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Concept Mapping

2010-03-12T19:55:00+00:00

While reading comments to a blog post about whether or not faculty should ban laptops in the classroom, I came across a comment that linked to a blog post about a student using concept mapping software to take notes.

This particular student was using Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The student wrote that he was taking much more useful notes by applying them to concept maps and he was at the same time paying better attention to the lectures instead of just transcribing the presentations.

This got me thinking. I’ve been considering using concept maps for projects and preparing presentations, articles, excreta. However, would this approach work for conferences notes? If I did decide to use concept mapping software for conference notes, would I make separate concept maps per session? per tract? just one for the whole conference? I’m not really sure, but I think this has some potential. Taking notes in a linear way works for certain sessions but never seems to work for a whole conference – especially a focused conference. Yes, I record information about the sessions, but it kind of misses out on capturing the whole theme of the conference and what the general vibe and intellectual feeling was. For me, it is almost like looking at the trees but not seeing the forest.

I am not sure that concept mapping would really capture the forest, but it may very well be better at it then traditional, linear, note taking. Has anyone tried this at a conference? If so, I’d be interested in your experiences. I think I’ll try it at an upcoming conference and wee whether or not it works well for me.

Kim Komando’s link of the day and libraries

2010-03-10T15:02:23+00:00

Nationally syndicated tech radio talk show host, Kim Komando’s download of the day is Zotero. Personally, I am a big fan of Zotero so I am happy to see it getting some love. However, one of the things she writes in her short blurb about the download is:

Research used to be done in the dark stacks of a library. Archived news stories were stored on microfiche. [...] Today, the Web holds all the information you could want.

Librarians will know that not all archived news stories are available in digital format, and many that are come with subscription fees. Yes, there is more information available at your desktop and Zotero is an excellent tool to organize it, but to say that all the (research) information you could want is available on the Web has no basis in reality – yet many people seem to think that it is.

While today’s libraries provide more then just access to information and IMO would still be valuable even if all information were freely available on the Web, librarians need to realize what some influential people are saying and be prepared to counter those claims. We need to be able to make a case to our stakeholders, whether they be voters and elected politicians in the case of public libraries, or faculty and administration in academic libraries, that we are a) providing information that people can not get elsewhere, and b) that we provide valuable services around that information. We can’t just lament or criticize people like Kim Komando for not knowing this, we need to educate them.

Koha finds a new home on the Internet

2010-03-03T18:35:54+00:00

The Koha community has decided to create a new home for Koha on the Internet. The new URL is http://koha-community.org/. The stated reason is that the host of the old site, LibLime, was not responsive in updated the previous site. I really haven’t been following the LibLime and Koha saga that closely but it is clear that the actions (or in this case, inactions) of LibLime have left a bad taste in many people’s mouth and it is a shame that it has come to this. Much of the success the Koha has had, at least in the United States, can be directly traced to the work of LibLime. It is sad to see that they appear to be no longer an integral part of the community.

Redwoodvirtual closing down

2010-03-01T16:59:33+00:00

When I started this blog way back in October, 2004 I started it on a Linux Virtual Private Server hosted by Redwoodvirtual. Although I moved my blog about a year ago to another provider, I kept my Redwood account although I really only used it for SSH access to IRC. Still, it was with a bit of sadness I recieved the following in an e-mail the other day:

Due to many factors we have decided to close redwoodvirtual. This is a difficult decision to make after being in business for six years.

Our last day of operation will be March 24th, 2010 at noon. This will give one last month for monthly accounts to migrate to another host provider. For yearly accounts we will refund the remaining amount, prorated from March 24th, 2010. If you have any questions, please emails us at support@redwoodvirtual.com.

We apologize for the sudden announcement, but wish you all the best.

Sincerely,
the Redwoodvirtual Support Staff
support@redwoodvirtual.com

While Redwoodvirtual was not always the most responsive company, they were also very inexpensive and overall doing business with them was a positive experience. I’m sorry to see them shut their virtual doors and I wish them good luck in their future endeavors.

Moving to management

2010-02-19T15:51:54+00:00

Before I moved to my current position as Head of Library Technology, I was the systems department at my previous job. That meant I had to do almost everything when it came to library-specific technology and applications. It was rewarding and allowed me to do a lot of things the way I thought best. Now that I run a department, albeit a small one, that is no longer the case. I need to let the people in my department have the freedom to do their job (which luckily for me, they are excellent at). This creates a bit of a sense of loss of control. I don’t have time to micro-manage everything to make sure everything is done my way. As long as things are getting done in a timely manner that serves the goals and mission of the Libraries, than all is good. This seems logical but when I first moved into this role and was doing more managerial tasks than before I felt a bit lost, I missed doing everything my way. While I am not a Vice President and I still do plenty of hands on stuff because of the size of my department, I related to the blog post on Insider Higher Ed by Kent Barnds. In his blog post, Making the To-Be List, Brands makes 6 recommendations for those moving to an administrative role. They are:

Do not mourn and dwell upon the loss of control
Redefine “doing”
Embrace delayed gratification
Serve as a real mentor
Listen actively
Applaud others’ successes

I think he offers some good advice and I would recommend anyone thinking about moving or who has recently moved into a more managerial or administrative role to read the post.

On Libraries and the Public Spehere

2010-02-12T23:57:37+00:00

One of the major reasons I became interested enough in the concept of Libraries and Democracy (well, besides being a librarian and a fan of democracy), is the work of John Buschman. In particular, his book “Dismantling the Public Sphere Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy.” While I am sure that I will use that book as one of my sources for the paper I’m presenting at the Networking Democracy? New Media Innovations in Participatory Politics symposium, for those who are interesting in a short introduction into Buschman’s work in this area, should read his article, On Libraries and the Public Sphere, that appeared in Library Philosophy and Practice Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 2005).

On Libraries and the Public Sphere is the text of an address that Buschman gave at Rider University and does a good job of introducing the role that Libraries can, and should, play in public discourse. One thing I think that should stand out to librarians from this address is:

If information and its related sets of critical skills are as important to economic and political participation as we keep insisting, then what information we produce, how we keep it, what we keep, and how it is absorbed or not are crucial questions in our culture – and libraries are important (if undervalued) institutions in this.

I think most people will recognized that in order to have a strong democracy, the electorate needs to be informed. Libraries can, and have in the past, played an important role in this. After all, we are in an information economy so information organizations should be seen as important. For those not familiar with the concept of the public sphere, Buschman explains it in terms of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas’s work. Habermas asked how and why democratic governments come out of closed political systems that were based on the divine rights of kings. Buschman explains that Habermas’s answer is that a a “sphere if non-governmental opinion making” developed from the marcantile economies of northern Europe. As people gathered in new urban places such as coffee houses political conversations took place. These were assisted, or informed, by the intellectual press of the day. This caused two crucial things happened:

Opinion became communicated and recorded outside of a small group of family and friends.
The principle that in order for (governmental) power to become legitimate, its proceedings need to be made public.

Buschman then goes on to relate how libraries are a part of Habermas’s definition of the public sphere:

Libraries house and further rational discourse through the organization of collections coupled with the principle of unfettered information access.

The field enacts the principle of critique and rational argumentation through the commitment to balanced collections, preserving them over time, and furthering inclusion through active attempts to make collections and resources reflect historical and current intellectual diversity.

By their very existence libraries potentially verify (or refute) claims to authority in making current and retrospective organized resources available to check the bases of a thesis, law, book, article, policy etc. continuing the process of debate which lies at the heart of the public sphere and democracy.

By policy and practice, [librarianship] has sought to reach out to those not served – or sometimes not wishing to be served! – to make access to information and education more widely and universally available.

Thus, Buschman believes that libraries have a fundamental connection to the needs of democracy and “when we debate information and communication and the future of libraries, we’re debating democracy by other means.” Librarians should keep this democratic role in mind when making decisions involving the procurement and preservation of materials. By competing with big box bookstores, libraries risk evacuating their historical polices of public purpose, broad representation, and fairness in exchange for an immediate payoff for the institution.

Buschhman says that truly informed debate “remains the essence of both education and democracy and libraries play a pivotal role in both.” Librarians and the people who run the parent organizations of libraries such as local governments and universities would do well to keep this in mind when making decisions regarding libraries. Society can afford the public mission and the democratic good that libraries can offer and we need to ensure that potential is preserved

Open Societies Need Open Systems

2010-02-03T23:01:33+00:00

The BBC News Web site had an interesting column by Bill Thompson yesterday titled “Open Societies need open systems.” The subtitle, “Openness, like democracy, must be constantly defended, says Bill Thompson” basically acts as a partial abstract as well. In this article he looks at Amazon’s disagreement with Macmillan that resulted in Amazon briefly de-listing all Macmillan stock and removing it from its indexes and the Apple/Adobe keruffle of Flash on the iPhone and soon to be released iPad.

I’m not quite sure how the Amazon/Macmillian dispute effects Democracy, or Openness for that matter, but it does go to show that highly successful retailers such as Amazon and Walmart can make it more or less difficult for a producer of a product to get it in the hands of consumer. Amazon, no doubt, felt that by trying to prevent different pricing for e-books it was helping the consumer (and thus it’s self) but obviously authors like Charlie Stross quoted in the article as saying “Amazon [has] screwed me, and I tend to take that personally, because they didn’t need to do that” saw it differently.

The Apple and Adobe situation I see differently, and while I do believe that while Apple is looking out for its own corporate interests, Apple also does want more Openness on the Web. As a company with a minority operating system share, the more open the Web is the better chance they have to compete. Adobe, on the other hand wants to, as Thompson puts it, “close off the web to non-Flash content.” While Apple, with its stance on DRM and other issues, has not always been a strong supporter of Openness, I believe in this case they are squarely on the side of Openness by support HTML5 and H.264 over continuing to enable the proprietary Adobe Flash format to be the de facto standard for video on the Web. Thus I find it a bit odd that Thompson appears to be supporting Adobe on this issue. Thompson says:

Just as we must work to retain our democratic forms of government in the face of adversity, so we must constantly be alert for those who would remove open systems in the name of efficiency and effectiveness.

He may be right that not installing Flash on the iPhone and iPad is in Apple’s best interest but I don’t see it as anti-Openness. Sometimes Openness and corporate interests can align, and I believe in this particular case Apple is on the side of Openness and Adobe is on the side of a closed, proprietary Web. At the very least, even if Apple is not a friend of Openness, neither is Adobe. Proprietary technologies and formats as de facto Web standards are a much greater threat to Openness than devices that don’t support them.

In looking at this issue from a Democracy 2.0 and access to information situation, libraries need to be aware of potential problems with proprietary formats and what devices can and will support them. If librarians believe that access to information is important for democracy, we need to make sure when we acquire (via licensing or purchasing) that the content is in a format that will be accessible to out patrons now and into the future.

Balancing Innovation and Focus: A Non Sequitur

2010-02-03T01:24:24+00:00

Note: This is post is a modified version of a comment I originally posted on Carl Grant’s blog. If you already read it, move on. Nothing new to see here.

Carl Grant recently made a post about Balancing innovation and focus that had a huge bent towards the question of investing in Open Source Software (OSS)

I agree with Carl that many libraries could use more focus when implementing new technology but I strongly disagree that this is any different when it comes to OSS versus proprietary applications. None of his critique is specific to OSS and signally out of OSS to me is a bit of a non sequitur. Many proprietary applications, including some of Ex Libris’ offerings, need a great deal of customization and often just as much, if not more, staff to implement and maintain as Open Source. I was talking to a proprietary ILS administrator from another University last year and they have twice as many systems people working on their ILS then Georgia Pines had to original develop Evergreen. Another example about three years ago a University had four new job advertisements to help them implement a new proprietary discovery layer. People like David Walker have put into a lot of work implementing a custom interface on top of Metalib. Are these wasted, redundant efforts? Why is this different then focusing efforts on OSS? It’s not any different. Or if it is, one could argue that at least a library would have the software to change and modify like University of Rochester did with Dspace in creating IR+ which they couldn’t do if they put all their previous efforts into a proprietary product that ended up not suiting their needs. This is not an OSS issue, it is a technology issue and a management issue. It is just as easy to say that Ex Libris building Primo Central (or whatever product you want to name) is “redundant and poorly coordinated investments” considering other vendors are in this space.

