Monthly Archives: March 2008

Back to work

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It’s a dark, rainy Monday and the weather matches my mood as I get back into the swing of things at work after a nice but short vacation. I really think I need to be more like Tigger and less like Eyore but it’s hard to fight years of pessimism.

We had a really good time last week on Thursday through Saturday, going out to eat most of the time, watching a movie in the theater (such a rare occurrence), visiting the Field Museum, and buying some new pets to add to our already chaotic household. Yesterday we didn’t go anywhere or do anything; I think the highlight of the whole day was when I went to McDonald’s late in the evening to buy milkshakes for everyone!

I’m still trying out and getting used to the new stuff in WordPress 2.5. I love the new photo gallery functionality but find it very frustrating at this point because there is so little documentation on how best to make use of it. My plan is to redo all photos and host them here on this blog rather than on Flickr and/or Picasa, eventually.

I’m trying out the WordPress.com stats plugin and liking it so far. Also, I’ve added a sidebar widget for my Twitter posts using the great Twitter Tools plugin. Oddly enough, two different people have contacted me since I moved to a new host, asking me if I would allow them to advertise on this site. Weird. Also, I still have really messed up permalinks, unfortunately. And I am just about as confused as ever in terms of deciding on using categories vs. tags.

OK, now back to the real world.

New pets added to our menagerie

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This beautiful bird is the type of bird we bought Dove - Jardim dos Louros, Funchal, Madeiratoday at the Spring show of the Greater Chicago Cage Bird Club held at the DuPage County Fairgrounds. None of us had ever been to one of these shows. We decided to go because Tristan really wanted to get a bird as a pet. He still remembers Ben and Jerry, our two parakeets we had many years ago when he was little. We went expecting just to have a good time looking around and seeing some interesting birds. But when Tristan and I saw an Asian American lady with two cages full of these birds, we thought they were quite irresistible. The woman who raised them gave us them for $5 off the list price because we were buying them for the children. I have never seen such birds before. They are called diamond doves (Geopelia cuneata — see more information at http://www.diamonddove.com/) and the specific kind we purchased is a blue diamond dove. We were able to purchase a pair; the male is about six months old and the female is about a year old, we were told. I think these birds are originally from Australia.

We bought a cage and food for the newest additions to our menagerie, and at the moment they are cuddling together going to sleep for the night.

After thinking about names for a while, we decided to call them “Onslow” and “Daisy” in tribute to two characters from our favorite BBC show, Keeping Up Appearances.

(Photo Credit: jmaximo)

NASIG 2008 award winners

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Good news to hear: Today, the NASIG 2008 award winners were announced. Here they are!

Fritz Schwartz Serials Education Scholarship
Alena Jewel Rucker, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Information Science

Marcia Tuttle International Grant
Stephanie Schmitt, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE

NASIG Conference Student Grant
···Eugenia Beh, University of Texas at Austin, School of Information
···Barbara Birenbaum, UCLA, Department of Library and Information Studies
···Kathryn Machin, Queens College, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies
···Jason Ronallo, Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science
···Pegeen Seger, University of Oklahoma, School of Library and Information Studies
···Nancy B. Thomas, University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences

NASIG Conference Mexican Student Grant
···Armando Avila-González, Escuela Nacional Biblioteconomía y Archivoeconomía, Mexico City, DF, Mexico

Horizon Award
···Betsy Appleton, George Washington University

Serials Specialist Award
···Marie Peterson, University at Buffalo, State University of New York

Warm congratulations to all. To find out more about each of these awards, go to the NASIG website and look here.

Faster is better

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When it comes to the Internet, faster is better, just about always. I have been thinking a lot about this since reading a post about this issue in the Official Google Mobile Blog a few weeks ago. In that post the author wrote about how Google used analysis of their search logs to see the dramatic effect of improving search response time for mobile users. If things are slow, they lose users. If things are fast, users want to use their service more.This one simple reality has so many big implications for me and for library technology. In an environment in which I feel constantly unable to satisfy user demands, where there is so much work that needs to happen in order to create a good user experience, it behooves me to focus more on this one thing. Make things go faster for users. Faster = happier users.I have spent time thinking about how true this is in my own experience. I am a bit of a new technology gadfly, willing to try new things and jumping from one to the other. Take for instance my web browser habits. I have used just about every web browser there has ever been, and also just about every version or iteration of them there ever has been. Overall I am most satisfied with Firefox and that has been my main browser of choice for a very long time. But I have tried Flock, Opera, and of course Internet Explorer. I know that IE is my absolute least favorite. So, OK: Firefox is mostly my favorite, IE is my least favorite. Sounds simple. But it isn’t. I can’t stop myself from jumping around to try others or different iterations of all of the above. For example I have used all different kinds of browsers on my mobile devices, different ones on my home computers, and still others on my work laptop. I am not 100% satisfied for long with any of them. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons but one constant issue I have is speed. I want lightning-fast response time. Period. No matter what. Any delay is frustrating.This is why I have always played around with Safari, both for Mac and Windows. The earlier iterations of Safari for Windows were just awful. But even so, it was lightning fast, faster than anything else I’ve ever tried. I hate that I can’t customize it like I can Firefox. But I’m at the point now where speed trumps “like to haves”. Last night after reading some good reviews of the latest version of Safari for Windows (3.1), I decided to once again take the plunge and try. I am really happy with it so far. It’s early days yet and perhaps my fickle heart will eventually tire of it. But it is stable, and lightning fast, and that really counts for a tremendous amount in my book.So…I do believe faster is better, even with some caveats. It’s like the time back in the late ’90s when I moved away from dial-up to cable Internet access. I have never looked back nor wanted anything else but the fastest connection. I can’t imagine going back.We who work in libraries, especially with technology, would do well to simply try to make things work faster for our users. I bet we’d have a lot more happy ones if we emphasized this aspect of our online services more.

