Yesterday I turned 41 years old. I had a happy birthday this year. For some reason I am usually down in the dumps at this time of year but not this time. We had an enjoyable weekend highlighted by the return of Keegan and Tristan, who were gone all last week on a trip to Canada.
I have many memories of our family living in Detroit, MI with my maternal grandparents in their basement at first, and then living in our own house down the street later on. This was from 1970-71, a relatively short period of time but one filled with a lot of experiences. I was about three years old. This photo of my grandparents was taken around this time, I believe.
As anyone knows who has children of their own, it can be hard to get the little ones to take their afternoon naps. All of my own children stopped doing that right about the same age I was in this story. When I was three years old, I didn’t like taking naps any more than my own kids do. I distinctly remember my Grandma telling me, “Steven, if you take a nap this afternoon, I will have a surprise ready for you when you wake up!” So I took my nap.
I wondered what on earth my Grandma would give me. I was really surprised and delighted when she presented me with my very own scrapbook that she had made for me. I still have that scrapbook; it is one of my most treasured possessions.
My Grandma made the scrapbook out of clippings from magazines and little odds and ends that she had collected from her travels and elsewhere. For example, one of the things she particularly liked, and always had a supply of in the house, was a brand of tea bags named Red Rose Tea. It was only available in Canada at that time but that wasn’t a problem for her to get, living just across the river from Windsor. Each box of this special tea came with a little surprise such as a pack of little, colorful cards, about one inch wide and two or three inches tall. Each card featured a picture of an animal with its scientific name at the bottom. On the flip side of each card was a brief description of the animal, its habitat, etc. I loved those cards! Grandma kept them in a collection on her kitchen counter and some of them she included in the scrapbook. I remember sitting on her counter looking through those cards. Later on, Red Rose Tea stopped including the little cards and began to include one little china figurine of an animal in every box. Grandma collected all of those, too, and I loved them just as much as the cards. I kept as many of them as I could for a long time when I was a kid. Nowadays we are able to buy Red Rose Tea here in the States in most grocery stores. It’s been many years since I bought a box and I wonder, do they still include those little ceramic figurines in each box? But I digress.
That scrapbook fascinated me and still does to this day. It is like a snapshot of American life and customs and products from the early seventies. It’s hard to describe how much it means to me because of the memories it evokes.
Unfortunately now almost forty years after it was made, my Grandma’s scrapbook is a little worse for wear. I now have children of my own who aren’t particularly careful about how they handle this book and consequently, some of the pages are ripped out and some of the clippings have been lost or come unglued. For a long time I have thought about how to somehow preserve it (other than locking it away somewhere in a dark, safe place). A few nights ago I decided to take a photograph of each page just to see how it might turn out. You can see them here if you’re interested. My camera doesn’t have the high-powered resolution, and the setup is just my kitchen table, so the photos aren’t as clear and professional-looking as they could be.
I dearly loved my Grandma, who died October 25, 1982, surviving only a week after a severe heart attack. (The photo on the left is the last one taken of her before her death. It shows her with her only great-grandchild at the time, my nephew, Nils.) Her features are a little fuzzy in my mind’s eye, and although her voice was distinctive, I can’t exactly recall it as I used to. But her scrapbook lives on and provides me with an important link to an important time, and a very important person, in my past.
P.S. After writing this I discovered that Red Rose Tea has its own website at http://www.redrosetea.com/ There is a page that talks about those little figurines and there is more information about its history. This is still my favorite black tea in the world to drink.
I haven’t posted anything in a great while and that’s a good thing. I just haven’t felt like writing anything. Now that it’s January 1, 2008, I felt I should write the first post of the new year.
So, what’s been happening in my life? Well, I’ve been enjoying the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I had to work last week, which was dull. But I’m thankful to have had some time off anyway. We hosted Christmas Eve (which is when my family gives presents and does the usual Christmas-y things). It required a tremendous amount of work to make our house somewhat presentable given that it usually looks like a bomb has exploded. But we managed to pull it all together and we had a good time. Michele made a lovely meal, there was plenty of yummy things to munch on, and even some Bailey’s Irish Cream was on hand to enjoy. Christmas day was quiet and relaxed. We had a nice meal then, too, and sat around watching movies at my brother-in-law’s house.
