authority). Registered with NISO.

Relationship to other schema. General-purpose and compatible with MARC. More broad than many other formats (EAD, ONYX, etc.) Difference between MODS and Dublin Core: MODS has structure, DC is flat. Can more precisely modify/qualify fields in MODS, for example, publication info can be related to date in MODS, can’t in DC. MODS is more compatible with library data. MODS can include record management information.

MARCXML vs MODS. Demo’ed music records in MARC, MARCXML, MODS. May not be exactly the same specificity when converting from MARC-MODS but most of the record converts.

LC uses of MODS. Using to describe electronic resources (AV project, web archiving). METS. SRU/SRW implementation offers records in MODS (this is one of the available choices).

MINERVA web archiving project. Exploring born-digital materials. Used MODS native (vs. creating as MARC and then converting to MODS); perhaps will some day put into the library catalog, but perhaps now. For web archiving, created 1 collection-level record, individual MODS records for each object.

Election 2002 web archiving: webarchivist.org cataloged the datea, creating MODS records for each site, some of which were captured more than one time. Other web archiving projects, yet to be cataloged: 9/11, 107th Congress, 2004 election.

Demo’ed 2002 election archive. Used XSLT to transform MODS to HTML. Link to the archived site. Showing MODS in XML – date captured data includes start and end points for capture. Decided not to link to the live site, which in many cases disappeared almost immediately after the election anyhow.

107th congress website archiving. Did in-house (MODS cataloging at LC). Used XMLSPY to catalog. Built own search and browse. Browse has drop-down menus to select the house or senate ctte.

Iraq war. Now have an input form for the catalogers to use as they catalog w/drop-down menus, etc.

I Hear America Singing project. METS + FEDORA w/MODS. METS packages all metadata and all digital objects, including sounds, CD covers and other images, etc.

Other MODS projects. MusicAustralia and Screen Sound Australia are using MODS as an exchange format.

Directions for MODS. Continue to explore interactions with METS. Continue to use for digital library projects @ LC. Richer linking capabilities than MARC. Website archiving. Looking at MODS tools, looking at using it with OAI as an alternative to D.C>

Q&A for the first three speakers
Q. When will MODS 3.1 be out?
R.G. Had hoped last week, but within next few weeks. 4.0 will be a complete rewrite and is in the workds but will take more time, require broader discussion, etc.

Q. As Cornell attempts to shift from a projects-oriented approach to a program-oriented approach, what will happen with the collection-specific approach, and have they talked about using MODS?
M.K. Talk about it all the time but there is some political drag to this idea.

Q. About LC web archiving; are any of the keywords or other data automatically extracted from web sites as they are archived/cataloged?
R.G. Yes, worked with their IT folks who extracted from the HTML. For the Milstein project (music project from I Hear America Singing) the metadata was all manually created, not extracted.

Q. Will MINERVA records go into library catalog?
R.G. Initially, though ILS was where all the records had to go, but with emergence of federated search, are no longer thinking this is the case.

Q. MARC records are dynamic and maintenance is possible (update an authority record, all records linking to it are updated)
M.K. Still consider library catalog to be the catalog of record. Haven’t established periodicity for refresh but it is possible to do this, built in to their design.

END OF PART ONE

Overall I found the panelists — Jim Lichtenberg, Jackie Griffin, and David Molnar — to be entertaining and informative. I was familiar with much of the content but learned there is still work to be done as privacy issues have not yet been completely resolved in library RFID.

Lichtenberg, a library technology consultant and regular Library Journal contributor, provided an overview of the technology. We’re still at a point where many librarians don’t fully understand how the technology operates and so this explanation was welcome even if it was a bit repetitive for the more RFID experienced members of the audience.

Lichtenberg used Alice in Wonderland — to much humorous effect — to explain how using RFID is like “going down the rabbit hole.” He says the technology is truly transformative and although we don’t really know what the result will look like at the bottom of the well it will be a wonderland when we arrive.

People are simultaneously excited by and terrified of RFID because it is the leading edge of a much more profound transformation of society, says Lichtenberg. He predicts we will experience more intense change in the next 20 to 25 years than we did with the advent of the Internet. The reason? Rapid advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and the cognitive Sciences (NBIC). Lichtenberg discussed current research which could lead to nano robots being surgically implanted into humans to repair tissue and biotechnology that could lead to the reversal of the effects of aging.

Accelerated technological change IS frightening. The key issue is the creative tension between the benefits of the technology and the need to protect privacy. At this point Lichtenberg listed the advantages (widely available, relatively inexpensive, better inventory control, increased self-check etc.) and disadvantages (high start up costs, indirect return on investment, immaturity of middleware, lower than expected accuracy and immature standards). Lichtenberg says that libraries considering implementation need to focus on supporting their clients and better understand their needs. Normally we think of RFID data-flow in libraries in only one direction. Information passes from tag to reader to middleware to library systems. The backwards flow of information, says Lichtenberg, will actually provide more important business intelligence for libraries. He reminded me very much of Lawrence McCrank from the Saturday RFID program with his call for intelligent and creative applications for library RFID which better serve our users needs. RFID can be used to push information to people.

Lichtenberg wrapped up his presentation with a metaphor of a glass bottomed boat. As time goes by the muddy waters will clear and RFID will allow us to understand exactly what’s going on in the library. It’s not about tags and readers but transparency. What can we learn with the data?

The next panelist was Jackie Griffin, director of the Berkeley Public Library. The Berkeley Library has come under much public scrutiny during their implementation of RFID. Griffith explained the history of the local movement protesting the installation and provided advice to librarians considering RFID so that they could avoid making the similar mistakes.

Berkleyans, says Griffin, have a long tradition of protecting free speech issues. The Board of Library Trustees (BOLT) approved the library’s purchase of RFID over a year ago but the protesting didn’t begin until after the San Francisco Public Library proposed their implementation. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Berkleyans Organized for Library Defense (BOLD) have weighed in against RFID in libraries. The most recent protest was only a week ago. A small number of protesters went to Berkeley City Hall to request that funding allocated to the library be removed if they continue with RFID.

At this point, most of the conversion has been completed and it’s unlikely that RFID won’t be used at Berkeley. Griffin says she is very comfortable with the decision to go with RFID. The library has had enormous expenses for repetitive strain injuries. These expenses were enumerated by a consultant hired by the City of Berkeley to analyze costs. In addition, the library had capital funding to double the size of their building but they had no corresponding increase in operating budget. In order to serve more people with the same number of staff they needed to turn to technological solutions.

During the course of investigating RFID Griffin was very involved in work outside the library protesting the Patriot Act. Griffin has a long history working with the intellectual freedom committee of the California Library Association. She is aware of privacy issues and government interference with freedom to read but says it didn’t occur to her at the time that RFID would be a risk. She cautioned the audience to be very aware of the potential consequences of any action they may take with technology.

Once she was aware of the risk she had Lee Tien of the EFF come and speak to llibrary committee managing the project. She also consulted with authoritative experts such as David Molnar, a UC Berkeley doctoral engineering student, and the Samuelson law clinic (which specializes in the legal implications of emerging technology). These experts helped Griffin and her staff to draft their RFP and to develop best practices (which are posted on their public web site). They interviewed five vendors and selected they felt best addressed the issues.

Griffith says that a bigger intellectual freedom issue is access to information. Many public schools in Berkeley lack media specialists and 30% of Berkleyans do not have a computer at home. If there is such a concern that library rfid tags may be used by the government to interfere with things people read then the real question is what the government is doing. Griffith says that RFID has allowed the Berkeley Public Library to reopen on Sundays and to return their book purchasing budget to near normal levels.

The final speaker was David Molnar. Molnar continues to be interested in RFID security issues and he provided the nitty gritty details about how a library RFID system could be compromised. These risks are outlined in his paper, “Privacy and security in Library RFID” (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dmolnar/library.pdf) and they include: hotlisting, denial of service attacks, and vandalism. He discussed questions for librarians to consider in order to evaluate the risk to their constituencies.

The first question is determining what is on the tag. Every library implementation that he has seen only uses barcode information and possibly, depending on the vendor, a security bit. Limiting the information on the tag limits what an adversary can do. Some might argue that it’s just a barcode which can’t be mapped to a book title without information from the integrated library system. Although libraries secure their ILS, it is now even more important to do so.

Older library RFID tags which use the ISO 15693 have a static identifier burned on at time of manufacture. Some libraries have unique prefixes in their barcodes which can be used to make inferences. Any persistent identifier enables tracking via hotlisting, which is the creation of a separate database of items you know in advance. For example, you could read the tags of every copy of Osama Bin Ladin’s biography. Then you could use your reader and preexisting database list (the hotlist) to identify scholars of the middle east.

The second question is who can read the tags? Anybody can obtain a reader that can detect the 13.56 Mhz frequency. The largest observed range he’s aware of is 3 feet, but getting a read from that distance requires a specialized antenna. Most reads are only viable in the range of inches. t’s the ubiquity of readers which will be a problem. When readers are installed at every Starbuck’s then those people carrying the Bin Laden book can possibly be tracked.

The third question is who can write the tags? If a tag is re-writable then it needs to be locked against vandals in a security bit denial of service attack. Vandals can write their own information to the tag and lock it against any further writes effectively destroying the tag for library applications. Tag writing issues can also affect future upgrades to the system if a proprietary read/write protocol can’t be handled by another vendor’s system. Rewriting the tag at checkout could fix the hotlisting issue by removing the barcode as the item is removed from the library. Nobody sells such a solution yet and there are robustness issues. If the item is not checked back into the library properly than it won’t have the barcode information anymore.

The final question is what type of encryption does the wireless communication between tag and reader have? Most systems are not securely encrypted and can be sniffed. There can be several meanings to the term encryption and you must understand what your vendor is doing if they say their product has it. If they encrypt using proprietary encoding that each library that uses the same vendor will have the same type of coding. Since it’s not different per library it can be reverse engineered. Some vendors encrypt the barcode information with a per-library key. This leads to static data and brings back the hotlisting and data tracking concerns. Finally some encrypt by pass wording the ability to read tags. How does the reader know which password to use? Is it the same for all tags or for each tag? The answer has serious implications. If it’s the same, then you’re back to the static identifier problem.

RFID security is a multilayer problem, says Molnar, and you need to include privacy issues and the appropriate questions in your RFP. He recommends that libraries minimize the amount of data they put on a tag and that they test out vendors products in real-world settings. Tag readers are relatively inexpensive and can be used with open source software called RF-Dump (http://www.rf-dump.org/). Can you crack the system you’re interested in?

There was a question and answer session between the audience and the panel members. Most of the questions were addressed to Jackie Griffin regarding the size of the collection and the protests in Berkeley. There had been reports in the news which conflated the purchase of RFID with library layoffs. Griffin says that they received a better budget than they anticipated and the layoffs didn’t happen. Library staff is getting more enthusiastic about RFID now that they feel it isn’t a threat to their livelihood.

One audience member asked the panelists to comment on Lee Tien’s published remarks regarding the library as a moral compass regarding the use of RFID (if it’s ok for a library, then it must be ok everywhere). Lichtenberg says libraries are going to be far, far, far from the only place using RFID. The technology is so pervasive that libraries aren’t going to dictate its mind-share. Griffin says that what the profession is doing to discuss RFID is amazing. She is not aware of other communities raising and discussing these issues. Molnar says that the economics of RFID will improve with the tags becoming cheaper and increasingly used by industry.

In sum, the panel was informative and a great review of the many questions librarians should consider if they purchase RFID. RFID security is still a research issue but the technology will not go away. Librarians are doing an excellent job raising awareness and discussing the issues but there is a need for more creativity in designing applications for library RFID that truly serve the library user.

Council items LITA-worthy:

Resolution in support of community broadband, out of Committee on Legislation, with strong encouragement from OITP. Pat Mullin commented at LITA Board that this is very “motherhood and apple pie.” In my own home town, Palo Alto, a “fiber to the home” initiative was ultimately stopped by (among other things) the chilling effect of potential legal challenges. Yet I can tell you that I had Councilors asking me what the heck this issue was about. No one on Council voted against it, but I wish COL had issued this resolution earlier, with a one-page or even half-page backgrounder (or even an email to Council), so the resolution’s vote could be a “teachable moment.” If you have community broadband stories, please do share!

Biometrics. Initially Intellectual Freedom Committee was prepared to put a resolution on Council’s agenda very emphatically opposed to biometrics in libraries. This resolution was in response to two public library systems (Buffalo, NY and Naperville, IL) that are using biometrics for user login on Internet computers. I set aside my personal convictions about intellectual freedom (can I say, “EEK! Fingerprints?!”) to note that the resolution was poorly written and had not been reviewed by either Committee on Legislation or LITA. (This suggests an opportunity for reinvigorating lines of communication between LITA and IFC.) As strongly as I feel about intellectual freedom, I feel even more strongly that resolutions related to technology, particularly technologies new to libraries, need LITA’s input and should go forward with the most technologically correct insights and language possible. Expect opportunities for discussion prior to Midwinter and a hearing in San Antonio. I’d love to get input from LITA folk on this topic.

Reduced division dues for retired ALA members. Remember that item on the ballot about lowering the quorum for ALA membership meetings? Well, it passed, and because it did, membership meetings have had enough people present (75 members based on current membership) to pass resolutions that Council then has to take action on. In this case, members expressed their concern about the need for reduced dues for division members.

Initially I was prepared to vote against this resolution, as other division councilors were insisting that nobody else had business telling the divisions how to do business (“states’ rights,” as one Councilor put it). But after hearing the discussion on the floor, I ultimately agreed that it is reasonable for members to ask divisions to begin to discuss the dues structure for retired members. It is not a mandate—just a request to add this to our fiscal discussion. With a 66,000 member organization largely over 35, how we take care of our retired members will become increasingly significant. We gave the membership a tool to communicate with ALA governance, and we should be glad they are willing to use it to catch our attention on matters important to all of us.

Minor tweak to ALA Strategic Plan. Someone in ALCTS alerted Bruce Johnson, ALCTS Chapter Councilor, that the ALA draft strategic plan mentioned state and federal standards but did not mention international standards. Bruce drafted substitute language, I seconded, and after some discussion, the new language passed. Note that I was able to cite LITA’s Strategic Plan in this discussion. Go LITA!

On other fronts, Council passed resolutions related to workplace speech, “Threats to Library Materials Related to Sex, Gender, Identity, or Sexual Orientation” (encouraging state chapters to fight these heinous and hypocritical attacks on library collections), the Iraq War (primarily asking the nation to move its priorities from the Iraq occupation to services such as libraries), disinformation (we voted against it), and immigrants’ rights to free public libraries (particularly important in light of the latest attempts to implement national identify cards). A “Resolution on Equal Access to Resources in Non-Roman Alphabets in Libraries” passed Membership, but was defeated in Council (a resolution on cataloging that doesn’t emanate from ALCTS is doomed to fail). A resolution calling for ALA to establish a formal list of “Endangered Libraries” was referred to BARC (Budget Analysis and Review Committee) for fiscal review, but is not likely to pass when it reemerges. I voted for a resolution calling for ALA to ask U.S. News and World Report magazine to update its rankings of library schools, but as expected the resolution failed. Among our tribute resolutions was one for the “The Hollywood Librarian: Librarians in Cinema and Society,” a forthcoming film by the irrepressible Anne Seidl, who among her many accomplishments is a GIS geek.