Carl’s underlying point “that librarianship is in need of a clear definition of the future of the profession and to examine how technology (open source or proprietary) will move that definition to fruition and, at the same time, leverage librarianship” is well taking and I agree. Libraries should evaluate each technology acquisition carefully considering need, budget, skill level, mission, etc. This evaluation may or may not lead to an existing OSS or propitiatory solution, developing a new OSS or home-grown solution, partnering with a vendor on a new product (such as the URM development partners are doing with Ex Libris), or not implementing anything at all. But dividing the world between Open Source and proprietary applications only serves in muddying the water and weakening this message.

That’s a lot of text for a non sequitur, no?

Technology Free Zones

2010-02-02T00:58:44+00:00

In a campus IT meeting during a discussion about strategic planning one of the faculty members brought up the idea of a technology-free zone. Apparently he heard about some other college implementing such a thing. The committee decided to think about it and discuss it at a future meeting. I did think a campus-wide technology planning committee coming up with the idea of a technology-free zone a bit ironic. Anyway, I posted a brief tweet about this irony on facebook, twitter, and identi.ca and I got some good responses aboiut why this might be a good or bad idea. Dan Scott did point out we better “[g]et the level of technology right for those zones; otherwise, no clothes.” With that warning, lets look at technology-free zones when technolgy is defined to not include clothing.

After reading some comments (mostly on Facebook), I am thinking about this more. I did a quick Google search and when limited to .edu domains, it appears not many universities have such an area (I’m sure more than the few I found do, but they probably call it something different). I think if a campus is going to do this, a library makes a logical choice. Setting up such a zone shouldn’t cost too much money. Mostly some furniture: maybe with some comfy chairs and plants like the UW-Parkside Teaching and Learning Center? I think the bigger issues are 1) Space, and 2) Will they use it.

Space: I don’t know many libraries that have too much space. So, with limited space, is a technology-free zone a good use of space. That obviously would vary library-by-library and campus-by-campus.

Will they use it: On facebook I mentioned that none is forcing people to use technology and most libraries have quiet study areas. So, why make a technology-free zone? A former colleague mentioned that in most quiet areas there is still “residual noise” such as music from ear bugs and keyboard chatter. So really, a technology-free zone does offer something that a quiet study does not. That still doesn’t mean people would use it though.

Personally, I think if a library has a space it would be worth trying, or at least worth surveying students to see if they were interested. What’s the worse that can happen? No one comes, so after a year you re-purpose the space as a quiet study or group study or anything else. However, I’m not sure it would be worth trying this if it meant eliminating other spaces (such as quiet-study) or services. I say this mostly because with so much of of the information libraries are providing require technology to access, it could cause issues. Does anyone work in a library that has or had a technology-free zone? I’d love to hear how it worked.

2010 Horizon Report & Libraries

2010-01-28T19:35:00+00:00

I was debating whether or not to invest valuable time in reading the 2010 Horizon Report on emerging technologies in higher education until I found out it was on the agenda for an upcoming meeting of a campus IT committee I am a member of. Thus, my decision was made, I had to read it. So, read it I did. I’m guessing most everyone that is interested in the report has already at least read about it, but just in case, the six technologies they focused on this year were (time to adoption in parentheses):

Mobile Computing (1 year or less)
Open Content (1 year or less)
E-Books (2 to 3 years)
Simple Augmented Reality (2 to 3 years)
Gesture-based computing (4 to 5 years)
Visual Data Analysis (4 to 5 years)

While the report does list a lot of good reasons for these technologies in higher education, they do not focus on libraries. Instead of repeating or rebutting what they said for higher ed as a whole, lets look at this from the academic library perspective.

Mobile Computing: People who talk to me on a regular basis about library technology probably know I’m a bit of a detractor of this whole mobile computing bandwagon as it relates to libraries. Certainly there are some who think it is the next big thing, so maybe I’m wrong. Heck, there are whole conferences devoted to mobile computing in libraries. Basically, I see mobile computing as a time-limited market – especially when it comes to libraries. I do see a reason to make some of the core pages of the academic library Web site (hours, contact information, maybe the catalog) but I don’t see a need for special iPhone apps or anything like that. I heard Joshua Kim present a Webinar the other day and he said that the demand from students for mobile community has been highly over-estimated by many information technologists. I agree.

There are reasons to be skeptical. But even if I were less skeptical about students wanted to use the library from there phone while they were hiking, I think a bigger reason into to invest too heavily in this is that mobile devices keep on improving. By the time that there is 1) interest from users, and 2) applications that they want to use, the devices will basically be able to do anything a laptop can, so it won’t be necessary to design services for mobile computing. What is and will remain more important is to design Web-based services and resources using open standards and make sure that they are accessible and limit the sue of propitiatory formats and applications whenever possible. If this is done, the mobile problem will most likely take care of itself. HTML5 may help with this.

Open Content: What I found interesting about the 2010 Horizon Report’s section on Open Content is that they were focused mainly on open courses, and maybe to a lesser degree on open lectures. Here in the library-world we seem a bit more focused on open access journals. There has been a lot written about the latter from a library perspective, even something by me, so lets look at open courses from a library perspective. What does it mean? How should libraries be involved? I’m still trying to figure that out. Certainly librarians can create open “courses” on searching databases, evaluating resources, etc., but should libraries be involved in curating open course materials, entering them into the library catalog or discovery layer? I can see some strong benefits to this, but would faculty want us to be preserving materials? What about faculty that do this outside of official mechanisms? I don’t think there is any technical reason why libraries couldn’t be involved, but there may be policy and staffing issues. This is something that I think librarians need to keep on their radar screens.

E-books: It is interesting that the report said e-books are two to three years away while I know that many academic libraries have been providing access to e-books for a while. What was also interesting about the report was when they were provide examples about e-books and libraries they seemed to focus more on recreational reading than academic reading. Obviously e-books are here. What will it mean for libraries? I’m not sure longterm. One thing I am wondering is how the market will go? If we are purchasing e-books, from company X and they are hosting, what happens if they go out of business? What about privacy? E-books are here, but there are still a lot of policy and access issues to be addressed.

Simple Augmented Reality: I’m not really sure what role academic libraries can play here. We can make library tours, and maybe provide access to equipment, software, and/or space. But at this point I am having a hard time seeing where libraries fit in except on the fringes. That’s okay though, we don’t have to be involved with every new technology. That said, I’d be interested to see what library specific applications others see for augmented reality.

Gesture-based computing: Gesture-based computing is another one that I’m not sure where an academic library fits in. Like augmented reality, I can see libraries playing a role in provide equipment, software, and spaces, but library-focused uses are not as obvious to me. Maybe in four to five years they will be. I would say, the one technology in this area I’m interested is the newly announced Apple iPad. While multi-touch screens are not the end-all and be-all of gesture-based computing, they do have there place. It will be interesting to see if libraries look at innovative ways to use this product (and the competitors that are sure to come if it proves successful). Personally, I can see us lending these out instead of or in addition to laptops or netbooks, but library-specific applications for gesture-based computing seem less likely. However, what I can see happening is the development of gesture-based hardware and software designed to help those with disabilities. I think that is one area librarians should keep an eye on.

Visual Data Analysis: I think the area of large data sets is one area where academic libraries could play a large role in the future. Will they is another question. While there are some academic libraries involved with large data sets, I am not sure that librarian-involvement is wide spread. Large datasets are going to continue to both grow in size and number. Will libraries be involved with maintaining and preserving them? I would hope so. This would allow researchers to focus on there research and I believe that libraries have the knowledge and ethics of preserving information that they would be a good choice on campus to put this responsibility. Whether that will happen though is unclear. While libraries are a good choice to me, there are other campus entities that may also step up to the plate like campus computing or the division of research. Libraries need to keep vigilant about this field and any mid- to large-sized activity make sure that at least a few of the librarians are aware of the issues of preserving and maintaining datasets so that they can speak knowledgeable about the subject when approached. I am not sure if we have to lead the way, but we need to be prepared to be at the table and to offer ideas and solutions. As far as for visualized data analysis, I just see that as an outgrowth of data sets. Researchers need tools to access datasets. If libraries are involved with helping to preserve and maintain data, they will be involved with providing visualization tools and instruction

EPrints Document License Types

2010-01-26T22:50:13+00:00

Today I was adding some files to our EPrints-based repository and was asked to assign a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike US 3.0 license to them. By default, our repository various had Creative Commons licenses included, but they were neither the United States one, or 3.0 (they were 2.5). I figured this was just a matter of editing the phrases since I didn’t really want to have both the CC-NC-SA 3.0 US and the CC-NC-SA 2.5 licenses in the repository. However, it was a little more difficult then that. EPrints is, I think, a lot more powerful then sometimes it is credited for. Some of the power lies in the various format files.

After some searching on EPrints wiki and Google I couldn’t find out how to do this. This is when I turned to the all powerful grep command to search for phrases in files, and I was able to figure out which files contained the information I needed to change. It turns out there are a few different tasks that must be done and they may not be apparent at first. One of those files the contains information related to license information is a Namedset file. This file tells e-prints the codes to use for licenses. My original on looked like:

eprints@elekhasik:~$ more archives/binghamton/cfg/namedsets/licenses

# types for document licenses
cc_by_nd
cc_by
cc_by_nc
cc_by_nc_nd
cc_by_nc_sa
cc_by_sa
cc_public_domain
cc_gnu_gpl
cc_gnu_lgpl

To add a new document license type, all one needs to do is add a new code. Incidentally, the licenses appear in the E-prints editing pages in the ordered listed here. To make things easier on future depositors, instead of simply changing the cc_by_nc_sa license, I decided to make a new one called cc_binghamton. I did this so that people depositing things will know this is our libraries’ default license.

EPrints by default uses the installation-wide (versus repository based) system.xml file to translate the code to phrases for both the depository screens and public view. The two phrases that need to be read are the
licenses_typename_XXXX and licenses_description_XXXX phrases. However, E-prints comes with a warning saying “DON’T EDIT THESE FILES…. Editing the contents of this directory is not recommended.” Okay then, I’m not touching these then. Instead, anything in the system.xml file can be overridden by placing the phrases in any file located in the eprints3/archives/ARCHIVEID/cfg/lang/en/phrases directory. Not wanting to cross that warning, I did just that. While technically the phrases can be in any file, I decided to create a new file in that directory called zz_licenses.xml. The “zz” part tells me it is of my own creation and, if I recall correctly, the files are read in alphabetical order so, it gets processed at the end. As I mentioned, I added a new license called cc_binghamton. So, I needed to add entries for that. I also decided to update the CC-NC-SA to point to the 3.0 US version so I didn’t have to go back and change any previous submissions. I just followed the phrase format from the system.xml, changing the values. Besides properly adding the phrase ID, there is some file header information required. My resulting file looked like this:

<epp:phrases xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”
xmlns:epp=”http://eprints.org/ep3/phrase”
xmlns:epc=”http://eprints.org/ep3/control”>

<epp:phrase id=”licenses_typename_cc_by_nc_sa”>Creative Commons Non-commercial Attribution Share Alike
<epp:phrase id=”licenses_description_cc_by_nc_sa”><a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/”>Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike US 3.0

<epp:phrase id=”licenses_typename_cc_binghamton”>Binghamton Library Staff</epp:phrase>
<epp:phrase id=”licenses_description_cc_binghamton”><a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/”>Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike US 3.0</a></epp:phrase>
</epp:phrases>

Note that because the description is the same, they will both look the same to the end-user.

Wait, your not done yet! If you added a new license type, you will need to reload your EPrints configuration and restart apache:

eprints@elekhasik:~$ bin/epadmin reload ARCHIVEID
eprints@elekhasik:~$ sudo apache2ctl restart

Also, you will need to at least generate new abstracts (or wait for cron to do it assuming you have it configured). I decided to create new abstracts, static pages, and views just to be safe although I am not sure that they are all required.

eprints@elekhasik:~$ bin/generate_static ARCHIVEID
eprints@elekhasik:~$ bin/generate_views ARCHIVEID
eprints@elekhasik:~$ bin/generate_abstracts ARCHIVEID

That’s it. It is pretty simple once you know how to do it.

Library Perceptions Gossip

2010-01-26T17:36:47+00:00

I finally had a chance to look over Marshall Breeding’s Perceptions 2009: An International Survey of Library Automation. As Dan Scott mentions on his blog post In which I perceive that gossip is not science (and Breeding acknowledges in the comments), it is not scientific. I do think it is a little more than gossip… at least with vendors where the n → 50.