This past few days were spent with my side of the family in east central Illinois. We hadn’t been there in several months — quite a long time. It was great to see everyone, including little Russel, my niece’s baby boy. My nephew Ben was with his cousins in Canada so we didn’t see him, and my brother, Dan, wasn’t feeling well so we missed seeing him, too. But everyone else was there. One of the fun things we did was to go on our first geocaching adventure using the GPS unit my brother-in-law gave me for Christmas. I looked up three geocaches in the area and we were able to find two out of the three. The children enjoyed it and in the process we were able to spend some healthy time tramping around in the outdoors finding lots of interesting things like a cecropia moth’s cocoon, and seeing a flock of pheasants (something the little kids had never seen before).
Of course we enjoyed giving and receiving lots of presents. The little kids each got some special things such as kiddie digital cameras, MP3 players, cute big fluffy animal slippers, and much more. Michele got an iPod nano — cool!
We are thankful for many blessings, including the opportunity to spend time with both sides of our families.
With some sadness and lots of fanfare, Keegan and Tristan left with Grandpa and Grandma Jozwiak on a missions trip to Manitoulin Island, Ontario. This is what Keegan has done each year for the past eight years, but this year is Tristan’s first time. His grandparents promised him that he could go with them once he reached six years of age. He has been looking forward to this for weeks and was unbelievable excited and goofy from the minute he woke up early this a.m. It feels strange to only have two children to ourselves for the next week!
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[Through a series of missteps that I won't go into here, I discovered that I had accidentally deleted this post, first published a few weeks ago. I feel pretty dumb. When I figured out what happened, I sat here, stunned, wondering what to do. Then I remembered Google's good 'ol caching capability, did a quick search to call up the cached version of this post, did a quick copy and paste, and voila, problem solved. Well, almost. My error wiped out the original post entirely, meaning that it automatically broke the link to that post, as well. There's nothing I can do about that. In the process of reconstituting the content, I decided on some editorial tweaks throughout.]
(Warning, this is a pretty lengthy post.)
Yesterday was the start of EndUser 2006, Endeavor’s customer conference. Somewhere around 1,000 customers have shown up for this event, some coming from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, several European countries, as well as Canada, Latin America, and of course, the U.S. As I’ve noted before, there are several conference sessions dealing with topics of interest, but yesterday’s highlight was the opening general session featuring a representative from Google who spoke in depth about Google’s Book Search project. Tom Turvey, Head, Google Book Search Partnerships, gave a brief over of Google and how it makes money, defined the elements of Google Book Search, described the Google Book Search Partner Program (which he oversees), and finally discussed the Library Program portion of Google Book Search. Tom has a long history of working with online content, serving in numerous roles in the publishing industry relating to online delivery, including launching Barnes & Noble’s ebook offerings and most recently holding a senior post at HarperCollins.
Tom began by describing Google’s business. He mentioned that Google now provides 59% of all Internet search referrals. Google’s oft-repeated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Their Its core business, i.e. how they the company makes money, is from advertising revenue generated via paid search ads using Google AdSense. Tom also mentioned that Google is the leader, by far, in referrals to book sites (currently it processes about 60% of all such referrals). In describing Google’s business, Tom pointed out some interesting statistics about book purchasing. He provided statistics showing that 13% Thirteen percent of all book purchases are now done online; schools/libraries make up about 24% of the book buying market, direct to consumer purchasing (direct from publishers) is about 2%; and the biggest growth area recently has been in non bookstore retail (books being purchased in Costco, Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart, etc.).