An introductory session on the social web

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Last Friday a colleague of mine (who also happens to be a fellow UIUC GSLIS alum — GSLIS alums are plentiful where I work!) gave a lunchtime presentation introducing the social web to other colleagues in our library organization. We only had an hour in which to present a broad overview and as a result, we were quite rushed toward the end of the time period. We had over 30 people sign up but only about 11 actually showed up, mainly due to the weather, I think. (We had a winter’s-last-gasp-type of heavy snowfall that day.)Our general purpose was to provide some clarity to the various bits and pieces that make up the social web (a.k.a. Web 2.0 and its many derivatives, e.g. Library 2.0). We gave an overview of what comprises the social web in terms of concepts that include friends, commenting, recommendations, “push button” publishing, and so on. Then we covered several specific social web tools such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging, social networks, RSS, etc. Our hope by giving this presentation is that it will be a catalyst for more active learning and participation among more staff in social web initiatives. Our company is only just beginning to explore ways in which to incorporate social web-type stuff into its technological infrastructure. Frankly, it’s not the technical that is challenging but more the cultural aspect. We have a huge way to go to overcome a mindset that can be rather clueless about Web 2.0 and why it might be of value to use and to know about. One of the points that became clearer to me while we were talking about this stuff in that presentation was that many corporations are already on the social web bandwagon in terms of external relationships, i.e. with customers. I suspect that a much smaller set of companies has made progress with using social web tools internally, i.e. for staff use. Part of what my co-presenter focused on was that aspect, that is, identifying what we are working on, testing, or considering for internal use relating to the social web. It seems to me that this is a much harder thing to sell management on or to simply implement with an expectation of immediate, concrete ROI.Even though there weren’t as many attendees as we had hoped, we both really enjoyed giving the presentation. There was quite a bit of enthusiasm among the participants as well, and I think we’ll be planning followup sessions to explore more details of particular tools, e.g. social bookmarking, and how we might apply them in our particular setting. We really want our library to be leaders in this area and we believe there is a strong opportunity for the library to play a significant role in social web initiatives within the company. This is just the beginning.On the way home (it took me 2 1/4 hrs. to drive what normally is a 50 min. commute, due to the snowstorm) as I was reflecting about the presentation, it occurred to me that I’d love to be able to do this kind of thing all the time. To be a sort of evangelist for emerging technologies, if you will. Maybe that’s the dream job I have always wanted.

LibraryOKRA.com

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Thanks to Jamene Brooks-Kieffer @ KSU for a writeup of a very interesting presentation at the ER&L conference on the problem of maintaining multiple knowledgebases of information for libraries. The presentation and more information is available at LibraryOKRA.com. OKRA stands for One Knowledgebase to Rule them All. Love the title. Presenters were Jonathan Blackburn and Mason Hall. Highly recommended! I look forward to seeing what conversations might ensue. I found this so intriguing because basically I have been thinking about and trying to solve the same problem in my library.

GSLIS publications digitized

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I was excited to find out that some important publications from UIUC GSLIS are now digitized and available in UIUC’s institutional repository, IDEALS. These include:

Allerton Park Institute Proceedings(1954-1997)
Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing (1963-1995)
Occasional Papers (1949-2004)

These are highly important publications in terms of recent library history, and it is great that they are now readily available like this. I know that the Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing in particular discussed important, cutting edge development around MARC and early integrated library systems (including NOTIS from Northwestern University Library and LDMS from The University of Chicago Library), and that you can’t get a complete picture of library automation history without reading papers presented there. Take a look at http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/154.

(Found out via message from Sue Searing, LIS librarian, to GSLIS faculty earlier today. )

A tag cloud for FML

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Last night I spent a lot of time figuring out how to use my WordPress categories to create a tag (technically, I guess, a category) cloud. I’ve tried doing this before but was never quite satisfied with the end result. Part of the problem is that I hadn’t used categories consistently, and also, I had tried using various tagging systems over the years with little success. I’m still working on filling out categories using the great Batch Categories plugin, but already I like what I see in my new tag cloud page, using the Category Cloud plugin.