That said, one thing I do think is that comparing the numbers from one vendor or ILS to another doesn’t mean very much, For example, Apollo was rated very high, but the needs and expectations of someone running Apollo is much different from someone running Voyager or Aleph. In fact, they don’t even serve the same audiences as Apollo is marketed to small and medium public libraries while Voyager and Aleph is marketed more towards Academic, Special, and national libraries.

What I do find interesting is trends. While the people filling out the survey are not the same every year, it is interesting if one ILS or company’s score goes up or down. Being that I’m on the ELUNA Steering Committee and have worked with Aleph and Voyager more than any other ILS, I focused on the scores they received over the last three years. The three questions I looked at were:

How satisfied is the library with your current Integrated Library System (ILS)?
How satisfied is the library overall with the company from which you purchased your current ILS?
How satisfied is this library with this company’s customer support services?

Breeding also asked “How likely is it that this library will purchase its next ILS from this company?” and about likelihood of migrating to an Open Source ILS, but I think there are many other factors in those questions that don’t reflect on the quality of the software or company providing support so I’m ignoring them. For example, Ex Libris is coming out with the URM. If I’m a smaller academic or special library, I may decide I do not want or need URM so I may go elsewhere if I were choosing an ILS no matter how much I like the company. Likewise, if Ex Libris is the only one in the URM market place when I’m looking at a new system, I may go with them even if I am happy with whatever company provides the ILS I’m currently using.

With three years of responses to look at, what is the trend for Ex Libris’ two ILSs? I’m happy to report, that over the last three years in every case (excepting one) the numbers improved. They might not have in regards to a statistical difference, but still that is a positive trend. The one case where it did go down was that Voyager users felt slightly less happy about Voyager in 2009 vs. 2008 (5.91 vs. 6.01). It was still higher than 2007 (5.53)). That is a relatively minor fluctuation and is within standard deviation. So overall, the trends for comparing Ex Libris with it’s self is positive.

On the Aleph side, Ex Libris had some pretty high jumps from 2008 to 2009. In fact from 2007 to 2009, the perception of customer support for Aleph went up over a point (4.87 to 5.90).

So while the scores for Aleph were generally in the middle tier, and by just looking at numbers, Breeding is correct that “Voyager did not fare quite as well on the survey” a look at the trends show Ex Libris in a more positive light.

That said, Dan Scott does have a good point that this is not science and gossip. But usually there is some truth in gossip.

Libraries, the Public Sphere, and Democracy 2.0

2010-01-23T03:20:36+00:00

I recently learned that the extended abstract I submitted to “Networking Democracy: New Media Innovations in Participatory Politics’ Symposium” has been accepted. The conference is going to be held at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania at the end of June. Needless to say, I am very excited. My presentation is titled the same as this blog post, Libraries, the Public Sphere, and Democracy 2.0. Like all good things, there is a downside. Now that my abstract has been accepted, I have to write a paper that is up to 7,000 words long.

While I am knowledgeable about the subject (especially the “Libraries” part) there is still a lot of research I need to do for this paper. I remember back in graduate school I was asked to make annotated bibliographies for some of the papers I wrote. I am going to do this as I do my research, along with taking out a few of the quotes I may want to use. Typically when I have done this in the past I used my favorite text editor. However this time there is going to be a twist. With this post I am creating a new blog category, democracy2.0. I will be posting my annotated bibliography (and related notes) as I research and prepare my paper on this blog.

I hope readers find this interesting. I believe it will be for most of my readers (or at least my perception of who reads this – librarians and open source/free software proponents). If not, please just mark them as read as you find them in your e-reader. As you would imagine, I did a lot of research before submitting my extended abstract, so I will also be posting my notes from some of my previous research as well as new research. I should add, what I post will be parts of my scholarly process and not necessarily points I agree or disagree with and they may or not make it into my final paper. It should be noted this is a bibliography with a specific purpose: to help me write a specific paper on a specific topic. Thus these collections of posts are not to be comprehensive, so please don’t assume it is. Still, I think it could be useful to others with similar interests.

Although my purpose for doing this is not to solicit feedback on what I’m reading or researching, if reading my posts makes you think of related ideas or articles (especially scholarly ones), please feel free to comment and share.

Cristóbal Conde Interview

2010-01-22T16:41:27+00:00

The New York Times published an interview with Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard on 16 January 2010. The interview is about leadership and is well worth a read for anyone at any level (or desire) of leadership. I could point out many things that struck me, but using Conde’s concept of everything in threes, I’ll point out three.

Threes: The idea behind this is you can give a list of things of people to do or priorities, but that doesn’t mean they can remember it all. Instead focus on a handful of things, which Conde translates into threes. For example when he does a review, he always points out three things that are going well, and three things that need improvement. Since everything knows he does this, they don’t take the three negatives as personal as the otherwise would.
PowerPoint: Conde said he “actively despise[s] how people use PowerPoint as a crutch.” He instead believes people should write a proposal before the meeting and assume everyone has read it. One reason Conde doesn’t like PowerPoint is that “PowerPoint can be a way to cover up sloppy thinking, which makes it hard to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas.” Added to this is the question if a meeting added value? If it is mostly a deck of PowerPoint slides, typically Conde believes “you conveyed information, but you didn’t actually add value.”
Time Management: Conde said that one of the thing he tries to block off an hour and a half every day to” go somewhere that doesn’t have a PC or a phone” so he can think. He thinks many entry level people do not have enough to to think and are bombarding with information. I don’t know about others, but I certainly am. Since so much of my work is computer based, I doubt I can do this with 1.5 hours of my day, but I think I may try to build in some part of my day to do this. Even if it is just 30 minutes after I get my mid-morning coffee. This reminds me of something John Maeda said at TED 2007, “Vacation is the most important skill for any kind of over-achiever.”

Let's take security to the next level...

2010-01-21T22:06:08+00:00

Current Setup:
An application has to be limited by the most lax permission in order to maintain the functionality. For an application that will ever have access to the user's files this means it needs to have access to all of the users files.

Possible Solution:
Have the file browser/chooser application give temporary permissions for the specific chosen files/folder to the application that launched the file chooser. Care will need to be taken so that "recent files" in applications still work as expected. This may require a per application recent file list to be stored in the security system.

Example Use Cases / How it does it:
Picture Viewer
1) User clicks on Picture with an active exploit in it (on the desktop)
2) Opens with default photo viewer
3) The exploit now has full control of the photo viewer, but can only access:
    Photo viewers recently opened photos
    The photo with the exploit
    Photo viewer config
    Anything else the photo viewer can access (say uploading to flickr)
    All other photo's in library (if configured, which in this example it is not)
*) All other documents remain secure...

How it did it. (behind the scenes):
the user opened 4 pictures from the file manager, the application had those 4 pictures added to it's "per application recent file permission list" thereby enabling the user to open them directly from the photo manager at any point in the future. That list was customized for the application to limit the list to the 4 most recent due to the application only having 4 option in it's "recent list".
This list is used by apparmor/selinux to enable access to the pictures for the application.

Rhythmbox
1) User configures library (using directory chooser)\
    - Called with options to set up a permanent user/application permission for the music folder in question
    - this allows rhythmbox to access all files contained within
2) User listens to internet radio and finds a malicious file
3) The malicious file deletes everything it can touch, the user loses her entire music collection, but has all documents intact.

When configuring the rhythmbox library directory, Rhythmbox used a special call to the directory chooser to ask it to switch it's permanent directory to whatever the user chooses, thereby adding the necessary rules as well.

Of course, if you can already do this with selinux/apparmor (at about the same complication level) please tell me how :)

Memory is to hard to measure

2010-01-08T16:45:12+00:00

Inspired from the comment "It saves zero memory" from here
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/501241

I've been trying to keep my eye on Ubuntu's memory usage for some time now, but there has never been a great way to measure memory usage. Here is an alternate memory tracking idea.. Don't bother trying to observe it directly. These are the steps I followed to prove that removing tty2-tty6 will save us more than zero memory.

Figure out how much your computer (when booting off of a liveUSB in my case) needs to boot, open a terminal, and run free -m with using almost no swap.

[make sure the computer has a swap partition, or else this won't work]

Do this by booting the kernel with different mem=???M options. And try getting swap close to zero (see it with free -m), but still in positive territory by a few. Mine was mem=450M, and swap used was 3 M
Then make your changes, in my case rm /etc/init/tty[2-6]
Reboot with the same kernel option (mem=450M), run the terminal, run free -m and rejoice in the lack of swap used.

Why does this prove my point?
It gets around the memory measuring difficulties and says, "If we don't do X, will the system decide it doesn't need to activate swap?"

Who’s #1? Boise State!

2010-01-08T14:52:56+00:00

Here is my final top 10 of the season. Boise State with their bowl victory over TCU is my number one. Alabama, the other undeafeated, is number two. Why, you ask, Boise over Alabama? Simple: Out-of-conference schedule. Boise beat three bowl teams, including PAC-10 champion Oregon, out-of-conference during the regular season and another team that won their conference chapionship (UC-Davis). How many bowl teams out-of-conference did Alabama beat? One. Who else did ‘Bama schedule out of conference you ask? Two of the worst three teams from the Sun Belt and a team that is not even in the BCS-subdivision (Chattanooga). What makes the Chattanooga game even worse is that it was scheduled in November! Let me repeat that: November! And not even the begining of November!

This means one or more of a few things things, ‘Bama (and most of the SEC) is scared of playing a quality out-of-conference opponent (esp. on the road – the Va Tech game was a neutral site, 2) they are trying to stack their record, 3) they are trying to rest up for a team that they are concerned they other-wise would have lost to (and the team they played afterwards, Auburn, they almost did lose to as they also almost lost to Tennessee at home earlier in the season – and without some questionable officiating they would have lost one of those games). Seriously, scheduling Chattanooga in November should count as a loss.

I know SEC apologists will say that the SEC is tougher than the WAC. That may be so, but I don’t see the SEC offering a spot to Boise State. I am not going to credit the conference for locking other teams out. In other words, just because your rich, I’m not going to make you richer. You have to earn it, and by not playing quality out-of-conference opponents (esp. on the road in hostile environments) you are not earning it. Now maybe if the SEC would drop teams that are at the bottom of the league and add teams from other leagues that were good, I’d by the strength of conference schedule argument. However, your cartel is no good here. You can’t say that they didn’t play anyone when you refuse to travel to play a good team north of the Mason-Dixon line or west of the Mississippi. You didn’t play anyone in the part of schedule you control: the out-of-conference schedule. I’m not a huge Southern Cal fan, but at least they go on the road and play teams like Ohio State and Notre Dame.

Still, credit ‘Bama with a great season and great victory last night. They beat the Longhorns pretty easily although without the injury to Colt McCoy the game would have been much different. I’m not sure what would have happened and the outcome may have been the same, but the game would have been different.

Without further ado, here is my final top ten of the season:

1) Boise State (14-0) (prev: 2)
2) Alabama (14-0) (prev: 4)
3) TCU (12-1) (prev: 1)
4) Texas (13-1) (prev: 5)
5) Florida (13-1) (prev: 7)
6) Cincinnati (12-1) (prev: 3)
7) Ohio State (11-2) (prev: 9)
Iowa (11-2) (prev: 10)
9) BYU (11-2) (prev: unranked)
10) Oregon (10-3) (prev: 6)

Nexus One: Hype about Nothing

2010-01-07T02:48:05+00:00

The more I read about the new Google phone, named Nexus One, the more I wonder why I bother. Sure, it sounds like a nice phone and will be a good competitor to the Droid and maybe the iPhone (although I think the absence of multi-touch would be a big down-side to me), but it is just another smart phone. Yes, it has nice features, maybe advances the art incrementally, but that’s all. It is nothing earth shattering.