I have other reports I would like to process and run by you folks, such as the conclusions of the Committee on Conferences, but I’ll trickle these out over time. I enjoy representing LITA on Council, and encourage your comments, questions, and feedback. Let me know how I can serve you better!

There were probably about a hundred people at this session and the handouts ran out. Handouts and more have now been posted. (Thanks, Kyle!)

I’ll add a few more notes to complement Claire’s summary:

Allison Zhang

The UI out of the box was very basic but it was customizable. Allison showed screen shots of different collections they had worked on, each with customized graphics.

Two different kinds of materials were included in their projects: Digital collections (Dublin Core encoded) and Finding Aids (EAD encoded).

The collections are available at http://www.aladin.wrlc.org/dl/. Allison highlighted the Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, which is a collection of some 20 years of comic books. For this collection they created metadata for each story, plus structural metadata to link from page to page within each story, and from each story in an issue to others in the same issue. They set up a conditional display format in Greenstone to show the table of contents for an issue differently from the page display. At the top of each page of content, there are links to page back and forth through the story. Her main point in showing all this: You must design your metadata.

Tod Olson

The Chopin Early Editions collection was designed to allow browsing by genres, e.g., nocturnes. In this project they used metadata to drive custom navigation features. Tod showed the pathway from data (catalog records, scanned images, structural metadata) to the integrated record in Greenstone. See PDF of his slides.

Custom page-turner metadata contains previous-page and next-page information; if my notes are correct these were generated from the record creation process, a great idea!

They are using Greenstone 3, with METS internal storage format, MySQL for metadata storage.

The proof-of-concept project allowing music search by "playing" a displayed keyboard image was very impressive. Encoding the pitch intervals rather than the specific notes makes it much more likely to work. It’s good to see some progress on music searching like this.

Laura Sheble

The primary focus of the survey was support needs, but they also asked about characteristics of Greenstone users’ technical environment and collections:
24 questions – general support mechanisms
8 questions – collections and target audiences
8 questions – contact info for follow-up and directory

Unfortunately the legends on the charts were barely or not at all visible from where I was sitting, so I only caught a few of the findings that Laura actually said verbally; for more detail you can check the Handouts. A few selected highlights:

• Total valid responses: 54
• Most installations were on Windows OSs, fewer on Linux/UNIX
• Large percentage of installations were in US/Canada
• 93% of respondents were actively developing collections
• About half were developing 0 – 1 collections, about a quarter were working on 6 or more
• Half were university-affiliated, 20% regional or international centers, and surprisingly to me, about 7% were commercial enterprises
• About 30% had a multilingual target population
• Of the major support needs, many respondents cited local training and materials and local support organizations in their own country as needed. Interestingly, many of them were actively developing training materials.

The survey is closed for this particular statistical analysis, but is still open for responses:
Greenstone survey

Q & A on Greenstone

Q. Is Greenstone 3 available?
A. It’s available; serving is in an advanced development state but building is still under development.

Q. What is it written in?
A. Greenstone 3 is Java-based.

Q. OCLC ContentDM has resources behind it, while Greenstone is perceived to be hard to use. Wouldn’t I want to go with a commercial, supported product?
A. There is a DL Consulting company. But open source software, by its nature, is not usually well marketed or professionally supported and documented.

Q. We are a non-profit with an existing base of XML and our own DTD. Can this work with Greenstone?
A. You could develop a plugin to translate your existing data to Greenstone internal format.

Q. Does Greenstone support DSpace?
A. It supports importing from DSpace internal format.

Q. JPEG2000?
A. Pretty much any image format (using Image Magic ?? I wasn’t clear if that was a required plugin for this).

Q. Fedora?
A. There’s work underway to support it as a storage format with Greenstone for the indexing and presentation.

Q. What’s the maximum size of a Greenstone collection?
A. About 11 million records. The BBC metadata currently contains about 3 million and is using Greenstone. There is a known bug after about 20 GB of text, but due to Greenstone’s compression algorithms it takes a long time to hit that limit. Due to support for cross-collection searching, though, you can segment a large corpus into smaller collections. Most people do currently use it for smaller collections.

The joys of the Intercontinental

Here is the room where the Greenstone session was held (the King Arthur Court room)!

I plan to complement Will’s “Federated Search” program write-up with a post once I get home, since, after arriving late, I caught the last speaker, which he missed, and I also snagged all the handouts. Will did such a great job on that post that I hesitate to even touch the topic, but I’ll try. I also have notes from the Google Scholar/Print talk, though I may just comment on Leo’s fine writeup. If you have notes from things you attended, come on and blog while it’s fresh!

Sunday, June 26, 2005
8:00-10:00 a.m.

Analog and Digital Preservation Technology

Apologies for the lateness and the brevity of this post. I was both late for this session and had to leave early—the very worst kind of guest. However, I determined that I still really wanted to blog it. I went for the brief time allotted in part because I’ve been to good PARS sessions in the past. Even more, I went because this was the only session at ALA that came up in the event planner on a keyword search for microfilm. My day job is as a newspapers and microform librarian.

This was held in one of the smaller conference rooms on the first floor of McCormick. Fairly well attended, i.e., someone in almost every third seat.

When I arrived, the first speaker, whose name I did not get, was discussing video preservation strategies. He mentioned film widths I’ve never even heard of.

The next speaker was Priscilla Caplan, Assistant Director for Digital Library Services, Florida Center for Library Automation. Her talk was on Digital Preservation & Trusted Repositories. She described preservation strategies, standards & frameworks, tools, and applications and initiatives for CRL certification.

Priscilla cited a Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) report from RLG/OCLC working group. [Must look up!]

Her main thrust was Trust But Verify!

Dean Michele Cloonan from Simmons College followed. I had to (reluctantly) leave during her talk.

Dean Cloonan spoke about we have to consider copyright issues with every single copy we make, any format, any reason. Fair uses is evolving—who wants to be the test case?

In digitization projects, there are always human, financial, and technical expertise needs. Social issues are key—mission, copyright, etc.

Analog preservation has been reactive—deterioration has prompted. However, digital preservation must be proactive—build it in.

An observation: “Vietnam is a country, not a war,” i.e., ongoing, never done. Build, create, constituency. Collaboration!

Time to dash, very unfortunately! I guess I missed whatever discussion there was of microfilm….

I’m sitting here in ALA Council listening to discussion about the recommendations from the Task Force on Library School Closings. Earlier today I negotiated discussions about two draft resolutions, one on biometrics and one on RFID, and offered to bring the matter to LITA. When someone from IFC asked me why LITA needed to weigh in–after all, OITP had reviewed the resolutions, wasn’t that enough–I said that LITA’s strategic plan notes that emerging technologies is one of its central concerns.

I did not add that it’s really good for LITA members to be continually challenged to think about intellectual freedom issues related to technology–and it’s really good for other divisions to be reminded that all library and information science professionals, including LITA’s members, have a place at the table on cross-cutting intellectual freedom issues, particularly issues that are so clearly commingled with technology.

Then I moved on to talk to one Councilor about another, non-LITA resolution, and to reassure another that I would not forget about his concerns about the online event planner. I made sure two Councilors who had been having trouble with their wifi connection were hooked up (one Councilor had never used a laptop, let alone wifi, but despite the fact that her laptop was buttoned down more tightly than a missile silo, soon she was happily emailing away). I also seconded a minor change to ALA’s strategic plan that ALCTS had introduced to ensure that the plan referred to international standards (in addition to local, state, and federal standards), and was pleased to see the motion pass swiftly and smoothly, with only minor objections, primarily from people who misunderstood what we meant by “standards.”

I was IM’ing someone in a big organization today and explaining that Councilors bring many competing (and complementary!) interests to the table in our debates and discussions. She started to commiserate, but I stopped her. I think this is a Good Thing. It’s good for ALA, and it’s good for those of us who get a chance (or in my case, three so far) to serve on ALA’s governing body and participate in this delicate process dance.

Sitting on Council can be like watching paint dry, given the necessary slowness of parliamentary procedure. But at the end of the day I’m proud to serve LITA in this capacity.

We’re voting on whether to close debate on the “Endangered Libraries List” (I loved the comment from one Councilor that he would only vote for it if ALL libraries would be listed on it), so I better wrap up this post. Do you realized it’s about 100 days to forum? Can’t wait!

Sat., 06/25/2005
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Palmer House Private Dining Room 5

Smallish room, approx. 25 attendees tops. I recognize most from previous NUDG sessions at midwinter and annual.

OCLC Terminologies Project and the Newspaper Genre List.

Eric Childress and Diane Vizine-Goetz, both from OCLC
The mapping of fields from the U.S. Newspaper Project (circa 1970-1990) to MARC fields should be useful for those projects still working with the old data.

Attendees described OCLC’s efforts to convert USNP LDRs to MARC 21 MFHD later this summer. Mark Sweeney, not present, has been involved in efforts.

Microfilm and Digital Newspaper Projects in Pennsylvania
Sue Kellerman, Penn State University Libraries

Overview of progress on the PA Newspaper Project, which went on hiatus for 15 years due to lack of funding. Old data, rechecking, cooperation among repositories, filming, next steps. Plus very successful project to digitize Penn State student newspaper. See http://www.collegian.psu.edu/.

Civil War newspaper digitization project using which has a thematic approach. Using Active Paper from Olive http://www.olivesoftware.com/–now Israeli.

Some discussion of National Digital Newspaper Project, funding, etc. People present from Berkeley, Tennessee, and Utah (all first round grant recipients) discussed progress, issues, etc. Technical and program information is on the web at http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/.

Jessica from UWash described an interesting, rich thematic approach to a collection on 1919 including newspapers, pictures, and other formats. The Seattle General Strike Project: http://faculty.washington.edu/gregoryj/strike/

Sue Kellerman will be the new chair of NUDG. We have to standardize our meeting times for Midwinter.

Googling the Better Mousetrap: Cyber Resources on the Front Line of Reference

RUSA 2005 President’s Program

Monday, 06/27/2005
Sheraton Chicago Ballroom VI/VII

[Mere minutes late! Getting better at timing leaving the McCormick wifi teat and busing to a hotel. In my next life, I’m staying at the Sheraton. It’s right on the river, and I found the ballroom easily! Large ballroom, not quite full but crowded.]

Most complicated evaluation form ever seen. Eek—forgot to fill out! Will mail…

Panelists:

John Dove, President, Xrefer
Chris Nasso, Gale Group
Bill Pardue, Arlington Heights Memorial Library
Marilyn Parr, Library of Congress
J. L. Needham, Google
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia/Wikimedia

Abstract: How do information/reference sources live and grow on the web? A panel of librarians, publishers, and search engine designers will discuss:

I don’t think the panelists managed to cover all the points in the abstract, but it was a really good discussion.

Marilyn started things off nicely with a short discussion of LOC’s history with computing since 1960. I was interested that she mentioned how digitization of photographs led to LOC’s entry into electronic resource creation. Now, LOC pages are accessed 1 million times a day, many times through referrals from Google. She hears increasingly from the public that “the Library of Congress should use Google for search.” (Well, American Memory results can be daunting.)

J.L. started off by noting that the program title was an example of improper use of the Google brand. He also admitted to only 6 months of exposure to library land at Google. (We must be gentle?)

He noted that previously e-books have been mostly invisible on the web to users and search engines. He said it is time to up the ante with publishers—for both cataloging and search engine optimization (not his term). He said publishers need to reallocate resources to provide access to the document itself rather than to their home page.

Bill described how NorthStarNet uses distributed content creation—it is a reference resource created and maintained by its users—mostly reference librarians. It is a directory, a calendar. Provides contributors with a blogging interface, forums, and a possible “community in a box”.

Chris described how as a regular public library user, he has observed patrons searching online for information he knows the library owns (doesn’t he mean rents?), but they are looking in a place where he knows they won’t find it. Jokes that guards are finding his behavior suspicious—kinda have concerns there myself—privacy anyone? Anyway, he sees a big evolution in the industry. Gale/Google “accessmylibrary.com” aims to improve the content of the internet, and that users will get the “going through their library” concept.

Jimmy gave a precise explanation of Wikipedia’s history, philosophy, and process. He spoke a little about the influence of the four freedoms of free software. He considers Wikipedia’s strength to be its strong, passionate community.

John had recorded comments from Terry Winograd and Amy someone, a reference librarian. Terry said we need to get to a mind reader—and for that to happen, a search engine needs to know you. John said that if a search engine tried to know him via his shared home PC, it would go crazy. Amazon’s “people who purchase…” feature already gets pretty weird trying to reconcile him, wife, and son. Amy said we don’t need a mind reader machine; we have reference librarians. John talked about reference needs moving to 24/7 and self service. Content + librarians + users need another business model, not advertising based and not F2F. Google Print is fabulous, but how will users make sense of the retrievals of the Bodleian’s 18th century results? The librarian role in this has not yet been invented. Someday in the future, a 5th grade grandchild will ask him, “what’s a results list?” So we need a good online self-service reference platform.

Highlights of the extremely lively Q & A:

How will Google do the ranking of hits from Google Print?
J.L.: already working with different algorithms for different formats.

What if a librarian who wants to teach evaluation plants bad info in Wikipedia?
Jimmy: in his experience, librarians are more ethical than that. [Laughter.] Described how new posts are the most scrutinized. The constant review process has made bad behavior rare.

Wikipedia and controversial posts, i.e, George Bush entry during election?
Jimmy: media reports were completely wrong. The Bush and Kerry entries were not controversial—it was just vandalism from outside the community that made them lock the entries. They are about to go live with new software that will allow a time delay mode to keep vandalism at bay.

What do Google and Wikipedia know that the library community does not? (wow, this spark ignited things!)
Bill: Rely on the community to generate reputation and usefulness. Marilyn: LOC uses Google to find LOC stuff. The LOC’s own metadata doesn’t talk to each other, leading to incomprehensible results. J.L.: Currently the open web has no competition. Libraries are walled gardens. Speed drives decisions (milliseconds matter.) Comprehensiveness is key. He used Wikipedia to get info on a Chinese province recently. Search engine indexing of our walled gardens is key. John: Google speaks to Ranganathan’s Fourth Law. Speed, yes. But relevance and authority need context. Chris: Search engines have such sheer breadth of coverage. Individuals information needs morph so quickly—within one search session even.

Lowered expectations—Google gives sufficient answers. Students going for full text convenience of lesser source rather than go for better print resource one floor away.
Jimmy: Funny line about regular emails from college students getting Fs for citing Wikipedia. He says, “You are in college! Learn to use sources!” [laughter.] It’s a problem that wider digitization efforts may solve. Marilyn: Google draws students into things they wouldn’t have found.

Which product is fun? Which offers community? It has upped the burden of scholarly resources. Chris: new name for Thomson-Gale? [laughter.] John: new name for Xrefer that does not include “Thomson”! [much laughter]. Then gave example of how Xrefer content map on Armageddon led to paper on Pink Floyd.