The next portion of the presentation focused on an explanation of Google Book Search. Tom pointed out that in his experience, never has there been so much misinformation about a product as there has been with Google Book Search (GBS). He made some comment that 90% of what has been published in the news media is false, thus the importance of explaining exactly what it’s about. GBS, at its heart, is an attempt to associate book content with what searchers are looking for in search engines. There are two main parts to GBS: the Partner Program, and the Library Program. The Partner Program involves relationships and agreements between Google and publishers. GBS launched in October 2004 at the Frankfort Book Fair. As of now there are literally thousands of publisher partners spanning seven languages. One of the most frequent questions publishers ask Google is, what books are good choices for discovery via GBS? One of Tom’s funnier statements was “we don’t need to help Harry Potter find an audience.” What Google is mostly interested in is the arcane, the obscure, and bringing this material to light via searching GBS. Every page is searchable; users are searching books from cover to cover. There are two ways of providing search on book content: a dedicated search (books.google.com), and integrating book content within the general Google search. The main intent of working with publishers is to drive book sales. Content is protected in a variety of ways (Tom mentioned that as you can imagine, this element of agreements with publishers often gets “into the weeds”). Only 20% of a book is viewable by one user during the course of a month. Print, copy, and save are disabled. Scanned images are purposely low resolution. Publishers can add/remote remove their material at any time. There is page level security as well. A percentage of pages is never visible at one time. Google’s process for receiving publisher content is pretty straightforward: the publisher usually sends either a PDF or a print copy. If the latter, Google digitizes it. As an interesting aside to closing out this portion of the talk, Tom mentioned “Oh by the way, the five publishers who are suing Google over the Library Project are actually members of the Partner Program.”
In turning to the third and last portion of the presentation, Tom outlined the elements of the Library Project. Partner libraries, as most people are aware by now, include Stanford, NYPL, Oxford, Michigan, and Harvard. In researching and comparing collections from each partner library, Google discovered that 60% of books are held in only one of the partner libraries. For legal and other issues, Google began the project by focusing on public domain books. However, public domain books make up only about 20% of a typical library collection. Ten percent of a typical collection is made up of books that are still in print (i.e. the stuff that is handled via the Partner Program). Most books, 90%, are in print but in a fuzzy area in which they may be out of print but still in copyright, or perhaps out of copyright. Seventy percent of collections were published after 1923 and fall into three categories: in copyright, in public domain, or the rights may have reverted. Obviously Google needed to figure out how to solve or address these complexities. Their solution was to offer to scan everything but provide three views: sample pages (partner view), snippet view (book under copyright w/out agreement with a publisher partner), and full book view (book is in public domain). The snippet view means that the full text of each book is indexed; users can only view three snippets from the book; there are links to “buy this book” as well as “find in a library”; different categories of books are handled in different ways; and copyright holders may opt out of display and/or scanning.
Obviously a critical factor for Google is optimizing and streamlining the workflow. For example, a key consideration was figuring out how long it takes to scan a typical book. Tom mentioned that in the early days of the project, founder Larry Brin and another staff member would use a metronome to time each other over and over again as they tried to figure out how best to scan a book. (Why a metronome? I have no idea and neither did Tom.) Books are scanned as is, including scribbles, marginalia, notes, whatever. Google is aiming to build a comprehensive collection of indexed books but has a long way to go yet on achieving that goal. Some of the challenges they face on a daily basis are 100% OCR accuracy, 100% image quality, search and integration with web search, the accuracy of any affiliated metadata, the existence of lots of “edge cases” in terms of how to process and display the scanned results, how to address books that contain multiple languages and/or scripts; and how best to achieve a good level of speed/automation of the entire process. As with their much vaunted (and top secret) search algorithms, Google is constantly tweaking the process to try to improve the quality. How do they handle math formulas, spelling correction (Tom used the example of vernacular language that is meant to be spelled a certain way but which looks wrong to a typical spell checker), etc.? What is the best way to deal with automated metadata extraction? Can they figure out an automated way to detect (and appropriately handle) different languages and/or scripts?
Tom made a big point of the fact that Google is actively engaging the library community. Librarians tell Google the good and the bad about GBS (e.g. of bad: too overwhelming for users, hard to know which stuff is authoritative and what is junk, desire to know exactly how the process for scanning and indexing works). Google wants to ensure that GBS works for libraries by making information more discoverable, driving more library usage, and supporting a worldwide community, which is especially relevant for remote and distributed library users. Google has no desire whatsoever to put libraries out of business; in fact, Tom claims that the opposite is true.