The one thing that might be earth shattering, and some are saying it is, is that Google is going to sell them on-line with a contact or unlocked without a contract. Sounds nice although this isn’t that different then what you can already do on Amazon or NewEgg. Still, unlocked phones is a concept I approve of. Only the Google phone, at least in the USA, for all practical purposes isn’t really unlocked. Yes, it might not be software locked, but it is hardware locked. In the USA different carriers use different technologies and/or frequencies which are not compatible. Currently there is only a version that will work on the T-Mobile network. They claim that they will also add a Verizon network friendly version – but still no version that will work on other networks such as AT&T. To me as an end user, it means nothing if a phone is unlocked if it will only work on one network because of hardware limitations. All of this reminds me of the Henry Ford quote, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”

Blog directions

2010-01-06T21:04:51+00:00

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the direction of blog.ecorrado.us. There a number of things that are making me do this:

I really would like to post more about library leadership and philosophy topics as they relate to technology.
If you read back on old posts, I used to post a lot more about going to autoracing events, now I hardly ever do. In fact, I haven’t in approximately 1.5 years. I have now been to over 200 tracks and feel like a real member of the TrackChasers community. Thus, I feel even more of a desire to write brief blog posts about autoracing
People have suggested to me that I should start a food blog, and I have some good ideas about how to do that, and am considering it. This is especially true since I’ve become addicted to reading some food-related blogs such as (never home)maker and Simply Recipes
Do Trackchasers want to read about food and libraries? Do librarians want to read about racing and food? In other words, is a single blog approach appropriate?
This all requires time.

Right now, I am leaning towards starting separate blogs for the autoracing and food topics, with this one being more of a professional blog and the racing one containing most of the personal stuff and my “top ten” posts about college football. This would lead me to having 3 blogs. I’m a little skeptical of keeping my food blog populated (how many chili recipes can one person post?) – which is also a concern.

However, I’m not sure. In theory, keeping one blog with three categories would be the best way to do this, but do people really just subscribe to categories in their RSS readers? I tend to doubt it.

What do people think about hybrid personal, hobby, and work blogs? Should they be avoid in favor of separate blogs?

ipsCA and Mozilla fail

2010-01-05T18:53:35+00:00

Many educational institutions in the United States have relied on ipssCA for SSL certificates. The main reason for this is that ipsCA has offered them at no cost to these institutions. Certificates, especially Wildcard certificates that are required for services such as EZproxy, can run into the hundreds of dollars per year. For example. Digicert charges $495 for 1 year and Instant SSL charges $449.95 for 1 year. Thus, it is not a surprise that over 12,000 higher educational institutions would rely on ipsCA for certificates.

Each certificate issuer has to have CAs, and ipsCA recently received a new ones because there previous CAs expired. The new ipsCA CAs have been issued and they are providing customers with new certificates based on their new CAs free of charge. Once they receive the CA’s, issuers have to provide it to Web browser developers to be included with the browser. However, ipsCA did not do this until recently and while Microsoft has accepted the new root CA, Mozilla (creators of the Firefox browser) has not up until this point. In fact, Mozilla will not be adding the new CA anytime soon. According to Mozilla’s time line the process typically takes up to 14 months and because of issues with the initial request from ipsCA, their request is at the beginning of the process and it appears Mozilla is unwilling to speed up the process. According to David E. Ross:

[T]he problem lies in the hands of ipsCA and not Mozilla. [… T]he very late recognition by ipsCA that they had to replace a root certificate that was about to expire compounded the problem. Further expressions of the need for haste will not speed the process. Any shortcuts or other measures to hasten the process can only weaken the trust users have in the overall certificate database.

While I understand David’s (and apparently Mozilla’s) reluctance to speed up the process, I disagree with him that doing so will weaken the trust in the overall certificate database. In fact, I believe just the opposite will happen because of delays like this. Having a time line that takes 14 months when most of the time nothing is happening is just not acceptable in 2010 – especially when it involves technology and the Internet. However the process is moving at glacial speed. If CAs are not added in a timely process, people will become use to creating exceptions which, when done on any scale average Internet users, will undermine the whole idea of a certificate database. Apparently Microsoft was able to handle this in a timely manner, why can’t Mozilla? If their was some kind of constant review going on, that would be one thing, but things just sit in a queue for 9 out of the best case scenario of ~10 months. They need to figure out a way to increase their goal from only starting one public discussion per week. Yes, ipsCA messed up and the fact that they didn’t act sooner is the major cause of this particular problem. However, I do not think Mozillia should be let off the hook. They have failed over 12,000 institutions and millions of Internet users that use the Web sites they operate. A 14 month process with 90% of the time being spent in queues is just not acceptable. Mozilla #FAIL.

2009: A year in a Tweet Cloud

2010-01-01T15:29:46+00:00

I created a Tweet Cloud of my 2009 tweets using http://tweetcloud.icodeforlove.com/.

2009 Tweet Cloud

The top four words I used in my 2009 tweets were:

time
library
binghamton
coffee

In my time off from the library at binghamton I’m going to drink coffee.

Social Networking Usage and Grades

2009-12-28T15:15:21+00:00

I see a number of articles about a recent study of Social Networking usage and grades (pdf) performed by a class at The Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). Other studies have found likewise, while at least one study has shown that Facebook use leads to lower grades. So what is the answer? I don’t know, but my guess is that it isn’t that significant. Students either try hard to get good grades or they don’t and using social media has nothing to do with that decision.

The UNH study does not go into much detail about how it was performed, so it is hard to draw many conclusions, but it is interesting that some of the results (no grade difference, types of majors more likely to use social media) conflict with the Ohio State study by Aryn Karpinski that found a grade difference in Facebook users. Maybe the school has more to do with thing than one would think? Maybe this is all just media hype?

Some takeaways from the UNH study:

96% of students used facebook. 84% used YouTube/ Only 12% used MySpace.
More students increased Social Media usage on weekends then decreased (I bet this is opposite for professionals)
26% of students used Social Media for Educational reasons and 16% for professional ones

I think academic libraries should look at that 26% number as a sign that they should be involved in these spaces. I don’t mean going out and friending all of the students at your college, but make resources available to students in faculty in these arenas.

Form to e-mail with attachments

2009-12-24T11:35:31+00:00

For a new section of the Binghamton University Libraries Web site, I need to create a Web form that would e-mail attachments to a specific account. At first I thought this would be as easy as Googling “web form email attachments.” Apparently I was wrong. Most of he posts I found either talked about problems people had, or were just small snippets of code. Most of the actually code I found was rather outdated. I didn’t want snippets because I didn’t want to write my own script. I can, but I figured if I can get a more complete, tested, solution I’d be better off. I did see some scripts one could purchase, but I wasn’t interesting in paying for anything.

However, all was not lost, after lots of searching, I finally came across PHPMailer-FE, “a form-2-email application with very powerful capabilities.” PHPMailer-FE is licensed under the LGPL and was last updated on 2009-12-08. It took a little while to figure out how to configure it for my needs, and I still have a thing or two to clear up, but I’m happy with it so far. If you are looking for a php based Web to e-mail form, check it out.

Virtual conferences

2009-12-23T14:26:44+00:00

I was recently (re-)reading Eszter Hargittai’s Conference Do and Don’ts. The piece was definitely geared to freshly minted (and soon to be minted) Ph.D’s and not to established academic librarians, but I still found it interesting. Since I organized my first conference earlier this year (local arrangements, not necessarily the program) and have been involved with other planning committees, what makes a successful conference has been on my mind.

Eszter points out that:

While an important part of going to conferences is to present your work and hear updates on other people’s research, it would be wrong to think that formal presentations are the only key component of professional meetings. In fact, at least as significant if not more are interactions that happen in between sessions and during social outings (e.g., receptions, group dinners).

I wholeheartedly agree. In Ezster’s case, I believe her blog post is more focused on creating connections for future academic job connections, but there are other reasons why an academic librarian needs to try to take advantage of social opportunities at conferences whenever possible. This is especially true if you are the only librarian (or one of a few) in your organization that does what you do. This is often the case with systems librarians but other type of librarians, especially in small to mid-sized institutions, are often in the same position. By meeting other librarians that do similar things at conferences, you can create a network that will help you get your job done.

Say, for instance, the Director of Libraries wants to implement a new institutional repository. If you have been to conferences and met other librarians who have worked with this, you have a ready-made list of (free) consultants. While you could send out an e-mail to a mailing list, you are much more likely to get the real-scoop from someone you have met before and have even a small relationship with than you are from someone that you have never met. These relationships can be very valuable. I remember once a number of years ago we heard about this great new product from a vendor. The demos were impressive, and the developer partner presentations made the product look like it was very promising. However, once I started talking to a colleague from a developer partner site off-site over a few drinks and dinner, I learned a lot more about the day-to-day dealings with this particular product. While the product may have been good for some libraries, it became clear that it would not have been a good fit for us. We decided to not invest a significant among of time and money into a solution that would have turned out to be a mistake for us, that there was a very good chance we otherwise would have. (BTW: I think looking back, everyone would agree that the product was not successful, so I am positive we made the right choice).

So what has this have to do with virtual conferences? Nothing, and everything. Yes, at virtual conference you have the opportunity to present your work and here other people talk about there projects and that is very valuable. However, you do not get to make the same sort of connections as you can in person. While attending a conference in the comforts of your own office, it is very easy to get distracted by e-mail, printer problems, people knocking on your door, etc. Thus it is harder, at least for me, to pay attention to sessions you do attend. Likewise, you don’t get to see the audience reactions and unless attending with other colleagues from your own library, you can’t instantaneously run new ideas and concepts learned off of others.

For this reason, I am not a fan of virtual conferences and do not see them as a viable replacement for in-person get together. Yes, virtual presentations have there place, and grouping them as a conference can make some sort of sense, but I think that the virtual is better suited for training, and shorter Webinars.

You may ask then, what about travel budgets? We can’t afford to fly librarians all over the world. Yes, this is a problem. But there are cheaper options. State library conferences, regional conferences such as those put on by the Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA)’s Regional User Groups are inexpensive options. Depending where you live, there may be many other local one or two day conferences. For example, I often see some nice conferences put on by New England ASIS&T and NERCOMP in the New England area. If there isn’t any in you area, unless you are in a very remote area, that is a sure sign that someone should step up to the plate and put one on like the folks in Portland Oregon are doing with Code4Lib Northwest. It doesn’t have to be a huge production with paid plenary speakers. An unconference for example can be put on with less organization (at least by the host). You just need a date, a room or two, and someone to feed the attendees (or at least supply them with coffee).

Big 12 expansion

2009-12-22T22:40:58+00:00

Besides my College Football Top Ten, I don’t talk much about sports on this blog, but I’ve been thinking recently about the Big 10(+1)’s plans to look into adding another team (or more). As a Rutgers University alumnus, this is particular interesting to ponder since they are one of the teams being mentioned. I may be biased, but I see them as the best fit. I do think, however that Missouri is a close second and Pittsburgh is a possibility as well.

According to Wikipedia, rumored teams include:

* University of Notre Dame
* University of Texas
* University of Connecticut
* Rutgers University
* Syracuse University
* University of Missouri
* University of Nebraska
* University of Pittsburgh
* University of Cincinnati
* West Virginia University
* Iowa State University
* University of Maryland
* University of Kentucky
* University of Louisville

Before we get into why I like these teams, lets talk about some of the other teams I’ve heard speculated by some informed or not so-informed people. The first thing people need to remember is that unlike many other major college conferences, the Big 10(+1) is not separable from the academics and missions of the University members. In fact, I believe the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (which is made up of the Big 10(+1) and University of Chicago) has veto power over any additions to the conference. This means, if you are not a member of Association of American Universities (or likely to become one), you are not going to make the cut. The following on Wikipedias list are not currently a member of AAU:

* University of Cincinnati
* University of Connecticut
* University of Louisville
* University of Notre Dame
* West Virginia University

A few of the above could probably get in if they wanted to, but the fact remains they haven’t tried to make that leap to be recognized by the AAU as a leading research-intensive university. Add to the fact that none of these (besides Notre Dame) adds a lot to the conference overall in terms of market or prestige, I will eliminate all of them besides Notre Dame from my short list on these grounds.

Notre Dame would be such a huge win on the athletic side, that the Big 10(+1) would take them in the heart beat and while they are a smaller school (11,300 students) by Big 10(+1) standards and are not an AAU school, they are excellent in what they do academically, so I am sure the CIC would not stand in the way. However, what does this alignment gain Notre Dame? Not much. They already have a conference for other sports. And not just any conference, the Big East, which is a (the?) top conference in many of them (especially basketball). Notre Dame with being able to stay independent and have their own TV contracts has nothing to fain from joining in. They really are a better fit academically with the Georgetown’s of the world anyway.

Moving on, University of Texas? Why would they leave the Big 12? They already have the highest or second highest sports revenue because of the way the Big 12 profit sharing works. Would the other public Texas schools let them even if they wanted to? How about the Texas legislative branch? Also, they aren’t a fit geographically. I have read that any new schools must be in a current member state or a contiguous state. While I’m sure rules can be broken, this doesn’t make sense.