Users don’t care about the container! LIS schools spend so much time on encyclopdediae, almanacs, gazetteers, etc.
Chris: we want to be fun for the user, but we must offer authority to the librarian customer. We will all be out of our comfort zone for a while.

LIS educator: we are trapped! Cri de couer; we don’t know what is going to happen, butwe have to keep all segments happy.

This started devolving into a wonderful conversation between vendors, publishers and audience–impossible to credit who said what, plus questioners would amplify, translate, perform! Ideas:
Jimmy: Wikipedians (my term) get to be quiz show winners—exercise serendipity by following links.
John: we can’t prejudge what users need. Publishers need to present hundreds if not thousands of results on one page to show context. J.L.: Serendipity abounds on Google. Now using format icons to present context.

Expanding John’s comment that “ads aren’t it; free isn’t it”?
John: don’t libraries need more than one encyclopedia? Need best thoughts of best thinkers. Need editors. What is the business model? Look at extrapolations. Ads don’t meet academic approbation. But academic journals often have ads. And open access publishers are using AdSense to generate some revenue.

Google Scholar is looking to aggregate all emanations of an article. Thomson Gale wants any content of value. Expansive search vs. focused search. Learning styles. 8 modalities of reference inquiry. Sometimes source matters but sometimes it doesn’t. Creating content is a form of service. The classics were gatekept. Librarian’s role is getting to the right question. How is 24/7 reference mediated? We need to build bridges. Need diversity of sources and contexts.

I think this session might have gone on happily until all were completely exhausted. But someone else needed the room. The moderator mentioned the panelists had a lively lunch beforehand. The give-and-take on the panel and with the audience was wonderful to see. Information=conversation indeed! There was agreement and disagreement but there was listening on all sides. Hmm. How can the range of conversation, including the front-line librarians, LIS educators, info literacy, etc., continue? Maybe a wiki? Kudos to panelists and questioners!

[Note from Claire: sorry, everyone, my laptop died so I don't have complete notes on this session; hopefully my co-blogger has a more complete record]

Speaker 1: Ian Witten, University of Waikato, developers of the Greenstone library system

Goals of Greenstone have been:
-to be able to present collections of digital material and to support custom presentation of these colls.
-large scale support, up to several Gb text
-support associated/linked images, movies, etc.
-serve on web or publish to CD
-run anywhere, on any platform, and with support for many languages
-non-exclusive as to format
-non-prescriptive as to metadata, etc.

Easy to install, supports full text or fielded search. Extensible.

FACTS
-Open source (SourceForge)
-5,000 copied downloaded each year
-supports 38 languages
-Supported by some important international agencies; UNESCO distributes and provides Greenstone training

Ian did a demo of the Greenstone system (I believe he said he was showing version 2):
Running the librarian interface, demoed creation of a new collection with these main steps
“Gather” – drag/drop images and other Beatles miscellany into a collection window. Greenstone detects mime types, prompts to install plugins for mime types not previously encountered (MP3 and MARC)

“Enrich” – optional step to add metadata, which Ian skipped for demo purposes

“Design” to create indexes. Uses any available extracted metadata if metadata not explicitly provided in the Enrich step (titles from MP3 and HTML files, etc.)

“Build” to build the collection

Demo’ed a search for “love” in full text & title. Shows thumbnails of images, which it creates as the image files are imported in the “Gather” phase.

Bulding a more sophisticated collection for Beatles miscellany took about 1.5, this involved adding a MIDI plugin, adding metadata for the objects, adding DC classifiers, adding a browse by media type function.

Greenstone 3 is a complete rewrite and is in the works; can be downloaded in beta form now but not recommended for production use. V2 is still the supported/recommended product. Changes coming in 3: generates XML rather than HTML, METS is the foundation and underlying collection format, JAVA-based and uses SOAP.

Speaker 2: Alison Zhang, Washington Research Library Consortium

WRLC is 8 academic libraries in the DC area

In 2002, received and IMLS grant to provide dig. collections in a consortial environment

Needed power and flexibility from a digital library delivery system. Features sought:
User interface: good browse, powerful search, customizable, collection-based indexing and labeling, linkable digital objects & metadata, multipage object display (books or other complex text objects), support for multiple formats (MD?), support for standard schema, federated search
Staff interface: ease of use, support for Dublin Core, support master and derivative vers. of objects, templates, direct view of digital objects, allow search edit and delete of records, support global changes/updates, local authority control.

None of the software evaluated met all requirements, so decided to customize two open source packages: DCDot for metadata creation and Greenstone for display/user int. Neither supports federated search or multipage object view.

Most of staff interface is DCDot-based, customized. Created own multipage viewer.

Example collections, for which customized HTML templates were built (17 dig. collections built since 2002 using Greenstone): Art images Collection, Finding Aids collection (EAD-based, first Greenstone customer to do this).

Delved a bit into the details of how to customize Greenstone, referred us to the doc. she wrote which is linked to from the Greenstone site: “Customizing the Greenstone User Interface”

Customizing DCDot – most customization involved Perl. Created templates, implemented a drop-down authority list that updates dynamically as additions are made.

Created own collection management system to tie everything together and are in the process of replacing DCDot with another management interface, possibly DSpace.

Speaker 3: Tod Olson, University of Chicago Library

Chopin Scores project: over 400 scores from Chopin’s early period.

Tabbed user interface display, choose to view bibliographic desc. or the document itself, which has a multipage browse feature.

Built this project on AACR2 MARC from library catalog. Preservation scans and structural metadata were input into a relational database. MARC was transformed to MODS, which were then combined with images and structural md to create a METS record. METS transformed via XSLT into the Greenstone structure. Tod explained in some detail which bits of the METS structmap, etc. were mapped to the Greenstone format.

Features of Greenstone3 that U of C looks forward to: support for Lucene or MG/MGPP (Greenstone internal indexing component), METS as internal structure, MySQL support, XML/XSLT for presentation, continued support for existing Greenstone2 data.

Proof-of-concept Music Information Retrieval (MIR) component:
Scores in the collection are matched to existing MIDI examples. Pitch intervals are encoded as text, which is added to the document metadata.

User can input a tune into a keyboard. This MIDI file is similarly encoded as text, then a search looks for matches in the document metadata. It actually works!

Chopin Early Editions

Speaker 4: Laura Sheble, Wayne State
Greenstone User survey

Created a user survey to get feedback on Greenstone support mechanisms

[Session notes cut off here, sorry - Claire] [no problem, great post! -- kgs]

Participants

What everyone came to see was the panel discussion featuring Google’s Adam Smith along with representatives from the five libraries that have agreed to let Google digitize their books. In order of seating, that was John Price-Wilkin (Michigan), Catherine Tierney (Stanford), Ronald Milne (Oxford), Dale Flecker (Harvard), and John Balow (NYPL). Maurice York (Emory) on the far left was moderator.

Google Print

Although the program was subtitled “What’s in Store for Google Print and Google Scholar”, most of the attention was paid to Google Print — quite rightly because it involves libraries handing over to Google the very things that make them unique, namely, their collections.

It soon became clear however that some of the libraries appear to be engaged in “Pilot Projects”. Harvard for example, is starting out with 40,000 volumes.

Why Google?

The motivation for doing this was obvious: Google has the kind of deep-pockets (or claims it has) to undertake digitizing entire libraries — at a rate far faster than the libraries themselves could manage. It also has, in the words of Dale Flecker, the “nerve” to do it. When Google told Michigan it wanted to digitize their entire collection, John Price Wilkin called it an “amusing story”.

What the libraries get in return are their books back (natch) plus a digital copy of the material. What the libraries will do with their copy isn’t immediately clear. John Balow conceded that these are still “early days”.

Even Adam Smith admitted that Google is in “research-mode” concerning some aspects of both Scholar and Print. Its technology “continues to evolve”.

Access & Preservation

What isn’t in doubt is the increased access these titles will have once they’re part of Google. “It’s all about access,” Ronald Milne emphasized. For Oxford, the notion is to bring the “Republic of Letters” into the 21st Century.

Not addressed are issues of preservation. Indeed, with the exception of Michigan, most didn’t think this was a “preservation project”. The kind of “industrial” process that Google is using (mum’s the word on what it actually is) can only be used on books that are in good shape.

That said, it would be “more possible”, in the words of Catherine Tierney, for libraries like Stanford to concentrate on their more unique materials — with Google handling its part. Dale Flecker thought it might also make things cheaper.

Copyright

Google intends to scan everything including books not yet in the public domain. The user will only see “snippets” of works where Google has no agreement (read, permission) with the publisher. This naturally raises questions of copyright infringement.

Adam Smith stressed that Google wasn’t setting up a “book distribution system but an indexing system”. That said, Smith admitted that copyright is a “complicated issue”. He suggested a public listing of “orphaned” works post-1923 so everyone would know what was in copyright and what wasn’t.

Trust Google?

One recurring theme was whether it made sense to put so many (library) eggs in the basket of what ultimately is a profit-driven corporation whose first loyalty is to its stockholders.

None of the representatives seemed disturbed by this. As John Balow explained only half seriously, “We rely on the generosity of strangers. This is just another day of work.”

And what if Google should pull out?

“Time will tell,” John Price Wilkin concluded.

Links

Google Library Digitization Agreement With University Of Michigan… (Search Engine Watch).
Includes link to the U-Mich/Google Agreement

Michigan Digitization Project
Good information about Michigan’s project plus links to the other Libraries in the Agreement.

Don’t Get Goggle-Eyed Over Google’s Plan to Digitize. (Mark Y. Herring, Chronicle of Higher Ed. March 11, 2005).
Looks at the Agreement with a Grain of Salt.

Review of Google Scholar (Martin Myhill, Charleston Advisor – April 2005)
Balanced — even helpful — review of Scholar.

Use Measures for Electronic Resources: Theory and Practice
Monday, June 27, 2005 1:30 – 5:30 PM
Collection Management and Development Section, Association for Library Collections and Technical Services

Speakers (in the order they spoke):
Martha Kyrillidou, Director, ARL Statistics Program
Dr. Peter T. Shepherd, Project Director, COUNTER
Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist for Electronic Resources, EBSCO Information Services
Daviess Menefee, Director of Public Relations, Elsevier
Todd Carpenter, Business Development Director, BioOne
Brinley Franklin, Director of Libraries, University of Connecticut
Joe Zucca, University of Pennsylvania Library

The program was organized into three large segments with 2 or 3 speakers representing each:

1. Standards
2. Vendors
3. Universities

Standards

Martha Kyrillidou began by discussing what she described as a draft report, titled “Strategies for Benchmarking Usage of Electronic Resources across Publishers and Vendors.” A preprint of this white paper is available online. The paper describes the ARL E-Metrics project, describing the history of attempts to evaluate usage of networked electronic resources, then analyzes results of a surveys of ARL members compiled in 2000 and again in 2004.

Ultimately what you want, said Kyrillidou, is not to have to deal with each vendors statistical reporting system separately, trying to combine all those numbers. She suggested three possible approaches to a solution. The first would create a combined database for sharing data across institutions, kind of a new OCLC for statistical data. In the second proposed model, multiple databases would be used, but the databases would be capable of talking to each other. In the third approach, there would be no databases at all, but rather a standard, with everyone using the same XML DTD, or some equivalent type of technology.

Use is not everything. Focus on the user. DigiQUALâ„¢ is an attempt to focus on digital library service quality. This project is funded via the NSF and NSDL. Institutions can use DigiQUAL to create a user survey for evaluating their web sites.

Kyrillidou’s final slide showed a dress with the text “Does this make me look fat?” written across it. Everyone wants the statistics they collect to make them look good.

Peter Shepherd is the COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) project director. He began by providing an update on current COUNTER activities and progress. Release 2 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases was released in April, 2005.

Dr. Shepherd provided the following principles for usage statistics:

Usage statistics:

• Should be practical
• Should be reliable
• Only tell part of the story
• Should be used in context

How can usage statistics help us measure success?

Both libraries AND vendors need usages statistics.

COUNTER Release 2 includes specifications for consortia-level reports, although only 2 of the 5 reports must be available at the consortial level.

Dr. Shepherd put in a plug for COUNTER membership. Libraries can join for only $375/year, and consortial membership is $500.

Vendors

Oliver Pesch provided an overview of EBSCO’s statistical strategies, and their stats management interface. He made the important point that libraries need to isolate federated search sessions and searches (via IP address or by usergroup/profile) so that these are counted differently than normal searches. He illustrated how a single user search can create multiple searches across various vendor statistical reporting systems. NISO is developing a standard which will allow metasearch activity to identify itself as such to databases.

He also suggested that we take a look at ERUS as a stats consolidator. ILS vendors often provide options as well.

Daviess Menefree provided similar background information on Elsevier’s statistical reporting activities.

Todd Carpenter spoke on behalf of smaller publishers. Now that BioOne allows full-text crawling of its journals by the search engines, 96% of its traffic comes from Google.

Universities

Brinley Franklin presented a summary of three in-house university unit cost studies which analyzed all aspects of journal costs, and compared print with electronic. Typically the non-subscription costs: staffing, housing of print journals, etc. were substantially higher than the subscription costs.

In a Drexel University study from 2002, the cost per use for print journals was $17.50, while per use costs for e-journals was a mere $1.85. A similar study in Muenster, Germany the following year had much the same results: 16.68 Euros print per unit cost, and 3.47 Euros for e-journal per unit cost. Not to mention that in both studies the e-journal use was much higher than the print use.

A 2003 University of Virginia study calculated a cost per article downloaded of $1.64 and a per search cost of $0.52. A University of Connecticut study found per search costs of $1.15 and $1.20 in 2002 and 2003, respectively. In a CARL study, Alliance libraries realized a per search cost of $0.25.

Unit cost data can become a very powerful tool for management and collection development decisions. One conclusion that can be easily drawn from these studies is that universities should work cooperatively to substantially reduce bound journal collections. There is no reason for every institution to house and service the same enormous backfile print collections.

MINES (Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services) provides a totally different approach to evaluating e-journal usage. MINES uses a web-based survey form and sampling plan to measure who is using which resources, from where, and for what. These brief (3 or 4 question) surveys pop up during the authentication process, and are answered by selected users before they gain access to the resource.

E-Use Measurement: A Detour around the Publishers

To say that Joe Zucca’s work is impressive is a major understatement. My reaction was “I want this guy doing MY stats!” Basically he and his people are bypassing vendor generated statistics entirely, and are generating incredibly granular statistics using web metrics. He showed us graphs and charts measuring usage of electronic resources by student housing locations: a “party” house vs. an academically oriented “house” or an average upper division house.

One interesting byproduct of his statistical studies was a very high degree of correlation between checkout of print items with login access to electronic resources over time. The total numbers for e-resource use were an order of magnitude larger than the print checkout numbers, but when one went up or down, so did the other, proportionally.

My personal conclusion: we (me, in my job as statewide database licensing project manager for the State of Washington) should be doing a lot more with usage statistics than we are.

