Monthly Archives: May 2004

Church and holiday

Posted on by
Reply

Well, the long weekend was welcome. I just wish it was longer so that I could get out of this very deep funk I’ve been in for a while. Some good things happened this weekend. For one thing, we had a really enjoyable time at church. The pastor’s message on Revelation 13 was one that you don’t hear very often in many evangelical churches. The spirit of the anti-Christ is very much in evidence around us today, and we need to recognize it and understand it. There was much more to the message and it was actually quite encouraging. We really like this church.

Another positive event was that I was able to weed the flower beds on Saturday, as well as trim some of our shrubs. I also fixed the Ryobi so that I could finally trim around the bushes and trees and other things. There is a lot more left to do to make our house look presentable, but this is a start!

Yesterday we had a relaxing morning and then in mid-afternoon, we decided to go on a drive through the country nearby. We went through Montpelier and then made our way to Berne. Berne is kinda interesting in that it has the world’s largest Mennonite church. It also has a large population of Amish people. We stopped at Amishville and I was able to take a lot of photos of the little kids interacting with some of the animals. Keegan enjoyed it also because he got to just sit in the van reading a book. On the way home we drove through some storms and then, Keegan spotted a beautiful rainbow as we were driving west from Hartford City. We also stopped at an old church and I took some photos of it against the dark, stormy sky as a dramatic backdrop.

All in all, a pretty quiet time, but there were lots of moments to enjoy…

Indiana-isms

Posted on by

As someone who is still adjusting to the vagaries of living in rural Indiana and who still doesn’t take kindly to being called a “Hoosier,” I thought these Indiana-isms, sent to us by friends and whose source is unknown, were pretty funny. They are funny because many of them are very, very true. In our two years here, we have experienced many of these. That’s scary!

If you are a Hoosier:
* You think the state bird is Larry.
* There’s actually a college near you named “Ball State.”
* Your feelings get hurt whenever someone points out the acronym for PurdueUniversity is PU.
* You’ve never met any celebrities.
* Your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway.
* “Vacation” means going to Indiana Beach or Holiday World (Santa Claus,IN).
* You know several people who have hit a deer.
* Down south to you means Kentucky.
* Your school classes were canceled because of cold.
* Your school classes were canceled because of heat.
* You’ve ridden the school bus for an hour each way.
* You’ve heard of Euchre, you know how to play Euchre, and you are the master of Euchre.
* You’ve seen a running car, with nobody in it, in the parking lot of the grocery store,no matter what time of year it is.
* You end your sentences with an unnecessary preposition. Example: “Where’s mycoat at?” or “If you go to the mall I wanna go with.”
* You install security lights in your house and garage, then leave both of themunlocked.
* You think of the major four food groups as beef, pork, beer, and Jell-O salad withmarshmallows.
* You carry jumper cables in your car regularly and your wife/girlfriend knows how touse them.
* You think nothing of it in spring and fall to be stuck behind a farm implement drivingon the roads. You just hope it’s not a hog truck or a manure spreader.
* High school basketball games draw bigger crowds on the weekend than movietheaters, IF you have a movie theater.
* Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow.
* Newspapers have international news & headlines on one page but requires six forlocal sports.
* You can repeat the scores of the last eight NBA games, but, unless the MVP is aHoosier, you are not sure who he is.
* You can see at least two basketball hoops from your yard.
* The biggest question of your youth was IU or Purdue.
* Indianapolis is the BIG CITY.
* Getting stuck by a train is a legitimate excuse for being late to school.
* You know several different definitions as to what a Hoosier really is.
* Everyone knows who the town cops are, where they live, and whether they’re athome or on duty.
* To you, tenderloin is not an expensive cut of beef, but a big, salty, breaded piece ofpork served on a bun with pickle.
* You’ve been to the covered bridge festival
* You have no problem spelling or pronouncing, Terre Haute
* You don’t know what a real pacer is but get upset if they lose
* People in your area REALLY like NASCAR.
* You know all four seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, construction.
* You actually understand these jokes and forward them to all your friends in Indiana.

PALNI meeting re TPAS

Posted on by

Yesterday Dan (my library director), Matt (one of the students with whom I work), and I went to Indy to meet with some other libraries within our consortium, PALNI, to demonstrate our periodical management system, which we call TPAS (Taylor Periodical Administration System). I have to admit to quite a bit of nervousness about the whole thing, for a number of reasons. Other libraries represented in the meeting included DePauw, Butler, Concordia, and the University of Indianapolis. There were also folks from INCOLSA in attendance. The meeting went much better than I ever expected. I am really pleased at the level of interest in and appreciation for the software we’ve spent so much time developing locally. There is a real chance that other libraries will implement it and then we can all benefit from not only cooperative use, but also cooperative development of this alternative to a vendor supplied system. I believe quite strongly in the benefits of open source and the positive reaction from other libraries to TPAS gives us the impetus we needed to further develop it to a point where we can make the software freely available as open source via SourceForge.

Periodical Management Systems

Posted on by

A while ago I mentioned that I had written an article for Serials Review on periodical management systems, and that I had been working for quite some time on such a system at my library. This topic continues to be of interest to a lot of folks. Recently there have been two or three threads on SERIALST related to this issue in which the predominant opinion seems to be that Serials Solutions walks on water. I haven’t used their services — the whole point of developing something locally is/was to do what they or competing services do for cheaper and do it better — but they seem to get consistently good press!