Syracuse is an AAU school and brings a good football traditional and a great basketball one, so I can see why it is one of the most mentioned. However, it is a private school, not huge (12,491 FTE undergrads), and doesn’t bring a big media market. Athletically and academically it might be a nice fit, but I don’t see what it brings in monetarily compared to the other schools being talked about.

Iowa State seems to be mentioned by a lot of people. However, mostly on blogs by people from Iowa or adjoining states. Sure Iowa v. Iowa State in conference would make a nice rivalry, but don’t they already play every year? US News and World Report has them ranked 88 in national universities and is an AAU school. While 88th is a little on the low side, I think if the Big 10(+1) could show that Iowa State would add enough academically that the CIC wouldn’t put up a huge fuss. Still, what do they add? Not really any new markets since they already have Iowa. I don’t see it.

University of Maryland fits the bill academically (53rd in US News). They could land the DC market, so I can see some interest. However, I don’t see what leaving the ACC does for Maryland. They get to play the likes of North Carolina and Duke in basketball every year and their football team normally (but not this year) does okay there. Plus, it isn’t a great fit geographically. Doesn’t seem like a good fit.

The University of Kentucky hasn’t gotten a lot of press as a possibility, but like Maryland I don’t see it happening. Why would they leave the SEC? They are one of the top 20 or 25 in college sports revenue and the SEC confines are a good fit. Also, the academic rank of 128 in US News isn’t going to bring any love via the CIC either.

University of Nebraska has been mentioned by some. It does add one thing that I don’t think any other rumored school besides Notre Dame could bring and that is the level of football history and excitement nation-wide, They don’t add much in basketball, but I’m not sure that would be a deal-breaker. Since Lincoln is on the eastern side of the state, they are not a real bad fit geographically. Academically they are 96th in US News. I think that would make a harder sell to the CIC though as I am sure they do not want to make this look like it is all about money and a 96th ranked school makes it look that way a lot more then a 71st ranked school would. While Nebraska would bring some notoriety, again, not a huge market. Also, I think the Big 12 has served Nebraska well and I don’t see the Big 12 letting them go very easily even if they wanted to leave. Thus, I think the Corn huskers are staying where they are.

This leaves the three teams I think have the biggest chance of being asked and accepted: Pittsburgh, Missouri, and Rutgers. All of them bring some good things to the table and are worthy of consideration. Also, I can see all of them being willing to leave under the right circumstances. And in fact, if the Big 10 wanted to be the Big 14, I can see all three of them being added, but I think they will probably stop at 10 despite statements saying they would consider 14 or 16 teams.

Missouri is ranked lower then Nebraska on the US News and World Report (102) but I don’t think the perception that this will only be about football would be as strong with them as it would be about Nebraska. Missouri has made rumblings that they are unhappy with how revenues are split in the Big 12 and they have been jumped over by worse teams for bowl games so I am not so sure they are thrilled with the Big 12 right now. They also bring in both the Kansas City and strengthen the ties to the St. Louis market. Not as big as New York/Philly like Rutgers, but still a nice addition. Still, I don’t think the Big 12 would let them leave without a fight.

One thing some people may not know is that the University of Pittsburgh is actually a fairly large (17,427 undergraduates) public university. It has a good tradition in basketball and football, and is closer to the center of the conference than Penn State. It is raked 56th in US News and is home to the internationally renowned University of Pittsburgh Medical Center so it makes sense academically and geographically. While it would seem that it would add the Pittsburgh market, it really doesn’t since Penn State already encroaches on it (as, I would imagine to some extent, Ohio State does from the west). Also, while Pitt is good in both major men’s sports, I’m not sure the Big 10(+1) is really interested in a top basketball program joining in. In this case, I think the basketball, if anything, might be a minus. Also, as a founding Big East member, I think they might be less likely to leave the Big East than Rutgers would be. Thus, why I wouldn’t be surprised if they were offers a spot in the Big 10(+1), I think television markets are working against them.

The last one on the list is Rutgers. As I mentioned, I received a degree from the fine institution so I am biased, but I think Rutgers makes a lot of sense. They are in the New York market and, often overlooked, are close to the Philadelphia market as well. They are raked slightly lower then Pitt (66th) but have a great reputation. One thing that hurts their ranking a bit is endowments, but I think Rutgers will start seeing that go up compared to other similar schools due to the history of the University (It didn’t become Rutgers The State University until 1956). With 28,031 undergraduate on the New Brunswick campus, it is a large(r) school and that means alumni watching TV. Also, while nay-sayers point out NYC is a pro-sports town, one needs to remember a lot of New York and New Jersey residents went to school at Big 10(+1) schools. This means alumni receptions at Rutgers stadium. This also means recruiting in the area. Geography is not as much of an asset as with Pittsburgh or maybe even Missouri, but it has good transportation hubs so it is not horrible. Rutgers has one four straight bowl games so they are an up and comer. While they won the first football game ever, they are not really a perennial powerhouse, but they have been pretty good of late and I think they can hold their own through Big 10(+1) conference play and might be able to grow into one of the teams in the top half of the conference. Mens basketball hasn’t been great either, but again,I’m not sure that is a problem. One plus that Rutgers (along with some other schools in the list that I didn’t mention) is the women’s basketball program is very good. I think that helps them a little bit as well. Also, I am pretty sure that Rutgers, as a large land grant institution, would love to join the CIC, which I think would be offered if they joined the conference.

With all that said, I think Rutgers is the choice 1a and Missouri 1b. Pitt is a not so distant third. Maybe that 14 team league is sounding good if the Big (10(+1) is thinking along similar lines.

Thoughts?

Firefox 3.5 Most Popular Browser (Major Version) In The World

2009-12-21T01:04:07+00:00

According to StatCounter Global Statistics the most used browser version on the web is Firefox 3.5. Congrats to Mozilla (and the open web)!

But we can use this as a rallying call to do more. Let's Finish Off IE6 (remove the links to IE8 and Safari if you want, and maybe add one for Opera). And how many of you end up upgrading your family's browsers over the holidays? Good job keeping them safe, but bring everything you need this time on a USB stick, and then get back to enjoying the holidays.

Blackboard and Desire2Learn end litigation

2009-12-17T14:44:46+00:00

Blackboard and Desire2Learn announced a settlement of their patent litigation on Tuesday, December 15. This litigation has upset many of Blackboard customers and critics alike. And, like many patent cases, it has dragged on for a long time. The criticism of Blackboard’s approach, which to many was seen as trying to eliminate competition via the courts instead of by making a better product, has apparently played an important role in this decision.

In a blog post about the settlement, Ray Henderson, President, Blackboard Learn, alluded to the controversy and makes it clear that the community reaction was one of the reasons they agreed to end litigation. Henderson wrote “This dialog has distracted attention from the many positive contributions to the industry that Blackboard has made and can continue to make.” I can’t say I follow Blackboard enough to know the degree of positive contributions they have made, but obviously this cloud has been hanging over them for a while. Let’s hope that they do make positive contributions and abandon what many have viewed as anti-competitive practices.

Flash Rave hits Binghamton University

2009-12-14T22:42:09+00:00

Apparently Flash Raves are a big thing at colleges these days. They are usually about a 10 to 15 minute long dance party. For some reason, doing these flash raves in libraries are a popular choice. Well, Binghamton University didn’t want to miss this trend and had one this past weekend in the lobby of the Bartle Library building (not actually in the library-proper).

There is a second part and some shorter videos if you search for Binghamton Flash Rave on YouTube.

OSTP launches a public consultation on Public Access Policy.

2009-12-14T15:07:20+00:00

The U.S. Office of Science & Technology policy announced on Thursday, Dec. 10, that it will launch a public consultation on Public Access Policy. The OSTP says:

“[President Obama'a] Administration is seeking public input on access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in academic and scholarly journal articles. Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. The Administration is seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented.

They are doing this in three parts, with the first one already started”

Implementation (Dec. 10 to 20)
Features and Technology (Dec. 21 to Dec 31)
Management (Jan. 1 to Jan. 7)

According to the post, Each of these topics will form the basis of a blog posting that will appear at www.whitehouse.gov/open and will be open for comment on the OSTP blog. If you have nay thoughts about Open Access to government funding research, I’d encourage you to share your thoughts (no matter whether you are for, against, or indifferent about the Obama administration).

Libraries: Between Serendipity and Stratergy

2009-12-09T00:58:27+00:00

I just read a blog post about successful initiatives that falls somewhere between ’serendipity’ and ’strategy’. The post by a Dean Dad, Community College Dean, was titled “Make it Look Planned.” The point was that sometimes, maybe even often, successful things happen not because of of the “fetish of extreme planning” or totally by random luck, but somewhere in-between.

I think what Dean Dad is pointing out, that if you rely only on well thought out plans or conversely on pure luck, you probably aren’t going to go far. Using initiative and trying thinks on gut instinct is where real progress can be made. I think many librarians understand this. In fact, it is almost a necessity in the library world because we often do not have enough data to make evidence based decisions – even if we wanted to. Of course, I imagine this can be a tough sell at Universities that are focused on data-driven planning, but that doesn’t mean we should try somebody’s “what the hell” inspiration on how to improve the library experience. Trying out and implementing new ideas like this is how one can lead from wherever they are in the organization.

The trick is to implement the “what the hell” ideas in a manner that if they don’t work out, they can be rolled back. This can sometimes be a problem though. Often when these types of things are implemented, there has been little thought on how they are to be evaluated and how to migrate them, when successful, into the flow of the organization. In other words, how to move them from pilot to production.

College Football Top 10 – End of Regular Season

2009-12-07T01:32:51+00:00

The BCS bowl match-ups have just been announced tonight and it looks like the real championship game will be the Fiesta Bowl. TCU will be playing Boise State. That is correct, the BCS powers are so scared that their precious cash cow big-money conference teams will be beaten by the teams from non-BCS conferences again that they figured out a way to continue to duck them – have the two non-BCS teams play each other. On the field the small guys have proven they are better. Who did Texas or Alabama beat out of conference that was better than Oregon? That’s right. No one. Did they have the guts to go on the row to ACC runner-up Clemson and beat them in their own house. Of course not.

I’ll have one more top 10 after the bowl games. I can’t imagine that the winner of the Fiesta Bowl won’t be #1, but we will wait and see.

1) TCU 12-0 (prev: 1) Finished the season last week so they got to stay home and watch the gams on TV this week.

2) Boise State 13-0 (prev: 3) Blew out New Mexico State last week. Only undefeated team to beat another team that received a BCS bid, that being the PAC-10 champion Oregon.

3) Cincinnati 12-0 (prev: 2) Tough game against Pitt, but they pulled it out. Still they drop in my top-10 one spot.

4) Alabama 13-0 (prev: 5) Alabama blew out over-rated Florida in the SEC championship game. Because Texas almost lost, I moved them up one spot. Also factoring into the decisions was at least Alabama did schedule Virginia Tech this year. Yes, the Hookies aren’t up to typical standards, but they were expected to be in the top 10.

5) Texas 13-0 (prev: 4 ) If the Big 12 Championship game was 59:59 instead of 60 minutes, they wouldn’t have won the championship. Despite that I was hoping Nebraska would win just so the BCS was forced to consider one of the non-BCS conference schools for the championship, the replay was correct and there was one second left on the clock.

6) Oregon 9-2 (prev 7) Oregon beat Oregon State in the Civil War and jumps over Florida into 6′th in my pole.

7) Florida 12-1 (prev: 6) Florida showed why they duck teams like TCU and Boise State. They just aren’t the team the pollsters wanted us to believe they are this year as evident by their blow-out lost to Alabama.

8 ) Georgia Tech 11-2 (prev: 9) Georgia Tech moves up one spot by beating Clemson in the ACC championship game.

9 ) Ohio State 10-2 (prev: Ohio State didn’t play this week but will be in the Rose Bowl.

10) Iowa 10-2 (prev: 10) Iowa finishes the pre-bowl game season as the last person in my top 10. Penn State fans might not like it, but Penn State lost and Penn State, even more than Florida who at least plays Florida State, is kig of the cupcakes out of conference.

College Football Top 10

2009-12-02T01:06:09+00:00

Only one more week left. No changes in the top 6, but the rest of the top 10 saw some shake-ups….