The details:

The panel was introduced by Nancy John from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pat Harris, executive director of NISO batted lead. The big news from that corner is that NISO is sponsoring a workshop on RFID standards integration Oct.25-26 at the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge. Mark your calendars. I intend to attend if I can save my pennies. The workshop will include publishers, book sellers, librarians and industry knowledge managers. This is cool because there needs to be cooperation from stakeholders at every point in the publication cycle. Why tag your books if they can come that way from the publisher or book jobber? Speakers, agendas, sponsor information, registration and hotel information will be posted on the NISO web site after 7/15 (http://www.niso.org).

Harris began with a general introduction and overview of RFID technology which was totally appropriate for the mixed audience of RFID neophytes, nay-sayers, and veterans.
She explained the advantages of RFID use in libraries: circulation, self-service, workflow management, security, inventory, usage, and better work place (less repetitive strain injury). She briefly touched on the privacy controversy as a disadvantage.

NISO has been following RFID for at least 10 years and Harris says she believes RFID may be the trigger for the next round of major changes in libraries which will allow us to compete with the Barnes & Nobles of the world. There are many challenges, however, to RFID deployment at the global level due to interoperability issues. There are over 70 international standards pertaining to RFID says Harris. In order for libraries to strategically integrate RFID the profession needs to think about ways that RFID can help us manage rights expression and to gather new information on how people actually use libraries (this did get my spidey privacy senses tingling). Overall Harris says the market is maturing and librarians will need to embrace the technology as it evolves and that groups such as LITA will play a key role in determining how it plays out. Our community needs to focus on the emerging standards.

Harris finished her presentation a little early and introduced a surprise speaker, Leif Anderson from the Danish National Library Authority. The Danes have been working on RFID in libraries for some years and have recently developed functional requirements for the use of the technology in Danish libraries. The Authority started this work by setting five objectives for RFID use:

1 – it must support interlibrary loan
2 – it should have a full standards-based interface to any integrated library system
3 – It should assure reliance of information from several sources
4 – it should use the information from current bar code systems
5 – it should comply with existing international standards

Based on this the Danish representatives to NISO set up a meeting and invited all printers in the Danish market to participate. They set up a working group of vendors which included 3M, Bibliotheca and several European and Danish vendors. They have been working for several years to figure out how they can meet the objectives. Their report detailing the technical specifications necessary for a vendor to meet the objectives will be released next month.

The next speaker was Vinod Chandra, CEO of VTLS. He discussed some implementation issues a library might face after choosing RFID and provided a glimpse of future trends. He went through the typical workflow of a conversion and illustrated some operational issues that librarians might encounter during the process: incremental implementation, minimizing expenses, check station failures, gate issues and privacy concerns. If a library does implement RFID incrementally (one branch or collection at a time) then the system must continue supporting bar codes. Use volunteers or purchase pre-tagged books to minimize labor costs of converting. Use a test suite for the SIP protocol during the initial implementation to ensure that the response between readers and tags and integrated library systems can reconnect in case of power failure. Discuss privacy issues with your constituency in order to educate users and avoid problems. In the future systems will be more affordable and there will continue being multiple vendors innovating quickly. Minimize your risk of obsolescence by ensuring your equipment interoperates with other systems and has backward compatibility. Chandra says another future trend will be RFID software which is hardware independent — it can work with all tags.

Shai Robkin of Integrated Technology Group discussed the “real world” of RFID by listing constraints to implementation — financial, physical, political, existing infrastructure, personnel — and suggesting questions librarians should ask themselves before beginning a conversion project. In the financial realm there is usually a separation between a library’s capital and operational budgets. A change in operational budgets might affect your ability to maintain RFID. In the physical realm do you have a high percentage of A/V in your collections? Metal causes interference for the radio signals and can hinder the effectiveness of your implementation. Also consider how much metal shelving you may have. In the political realm ask yourself if you have buy-in from all stake-holders. Ensure that your technical infrastructure the is capable of handling RFID. Is your integrated library system compatible with your RFID vendor? Robkin says that not all vendors implement the SIP protocol as its written. Finally, doing a conversion can be labor intensive. How will you staff it? You need to educate your staff as well as your constituents. How will you manage self-check stations? They will require some employee oversight during the first few months.

Lynne Jacobson discussed her library’s experience by outlining their decision for changing to RFID, explaining their vendor selection process, showing a video of their automatic sorting system in action (that was pretty darn nifty), and entertaining audience questions. We learned that her library had problems initially with jewel cases breaking in the sorting bins but using a stronger brand alleviated the issue.

The session ended with a presentation by Lawrence McCrank which rocked my socks. The man, as Michael Stephens is wont to say, “gets it.” I think he scared some of the more conservative members of the audience. Nancy John mentioned something about rabble-rousing and alternating between feeling excited and irritated by McCrank’s prophecies when she provided the post-speaker summary.

Rather than discuss the same ol’ same ‘ol this-is-how-RFID-works-and-this-is-how-we-done-good thing he talked about how to use RFID to be user directed instead of collection centered. McCrank has used something called immersion theory to design the library of the future and it’s all about the ubiquitous computing baby. He’s creating this visionary playground at Chicago State University but he was careful to let us know that political and economic reality enforces a great deal of compromise. The real deal won’t look exactly like the dream.

CSU is using the Pareto principle to their advantage. They have closed stacks utilizing an automated sorting and retrieval system (ASRS) where 80% of their lower circulating items reside. The 20% in more active use is retained on the shelves as a browsing collection. RFID provides a double layer of security for them because it’s used when an item leaves the retrieval system and once again when a patron checks it out.

McCrank says that RFID can be used as an integration point in the information environment. Using a smart card to gain access to the library can help mediate copyright and intellectual property issues. The smart card can retrain an individual’s preferences to make an entirely personalized library environment. Imagine that you and your card’o’customization enter the library with a backpack full of books you’re using for a research project. The card could signal the OPAC, retrieve the MARC heading and use the LCSH headings to create a metasearch that t navigates all of the library’s A&I databases, the OPAC, and recall all the necessary physical items from the ASRS.

I found myself intrigued despite the glaringly obvious privacy concerns with this scenario. McCrank also mentioned the possibilities of integrating course management software and e-reserves into the mix. This is consistent with the top technology trends — people aren’t going to come to the library web site to retrieve things, we’ll need to push content out where its needed.

Ultimately McCrank was not dismissive of the privacy issues but that is a sociopolitical issue which requires sociopolitical solutions. He asked the audience to deeply consider that the benefits of RFID may outweigh the drawbacks. Given that RFID will be included on everything from refrigerators and passports there may be bigger things to worry about than tracking books.

I’m still not convinced that the benefits will override the potential erosion of my civil liberties but McCrank made an appealing pitch by shifting the focus of RFID in libraries from collections to users. I do agree with McCrank when he says that in order to remain relevant librarians will have to accept that ubiquitous computing will be part and parcel of our environment. We need to come up with intelligent solutions to the problems so we can derive the advantages of RFID.

After an audience Q&A Nancy John summarized what the speakers said. In short: we learned about how RFID is used, the concerns, and the need for interoperability. Our colleagues in Europe are doing excellent work. We got practical answers to thorny questions about work flows and conversion. The real world does differ from the potential we see. We have lots of possibilities to consider but librarians are thoughtful in how they select RFID systems and will continue to keep alive the dialog about abuses.

Are digital libraries useful? Few evaluations have been made of current digital libraries. Lesk did a quick comparison of Google and some common scholarly digital resources by doing some sample searches. He found that Google does give more general things, but an undergraduate may actually prefer this. Google can do everything that a scholarly resource can do, though the content will be different. I am left wondering if this is really a bad thing that Google can answer people’s questions. Is it Google’s fault that they answer questions with seeming ease while it takes a library catalog or database much longer in a convoluted system?

The Million Book Project –
Problems:
People do not want to lend their items. It typically takes one year from start to finish.
Copyright restrictions – Lesk provided a URL, which I of course wrote down incorrectly. Oops.
Accessing the results is difficult
Coordination is bad resulting in duplicate scans
Cataloging – the people who scan the books are not really trained in OCLC

Lesk discussed Gorman’s quote from the LA Times (December 17, 2004) in which Gorman stated that online reading of texts is bad because people take things out of context and only read snippets instead of the entire body of work. Lesk made the point that people have always taken things out of context and the web does not make that truth any different. I think that some of Gorman’s views on scholarship are a bit old fashioned. When doing research, I often read snippets to find what I need and rarely read every publication on a subject before I consider myself learned in that subject. Call me crazy…

Browsing will work differently online then it does when people can simply go to a shelf. Currently, we have no technology that really solves this problem, but there have been some that have tried. Lesk displayed some different interfaces, but they are lacking in applicability that would make sense to all users.

Michael Lesk’s final word: The result of many books being online will not be that libraries close. There will always be a need for libraries.

I could not agree more.

Every once in a while I would jerk awake long enough to catch a bon mot or acute observation. Regarding the truism that monkeys on a keyboard could eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, Lesk drily noted, “The web has proven that this is not true.” His slides were both simple and entertaining, such as the photo of the flatbed scanner rigged as an overhead scanner using parts culled from book trucks. Lesk’s discussion of the Million Book digitization project sifted into my brain with the image of a swirling amalgam of digitized knowledge thickening the Googlescape with content goodness.

Lesk pointed out that preselection is expensive, while digital tools have enabled cost-effective post-coordination–a theme that first came up at this conference Friday at the OCLC “Long Tail” symposium: “As time goes on it is cheaper to collect but more expensive to select; it is cheaper to search and more expensive to organize.” Lesk’s comparisons of general databases and Google also matched my personal experience (and probably yours): “It is hard to find a query that the professional resources do well but that Google cannot do at all.” Google reins supreme in the area of basic FAQ-style coverage of many topics, such as the example Lesk used of “neural nets.”

However, the sleepmaster sucked me under for the last twenty minutes, so I only woke up for two last pronouncements that sparked my brain back into quotidian consciousness. Lesk, pondering the future of the library, stated that if an academic library’s collections were digitized, the “overlap” in collections would make the public library’s collection redundant. As much as I believe that digital content will change public libraries in deep and unpredictable ways, Lesk’s statement is not evidence-driven. Collection overlap between academic and public libraries is negligible, as well it should be considering the very different missions of the two types of libraries. When was the last time Yale had a Toddler Time?

Finally, Lesk wrapped up his presentation with a call for more and better user education. I nodded approvingly until he used the example of a woman he had just heard on a panel who needed help playing an audiobook on her Treo. Wait, I thought, as people whipped around to stare in my direction, that’s me! But he fundamentally misunderstood my point at the Trends panel: I don’t need “help” playing an Overdrive audiobook on my Treo, at least not the way he means. I know exactly why I can’t play an Overdrive audiobook (paid for, as citizens are wont to say, with My Tax Dollars) on my Treo: it’s due to the complicated Digital Rights Management environment where Overdrive encrypts its books with Windows authentication so stringent that though I can physically move the Overdrive WMA file to my Treo’s memory card, I can’t play the file–and that’s entirely intentional. The file won’t even play through PTunes, a commercial sound Palm platform player that supports Windows files.

But I can’t blame Overdrive or the other big library ebook vendor, Recorded Books. Talk to the ebook vendors–and I have–and you find that if you want to vend ebooks you are in a hot-coal environment where publishers are antsy about piracy–forcing vendors to use draconian DRM if they want high-interest content–while a potentially big contender such as Apple is unwilling to play nice because it don’t want anything threatening its device-dependent cash cow, the iPod. Microsoft, to give the devil its due, is generous with its licensing, and has been a major enabler of ebook formats. In all cases, the imperative appears to be commercial.

Technically speaking, I can consider this whole mishagosh censorship and route around it. I can rip Overdrive WMA files to CD and then reimport them into Real or iTunes. So yes, I can play Overdrive files on my Treo—I’m just not supposed to. Nor is my local public library encouraged to tell me to subvert Overdrive’s DRM. And in the end, before I bother with all that I’ll download some of my favorite podcasts onto my Treo, tuck my Bluetooth earphone behind my ear, and enjoy the kind of information that really does want to be free.

It’s hard to sum up a presentation I largely slept through, but as I stood in the inevitable long line at the fifth-floor women’s room, I reflected that what I gleaned most from the President’s Program was a glimpse (however staccato) into a mass digitization project where out-of-copy books are being converted into online content goodness. It was a halcyon, entertaining, if mildly ivory-tower escape from messier questions of access, authentication, competing standards, and why I can check out a book I can’t–in the legal, not technical sense–listen to.

The standard is complicated and Robert Buckley’s description was very technical. He did a good job, though, explaining a complex open standard. The take away point about JP2 is that it uses an arrangement of packets to allow much greater flexibility in how images are used. For instance, when a thumbnail is desired, an image processor only needs to select a small group of packets in the jp2 file to create the thumbnail (rather than having to access the whole image to generate a thumbnail).

The same is true for generating images of higher or lower quality (a lower quality version of the image is retrieved by accessing the right combination of packets). The JP2 standard also supports ROI (regions of interest). An example use for this would be if someone wants to enlarge just a small part of a picture. Using a drawing tool, a random region in the JP2 could be selected and enlarged. This JP2 feature allows for great flexibility when navigating and exploring a complex image.

Another feature of JP2 is its ability to losslessly compress images. Unlike the original JPEG standard, whose compression will lose data, JP2 images can be compressed without losing any image quality. Buckley explained JP2 compression takes into consideration the types of content in an image. If a JP2 image contains text, a color image, and a black and white image, each content type is recognized and compressed differently. Different layers in each of those content types are also supported.

During the course of Buckley’s presentation, he explained the structure of a JP2 file. The jp2 “box stack” contains six main components: jp2 signature, file type, header, codestream, XML metadata, UUID. The file type identifies the JP2 version and profile. The header contains the compression type and color palette. The codestream part of the box stack contains the image data. The XML metadata secton allows any type of XML metadata to be stored in the image.

Whether an XML metadata section is useful to the library community remains a question in my mind. We have complex metadata management systems and we do a good job of managing that information over time. Putting this information in the image itself would be like putting the metadata associated with a digital copy of a book into the copy. I can see it as useful for conveying user supplied metadata, before it has been cataloged, or as a place to put the most recent version of the metadata before sharing the image, but I don’t see a reason for moving image metadata out of our controlled, and managed, metadata environments.

Next, there were presentations by three JP2 vendors. While, of course, they would like to sell their products, the presentations didn’t have to feel of being sales pitches. The LuraTech vendor showed many different sites using JP2 in their digital projects (showing what could be done with the JP2 standard). The Aware representative demonstrated the ability to select regions of interest within an image and also showed examples from a site using the Aware product.

One key point that was reiterated by the vendors was that they would like input from the library community about the types of products that we want. If there are features that would be useful to us as a community, we should let them know. One person from the audience stated that he would like more open source products. It was mentioned that some JP2 open source products exist, but these are mostly just the encoding/decoding tools. For image servers, only commercial ones exist.

The last vendor was a new company, SandCodex. Their representative explained that their focus was on the presentation of JP2 images (they don’t deal with the encoding/decoding issues like the other vendors). He showed a very impressive demonstration of their product that allows one to zoom in from viewing a large collection of images into a particular region of interest in a single image. This product is not currently on the market though. It also, as I found out later on their website, requires IE (has an ActiveX dependency). A future Mac version is planned, but there is no mention of a version for Linux.