I have a meeting on Friday with a subset of PALNI libraries to demonstrate what we’ve been doing locally with this homegrown system. My hope is that at least a few other libraries within our consortium will join in using it. One good reason is that we all share SFX and the Taylor Periodical Administration System integrates SFX data, making it somewhat distinctive from other setups I’ve read about. My ultimate hope is to make the system freely available as open source because I believe that there are many libraries out there who simply can’t afford services from Serials Solutions, TDNet, Ebsco, and others. I think this is particularly true of many small college and university libraries, as well as some public libraries. A huge amount of credit for the whole system goes to one of my student workers, Matt Wissman, who has worked on it for over two years now. He is really gifted in database design, advanced web development, and other areas, and I am really going to miss him when he graduates next year.

Open source ILL form

Posted on by
Reply

When I got back from my meeting in Indianapolis late this afternoon I was able to talk with Paul, a student who has worked for me for a couple of years and who graduated this past weekend from Taylor. He and the third student who works for me, Ashley, were the ones who got engaged last week. Paul is finishing up a long-term project to completely revamp the Java-based Interlibrary Loan (ILL) form that we’ve been using at my library for a couple of years. Our goal was to make it more functional as well as user-friendly. The original form was called ILL Wizard and was developed by a student at Olivet Nazarene University’s Benner Library along with a good friend and colleague of mine, Craighton Hippenhammer. Craighton made ILL Wizard freely available as open source and he and I have talked back and forth about it and what we’d like to change. I’m a few days away from making our own customized version of this original form available via SourceForge and hope to announce it on www.oss4lib.org as well. I’ve been a big proponent of open source for a while. This project is particularly gratifying because it will be the first time my library and institution will contribute (hopefully more broadly useful) software to the larger library community via open source.

Paul has done great work on this and I am excited to see this project near completion. Oh and by the way, Paul is currently looking for a job so if anyone reads this posting and has need of a good IT-system-analyst kind of employee who has library experience, please contact me so that I can put you in touch with Paul. He needs a job and he’d be a great addition to your staff!

Blog session at Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium

Posted on by
Reply

In an earlier posting I mentioned that I was going to a session on library blogs as marketing tools held at the Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium (GCLC). I also stated that I didn’t think I’d learn much from the session, which in retrospect sounds kinda snotty, and I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was that I had already been delving into the blogging world quite a bit of late and had a pretty good knowledge base already. Turns out I did learn some things at today’s session, which is always a good thing ;-)

The presenter, Darlene Fichter of the University of Saskatchewan, did a good job of covering quite a bit of ground. For some reason, my boss and I didn’t realize that it was a videoconference presentation, but actually, aside from a few glitches, Darlene did as good a job via videoconference as if she had been there in person. I particularly appreciated her emphasis on establishing an editor and/or editorial guidelines for library blogs to which more than one person contributes. This is exactly the kind of thing I have set up for my library and her point helped to solidify some ideas I’ve had about how best to operate the whole thing. Darlene also emphasized the need to establish a particular “voice” or “niche” for a weblog. I’ve heard that before but her mention of it again helped me to think more about what “voice” or “niche” I would want my library’s weblog to have. She also pointed out the flexibility of a weblog in terms of being able to use the information posted to it in various ways. For instance, the output of a weblog could be in email form, delivered via a newsreader, presented as a static webpage, or fed into an institutional portal environment. The latter point in particular struck a chord with me because my institution is introducing a portal environment beginning with the fall semester. Overall this was a very thorough and well presented session and I’m glad we drove all the way over to Cincinnati to attend it. And an added bonus was Cincinnati itself; really a beautiful city with interesting homes and buildings built up on a bluff high above the river.

As an aside, I had a wireless laptop with me at the time and was surreptitiously looking at Library Stuff and some other weblogs to which I subscribe. Darlene mentioned Kansas City Public Library’s RSS feeds, and just a few seconds later, lo and behold, I saw Steven Cohen’s post at Library Stuff about that very thing. Talk about convergence!

Trips here, there, and everywhere

Posted on by

This week is an “interesting” one. I have all-day meetings every day. Yesterday I was in Indianapolis, today I’m going to a meeting in Cincinnati, tomorrow I’m back in Indy, Thursday I am going to a meeting in Ft. Wayne, and Friday, I’m back in Indy again. It’s only Tuesday and I’m already tired :-) The meeting I’m going to today is about using blogs to promote library services, and it’s being held at the offices of the Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium. I’m not sure I’ll learn a whole lot but the topic is one I’m quite interested in, plus my boss is going with me and we’ll have a chance to discuss a lot of work stuff on the drive there and back.

From ER to Green Bay

Posted on by
Reply

We spent part of this weekend travelling to a wedding in Green Bay, Wisconsin. On our way there we stopped at my in-law’s in Illinois. We shopped briefly at a local Target to get some things for the trip, and Brinley fell against the edge of the shopping cart and split open her head. She was bleeding all over the place and we rushed her to the nearest emergency room. The wound in her head required five stitches. It was pretty rough to watch her going through this whole thing but she actually seems none the worse for it all. The wound is healing nicely and she should have her stitches out later this week. Michele and I hope she doesn’t have much of a scar.

The wedding was for one of my wife’s cousins. It was a great time, I really admired the bride and groom for the emphasis on Christ throughout the ceremony as well as the reception. E.g. in lieu of the traditional clanging on glasses to get the bride and groom to kiss during the reception, they asked that people come up to a microphone and share their testimonies. It was good to see quite a few of Michele’s father’s side of the family.