1) TCU 12-0 (prev: 1) Finished the season undefeated with a thumping of New Mexico.

2) Cincinnati 11-0 (prev: 2) Beat a Illinois team that is talented, but can’t seem to put anything together. Big game this weekend against Pitt where the winner will be the Big East champion.

3) Boise State 12-0 (prev: 3) Nice win over Nevada this past weekend. They finish up the season with an in-conference match-up against New Mexico State

4) Texas 12-0 (prev: 4 ) Next game is the Big 12 championship game against Nebraska which may be the toughest oponent all year. The Big 12 was a tough conference last year, but like the SEC is down this year. Really, who has Texas beat that was better than Utah or BYU – both of whom TCU handled easily? Not Oklohoma, not OK state, not A&M who scored 39 points against them. Texas does not deserve a spot in the title game over the likes of TCU or Cinncy based on the fact they didn’t beat any teams that should be in the top 20.

5) Alabama 12-0 (prev: 5) Almost moved Alabama down below Florida after Aurburn pushed them, but I think their out of conference schedule was slightly tougher (i.e. Va Tech > Florida State).

6) Florida 12-0 (prev: 6) Finally an admirable out of conference game on the schedule. Sadly for Florida, Florida State isn’t very good this year and hasn’t been for a while.

7) Oregon 9-2 (prev 10) With losses by Georgia Tech and Pitt, Oregon moves into seventh. The “Civil War” game against PAC-10 this weekend will serve as a de facto PAC-10 championship game.

8 ) Ohio State 10-2 (prev: 9) Ohio State moves up one spot thanks to some losses above them.

9) Georgia Tech 10-2 (prev: 7) Despite a Rambling Wreck loss against out-of-conference, in-state Georgia,Tech stays in the top 10.

10) Iowa 10-2 (prev: unranked) I had a tough time deciding who to pick for the 10th spot, but I’ll give it to Iowa. They had a poor performance in the loss to Northwestern but the other loss was to Ohio State which is a good team. Also, while Arizona isn’t that good, they are better than Charleston Southern.

Internal LAN, Package Distribution Quick Howto

2009-11-27T15:49:57+00:00

This guide simply mashes up two other guides, with just the parts needed to create simple packages and them to your own repository, all on the local network (no PPAs).

First you need to make packages (a more complete guide below [1]). My packages are very simple as I am using them just to distribute files around the local network. Let's pretend you want to include a simple bash backup script in a package.
Make a package

Make a folder mycompany-backup
Make two new folders in it: DEBIAN and opt
NOTE: pretend mycompany-backup is the / directory of whatever system you install it on, so everything in opt would go to /opt when installed, etc.
Make a new text file under DEBIAN called control
Add Some text to the file:
Package: mycompany-backup
Version: 0.1
Section: mycompany
Priority: optional
Architecture: i386 or amd64 or all (however all sadly doesn't work with the next part of this guide)
Essential: no
Installed-Size: 10
Maintainer: My Name
Add your content (in my case a backup script) to opt/backup.sh. Mine just backs up Documents to a place on our server. (NOTE: This isn't a complete backup solution as there is no automation)
#/bin/sh
SAMIAM=`whoami`
sleep 60

gvfs-mount mount smb://$SAMIAM@server/$SAMIAM #User must have saved password for share

rsync -rv /home/$SAMIAM/Documents "/home/$SAMIAM/.gvfs/$SAMIAM on server/BACKUP" --log-file="/home/$SAMIAM/.gvfs/$SAMIAM on server/BACKUP/latest"
Go one directory above where mycompany-backup is.
Run the command dpkg -b mycompany-backup/ mycompany.deb and you should have a new .deb file.

I got most of this from:
[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-debpkg.html

Distribute the Package in your own company repository

You need to already be running a simple web server (or not, you could just install apache)
Make a new directory on the server called apt (likely /var/www/apt)
Make two new folders in it: conf and incoming
Make a new file in conf called distributions - like this
Origin: Your Name
Label: Something here as well
Suite: karmic
Codename: karmic
Architectures: amd64 source (all would be ideal here but it doesn't work)
Components: mycompany
Description: Your description
Oh right, install reprepro
Add your deb to incoming
Then while in the apt directory, run sudo reprepro includedeb karmic incoming/mycompany.deb

Then just add the line to your other computers:
deb http://mycompanysServerOrIPAddress/apt karmic mycompany

Update apt, and then install the mycompany package like any normal package.

Again this website provided a great starting point for me, and has many more details.
[2] http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/286

Mostly did this for my own documentation, hope it was helpful for you as well.

If anyone wants to figure out why the "all" architecture doesn't work with reprepro it could be very helpful in making actually correct packages. The one in this example really should be all and not amd64.

College Football Top 10

2009-11-24T22:13:25+00:00

Not much changed this past wekend in my college football top 10. Here it is:

1) TCU (11-0) (prev: 1) Beat Wyoming on the road 45-10. Fellow undefeated team, Texas, beat Wyoming 41-10 earlier this season. I don’t know how much you can compare scores, but still I know if TCU beat Wyoming by less than Texas the Big Conference Supporters would have a field day with it.

2) Cincinnati 10-0 (prev: 2) Had an off week before playing Illinois this coming weekend.

3) Boise State 8-0 (prev: 3) Oregon’s loss to Stanford makes Boise’s biggest win not look as good, but still who did Texas, Florida, or Alabama beat out of conference that was better?

4) Texas 11-0 (prev: 4 ) Beat a one in-conference win Kansas State.

5) Alabama 11-0 (prev: 5) Beat the Chattanooga Mocs? If Florida didn’t play an equivelent cupcake, I’d move Alabama down a spot

6) Florida 11-0 (prev: 6) The SEC once again proves it can frost cupcakes but most of their top teams don’t have the guts top play tough out of region, out of conference games

7) Georgia Tech 10-1 (prev: 7) The Rambling Wreck had an off week before this weeks out-of-conference, in-state game against Georgia.

8 ) Pittsburgh 9-1 (prev: 8 ) The Panthers rested up this past week in preparation for the Backyard Brawl with West Virgina.

9) Ohio State 9-2 (prev: 10) Although Ohio State’s loss to Southern Cal is not looking so good anymore, I’m still giving them some credit for at least scheduling one tough out of conference game and thus they are my top 2 loss team.

10) Oregon 8-2 (prev 9) Just pulled out the win this past week in Arizona and the Stanford loss doesn’t look so good after Stanford lost to Cal this week. This drops Oregon to #10.

OLE now a Kuali Foundation Project

2009-11-20T19:39:13+00:00

On November 16′th the Kuali Foundation announced that a group of academic libraries are partnering to create the Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE) (pronounced Oh-LAY). Although I knew this announcement like this was coming, I find it welcome news. While I am a strong supporter of Evergreen and Koha Open Source integrated library systems (ILS), I think the OLE Project will bring something new to the table that neither of these other two projects currently do. Koha and Evergreen, while successful, are more replacements for existing ILSs such as those currently offered by SirsiDynix, III, and Ex Libris. Depending on your point of view, these may be better options than the existing proprietary ILS vendors offerings, or they may be more limited. However, even if one takes the position that they are better, offer more return on investment, and are a better fit for the philosophy of libraries, they still are not breakthroughs in terms of the type of functionality offered.

OLE, on the other hand, is being designed to “create a next-generation library system that breaks away from print-based workflows and reflects the changing nature of library materials and new approaches to scholarly work.” In this way, unlike Koha or Evergreen, OLE’s competition is Ex Libris’ URM that is currently being developed and not the more traditional ILS offerings such as Ex Libris’s Aleph or Voyager, SirsiDynix’s Symphony or Unicorn, or III’s Millennium ILS.

Will OLE be successful? I think they will be, at least some degree. They have some heavy-weight academic research libraries behind them as Founding Partners including Indiana University, a Florida Consortium lead by University of Florida, Lehigh University, Duke University, North Carolina State University, University of Chicago, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania. Not only that, between the schools and the Mellon Foundation, almost $5 million dollars has been committed to the project over the next two years.

What will this mean for Ex Libris’ URM? I think that this is actually a welcome development for Ex Libris. If they were the only organization (commercial or non-profit) attempting to create something like the URM, I think many libraries would be more skeptical of the concept. They also will have something to judge themselves against (and for customers to judge them against) besides a traditional ILS. This may make it easier for some libraries to convince the provost or other purse string holders on campus to open up for the next generation of library systems. If Ex Libris can offer a better product, with better support, at comparable costs as implementing OLE would be, they will be successful with the URM. At this stage it is hard to know what will be better and what pricing will be, but my guess is that there will be room for both OLE and URM to be successful in this market as long as neither of them lose focus.

College Football Top 10

2009-11-17T01:36:29+00:00

Somehow my November 9 version of the top 10 didn’t make it. I remember preparing it but I guess I never submitted it. Oh well. Sorry about that. Anyway, here is my November 16′th version of the College Football Top 10.

1) TCU (10-0) (prev: 1) Impressive win this weekend against Utah who has only one other loss this season

2) Cincinnati 10-0 (prev: 2) Beat a tough West Virginia team in conference.

3) Boise State 8-0 (prev: 3) Oregon’s loss to Stanford makes Boise’s biggest win not look as good, but still who did Texas, Florida, or Alabama beat out of conference that was better?

4) Texas 10-0 (prev: 4 ) Recent wins over Baylor and UCF aren’t great, but UCF proved they could step up and win a big game this past week against Houston.

5) Alabama 10-0 (prev: 5) Chattanooga Mocs? In November? What is a Moc? Way to show confidence that your team can beat a tough out of confernce team. Come on, step it up in the scheduling department SEC.

6) Florida 10-0 (prev: 6) At least one team in Florida isn’t afraid to schedule tough out of conference games. No, it isn’t Florida. It’s Florida International who earlier this season opened up against Alabama. Since then they won 3 games. Come on Florida. Aren’t you supposed to be good. Why don’t you prove it? Maybe because you’re not?

7) Georgia Tech 10-1 (prev: 9) Only lose by the Rambling Wreck this year was against Miami (FL).

8 ) Pittsburgh 7-1 (prev: 8 ) Only lose this year was against out-of-conference for North Carolina State. Nice out of conference win this past weekend against Notre Dame that is probably sending ND coach, Charlie Weiss packing.

9) Oregon 8-2 (prev 7) Only Loses to #3 Boise and what is turning out to be a really nice Stanford team.

10) Ohio State 9-2 (prev: unranked) Although Ohio State’s loss to Southern Cal is not looking so good now that Southern Cal is 5th in the Pac-10, I’ll still give them some credit for at least scheduling one tough out of conference game.

ASIS&T 2009

2009-11-16T16:35:13+00:00

From November 8 – 11 I attended the 2009 The American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This was the first time I have ever been to Vancouver and what little I saw was pretty nice – although I didn’t see much. Normally when going to a conference in a new place I like to try to take a few extra vacation days and explore, but there is a lot going on in work and I didn’t feel I could afford the time. Thus, I really didn’t do any site-seeing to speak of. I did find a few nice brew pubs and a nice tapas place though.

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, delivered the opening Plenary Session. I thought he gave a pretty good speech but maybe not one scholarly enough for ASIS&T. Maybe he would have been better suited for LITA? Some of the take-homes from Tim Bray’s keynote were that (according to Bray), every year approximately 1 billion mobile devices are shipped. These means that if your Web site doesn’t working on mobile devices such as the iPhone your site is a failure. Luckily it is not to hard to get your Web site to work with the iPhone as long as you follow some standards and don’t rely on Flash. Although it has been said by others, Bray reiterated the important point that the killer app on the Internet has always been people. Without people, the technology is just technology. This reminds me of the keynote from NYLA when the Keynote Speaker, David W. Lewis, pointed out that what happens on the Social Web doesn’t really become interesting until the technology becomes uninteresting. That is not to say that the technology is unimpressive or not complicated behind an application, but unless the masses can easily use it, you don’t get the kind of interesting social interaction like you do on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

One of the more interesting, and practical, sessions for an academic librarian was the panel on institutional repositories (IR) moderated by June Abbas. The two biggest take-aways to me where one: that in order for an IR to be successful it has to offer more than what we think of as a traditional IR. For example, the University of California’s repository is called eScholarship and

“provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services and research tools that enable departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.”