One thing I noted from the vendor presentations was that the most visually impressive demonstrations were using client side applications. The other alternative, also demonstrated by the vendors, is to provide the same functionality, but with less interactivity, in the browser itself (with no plugins). I would be curious to learn how/if more interactivity might be brought to online JP2 interfaces without requiring plugin dependencies.

The next part of the session was the panel of practitioners. Wangyal Shawa from Princeton University and Patrick McGlamery from the University of Connecticut showed projects that have been using JP2 in production. There was also a video presentation of a JP2/annotation protoype that looked very interesting. The protype, Vannotea, uses the annotea protocol from the W3C.

Wangyal Shawa, from Princeton, demonstrated layering GIS information over JP2 images to show, as an example, the Princeton area and its development over time. These images can be mapped onto larger GIS/JP2 images using embedded GIS data. Wangyal also explained the workflow involved with associating metadata with images, and moving both into production; he showed system architecture diagrams of his current JP2 system and diagrams of changes illustrating changes he would like to make.

Patrick McGlamery explained that they were in the process of moving several of their MrSid image projects into JP2. He talked about their Olson Collection project and their upcoming project, Connecticut History Online. Notably, UConn has also linked their image projects to their Voyager catalog so that links in the catalog take the patron directly to the image collection. There are also two other collections at UConn that are in the process of moving over to using JP2.

Overall, the session on JP2 was very technical but also very informative. It was interesting to hear what libraries are doing with JP2 and to learn about the advantages that JP2 offers over other image formats. There is a JP2 interest group for those in the library community interested in learning more. Also, as one of the vendors recommended, it would also be good for libraries to let the JP2 community know what we want from the standard. This, reportedly, can be done at the JP2 Info site.

I was so into what Siva was saying I forgot to take notes, my apologies. Here are the highlights that made it into my notes (busy day has smushed out most of the specifics I’m sorry to say – hopefully I’ll be able to channel it all back out of my subconscious in a week or so)

Siva spoke to the program title, which was developed before he was the speaker (he said he was happy to do so). Funny, but great.

He started off about how today was a surreal day to be discussing Google and it’s potential future since he/we expect to hear a decision from SCotUS tommorrow (Monday, 6.27.05) on the MGM v Grokkster case.

So: Siva starts out after the above caveat: “There is no functional diference between Grokkster and Google.” How’s that for a stunner? I missed a bit as I quickly pondered this & found that I agree.

I tuned back in just in time to get this: “there is one difference; Grokkster *doesn’t* copy, Google *does*” (regarding Google Print – which Siva kept calling “Google Library”), intersting and true.

The SCotUS decision will be a watershed moment (I’m not sure, now, which way I hope they decide). Deciding for Grokkster means probable copyright meltdown & hurried, suboptimal fix, deciding for MGM means the bright future envisioned and hoped for by many will be a wasteland.

3 big worries about Google Print:
Privacy (Google, unlike libraries, has no ethical constraints against sharing/giving access to reading/searching habits)
Privatization (See Brewster Kahle’s 3 models regarding this)
Property (which means a copyright meltdown is possible – which would be a bad thing – libraries would likely *not* have a seat at the table)

I saw several LITAns there, hopefully they can/will fill out my sketchy notes in the comments (or post a better summary, please!)

OITP Sonsors this Award, named for the late L. Ray Patterson, a reknown fighter for Fair Use and using Copyright for the public’s interest.

This (the inagural) year’s recipient is Professor Kenneth Crews of IUPUI’s Copyright Management Center (among many other affiliations).

Congratulations to Professor Crews on an honor well deserved!

Related link:
ALA Press Release

By its very title it assumes an us-vs-them mentality between systems and public services and that "us" is the reference librarians while "they" are the IT staff.

It became apparent that the IT staff was considered to include all systems librarians, IS managers, and tech support crew. The systems people on the panel seemed to spend a lot of their time earnestly explaining how they’re really trying to help the librarians do their jobs.

The speakers were:

• Craig Davis, Director of Adult Services, Chicago Public Library
• Karim Adib, Director of Library Automation, Chicago Public Library
• Dennis Newborn, Head of Library Systems, West Virginia University Libraries
• Mary Ellen Spencer, Head of Research and Reference Services, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries

Craig joined CPL as manager of the then-new Near North branch, which served a diverse population from Cabrini-Green and Gold Coast areas of Chicago [i.e., these are polar opposites on the income spectrum]. Internet computers were a novelty for both patrons and staff, and "tedious signup procedures became migraine headaches."

Tech support was available only by calling in from one of 79 branches to the central library, running back to the computer to try a suggested fix, running back to the phone to report the results, and then if the problem continued, waiting for technical staff to arrive. Sounding a theme repeated through the program, Craig said there was a "need for librarians to be librarians and not technicians."

The big advantage of getting Karim on board at the library was his success in meeting that need. There is a new automated signup system. PCs at the library now seem to fix themselves. "We’re not slaves to the technology any more."

Karim started off by quoting a Gates Foundation study’s statistics: four years ago 20.9% of all library locations offered public computers; now 98.9% do. Chicago Public Library was adding PCs at a huge rate, trying to bridge the digital divide.

But this was changing the very nature of the service. The challenge was to return the libraries to library service. At the same time, the information services department was unable to do information services as they were totally occupied just fixing PCs.

Step 1 when he arrived was the "emperor has no clothes" exercise: convincing branch staff to say things were broken when they were broken. Staff had developed a jaded attitude about technology, but "if it’s really working, you don’t see it as technology, you see it as a useful tool."

Step 2 was to invest an enormous amount of money in the network, in PC management software, and in new equipment. Public stations with no floppy or CD drives meant fewer components to break; remote diagnostic capability meant no more staying on the phone with IS to troubleshoot.

IS was then able to develop enabling software such as a fill-in form on the intranet that lets people who maintain content post it on the web. Karim’s approach to selecting projects for automation: If the human element wastes people time and doesn’t add value, automate it. If the human element adds value — e.g., the reference interview — refuse to automate it.

Dennis asked, about the computers in the university library, "Whose computers are these anyway?" The obvious answer, he said, was that they’re the university’s [I take this to mean, they don't "belong" to either IT or to the library staff/patrons].

In the past 5 years there’s been an explosion of networked computers including wireless networks and a tenfold increase in departmental PCs. Attacks from the outside are constant: 7,000 viruses and crack attempts counted in just a month. These security woes used to "take computers away" from the librarians so they couldn’t do their job.

A major campuswide network and computer security campaign virtually eliminated this problem. Part of this project was a standardized PC image for the staff. I got the sense that people didn’t much like that, and Dennis was explaining why it is that the standard image was helpful.

He said there was earlier a tension between technical services and public services; now it seems like that has turned into a tension between IT and public services.

Mary Ellen answered Dennis’ question differently. "Whose computers are these?" – "They’re the users’." She then addressed these points:

Why do we end up with this pushmi-pullyu of IT vs. public services?

• Security focus vs. access focus
• Need for standardization on systems side can hinder public services’ desire to create customized information services and to use their creativity
• Technical planning not intertwined with planning of new services
• "Tremendous learning curve" for employees — but new hires bring fluency in technology

How do we address it?

• Build relationships with IT staff.
• Public services: reach out to IT.
• Public services: focus on big picture. The very attention to detail that makes you a good researcher can keep you from appreciating/participating in useful projects
• IT: listen to the reference librarian’s random anecdotes. They are the usability test.

The most interesting points from the Q & A and subsequent conversations after the program:

• It was news to the moderator that advances in technology (self-diagnostic and remote diagnostic on PC) might actually solve problems that it was earlier seen to create
• CPL operating on a $14 million technology budget this year as part of a 5-year plan; their expenses on technology are justified and budgeted years in advance
• Warning from Dennis on any arrangement where the IT staff is not in daily contact with the library staff, preferably have separate library systems office
• Need for a translator between reference librarians and IT
• Useful for librarian to find out information needs of IT staff and meet them
• The speed of technology change for existing staff has been disorienting and brutal over the past 5 – 10 years, but seems to be calming down now
• Trust is developed by working together; it really depends on the people
• Part of the strain is the line of angry patrons forming at the reference desk when "the information is stuck in the computer" and it’s human nature to shift the blame to IT rather than say We, the Library, have a problem right now answering your questions

Many in the room seemed to share the assumption that computer services and applications are support tools for public services – not in themselves public services. Is this an assumption shared by most reference staff? Is it an assumption that needs to change, or not?

Speakers:

• Peter Webster, St. Mary’s University
• Marvin Pollard, California State University
• Robert Sathrum, Humboldt State University
• Joseph Fisher, Boston Public Library

Peter Webster led off the panel with an overview of the basics of federated searching.

First he defined the concept:

• Too @#& many interfaces
• “One stop shopping”
• “Google like searching”
• Silo busting
• Cross-file searching

He reminded us that cross-file searching isn’t really a new idea. Remember Dialog? And think of Ovid and FirstSearch. If you buy all your databases from one aggregator, you have it now.

Next he listed the current array of tools:

• WebFeat “the original federated search” and patent holder
• Muse Global “the World’s leading federated search tool” claim they began the company in 1997, predating WebFeat
• CSA Multisearch
• Serials Solutions Central Search
• Ovid Search Solver (Muse Global)

Most ILS’s now offer a federated search tool:

• Ex Libris Metalib
• Sirsi Single search (Muse Global)
• Endeavor (Muse Global)
• Innovative (Muse Global)

Comments:

Should federated searching be patentable?

Practically all libraries are automated, so the ILS vendors have to keep adding new features and services to generate new revenue stream. Federated search is one of the current hot examples.

What’s “under the hood” of a federated search tool?

• Custom “targets” / “database translators” / “Source packages”
• You have to translate for each individual database or vendor
• HTML, Z39.50 (known to be slow with more than 10 different targest) , XML, SQL
  OAI-PMH, API programming
• Screen scraping

Search issues:

• Target selection (should you include bib records for books along with virtual content in the same search)
• Results sort order (first back? Not good)
• Deduplicating
• Search feature variability

In a federated search environment, searches are generally only as good as the lowest common denominator, which means you’re often reduced to keyword searching, losing functionality, especially from specialized databases. Search vendors working on this all the time and making improvements, but current offerings still have a long way to go.

What does the future hold?

• Even better E-content integration
• We won’t be buying separate tools to bolt on top of our existing content for long
• Most database providers will be providing XML search gateways and API’s, so as to provide cross functionality between databases.

Examples of current initiatives to watch:

• Crossref Search Pilot
• NISO Metasearch Initiative — TG3 (We’re still a long way from standards but they will come)
• Ontario Scholar’s Portal, CSA’s interface to search all kinds of content
• Google Scholar (the 5000 pound gorilla)

Future trends:

• Rapid change
• More standardized e-content searches and interfaces
• Simple and diverse cross-search and fed search options
• Near universally web-searchable e-content indexing

Final comment:
Soon you may not need a federated search tool. In a few years you may be able to link at least some databases without any extra expense or effort via built-in XML, API’s and the like.

Second Speaker:

Marvin Pollard began by briefly detailing the history of federated search efforts in the California State University system. They started trying to build a system back in 1997 when there weren’t any off the shelf applications. Currently they are using MetaLib.

Major challenges have included

• User interface design
• Authentication across 23 institutions
• Configuring searchable resources for 23 institutions
• Promoting federated searching to librarians

They created a User Services Task Force. Members included:

• CSU public service librarians with years of experience designing library web sites
• People with information competence expertise
• The team was supported by programmers with expertise in web development

What do users want? Full text NOW

Federated search is only half the solution. Open URL link resolution is the other half. Document delivery is made available when full text is not.

The Cal State project had two initial goals:

1. Searching multiple databases simultaneously
2. Searching different databases individually, but using the same interface for each

After reviewing all of the currently available applications, Cal State chose MetaLib.

According to Jakob Nielsen’s May 9 Alertbox , user mental models for search are getting firmer. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing.

As Pollard succinctly put it, a user interface designed by committee will not be loved by anyone. In the Cal State federated search project, responsibilities are divided. The Chancellor’s office handles such responsibilities as:

• Licensing for applications
• Installing upgrades and updates
• System set up and troubleshooting
• Analyzing and resolving OpenURL issues
• Providing first line support and training
• Liaison with vendor for application support

The individual CSU libraries are responsible for aspects such as:

• Customizing style sheets and banners (they can do it themselves or have the Chancellor’s office do it to their specification)
• Configure database categories & types
• Assign databases/resources to categories
• Integrate MetaLib into library services
• Include MetaLib in bibliographic instructions

The Cal State system has one MetaLib server, running 23 instances. Each library can administer their own instance, localizing the knowledgebase to their own resources.

The system provides a Google-like search capability, can dedupe and sort the results by year or by date. A search form that includes database descriptions has also been implemented. The system includes a “find journal” component using SFX which is routed through the link resolver. Users can created their own “My Databases” page replete with alerts, saved searches, journal lists, database lists, and the like.

System development is now moving toward the use of Web API’s. Work remaining to be done includes:

• Continue refining the user interface
• Extend federated search capabilities
• Promote the idea of federated searching
• Integrate with course management systems on campus

Third Speaker:

Robert Sathrum of Humboldt State University provided a closer look at how an individual library within the Cal State system has implemented the Cal State product. Some of the issues that had to be addressed included basic organization of the resources to be included:

• Which databases should be included?
• How many categories should there be?
• Who would make these decisions?

It was hoped that subject librarians would assist in this process. About half actually did so. After conducting user surveys, they ended up with 10 broad subject categories, with a maximum of 8 resources under each.

Each database configuration has to be tweaked for optimum search functionality and display.

Setup issues include:

• How many resources to search at once
• Effects on performance, and on vendor servers
• Effect on licenses and costs (especially if you are paying on a per search cost, or have licensed a limited number of simultaneous users)
• User authentication/authorization

How do you integrate federated search into your library’s web site? Some of the options include:

• Wait for “perfect” system (you may be waiting a LONG time)
• Fully replace existing tools
• Incorporate into the site as an additional 51st tool

Fourth Speaker:

Finally, Joseph Fisher of the Boston Public Library presented a case study of using federated searching in a large public library setting. Unfortunately, my notes from this section of the program did not transfer from my handheld to my laptop when I got back to my hotel, and my memory is not accurate enough to reconstruct them at this point.

A brief question and answer session followed the formal presentations. All of the presentation slides will be placed on the LITA web site after the conference.

This program was a discussion of the updated RUSA Guidelines by a panel consisting of Joe Janes (associate professor at the University of Washington iSchool), Jana Ronan (librarian at the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida), Dave Tyckoson (librarian at California State University – Fresno Libraries), and Jo Bell Whitlatch (associate dean of San Jose State University Library). The panel discussed remote reference, staff training, and staff evaluation implications of the provisions of the 2004 update.

The members of the panel seemed to agree that the goals and objectives for remote reference are no different from those for face-to-face reference. The same behaviors are desired, but new skills may need to be learned to accomplish the same results – reference interviews in which the librarians satisfy their clients’ information needs.