[One of the things that I thought was particularly striking was that at one point during the session, Mr. Turvey asked for a show of hands from the audience of those people who were aware of the facts and details he had provided about Google Book Search. To my astonishment, I was one of the few people to raise their hands. Maybe this was just due to some people not fully understanding the question or to some people's innate shyness, who knows. But if it was an indicator of professional ignorance of these matters, then we're in big trouble.]
After concluding his prepared remarks, Tom invited the audience to pose questions. This was perhaps the most interesting portion of the session and Tom handled the questions with aplomb and a dose of wit. Below are my notes of the substance of some of the questions posed, followed by the substance of what I could jot down of Tom’s answers.
Question: When a user sees a link to “find in a library” which leads to Open WorldCat, what librarians want is to have that user come to us rather than use Google and/or buy the book from the publisher. What is your view on this?
Answer: It appears that this is in fact what is happening. Logs show that adding the “find in a library” link, directed to Open WorldCat, has driven a tremendous growth in traffic to WorldCat. Presumably this leads to higher library use.
Question: I’d like to see much more powerful search options, including things like truncation, proximity searching, and boolean capabilities. Is this something Google is considering?
Answer: That’s a very good question, what I’d expect from a librarian <laughter from the audience>. Some of these capabilities are things we are indeed working on, while some of them are already available via the Advanced Search option.
Question: I believe that in search results from publisher content, there is no link to “find in a library” when there is such a link provided in the library search. Why is that?
Answer: Good question. Remember that the goal of GBS is to have a relevant search. The vast majority of books available in GBS at this time are from publishers. Over the next few years, that proportion will flip to emphasize library-owned material. Honestly there is a constant tug and pull between publishers and Google over this issue of how to direct users. Publishers, obviously, participate in GBS to sell more books.
Question: Is there any plan to include Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as part of the GBS search?
Answer: LCSH and other taxonomies are already used to some extent behind the scenes to assist with determining relevance as well as identifying relationships between books (linking from one book to a related book).
Question: Can you speak about why you are being sued by some of your publisher partners?
Answer: Attorneys love it when you talk publicly about their litigation <much laughter from audience>. Seriously, though, no, I can’t answer that.
Question: Are you indexing each book cover to cover (i.e. full text)? How do you determine relevancy? [Editorial aside: Was this person paying attention? This question was clearly answered in the context of the presentation.]
Answer: Yes, we are doing full text. The ranking/relevancy algorithms used in GBS are pretty much the same as those used in the regular Google search. Some tweaking is of course necessary to make the algorithms relevant for book search. We do user interface testing every month and as a result, we constantly tweak/change the algorithms.
Question: Do you have a formal digital preservation strategy?
Answer: We have agreements with our library partners that cover preservation to whatever degree they have specified in their legal agreements. It really depends on what partner libraries want. Other than that, no, we do not have a formal preservation strategy and do not feel that that is a role we should assume.
Question: Elaborate on how relevant metadata is in GBS.
Answer: Well, first of all, metadata does play a role in GBS but our bias is always toward full text, with metadata/abstracts thought of as secondary. This is probably the opposite of how most libraries would prioritize things.
Question: I have a question on the issue of fair use. Are you working to expand the concept of fair use in terms of scholarly material in particular?
Answer: We feel that our stance on fair use and GBS is very, very significant. We do not have any formal focus on scholarly material in GBS, though.
Question: What is Google’s stance toward the Open Content Alliance? Does Google view them as partners, or competitors?
Answer: We have an open door, a desire to partner and share in digitizing material. We believe that initiatives such as the Open Content Alliance are worthy of our support. However, as you can imagine, there are certain complexities and a lot of politics involved in this kind of interaction. We want to participate in initiatives like this in as open a way as possible.
Question: “Find in a library” links only to WorldCat at present. Does Google have any plans for directing traffic to other bibliographic (i.e. library) databases (this is particularly important for those libraries who aren’t linked from WorldCat)?