The second take-away from the IR session was the three questions faculty ask about institutional repositories: Why should I care? Why should I bother? What’s in it for me? If you can’t answer these questions, your repository program is in trouble. The library needs to be able to talk about the services the repository offers and what is in it for faculty (Increased citation, perpetual access & preservation, search optimization, etc.).

The session on Evolutionary Approaches to Information Science Research and Information Use (and specifically Marcia Bates presentation on information browsing from an evolutionary perspective) was really good. Marcia Bates, who was a last minute fill in for Amanda Spink, argued that what we typically think of browsing for information is not really correct. People don’t just look at things one item at a time. They scan, things catch their eye, maybe a flashy photo on a magazine or cover on a book, we pick it up, feel it, scan it some more, maybe read a sentence or two, etc. Thus the “browse” feature in most information systems such as library catalogs really does not come anywhere near replicating the “real” browsing experience. Librarians need to be aware of this when trying to replicate the browsing of physical stacks in virtual stacks – especially of they are sending items to off-site storage many miles away.

Other interesting session included:

A talk that investigated the results of Google localized results. The results from Google Israel ((google.co.il)) were preferred vs. google.com results by test subjects (in Israel, obviously)
Melanie Feinberg’s presentation on: The Use of Genre as a Design Element in Information Systems. I really need to read her conference paper on the topic in the proceedings when I get a free moment.
A panel session about the convergence of museums, archives, and libraries. I think we are going to see more and more of this – especially on academic campuses. After all, isn’t a piece of art also a piece of information and a book also a piece of art?
As always, SIG-CON was the highlight of the conference. Where else would you have a presentation with both Ranganathan and RuPaul in the title or learn about the important research on submissive data by Dr. Dom N. Atrix?
The Pecha Kucha presentations on Diversity in Digital Information Environments: Opportunity or Chaos? were really nice, but maybe a but too scripted for my tastes. Also, I thought animated slides took away from the whole 20 slides by 20 seconds concept, but I did enjoy them and the content was interesting

Finally, I should mention the panel “On the Challenges of Implementing Library 2.0 Services” I was on that was organized by Michael Zimmerman and moderated by KT Vaughan. I’m obviously biased but I thought it was one of the better panels I have ever saw or was a part of. We didn’t have any presentations, just a list of questions that the panelists, KT Vaughn, myself, Maris Ramierz, and Nasser Saleh discussed (we also had Sara Rofofsky Marcus on remotely via Skype, but unfortunately the wireless connection wasn’t very good and we lost her early on). KT actually only asked one question on the list to start us off and the rest of the session was free-flowing with questions and comments from the audience (and a few answers too). This is what I think a panel should be, not 3 or 4 separate presentations. If that is what you are going to do, please submit 3 or 4 papers to be reviewed by your peers instead. Despite only asking one question of the list, the free-flow format had us covering all of the topics we had planned and then some. I hope to see more panels of this nature in the future. I actually tweeted while being on the panel which was an interesting experience. What do you say? What do you tweet? How do you pay attention? You can see the tweets from the session by searching for #asist09 and #lib2 on twitter.

Ex Libris Mid-Atlantic 2009

2009-11-16T14:30:23+00:00

On November 5 and 6, 2009 Binghamton University Libraries hosted the annual Ex Libris Mid-Atlantic (EMA) Conference at the Binghamton University Downtown Center. This was the first time I was the local host for any conference and it was a quite learning experience. While their were a few bumps in the road, I felt, and the evaluations showed, that it was a very successful conference. We ended up having a total of 51 attendees, which I thought was a nice number for this conference considering it was a new concept to Aleph sites. EMA started out as a Regional User Group for Voyager, a product of Endeavor. When Ex Libris and Endeavor merged, it became the Ex Libris Mid-Atlantic user group. Although last year their were a few Aleph sessions, this was really the first meeting that fully embraced the merger. Hopefully as more Aleph sites become aware of EMA, the attendance will continue to increase.

There were 14 breakout sessions, one plenary, lightning talks, round-tables, and two sessions by Ex Libris. All of the sessions I went to were well done and I felt I either learned something or got some ideas from them. For example, I saw a demo from one library that showed which of their iPods were checked out and when they were do. While we don’t circulate iPods, we do circulate laptop computers and I think a Web page that lists this information may be a great idea.

I enjoyed seeing the plenary talk, User Research at the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries: Using an Anthropological Approach to Build a Better Catalog by Nora Dimmock of the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries. I think more libraries ought to invest in this kind of research. I really like the idea of having an Anthropologist on staff. While only larger academic libraries could probably afford to have a full time anthropologist, I do think libraries could do more of this. Maybe this is an opportunity to work with the Anthropology department on campus? Maybe when hiring a subject librarian in this area, you look for one that has an advanced anthropology degree and make 1/2 of their responsibilities to do this type of research?

The lightning talks were new to EMA and were well received, but I think they probably should not have been the last thing on the schedule. Maybe a second plenary talk would have fit the bill so everyone would hang around. Also new to EMA was general library sessions. These were also extremely popular and people suggested that we continue to do this and maybe even expand them. I agree with that, except we do have to be careful that we remember we are the Ex Libris Mid-Atlantic conference and still have to keep Ex Libris products as the core of the conference. This is were it would have been nice to have a few more sessions for the non-ILS products. While we did have a Metalib and two SFX sessions, we didn’t have any sessions on any of the other non-ILS products. Hopefully EMA can attract more presentations in the non-ILS arena next year.

As I mentioned, putting on the conference itself was a learning experience. Unfortunately Binghamton University does not offer “one-stop shopping” for on-campus people who want to put on a conference. This meant searching for and trying to figure out who was responsible for what. While this proved to be a challenge, I must say that once I figured out who was the correct person for a particular thing, they all were extremely helpful and a pleasure to work with. And, now that I know who to deal with, if I ever host another conference I’ll be in good shape.

The conference presentations will be posted to ELUNA’s documents repository in the next few days, so look for them there.

Also, kudos to Dillinger’s for hosting the Thursday-night reception. Everyone who showed up had a great time.

Are OSS ILSs redundant? Carl Grant and the SirsiDynix kerfuffle

2009-11-08T21:42:16+00:00

Carl Grant, President of Ex Libris North America, has weighed in on the SirsiDynix – Open Source Software kerfuffle. For the most part I agree with Carl’s take. But I disagree with him and Clifford Lynch that the development of Open Source ILSs lead to un-necessary redundancies. Redundant solutions are a good thing. They keep everyone honest. If there was only one ILS vendor, we would be beholding to them.

If libraries can’t afford redundancies, how do we explain the redundancy in the proprietary ILS marketplace? Don’t “[w]e simply have more important things to do”? Why should we believe that redundancy is acceptable in the proprietary ILS world but Open Source competition is not? Not only is there redundancy between proprietary competitors (really how much difference is there between a SirsiDynix. III, or Ex Libris ILS? I’d hazard a guess a lot less than when one compares these to an Open Source ILS such as Koha or Evergreen), Ex Libris itself is doing redundant development with Voyager, Aleph, and now the URM.

If libraries can’t afford redundant development how can the customers of Ex Libris ILS offerings afford redundant development by Ex Libris? The answer is that redundant development is not an issue to be worried about. When it comes down to it, at least in my opinion, redundancy isn’t the issue at all, in fact I think it is a red herring. Return on investment is the issue that matters. For some places an ILS like Koha might provide the best return, while others might need a more full featured ILS like Voyager or Aleph. If an Open Source ILS is cheaper (either through a contract with a service provider or by self support) and provides the required functionality or the library can add it, investing in the “redundant development” is appropriate. Maybe it doesn’t move librarianship forward, but it does move the individual library forward by allowing them to re-invest in other areas and/or their staff. As I mentioned on a previous post on the SirsiDynix and Open Source Kerfuffle, each library should evaluate all the options available and invest in whichever one suits them best.

Having worked with both current Ex Libris ILSs, I can tell you for the most part they do the same thing and both are pretty good at doing what they do. They allow libraries to catalog books, circulate materials, budget expenses, etc. However they both have different strengths and weaknesses. While I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend either ILS to a library, it is clear that Voyager is better suited for some libraries and Aleph is better suited for others. This is why Ex Libris is still selling and supporting these “redundant” efforts. Depending on your library, one or the other may offer a better return on investment.

College Football Top 10

2009-11-02T21:37:57+00:00

1) TCU (8-0) (prev: 1) Easily beat an UNLV team that isn’t very good, but still stays on top. In two weeks they play Utah and we will see how good they really are.

2) Cincinnati 8-0 (prev: 2) At least the pollsters put Cincy ahead of Southern Cal this week. I here people stay the pollsters have an East Coast bias, but really they have a big name bias.

3) Boise State 8-0 (prev: 4) There comfortable win over PAC-10 leading Oregon looks even more impresive after Oregon’s blow out of Southern Cal. This moves them up ahead of Alabama.

4) Texas 7-0 (prev: 6 ) A blow out win on the road at Oklahoma State moves the Longhorns up one spot.

5) Alabama 8-0 (prev: 3) Drops down despite an off week because their one good win (Va Tech) isn’t looking so good no more after Va Tech drops to 5-3.

6) Florida 8-0 (prev: 7) Georgia isn’t as good as they benn, but still a nice victory at the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail party combined with Iowa’s lack luster first half moves the Gators up one spot in my pole.

7) Iowa 9-0 (prev: 6)They may have been lackluster against Indiana in the first half, but they were on fire in the 4th quarter. If they play like that the rest of the season they may actually make it to the BCS title game. However, I have my doubts.

8 ) Oregon 7-1 (prev: 8 ) (Top ranked one lose team with only loss on the road at #4 Boise State and a quality win over Southern Cal)

9) Georgia Tech 7-1 (prev: 10) Moves up one place after Southern Cal losses to Oregon.

10) LSU 7-1 (prev: unranked) LSU moved into the top 10 following Southern Cal’s loss. LSU’s only loss so far came against Florida. We’ll see how good LSU is this coming weekend when they play on the road at Alabama.

The SirsiDynix and Open Source Kerfuffle

2009-11-01T16:55:00+00:00

I know that I am a little late to the game, but I’ve been traveling and just now had the time to read over Stephen Abrams’ “Integrated Library System Platforms on Open Source” (pdf) white paper. Really, from all of the tweets I saw about it, I thought it would be much worse. Yes, there is a good bit of FUD in it, but what else would you expect? If they wrote a position paper about Ex Libris or III there would be as well. Certainly there are problems of un-cited quotes that may or may not have been used out of context. Yes, as Abrams says when asked about it, they are attributed, but when and where they were said has been left out and that is important to their understanding. If someone testing a new software product said it was bad in alpha or beta stage of development that has no bearing now. If someone said it is stupid to create a new ILS before it was finished, now that it is finished and is successful, it doesn’t mean much except maybe the person who said it was wrong with his prediction. The question is what is the situation now and that is why citations are important in these types of things. By not offer citations when asked, it makes me believe Abrams knows his use of Clifford Lynch’s view on Open Source ILS is either taken out of context or is dated.

Abrams tries to say that the US Military restricts the use of Open Source because it is insecure. The fact is, they not only use Open Source, they have also developed Open Source. Yes, they have an approval process, but that applies to all software. An Open Source ILS is not a terrorist threat. Abrams says “SirsiDynix has a long tradition of using open source in our solutions…” but if we are to believe his FUD, open source is a threat. So, If Open Source was such a threat, then why do they use it in their products? Abrams wants his cake and wants to eat it too.

A few other things that jump out to me from Abrams paper which are not directly related to Open Source. First Abram writes that “Open source software developers are spending the majority of their time and resources on getting the back room operations right, 30 years after we already completed the process.” If I were Abrams, I wouldn’t think this is a good thing to rest your laurels on. This is exactly one reason why OLE is being developed. Libraries need systems that weren’t based in the 1970’s. Ex Libris, one of SirsiDynix’s proprietary competitors, realizes this and this is why they are creating the URM. Libraries can no longer afford to operate on 30-year old technology.