Some observed problems stem not from the new technologies or from the behavioral guidelines, but from librarians failure to apply the guidelines. Whitlatch said that transcripts of co-browsing reference and instant message reference show librarians forgetting the niceties in their rush to try to answer the questions. They forget to identify themselves, restate the questions, tell clients what they are doing, and ask follow-up questions. Janes reported that when he used co-browsing reference, librarians pushed him new pages without asking if he was finished with the old ones. The librarians were not paying much attention to him.

Tyckoson said that librarians have not worked out their remote reference behaviors. In a light moment, he asked us what Alexander Graham Bell first recommended as the response to a telephone call. Janes knew the answer was not “Hello.” It was “Ahoy!” Librarians are like Bell, still seeking the proper responses. They have not yet adapted to instant message culture.

One of the more interesting discussions of the program dealt with the importance of accuracy, which has less emphasis in the new document. The panel said that the new thinking is that many questions have no right answers. Negotiating questions, helping the clients better understand their questions and information needs, and giving them information to make decisions will better satisfy clients than giving them accurate answers.

Approachability was discussed. In remote reference service, the key is letting the library users know the service exists. According to Ronan, academic and public libraries must market constantly to ever changing communities. Janes recommends placing links to services on non-library sites, such as local government, historical society, and other organization websites.

Roving was discussed late in the program. Librarians who are providing non-desk bound reference must be easily identifiable for clients to trust them. The panel agreed roving as defined in the guidelines is a necessity. California State University – Fresno Libraries are planning to free up the clients as well as the librarians, replacing all stationary computers with laptops.

Read these guidelines at http://www.ala.org/ala/rusa/rusaprotools/referenceguide/guidelinesbehavioral.htm.

Met the Curmudgeony Librarian in person here. He’s the one responsible for the T-shirt I’ve been wearing today.

I’ve collected URLs of Blogs I Should Check from the badges here.

This reminds me of the phenomenon of online groups back in the glory days of Compuserve and other 80′s dialup services, where after participating in chat rooms for months, the members would arrange an actual FTF at someone’s house and people would fly in from around the country to meet in person. Of course we have the technology now to post our photos on our blogs so people will know what we look like ahead of time, but we don’t do that. The more things change …

Back at the hotel:
Having recently moved again I couldn’t find my battery recharger before ALA. As a result, my camera batteries ran out after I took bloggercon photos and before I could post them here. Mission tomorrow: get a flashing Google button from the Google booth get batteries.

Thank you to the OCLC and WebJunction and BlogJunction crew. It was nice to meet you and I appreciated the veggies and the swag (the same orange beach bag mentioned in someone else’s previous post) and most of all, the opportunity to meet fellow litabloggers!

Finally, the pictures

Here’s WebJunction!

Munchies galore.

Bloggers.

Would you believe … more bloggers?

It’s All Good!

Sign in planter seen on exiting the hotel

Sally McCallum from LC was the first speaker, and she started by talking about XML in general, characterizing it as “just another data structure.” She pointed out that XML has more capability for hierarchy than MARC21, and noted that this could be either good or bad. She briefly discussed the place of XML schemas in the definition of tags and structure.

After a rapid fire review of why we want to do XML at all, Sally went over what METS was (which I suspect was a bit confusing for the uninitiated), and talked about other new XML-based metadata formats for rights, preservation, and technical information, as well as MARCXML, as a precursor to MODS and MADS. [It was a very quick overview, and probably difficult to digest for the uninitiated (way too many acronyms, for one thing)—a handout with the acronyms explained might have been useful.]

Sally finally moved on to MADS, and described the structure and tags for the authority structures within MADS. Top level tags are authority, related and variant and each has the same substructure. She also described the different attributes for the related and variant terms, most of which seem to be intended to keep intact most of the MARC21 authority structures.

Other elements have been added to accommodate other communities, and Sally explained affiliation and fieldOfActivity and their potential uses, even when (as in the case of affiliation) LC and the library community have no history or intent to populate or use the information.

Sally presented the change from numeric to English tags as a positive move, but clearly there is an issue with internationalization in this approach. She suggested that others could substitute different language tags and make transformations—this strikes me as a very problematic assumption—much cleaner perhaps to keep the numerics and substitute appropriate language names within a user interface.

Several MADS features were cited, among them linking capabilities and special attributes available for all elements (such as language and script). Sally invited attendees to participate in the MADS development (carried out on the MODS mailing list). In response to questions, she was very reluctant to predict how the two formats would be used after an “experimental” period.

Second speaker was Diane Boehr, from NLM, who described NLM’s planned exposure of their authority files in XML. NLM needed the capability to create a centralized, shared authority file for some of their web-based products. This project involved only names, not subjects (those are dealt with by their MeSH section), using their Voyager authority file as their central repository.

Interestingly, though this was a centralized file, not all participants were required to use the same content guidelines (e.g, AACR2), and they chose to perceive the variations as a way to enrich their cross-reference structure. They developed a DTD to enable this, which included different reference structures and accommodated different preferences and practices across NLM projects.

As a NACO participant, NLM still needed to pay attention to AACR2 and MARC21 when redistributing information. They used a combination of $8, a $0[initials], a $9 N value and some local heading tags to manage these variant needs and to suppress NACO distribution for information that was not NACO compliant. She showed some examples of this approach that had the interesting effect of reinforcing the reality that MARC21 is still both standard and flexible.

The NLM DTD did not use MADS because they needed to match the attributes of their bibliographic DTD and did not require direct correlation with every MARC field. They would like to go to XML schemas but are not ready to do so because of their legacy of DTD use.

Diane gave extensive explanations (rather too extensive for my tastes, but I can’t speak for the rest of the audience!) of the other characteristics of their work, which seems primarily oriented towards controlling output for various purposes. [Note for subsequent programs: XML on the screen is virtually useless—please provide handouts if you need to discuss details!]

Diane cites the primary advantages of their shared authority system as improved quality control and the ability to expose multiple, customizable outputs. She also asserted that their approach to multiple languages as better than the multiple, linked authorities approach used by MARC21 (as an example the way the Canadians use French and English separate records).

Louisa Kwok, the third speaker, discussed the work at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Library to define an XML-based schema to mark up multi-lingual and multi-script attributes of name information. Their implementation was intended to deal with the problem of identifying Chinese authors using the romanized forms of names used in traditional authority records.

She differentiated between name access control and authority control—which she defined as the difference in designating an authorized form and providing extensive, enriched support for identification of name usage. She further explained a “person model” based on FRBR: Person→Name→Name form. Variations in name form can be due to language, script or Romanization scheme, but all are used to facilitate access to the person and his or her works. The XML format is based on MARCXML (not MADS). Sadly, too many of her examples were unviewable from the audience—again, handouts would have been extremely helpful. She also demonstrated (too much, in my opinion) the workflow and processes for enhancing regular authority records to create the Name Access Control records. The room cleared out a bit after her presentation, even before a stretch break was declared.

Kevin Clarke, fourth speaker, began personfully with an explanation of goals for the XOBIS program. This project has attempted to combine the schemas for bibliographic and authority data, rather than separate them, relying on reusable components. According to the program announcement, “XOBIS hopes to foster the use of traditional library metadata in the digital realm,” though they’ve chosen to do so by using very different. As an example “Being” is used to describe “Specific identities of tangible or intangible beings (living or dead), including personifications.” Thank goodness we’re not losing track of those personifications!

Interestingly, in the midst of this differently modeled and denominated structure remains the “main entry,” presumably for the purpose of being able to map back to the old world. Clarke sees relationships (a big part of XOBIS) as a “growth industry” for catalogers, since these relationships are hard for machines to do well.

“What about the billion or so records that would have to be converted?” asks Clarke, rhetorically. A big job, he admits, and the audience tittered. A big job, indeed, and its difficult to see where the big payoff would occur.

Thom Hickey, the fifth speaker (oh dear, is this fair, to be the fifth of six on a Sunday afternoon?), discussed OCLC’s web service experiments with authority control. Thom first demonstrated an authority control component built for a DSpace implementation, which was limited in scope but pointed out the need for changes in the software to accommodate authorized forms. The service needs to be moved to standard protocols, ranking should be improved, it now links to OCLC rather than LC, and the files are not complete. Attention also needs to be paid to sustainability questions for what is now a free, though researchy, service.

Most valuable of Thom’s points were where a cool demonstration gave way to discussion of what’s still needed for persistent, useful services for authority data—things like free resolution services, persistent identifiers, and competent middleware. He also discussed the gaps in the traditional authority files themselves, which make support for institutional repositories and international libraries spotty.

There were also some tantalizing bits on the Virtual International Authority File and the OPAC Network In Europe Shared Authority Control, though Thom’s approach was at such a different level from the previous speakers that it was difficult to relate his points to their actual implementations.

Joanna Pong was the final speaker, describing the HKCAN, a cooperative project of seven academic libraries in Hong Kong, implementing an approach to the language, script and Romanization issues for Chinese names. Joanna launched quickly into slides with complex authority record representations, testing the focus and stamina of the audience. I admit that by that time my attention had flagged, and her soft, liltingly accented but speedy delivery made her difficult to follow, unless she was reading the slides. Of all the presentations, this one suffered from an excess of “how-we-did-it-good” without much reference to other approaches, including that of the other Hong Kong library presented earlier in the afternoon.

The IG should be commended for putting together such a rich and interesting program, but flogged gently with a wet issue of Cognotes for cramming six speakers into three hours with no chance for any discussion or even an opportunity for the speakers to ask questions of one another (often a good way to bring up good questions when the room is too large for good participation).

Diane Hillmann
Dih1@cornell.edu

Talk at my table began with a resounding agreement on the importance of project planning. Organizational issues were zeroed in on, and thoughts/ideas/potential solutions shared in response to questions like:

Participants also found value in connecting with colleagues and sharing practical knowledge on the technical issues surrounding metadata standards, software alternatives, and institutional repositories for digital thesis and dissertations. In the near future, notes from these table talks will be posted on the DLTIG website: http://www.ala.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/diglibtech/digitallibrary.htm

For the Pitt Crew from the University of Pittsburgh, pictured here prepping carts for the event, all eyes are on first prize- a full-sized gold book cart from sponsor Demco. Numerous members have been quoted saying, “Burn rubber, not books!” and “Ohmygod, did we remember the CD?” before breaking into spontaneous dance steps.

Here in Chicago and need a break from pre-planned conference sessions? Come over to the North Exhibit Hall Lobby at the McCormick Place Convention Center, 1:30-3:30 pm and cheer on your favorite team!

The User

The user quickly took center stage in this discussion about the usability of library web pages, online catalogs and search protocols. “People don’t read, they scan,” said Frank Cervone, and user interfaces must be designed accordingly.

And, noted Steve DiDomenico, if the students and faculty you’re surveying are not retrieving the desired results, “something is wrong with the site, not the person.” This point provoked laughter from the crowd and hinted, once again, that librarians need to remember that the digital interfaces we design are not for us, but instead the patron who wants the information they need in a quick, easy and accurate manner.

“All good software needs a good interface,” stated Mike Visser, Endeavor Product Manager, who sees usability testing as a cycle:

Understand -> Design -> Evaluate

Which leads us to what libraries like those at Northwestern University are doing…

The Libraries

Active maintenance of an ongoing culture of assessment is key. Such practices enable an institution to remain relevant and meet their users’ needs. But, as one audience member questioned, how much does incorporating usability studies cost in terms of time, resources, and $$$? With an institutional shift in priorities recognizing the importance of such studies, Frank says, these factors will not be barriers.

The Northwestern library web site- with changes implemented based on a series of comprehensive usability studies discussed by Frank Cervone, Steve DiDomenico and Jeannette Moss- will be well-worth checking out once it’s up and running: http://www.library.northwestern.edu

What you see will not be a final product; this digital interface is designed for change.

Deborah Jacobs of the Seattle Public Library reported that the new central library in her city is a big success. The press is positive, the staff is pleased, and citizens and tourists are flocking to the building. Usage statistics are way up. Jacobs credits smooth workflow, innovative technology, and environmentally friendly design. City officials are pleased by increased interest in land development around the library, and nearby restaurants have increased their evening hours to accommodate library users. It is estimated that the library has brought $16 million in tourist revenue to the city.

In some ways Seattle Public’s central library became more like smaller libraries. Jacobs reported that all the nonfiction collection was put into one Dewey number order, eliminating all the subject libraries. Unlike more traditional libraries, many of the desks have been eliminated. Reference librarians use small wireless communicators to network with subject specialists in the building in order to direct clients to the best librarian for their information needs.

Much is changing at the Queens Public Library. Peter Magnini showed plans for redesigned branches and a new children’s library, as well as mini-branches in train stations, the city’s museums, and even in new residential buildings. Spreading the library across the entire city is a goal, as is partnering with public and private institutions.

The redesigned branches all have RFID, self-checkout, and wireless Internet. Most public service desks have been eliminated, allowing the staff to mingle better with the library users. The new children’s library (in development) will mix museum displays, library materials, and advanced computing stations.

Architects Jeffrey Hoover and Elizabeth Martin continued the eliminate-the-desk theme, showing slides of libraries designed as learning commons and mixing circles, where there are no barriers between librarians and library users. RFID and self-checkout are again standard features. They also showed flat screened catalogs built into library shelving end panels. The pair also emphasized the area around the library building, recommending reading gardens and shady story time courts. Do everything possible to draw people to the library was their mantra.

Sara Randall from University of Rochester opened the program by giving us the definition of Web Services and its components. She showed Rochester’s CUIPID (Catalog User Interface Platform for Iterative Development) project that implements an XML-based library catalog with Google-like “did you mean” spell checking. She emphasized that web services are important to promote interoperability, including support for legacy applications and just-in-time integration.

Eric Lease Morgan followed up with a more elaborate definition of the service, some simple hands-on examples, and several web services projects such as OAI-PMH, the WordNet thesaurus project from Princeton, Google Maps, Weather Channel on the desktop, and “semi web services” of integrating MyLibrary content into Notre Dame’s campus portal. He also emphasized the need to start learning XML and embracing web services especially since many users prefer accessing library resources through the Internet.

Two case studies were then presented. Jeremy Frumkin from Oregon State discussed the OCKHAM Initiative project, a collaboration between Oregon State, Notre Dame, Emory, and Virginia Tech. Digital Library Services Registry (DLSR) enables easy advertising and discovery of digital library services by using a P2P network. Harvest-to-Query Service (H2Q) is a method for enabling any OAI-PMH available collection to be Z39.50 available. More info on http://ockham.org.

Diane Vizine-Goetz from OCLC discussed their Library of Congress Controlled Vocabulary project, a service that checks the name against the Library of Congress authority file. Another project presented was Terminology Services that can be delivered through MS Office 2003 Research Task pane. The goal of this project is to ”make controlled vocabularies more accessible to people and computer applications.” This service should be available for public in July.

From vendors’ perspective, Carl Grant represents Vendor Initiative for Enabling Web Services (VIEWS), an effort by vendors to enable interoperability in corporation with NISO. The initiative is hopefully to bring a win-win situation for the libraries as well as the vendors to achieve the optimal service. Read June 15th issue of the Library Journal on library automation (The Dis-Integrating World of Library Automation) about his thoughts on the service.