Answer: We’d be interested in any other worthwhile bibliographic databases, but WorldCat is it for now.
Question: A single search box is very attractive, but when you expand your data sources (as Google is doing), the simplicity and relevance of this one search become more difficult to maintain. How do you handle this?
Answer: We constantly reevaluate the one box concept and it is an ongoing problem to solve. There is no ready answer.
Question: How do you handle materials from publishers once those materials have gone out of print?
Answer: Good question. Once a publisher’s book goes out of print, they request that it be removed from the index and then it no longer appears in the search. The exception to this would be if there happens to be a copy of that same book that has been scanned and indexed as part of the Library Project. In that case, the book would remain in the index.
Question: Do you have plans for providing regional Google book searches (e.g. one for New Zealand imprints)? This is important for those outside of the U.S. because currently there is such a predominance of U.S. imprints in GBS.
Answer: We already do this, e.g. currently we have 65 regional book searches.
Question: The exposure from GBS for libraries is great, but it needs to be more two way, e.g. to direct users looking for material in a local library catalog to GBS and/or elsewhere. Are there any plans to extend the Google API to be used by libraries for integration into their online catalogs?
Answer: Something like this functionality is present in Google Scholar. We are very happy with this integration with library services and we want to figure out ways to extend this further.
Question: What’s your view on library’s development of customized Greasemonkey scripts to integrate library results in with GBS?
Answer: Anything that doesn’t violate copyright, we’re all for.
Question: GBS is very exciting. What about developing Google Journals?
Answer: <tongue in cheek> …So we have this thing called Google Scholar…Actually we are working ways to better integrate or link between GBS and Google Scholar.
Question: There is clearly a balance of power issue relating to the premise that allowing Google to do all this scanning and digitizing of book content puts the burden of proof on the content creator rather than the user. What are your thoughts about this?
Answer: We believe that this is a very important issue and our stance on this hinges on the belief that we are simply being consistent between the indexing of website content and indexing the content of books.
Question: What about working to include government documents, because they do no present a copyright problem?
Answer: Yes, we have a team devoted to this very issue. It is a bigger challenge to do this than it may at first appear because in order to do it we need to work out who is responsible (i.e. the publisher) of the multitude of gov docs. Expect progress on this front.
Only recently have I begun to read the T. Scott blog. It’s well worth the time. A recent posting describes the author’s experience attending his first meeting of the board of the Medical Library Association. In particular I just about cracked up over the following statement he made:
“Volunteer organizations are strange creatures. They run off the drive and energy of the terminally overcommitted, so there are never really enough resources to bring to bear.”
This tickled my funny bone because I’ve been there, done that. The time I spent on the board of NASIG was incredibly worthwhile and I will be forever grateful for that experience. Yet I can say that T. Scott’s observations are spot on. I remember attending my first NASIG board meeting as a visitor (newly elected vice-president/president-elect) at the NASIG annual conference at the University of Michigan. Like T. Scott at the MLA board meeting, this was an illuminating experience.
I don’t care what anyone tells you, being president of NASIG is no less work than a full time job (or in some leadership capacity in whatever volunteer organization). It was incredibly stressful and required that a lot of time be devoted to the organization. As an aside, it’s interesting to note the similarities between NASIG and the Medical Library Association given the huge disparity in membership dues between the two volunteer organizations. NASIG charges $75 (and there are variations on dues depending on your status, e.g. students get a lower rate, and location, e.g. those who live in Canada or Mexico pay less in US dollars) whereas the Medical Library Association charges $165 for regular members. And NASIG used to charge $20-25 from its inception in 1985 ’til last year, when the dues were raised significantly for the first time.
Anyway, getting back to the workload issue for volunteer organizations… Given the fact that we all have “real” jobs, T. Scott writes:
“Frankly, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all.”
Still, it is worth it. My NASIG involvement has been incredibly important to my growth as a librarian. Friends I made 15 years ago remain friends to this day, and many new ones have been made along the way. I particularly agree with T. Scott’s closing statement in his post, and it holds true for most volunteer organizations that I know of:
“It is, after all, an association. A gathering of people committed to working together to achieve some things they can’t achieve on their own. Sometimes we’re successful, sometimes we fail. Always our reach exceeds our grasp. I like it that way.”