If it weren’t for Heidi I know I wouldn’t be sitting here live-blogging the Opening General Session, because my brain wanted to be here but my body was telling me otherwise. “Go to the hotel bar and get a glass of wine,” my feet were saying, even though my mind said “But it’s BARACK, and don’t you want to say someday you remember when President Obama spoke to ALA?”

Time for a little help from my friends. With Heidi’s encouragement, just a cab ride later we were in the huge cave of the McCormick’s North Hall, soaking up the mounting excitement and basking in Mayor Daley’s library-uxurious comments (“The federal government should not interfere with libraries. The federal government should be helping libraries!”).

The Senator is up on the stage now. He’s cracking jokes about being a rambunctious kid who had to be given “time outs” from the library, a much better way to warm up this crowd than the usual “libraries meant everything to me” formulas we typically hear from speakers from outside our profession. He then talks about intellectual freedom, referring to authoritarians who want to “control the word,” and now he’s being frank about the attempts to suppress information about evolution and global warming. The crowd cheers when he says, “Our liberty depends on our ability to access the truth.”

Now he is talking about the importance of libraries in his life, but it’s concrete and fresh: talking about the way libraries were a comfort to him as a youth when he was “lost and confused.”

He says to us that we’ve been there to be “full-time defenders” of intellectual freedom, and he says in turn he’s worked to protect us so that we have a Patriot Act that helps us catch terrorists but doesn’t trample on our freedoms. He emphasizes that this is not an either/or proposition: we can fight terrorism while protecting the freedoms we fought for in the first place.

On to literacy and reading. “Literacy is the most basic currency of the knowledge economy we’re entering today.” He points out that in old times, an education wasn’t absolutely essential to make a decent living, but those days are gone. Now he’s back on the need for reading. “How can we send our children out into the world when they’re only reading at the fourth grade level?” Kids aren’t served by high schools that close at 1:30 because they don’t have the funding to stay open later. Kids need early education so they are not behind the first day they start school.

We’ve had some great Opening General Session speakers during my 13 years in ALA, but Barack Obama came here, spoke our language, showed he understood our values, thanked us for our work, and promised to continue supporting us. He’s my “patriot act.”

Just when I think the room can not get any more packed, twenty people walk in the door. Sharon and I guard our space by the plugs in the back like librarians hyped on coffee.

The Northwestern group speaks first:
Northwestern redesigned their site about five years ago and they found through surveys and interactions that their patrons were currently frustrated with accessibility issues, so they did usability testing to find what actually works and what does not. They asked a random sample of students to complete particular tasks on their website and they recorded the computer screen during the ineraction, which they showed during the presentation. It was enlightening to see the common mistakes that users make on what seems to us to be a very explanatory web site. They are mistakes that we see at the reference desk all the time, but may not ever take time to note.

Some basic findings:

The most basic thing to take away from this session: We must pay attention to what the users need, not what we think they need and we have to realize that usability testing should be an ongoing process.

Stephen Abram
Everyone’s learning style and personality effect they way they see and interact with the world. Only about 20% of people are word smart learners, which is where many librarians fall, and we must keep in mind that we serve more than 20% of the population. Stephen Abram also makes a point of saying that, starting with the younger Gen Xers, children are taught differently in schools than their parents were. I have never previously considered how personalities can effect the way people use the web. Unconsciously, I think many of us know this reality, but very few of us actually put it into use. As we design things, we must always ask ourselves how the users see things.

The four speakers introduced the subject and gave examples of the way that web services are contributing to the dis-integration of integrated library services. In fact, the final speaker cited an article in the June 15th issue of Library Journal (The Dis-Integrating World of Library Automation) as testament.

The plainspoken Eric Lease Morgan opened the half-day session with a simple explanation of web services and some of the key concepts. Because XML is the defining feature of web services, Morgan sometimes used the term, “XML Services.” He emphasized that attendees need to know XML to create and work with web services.

Some of the more familiar examples of existing web services are RSS and OAI-PMH, which take XML from a remote site and retrieve it to be displayed, manipulated or forwarded by libraries. Like his presentation, Morgan’s handout was clear and contained terms, definitions, examples and sample XML output for each. He defined web services techniques such as SOAP, REST and distinguished between services using the web, URL and other modes of data search and retrieval. Finally he demonstrated a few simple examples of web services both in libraries and other sites including Google maps, “My Library” portals, weather-bugs and other popular web add-ins.

He urged that librarians need to use web services to get into the line of sight of web users since they will not always come to the library website, a recurring theme of the afternoon.

Next, Jeremy Frumpkin described the Ockham Project, a collaboration between four institutions to, among other things, create a digital library services registry (DLSR). The project came out of a $425K grant from the National Science Digital Library and includes participants from Virginia Tech, Notre Dame, Oregon State and Emory University.

The DLSR is a catalog of services that can be searched as easily as a catalog or search engine that Frumkin described as a sort of domain name server for library web services. Users of this registry, which will go live in an alpha release soon and full release by year-end, will be able to access it via the web or harvest/download the data and use it locally. The registry uses peer-to-peer technology and has as one of its goals the automation of the creation of digital libraries based on services discovered in the registry.

Diane Vizine-Goetz from OCLC Research was the third speaker and she described web service projects in the area of controlled vocabulary and name authority records. Their LC Name Authority Service is a freely available web service that checks names against the Library of Congress database.

A second OCLC Research project, Terminology Services, deals with a controlled vocabulary and is unique in that Vizine-Goetz demonstrated that some web services do not need to rely on traditional web browsers to function. Microsoft Office 2003 has integrated several web services in its Research Pane, which could be useful to authors and writers as this thesaurus project demonstrated.

The final speaker, Carl Grant, is the coordinator for the Vendor Initiative for Enabling Web Services (VIEWS) and to say he is enthusiastic about web services is putting it very mildly. VIEWS has several major ILS vendors participating in this project to create web service standards. Participants include Ex Libris and Sirsi/Dynix and Grant detailed some of the web services currently provided by some of these vendors. He believes that within the next 2-5 years, web services will allow library resources to be opened up to web searches. As he puts it, “You just don’t want to bring users to your OPAC and dump them there.” With web services, he continued, “We can put our libraries where our users are, which isn’t necessarily in our libraries.”

The flexibility and use of XML and related standards will no doubt quickly change library online services and this session brought the attendees up to speed on this rapidly changing area of the profession.

These are pretty rough notes. Overall, it was a very interesting program on the role of libraries in the long tail, with a variety of viewpoints. Wish I hadn’t been late. I tend to be kind of worried about this issue. One questioner at the end asked about why can’t public libraries have the same depth of video holdings as Netflix. I’ve never considered that as a goal. But it was a clarion call from a user.

The old truism that popularity has a lock on markets is over. Libraries can be guardians of the long tail, look at ways to provide access for our patrons, use it ourselves…so many ideas!

Chicago Hilton Grand Ballroom—very grand. Lacy gold balconies, chandeliers everywhere. Great orange OCLC tote bags swag. Scream beach bag.

Chris Anderson—Mining the Long Tail. Thin, very short military cut. I can’t help it—he seems very wired . He is Wired’s chief editor.

Tail end of talk. Man, can he talk fast. PowerPoint slides just crammed with ideas. No way I can keep up. However, there is an excellent 4-color glossy handout, that I am hoping will be up via OCLC somehow.

“Now playing, every movie ever made.”

“Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”

Exponential curves all over the place.

Where I came in, comparing the “water cooler effect” in the 50s to now.

Water cooler effect–#1 show today wouldn’t make top 10 in 1950.

Radio influence on music is over. Radio used to make the hits. Ipod = customized, personal radio station.

Presumptions of markets=wrong.

Different incentives—different hopes. Bands for fun; not to be Madonna or U2. Money is not driving incentive. Pro-ams—mix of pros and amateurs.

Less concern with Intellectual Property issues at bottom of curve—creative commons.

Economics vs. reputation or psychological incentives

“Our children will never know the meaning of “out of print”.

BookSurge—print on demand

Expansion of virtual inventory

Used books classic secondary market; how will increasing liquidity affect primary market?

GreaseMonkey plugin for Firefox—credit Jon Udell

LibraryLookup reminders via RSS/B-lines
The tragically understudied economics of abundance?

Implications of Moore’s Law –waste storage, bandwidth

Waste transistors made Apples, PCs, made computers cheep & fun

Next Speaker: John Blossom. Seems older, more mainstream corporate, a little rotund. Golf shirt.

President—Shore Communications

Intro: Content Management System at Reuters

John loves libraries. Grandma was librarian. (Apparently Chris Anderson opened his remarks saying he knows nothing about libraries? No experience?)

What makes content valuable?

Content+tech+people=Vcontent i.e., valuable content

Long tail=content that finds value in highly contextual circumstances

Libraries=long tail experts

Content—from rare to raining

Need to create useful buckets

Distribution: the new aggregation.

Points of value more evenly distributed.

“Good content is where you find it.”

The most value is in personal contacts.

Content wants to be valued.

Ratings, recommendations=applause.

Value is meeting needs where they are.

All content value is local.

. Concentrate on contextualization, not collection ownership.
. Concentrate on digital objects—the it-ness, XML, web applications
. Concentrate on higher levels of service for base content!

Moving from hierarchical control to distributed context control.

Broad view of a community’s value is key.

Develop partnerships with local online content developers.

Be source agnostic.

Maximize “findability”.

Libraries can’t out-search search engines. We need to be masters of the finite, not the infinite.

Integrate user input. Community-vetted local content.

Use usage information to drive economics.

2:55 pm 15 minute break. Water. Milky Way Midnights! Twix. Tootsie Rolls. My kind of spread.

Chuck Richard, VP and Lead Analyst, Outsell
Golf shirt, khakis, PhD.

Deep experience with libraries during PhD

Brings up Chris’ earlier analogy of filters & noise.

Long Tail messages:

“That damned, elusive Pimpernel.”

Search engines not so great—disconnect between image and reality. Popularity no longer has a lock on profitability, but it does have a lock on search engines.

Blogs are a fabulous referral system.

Chart showing that management is spending more time on gathering information than on analyzing it.

There was a bunch in here that I did not get at all basically.

At OCLC Symposium 2

I could type in my notes, but they don’t make much sense, and are interspersed with huhs. Oh well. I think his overriding point was that the signal to noise ratio is very high for our clients (his term). The library’s role is to be the Automated Long Tail Sweeper (ALTS).

Ah, finally caught the moderator’s name: Phyllis Spies. OCLC?

Next up: Nancy Davenport, CLIR president

Following Chris’ set up, goes way back with libraries J

Last couple of years, has become an Ebay habitué, trying to understand it. Started searching for a handbag of her mother’s from the 1940s. Talked about becoming a smart finder as compared to a good searcher. Using common misspellings.
Libraries are in the business of satisfying users over time. We use little bits from taxes or tuition to build collections—all about scarcity.
With monthly leases on electronic resources, the most used items become the cheapest. The least used become pricey.
Long tail ramifications for libraries:
.findability
.discards
.preservation/stewardship
.geography disappears in terms of searchability, but not for access.
.last copy status/negotiation
.impact on collection development budgets
.peer review value to academic community

Cost of electronic resource distribution is marginal—needs to be better reflected.

“Place as library.”
Need for visionary leadership.
Library skills to discipline explosion of choice.
Deep digital scholarship.

Q&A—couldn’t catch most names or affiliations—sorry!

Arthur from OCLC Middle East?
Comment on value of long tail in libraries where it is not monetized (unlike Ebay).
Chris—long tail is on a continuum between commercial and noncommercial, i.e., New York Times coexists with blogs.
John—it’s all about what value is provided to the community
Nancy—cooperation; intra-institutional collaboration—scholar’s email messages most important repositories.
John—due to new regulations, commerce must now archive.
Chris—Conde Nast deletes all email after 90 days (me–think of Edmund Wilson’s correspondence!)
John—special libraries really looking at and questioning usage

Karen Schneider, www.lii.org
Role for open access journals in long tail?
Nancy—yes, just different because missing peer review (?)
Open ownership presents questions re: preservation and maintenance

Norman from Library Journal:
Implications of Netflix—on ILL, or popular item funds
Nancy—Ill growing. ARL are net borrowers. OCLC role.
Chris—used book stores provide the long tail for Amazon
John—is the collection “right” enough (versus big enough)

Karen Kaplan (Cornell)
Implications of making more systematic ontologies of people?
Described Cornell project to use social networks to create content system
Chris—previous attempts such as Friendster didn’t work because they don’t cover work.
John—powerful colleague networks vs. Patriot Act issues
Nancy—Cornell not being source agnostic—looking for best sources
Chuck—only attempts in commerce world minor
John—source agnostic doesn’t mean not about quality.

Bob ?
Internet doesn’t preserve—esp. Federal Deposit Library Program
Nancy—no argument. Digital just present new preservation challenges
Chris—Google cache, Internet Archive. Permalink, which is why blogosphere works.
John—yeah Brewster—Internet Archive

By way of introduction, I’ve been a MARBI watcher and participant since about 1988, rotating back and forth from the “Big Table” (as Liaison from the American Association of Law Libraries and LITA Representative) and the “Peanut Gallery” (the audience section, often consisting of a considerable proportion of ex-denizens of the “Big Table”).

In the old days, MARBI was the ALA home base for the data geeks, and there were often three half-days of meetings every six months. The agendas were full and the documentation for the meetings, when printed out (we didn’t bring laptops then) often approached an inch or more piled up. That was in the days before the distractions of MODS, METS and such, when MARBI was still lively and fractious. Now the issues are generally a bit niche and often ho-hum, and there are few in the room below the age of forty. There’s still a lot of candlepower, however, and those of us nostalgic for good discussions about data flogging still hang around. Occasionally we’re rewarded for our loyalty.

Adam Schiff is the chair this year. Like most MARBI chairs of recent memory, he was appointed from outside the MARBI community. (Why that is so has been a point of some speculation.) He’s a competent chair, though, and keeps the meeting moving, with respect for diverse opinion.

John Attig (Penn State), eminence gris and unofficial historian of MARBI, presented the first proposal, having to do with a change in coding instruction for languages in 041. [Proposal 2005-07: Revision of Subfield $b in Field 041 in the MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2005/2005-07.html] This issue arose as DVD’s with both captions and subtitles, sometimes in multiple languages. The restriction imposed by the current instructions make unambiguous encoding impossible. Rich Greene (OCLC) pointed out that this would remain a problem for legacy data, since records could not be retrofitted. Everett Allgood (NYU) suggested that summary and abstract information is quite different from subtitles, and perhaps deserved a separate subfield.

Subsequent to this, others brought up examples of other auxiliary text that might also be in other languages. John Attig suggested that trying to straighten out the whole mess of languages in multimedia might take a lot of time and effort, and AVIAC (who made this proposal for a simple fix) seemed to be concerned about opening up the proverbial can of worms and ending up with no improvement at all. Karen Coyle suggested that this simple change could be made now, and the large problem could be revisited later, if the group desired. Adam Schiff mentioned that there was a comment made online about the ambiguity of the word “subtitle” in this context, and suggested the substitution of “subtitling” instead. Others in the room were not convinced that the change was necessary. “Summary, abstract or subtitles” was suggested as an alternate wording, and the proposal was passed.

Rebecca Guenther (LC) introduced Proposal 2005-4/R: Hierarchical Geographic Names in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format [http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2005/2005-04R.html], explaining the tangled history of this, the fourth iteration of the proposal. The issues brought up by this proposal are interesting, in that the practices and points of view of two different communities have continually clashed over this seemingly innocuous proposal. To some extent, the problem is more fundamental than the proposal implies, given that the approach seems to push past the realistic limit of text strings, particularly when you throw in indexing considerations. The separation of 6XX and 7XX to express “aboutness” and the attempt to provide other discovery options relevant to place, while retaining some notion of standard hierarchy seemed often a bit rarefied. Some of the discussion about cities on various planets (and the piling up of “what if” scenarios with more arcane possibilities–moons in other galaxies, for instance) began to sound almost surreal.

The discussion came down, finally, to the need for a flexible compromise and acceptance of ambiguity, letting the thesaurus chosen drive the hierarchy decisions. Ultimately, of course, any text string solution seems somewhat doomed, even with as much ambiguity wrung out of it as possible. Oh, for a solution that dispenses completely with text strings and refers directly to a geographic thesaurus (letting the thesaurus manage the hierarchy)! Not likely anytime soon, and the lack of a $w in the proposal means that when it is possible, there’s no clear upgrade path.

The proposal passed after a clutch of wording changes were incorporated (see the official minutes for full details—they’ll probably be posted by Midwinter, give or take a month.)

Paul Cauthen introduced Proposal 2005-08: Changes to Accommodate IAML Coded Data in Bibliographic Fields 008/18-19, 047 and 048
[http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2005/2005-08.html]. He described the love/hate relationship that the music community has had with these fields, and the decision to come back to add codes maintained by someone other than MARC. The proposal would incorporate IAML form and genre, and medium of performance codes in MARC 21. Most of the discussion revolved around the practicalities of using non-MARC codes without adding ambiguity. Some very detailed discussion of the examples and alternatives ensued, which I will not repeat here. The vendor community was concerned about variable fields with trailing blanks, pointing out that assigning meaning under such circumstances is an exercise in futility, and that option was nixed in favor of either 2 character MARC codes or 3 character IAML codes.

Then the tide turned. It was pointed out that there were only 2 008 bytes, and potential more than one coded 0XX field to characterize. After some additional discussion, including the suggestion that the codes just be added to MARC, and the proposal was sent back for reworking and further discussion in the music community, splitting out the 048 portion of the proposal, and passing that portion only, with a change in the indicator position.

In the business portion of the meeting, Sally McCallum (LC) reported on updates to the MARC 21 documentation and MODS and MADS (for authorities). LC will be moving to the Unicode version of the Voyager system soon, and certainly the fact that RLG and OCLC are also moving closer to Unicode implementations has heated up the discussions of Unicode issues.

Everett Allgood, the CC:DA Representative to MARBI, reported on the efforts towards a new cataloging code, which will certainly be reported elsewhere. A joint meeting of CC:DA and MARBI (always an interesting clash of cultures) is proposed for next summer, when there will likely be more substance to discuss. Everett asked if the group would like to see the drafts as they appear. Karen Coyle expressed her strong feeling that the technology people need to be discussing the issues at the same time that the cataloging code is discussed, in order that the concerns about system changes not provide a drag on the efforts for change. John Attig opined that, at least for part I, there might not be big changes required—but changes should be considered even if not explicitly required.

The chair discussed some ALA Council proposed changes to the ALA 2006 Conference Schedule that will begin with Midwinter San Antonio. The big issue is that there are no three hour meetings (horrors!) and breaks are mandated after two hours. This problem caused much consternation, old habits dying hard (especially for aging librarians), and the most well received suggestion was to shift the longer scheduled meeting from Saturday to Sunday and retain the Monday meeting time if needed. Much grumbling was heard about 8 am meeting times and the notion of having to schedule four hour meetings when three hours were needed.

The last item on the agenda was a resolution by Jim Agenbroad (LC, retired) aimed at the ALA Membership Meeting on “Equal Access to Nonroman Resources.” Jim has long been on a laudable, if somewhat quixotic quest to improve the situation for non-Roman script materials (and special characters—he’s also supported my own quixotic effort, dating from the early 90s, to get the section symbol approved for MARC), and can be counted on to comment on Unicode proposals and reports where few others do. Adam Schiff described the process that the resolution would encounter. Karen Coyle noted that without a section in the resolution suggestion how ALA might play a leadership role, it was unlikely to go anywhere, even if passed. She noted that there are lots of interesting questions around this issue, and it’s possible that this might go somewhere if the right people were in the room, addressing practicalities. Some additional discussion is expected tomorrow when a Unicode report is on the agenda. Stay tuned.

The last announcement was that Martha Yee (an old MARBI hand) would be next year’s chair. Good luck, Martha …

Diane Hillmann
Cornell University
Dih1@cornell,edu

Press your ear against the wall, celebrate the confluence of the Web and niche marketing, keep your eyes on “That damned, elusive Pimpernel,” and think big-picture, long-view about preservation and access for digital content. Those were just a few of the ideas that came out of Friday’s OCLC symposium, Mining the Long Tail, held to an overflow crowd in Hilton’s eponymous Grand Ballroom, a huge, elegant venue dripping with gilt, mirror, and crystal.

The Long Tail concept turns some basic marketing concepts upside down. One of the points made yesterday was that major online retailers and organizations are able to make a lot of money from titles that are relatively obscure, because the inventory overhead for virtual stores is significantly less than for physical stores that must produce duplicate copies of items and ship, stock, and manage them. If you replace NetFlix or Amazon with “library,” the implication for us here is significant.

The speakers, were fascinating and lively, though the first speaker, Chris Anderson, spoke so fast I had trouble keeping up with his points (dude, go easy on the Red Bull!). Most of Anderson’s points can be found in an article he wrote for Wired Magazine last October which was available as an 8-page handout at the symposium (along with excellent bag-SWAG).

One other point that dwelled within me was the concept of pre- and post-filtering. Anderson saw a shift towards the latter, which he broke down this way:

Editors vs. Peers
A&R Guys (??) vs. Recommendations
Studio execs vs. word of mouth
Buyers vs. buyers

As I listened, I thought, I don’t see this model as either-or, but as and/and. We can continue to pre-filter, adding value ahead of time through material selection and organization, but we can also enable meta-rich, interactive, user-engaging post-filtering, allowing readers and users to add their own meaning to digital objects. User ratings in online catalogs, library blogs that invite comments, user education for assessing digital information—librarianship can not only exploit the Long Tail, but use it to enrich our profession and those we serve.

Two other speakers (whose names are in a brochure in my hotel room…) brought up good points. Some, almost in passing, greatly inspired many of us with a few resonating comments. “Outsource the nonunique, focus on noncommercial and local,” we were told—a point I heard PLA members talking about a decade ago. With the rise of music downloading, iTunes, and enabling technology such as the iPod, the FM radio world is in free-fall; one rock radio a week is closing, we learned.

I say this not from jingoism, but the final speaker, Nancy Davenport from CLIR, inspired me the most, particularly in the way she wove the concept of the Long Tail into her points about the need to preserve scholarly material and “keeping it usable over time.” Davenport added, “We have tools that can democratize the process and we have values we would like to maintain: equal access, right to read, right to privacy, core knowledge and skills about recommendations.” She challenged us to visionary leadership, asking, “What do we do with our objects to make them useful to future generations?”

We stumbled out into the swamp of heat and humidity in rush-hour traffic. As I hoofed it cross-town to LITA Happy Hour (dang! A great time had by all, but did we take pictures?), I kept running into LITA members having mini-conversations about this symposium, arms waving as they talked about long tails, user-added content, rock stations, preservation.Well done, Big O.

The ALA PATRIOT Act Study (‘Impact and Analysis of Law Enforcement Activity in U.S. Libraries’), an attempt to gague the impact of Section 215 on libraries, is now in the data analysis stage — preliminary data appears solid, though some audience members were sub-satisfied with the specificity of the questions asked, which limits usability of the results.

• Response rates: ~33% public libraries in a stratified sample, ~25% academic libraries from the census
• 137 reports of official, paper/documented requests for information *nb: Atty Generals Ashcroft & Gonzalez say Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act has been used 0 times *nb2: there is no legal way to answer a specific question regarding this, so there is no good way to aggregate this

Relevant links:
ala.org/oitp

Public libraries and the Internet 2004 Survey results:

• 98.9 libraries provide free internet access
• 10.4 public computers / public library building
• 90% of libraries report not enough computers available at peak hours
• 48% of libraries report ‘high-speed’ (>769kbps) connections
• 18% provide wireless, 21% more plan to go wireless within a year

Relevant links:
www.ii.fsu.edu
ala.org/oitp
www.gatesfoundation.org

OITP Telecommunications Blog:
oitpblog.org

For readers: Those of you attending ALA 2005, check in the Local Info and (if present) the Get-Togethers categories. Those of you unable to attend will want to look in the Programs, Meetings, and Speakers categories. There we will be blogging the programs, IG and committee meetings, as well as keynote speakers or other big-name events. Of course, Top Technology Trends already contains great stuff and will contain more after we blog TTT.

For bloggers: Please use the following categories to post your notes to the blog:
ALA 2005 Local Info – local info
ALA 2005 Get-Togethers – announce last-minute informal meetings here!
ALA 2005 Meetings – committee and IG meetings
ALA 2005 Programs – most scheduled programs go here
ALA 2005 Speakers – keynotes, special speaker events
ALA 2005 Notes – interesting asides, exhibit notes, etc.

As to style, Karen Schneider posted handy guidelines on the lita-bigwig list, which I excerpt [and helpfully annotate!] below:

Compose in a word processor, if possible, then spell-check and view your
work carefully. You don’t always have time to do this, but many of the best
blog posts you read are not first drafts by a long shot. Blogging in
real-time can be fun, but don’t feel you have to post right away if you
think your post could use more review and editing.

[Genny's note: Doesn't literally have to be a word processor; the text editor on your PDA is fine, or the blog Write Post page is fine -- if you click Save rather than Publish.]

Lead with your most important observation. Conclude with your second most important observation. The first and last sentences are the most noticeable
in any writing, but particularly for online writing. The first ten words of
your post should grab the reader and establish the topic for that post.

Use an active voice. Use good punctuation and grammar. Write with specifics.

For readability, keep paragraphs short. 75 words or less is a good rule of thumb.

Keep sentences short for the same reason. Avoid convoluted constructions. Try not to lead sentences with lengthy dependent clauses.

If you use facts, check them. If you quote someone, repeat their words back to them.

For interest and color, ground the reader in the setting. Sit down, open
your laptop, then look around. What do you see?

Try getting a real quote.

Finally: relax, have fun. Write in your own voice. The LITA blog is a
conversation among and with ourselves and others. Your voice is a gift to
the rest of us!

Great advice to all writers, not just bloggers.

I’ll be at the LITA booth on the exhibit floor between 11 and 12 on Saturday, so if you have any blog questions, feel free to stop by and ask me. I might give an answer, and it might even be correct … although I just realized it’s 2 a.m. Chicago time and I’m about to do Saturday on about 4 hours of sleep. I am not at all adjusting to this time zone yet!

Wifi can also be purchased a la carte for $9.95 a day, the standard McCormick price (compare to Boston at $25 a day–clearly a service where prices have no bearing on reality).

The problem is in order to get to the best places, you have to be willing to travel. I mean the best place I know for Ribs — at least on the North Side — is Smokin’ Woody’s on Lincoln and Berteau (the tips are heavenly). Ditto for a Polish (notice we omit the word ‘sausage’) where I make a monthly pilgrimage to a trailer marked “Maxwell Street” on Diversey and Damen. Even my favorite pizza place is a neighborhood joint called “Renaldi’s” on Broadway just north of Diversey.

Closer to downtown, you’ve got Twin Anchors which is a great neighborhood place at 1655 N. Sedgwick. They do a pretty good baby back ribs — just make sure you order the original sauce! On the Polish front, Portillo’s on Ontario and Clark is okay. For pizza, Gino’s East on Wells and Ontario and Pizzeria Uno a couple blocks east are pretty good.

(If anyone knows of good places near downtown, please help me out here!)

Where downtown excels is great places to eat for lunch. Lawry’s Prime Rib on Ontario just west of Michigan has a fabulous lunch menu till 2pm (weekdays only). My favorite is the 10 oz. “Lawry’s Cut” with mashed potatoes and spinach (don’t forget the spinach) for around $20! Another great place is the Stand-up bar at Berghoff’s on Adams and State. Great four-dollar sandwiches — corned beef and bratwurst, etc. Berghoff’s is also good for din-din.

Whatever you eat, make sure you’re got enough room left for Garrett’s Popcorn! People say, you have not lived till you’ve seen Paree. That is incorrect. You have not lived till you’ve had a bag of Garrett’s Caramel Corn! People wait in lines for this stuff — and rightly so.

To wash this all down, remember that Goose Island is the local brew. There are a number of varieties. You’re free to sample all 14 (depending on availability). My personal favorite is Honkers.

Lastly, once you’ve eaten, drunk and entertained yourself to your heart’s content, remember that Chicago is also a great city just to get out and walk around in. State Street and Michigan Ave., the lakefront and beaches — from the Field Museum to North Avenue — you’ve got some of the best walking areas in Metropolitan USA. In a matter of days, if not hours, you’ll find yourself wishing that ALA had its convention here every year. Enjoy it while you can!

Of course, you’ll be spending most of your time at the conference. Nevertheless, you’ll hopefully still have opportunities to step out and sample life in the Windy City. The first thing you should do is pick up a copy of the Chicago Reader. This is our alternative weekly and it lists within seven days more things than a normal person could do in a whole year.

If you dip into it, you’ll find that the “Big” event during ALA is Taste of Chicago. The “Taste” as they call it in these parts, takes place in Grant Park and features food, music and the combined populations of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. If that’s your idea of fun, don’t let me stop you — though frankly, you can get a whole lot better eats just about any place else. (More on this later.)

Also taking place in Grant Park is SummerDance which runs Wed-Sun (6/22-6/26) and where you can learn everything from Salsa to Swing. The City literally provides people to give you lessons.

Not too far away is Navy Pier. There, WIRED will be holding its NextFest over the weekend (Fri-Sun, 6/24-6/26). This “world’s fair” of the future will feature “robots, flying cars, private space planes, homes of the future, fuel-cell concept cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, hypersonic sound beams, invisibility coats, and much more…”

Of course, the big event a bit further north, is Gay Pride. There’s a large street fest on Halsted and Addison on Saturday (6/25, 11am-9pm). Entertainment this year includes Rupaul and Naked Boys Singing. The very next day (Sun. 6/26) is the big Gay Pride Parade. It starts at noon and features wildly enthusiastic people both marching and massed on the streets.

Wrigley Field isn’t too far away (Clark & Addison). As you’d expect on this Weekend Mirabilis, the Chicago Cubs are playing the Chicago White Sox (Fri-Sun, 6/24-6/26) — not an ordinary occurrence! Unfortunately all the action is taking place at Sox Park so you’ll have to hop on the Red Line and get off at 35th St. Good luck on getting tickets.

[ Tomorrow Part II: Dining Out. ]get.php