I like it that way, too.
I’ve been using Google Analytics since mid-November 2005 to gain some knowledge about who visits this blog, how much traffic it generates, and from where. It’s not a perfect tool but hey, it’s free and it’s easy to use. I’ve read that others question the results given to them by Google Analytics and I think it is a good policy to try to track usage in more than one way (e.g. by adding in analysis of server logs, depending on whether your ISP provides access to that kind of information).
It’s now been about two months since I put in place the necessary tracking code. Here are some interesting facts and figures that I’ve come up with so far:
I have seen steady growth in access these last few months. The traffic this site gets (and therefore its ‘impact’) is quite low, but that’s fine with me. It’s just kind of fun to know a bit about visitors, especially where they come from.
[Update: For reasons I don't quite understand yet, I discovered this a.m. that if I look at Google Analytics results for this site on a weekly basis, I get different results than if I choose to view the results for the complete length of time I have had Google Analytics running (approximately since mid-November 2005). The above statistics are derived from a two month summary rather than from analyzing results week by week. One major difference is the fact that a much larger number of countries are sources for visitors to this site than I had previously believed. These include China, Indonesia, Brazil, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, Romania, Italy, Netherlands, India, Vietnam, Mexico, Switzerland, Belgium, Thailand, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, and Czech Republic. I think this is pretty incredible geographic coverage for a very low traffic, English language site, and it gives real meaning to WORLD Wide Web.]
Some time ago I noted here that an acquaintence of mine had snagged an interesting job at ALA as RDA Project Manager. Yesterday I sat down and read more about RDA, which stands for Resource Description and Access. In particular I read through the RDA Prospectus, published by an international group called the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR, or JSC for short. This group is responsible for implementing changes to the cataloging code of practice in use by the majority of libraries in North America, the U.K., and Canada. The current cataloging code is known as the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR) and this has been the standard code for cataloging since the 1960s when the first edition of AACR was published. Having taken all of the cataloging coursework in library school and then starting out in the profession as a serials cataloger at the University of Chicago Library and then managing a large cataloging unit there for quite a while, I have “grown up” on AACR and have been actively involved in the cataloging community, particularly the serials cataloging part, in the past. I’ve since moved away from that professional focus somewhat and am no longer as current in my knowledge as I used to be. I had heard about RDA but didn’t really pay much attention to it. So it was a big surprise to me to read yesterday that RDA will be replacing AACR (or rather, AACR2R, which is the 2nd, rev. ed. of AACR that is currently in use). I decided to delve into RDA in more detail.
What I learned from the prospectus and from some of the discussion surrounding RDA that I could find is very intriguing. This is a very big change, and, in my view, a positive one. It is a big change on many levels but since I work for a major ILS (integrated library systems) vendor, I focused on what this new standard might mean for them. Here are some thoughts or impressions that came to mind:
I admit that I don’t know as much as I should know about RDA and surrounding issues, and I may have misinterpreted some of what I’ve read. Or maybe there are even more radical implications for ILS vendors than what I can think of right now. Regardless, I am fairly confident that RDA’s progressive approach bodes for a lot of upheaval for a lot of stakeholders. I’m going to pay a lot more attention to it than I have heretofore!
Saturday morning, we drove up to Marshall, Michigan, to meet my in-laws on their way up to Canada. Keegan went with them for a week-long missions trip to Manitoulin Island. This is Keegan’s sixth year of making this trip. Our previous home church, Wheaton Bible Church, sponsors a short-term missions trip each year to an Indian reservation on Manitoulin Island. This year, my mother-in-law went also. They decided to travel in a bit more comfort than in previous years by renting a popup camper to stay in during the week. Keegan was so excited to go, he loves this special time with his grandparents. I am really proud of him and the work he does with kids his age while at the camp each year. We miss him but we are glad that he has the chance to be a part of this work.