The second quote that jumped out is that using Open Source might involve “hiring an expensive consultant.” I can just as easily say that getting an ILS from SirsiDynix might mean signing an expensive contract. When it comes down to it an Open Source product is neither bad or good for a particular organization just because it is Open Source. Yes, I believe that the Open Source method can, and often does, make better software, often has a lower TCO, and that it has many benefits over proprietary methods both in practice and in theory. I also believe Open Source is a good fit for libraries because the philosophies complement each other (both librarians and Open Source supporters, want to give information away to make the world a better place). That said, each software acquisition decision needs to be evaluated on its own merits. There may be different things involved in the evaluation and different conclusions based on the type of library, the staffing of the library, the budget of the library, etc. What works for my library may not work for yours. Where I work we have a wide range of products we use. Some are locally hosted Open Source; some are local hosted proprietary products; some are hosted proprietary products. Each one of these methods works for us in our situation and we are happy with our choices (well, as happy as one can ever be). We considered the options with an open mind and depending on the project, staffing available, the financials, etc. we have come to different conclusions for different applications. If you are considering any significant software acquisition I’d encourage you to evaluate all the viable options and let the best solution win. Sometimes it will be proprietary. Sometimes it will be Open Source. My guess is that in the future the decisions will increasingly become to go with an Open Source solution, but time will tell.

Abrams says that he would like “a Respectful Discussion” but that is not what his white paper offered. Using the “T” word (terrorist) and quotes calling the creation of an Open Source ILS stupid are not ways to begin a successful dialogue on Open Source in Libraries. Let us hope we can move forward from here with a respectful, and truthful, dialogue.

RIP Geocities

2009-10-27T03:01:59+00:00

Looking back on Geocities success way back when makes you realize how temporal the Internet is. I can think of a number of other sites that have come and gone but this one is pretty sad even though I was never a fan of all the flashing and spinning gizmos people had on those sites. It was the cat’s meow in the late 1990’s and in many ways the fore-runner of sites like myspace. It is an end of an era and sad in many ways. At some point this will probably happen to MySpace and Facebook too. People will move on and people that remember the hay day of these services with a little bit of sadness of a time not so long ago.

I must say even though it probably won’t be around much longer, the xkcd comic commemorative theme today was pure genius and even brought back more memories.

College Football Top 10

2009-10-27T01:02:59+00:00

This week TCU and Cincinnati leap-frog an Alabama team that barely beat Tennessee who isn’t very good. Alabama needed a blocked field goal to hold on for the win. SEC fans will say this proves they are a tough conference. I point to Tennessee losing to a UCLA team that is 0-4 in the PAC-10. The SEC is over-rated this year. That is why most of the SEC teams are scared of playing tough out of conference games on the road.

1) TCU (7-0) (prev: 2) Nice win on the road this week against BYU and still the most impressive out of conference wins of the undefeated.

2) Cincinnati 7-0 (prev: 3) How can some of these polls put Cincy behind Southern Cal when they are undefeated and easily beat Oregon State on the road while Southern Cal only beat them by 6 at home? The pollsters should be ashamed of themselves!

3) Alabama 8-0 (prev: 1) (Drops down after barely beating a Tennessee team that isn’t very good).

4) Boise State 7-0 (prev: 4) (Still ranked high based on win against PAC-10 leading Oregon)

5) Texas 7-0 (prev: 6 ) (Blew out Missouri which may have been impressive a few weeks ago, but it looks like Missouri has mailed it in. Still, they jump Iowa which barely bit Michigan State).

6) Iowa 8-0 (prev: 5 ) (Tough game against Michigan State but they got the win to stay undefeated)

7) Florida 7-0 (prev: 7) (Florida got a few “questionable” calls for a second week in a row to help them win. Should the SEC officiating being investigated?)

8 ) Oregon 6-1 (prev: 8 ) (Top ranked one lose team with only loss on the road at #4 Boise State. Big game coming up against Southern Cal)

9) Southern California 6-1 (prev: 9) (Their one loss was a bad showing but give the Trojans some credit for playing and beating Ohio State and Notre Dame on the road out of conference).

10) Georgia Tech 7-1 (prev: 10) (Only loss on the road to Miami (FL) – it was a tough choice for this spot between the two and the Big East’s West Virginia Mountaineers)

Memory Requirements

2009-10-24T15:05:00+00:00

Mostly kicked off by this post (http://doctormo.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/ubuntus-minimum-requirements/)

OS	Required / Realistic
Ubuntu (full Gnome)	384 MB / 512 MB
Xubuntu	192 MB / 256 MB
Windows XP	64 MB / 128 MB
Windows Vista Home Basic	512 MB
Windows Vista (Other)	1 GB
Windows 7 32 bit	1 GB
Windows 7 64 bit	2 GB

Ubuntu is approaching Windows Vista Home's minimum memory specs, but is still a long way off our biggest competitor, Windows XP (70% market share and our only real competitor in netbooks). With netbooks usually having 512 - 1 GB of memory, it seems like XP would really let the user run many more applications (yes I am ignoring anti-virus and all the other random stuff OEMs load onto Windows to make it slower). So, I just have one question:

How hard would it be to reduce Ubuntu's memory usage from 9.10 to 10.04 by just 64 MB (oh, and does anyone want to make this an official goal for 10.04)?

I have knowledge of at least one school district where the majority of computers have only 128 MB of RAM. They are running XP and want to switch to Linux, but it was simply not an option due to memory. (And no if they don't have a big IT budget, read: no budget for LTSP)

Win 7 requirements http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/system-requirements.aspx
Win xp requirements http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865
Ubuntu requirements https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements
Win Vista requirements http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx

College Football Top 10

2009-10-20T01:41:07+00:00

This weeks top 10. Currently the BCS agees with me about #1 anyway. Teams that lost and fell out of my top 10 include Virginia Tech, South Florida, and Kansas. New to the top ten are one lose teams Oregon, Southern Cal, and Georgia Tech.

1) Alabama 7-0 (prev: 1) (Nice win in conference against South Carolina)
2) TCU 6-0 (prev: 2) (A dominate wn against Colorado state along with the previous out of conference road wins keep TCU in the #2 position)
3) Cincinnati 6-0 (prev: 3) (A nice win against previously unbeaten South Florida)
4) Boise State 6-0 (prev: 5) (An unimpressive win against Tulsa mid-week but still ranked high based on win against PAC-10 leading Oregon)
5) Iowa 7-0 (prev: 5 ) (Nice in-conference win at Wisconsin)
6) Texas 6-0 (prev: 8 ) (Texas triumphed in the Red River Shootout this past week to jump back above Florida).
7) Florida 5-0 (prev: 7) (Florida got a few “questionable” calls to barely defeat Arkansas)
8 ) Oregon 5-1 (prev: unranked) (Top ranked one lose team with only loss on the road at #4 Boise State)
9) Southern California 5-1 (prev: unranked) (Their one loss was a bad showing but give the Trogans some credit for playing and beating Ohio State and Notre Dame on the road out of conference).
10) Georgia Tech 6-1 (prev: unranked) (Only loss on the road to Miami (FL) – it was a tough choice for this spot between the two and the Big East’s West Virginia Mountaineers)

College Football Top 10

2009-10-12T21:17:54+00:00

This week’s top ten shows a little bit of movement since LSU lost at home, finally given Florida a respectable win. Too bad they still haven’t gotten a decent win out of conference, otherwise they would have moved up higher. Moved Iowa and Florida above Texas based on Texas still not playing anyone tough and Colorado keeping it close early. Along with LSU, Auburn drops out of the top 10 after getting run over by the Razorbacks. Undefeated Kansas and one-lose Virginia Tech take their places in the top 10.

1) Alabama 6-0 (prev: 1) (Nice win in conference on the road at Ole Miss)
2) TCU 5-0 (prev: 2) (A close win against Air Force, but still ranked #2 based on out of conference road wins)
3) Cincinnati 5-0 (prev: 4) (An out of conference win against Miami (OH) isn’t too impressive, but at least it was on the road.)
4) Boise State 5-0 (prev: 5) (An unimpressive win against UC Davis but still ranked high based on win against PAC-10 leading Oregon)
5) South Florida 5-0 (prev: 6) (USF isn’t get much respect from national pollsters despite a great road win against Florida State/ More evidence of pollsters big name bias. Will have to see which Big East team falls from the undefeated next week as USF takes on Cincy)
6) Iowa 6-0 (prev: 8 ) (Nice in-conference win against Michigan. Will they stay undefeated until Ohio State plays a visit on 11/14?)
7) Florida 5-0 (prev: 10) (Despite win over previous #2 LSU, I still need to see more, like maybe a win on the road out of conference, out of state to someone decent?)
8 ) Texas 5-0 (prev: 7) (Texas finally gets a tough game next week in the Red River Shootout, which might give them a chance top climb back up a couple spots).
9) Kansas 5-0 (prev: unranked) (Kansas hasn’t played anyone to speak of, but they remain undefeated)
10) Virgina Tech 5-1 (prev: unranked) (Only loss on the road at my #1, Alabama. Also beat a good, out of conference Nebraska team and in-conference Miami (FL) team at home)

College Football Top 10

2009-10-05T21:05:03+00:00

Here is my first top ten of the year. For a little background about the most important things I take into account, most important is win-loss record. If you lose, you drop. That simple. Second thing I look at is out of conference schedules. If you schedule cupcakes like Charleston Southern and Troy (no offense to those two schools), don’t expect a lot of love from me. Go on the road and play someone half-way decent in their own house. Don’t give me excuses about a tough in-conference schedule. Unless your conference has a rule where the bottom teams fall out and you invite other schools in every year, I don’t want to hear it. Sure, I’ll take overall strength of schedule into account, but I think out of conference is more important – because that is something you can control. And of course, head to-head match-ups. Also, don’t tell me what you are going to do. Let’s see it on the field. I’m not a computer, so there is no magic formula and gut feeling are involved. Anyway, without further ado here is my top ten:

1. Alabama (5-0) (yea, wins over FIU and North Texas isn’t impressive, but Va Tech is)
2. LSU (5-0) (a cup-cake against Louisiana-Lafayette, but a good win over Washington on the road)
3. TCU (4-0) (Two quality wins on the road at ACC schools)
4. Cincinnati (5-0) (A nice road win against Oregon State – does Florida even know where Oregon is?)
5. Boise State (5-0) (A nice win against Oregon)
6. South Florida (5-0) (A nice win on the road at Florida State without their first string QB)
7. Texas (4-0) (Schedule not impressive but at least they went on the road to play Wyoming)
8. Iowa (5-0) (A nice in-conference road win in Happy Valley)
9. Auburn (5-0) (A nice win against West Virginia, but not much else to speak of)
10. Florida (4-0) (King of the cupcakes!)

Mobile devices & libraries

2009-10-05T13:55:00+00:00

I didn’t get to attend the LITA National Forum this year but judging from he tweets I missed one of the better LITA conference line-ups in a while. One of the major topics I saw people tweeting about was designing services for mobile devices. The general gist from the tweets I saw was that in the next few years libraries will have to support mobile users. While I agree that we need to do our best to reach our users wherever they are, whenever they want us Twitterville has got me wondering. Is it true that we have a few years to do this? By then the opportunity might be lost. I wonder if in a few years we will need to provide specific services to mobile devices. By a few I am talking about maybe 4 or 5. I think it is something we ought to be doing now, but probably won’t need to provide in a longer time frame. The iPhone and similar devices already display most Web pages fine. Sure, you need to check them, but most are usable. That said, most are also currently not as easily to be used as possible. However with the rate of technology change, in 5 years mobile devices will be much better at display Web pages and I predict they will be able to display almost all Web pages without a hitch.

That said, I think librarians need to go mobile now. We can’t, or at least we shouldn’t, wait for mobile devices to catch-up with our, often poorly designed, Web sites and associated Web applications (e.g. OPACs, Federated Search engines, etc.). We need to be rolling out services now that will provide mobile users the services they need until mobile technology catches up. If not, I whole four year class (in Academic institutions) will be missing out. We shouldn’t allow that.

Wyoming County Int’l Raceway, Track #200

2009-10-04T14:44:35+00:00

I haven’t been blogging about my race viewing exploits lately, but I figured I’d make an exception since last night, October 3 2009, I went to my 25′th new track of the year and 200′th different racetrack overall.

Last night I went to the Wyoming County International Raceway in Perry, NY. This is the only permanent paved oval “National Speedway Directory-quality” facility in New York I haven’t been to (well, until Albany-Saratoga Speedway finishes removing the dirt that covers the pavement in a few weeks). That, and it being my 200′th “TrackChaser countable” track led me to head there to see the “Fall Shoot Out at the BullRing!” instead of heading to Fulton Speedway for the 200 lap DIRT big block event.

Racing started pretty much on time at 4:00pm in front of what I thought was a sparse crowd for a season ending race. The admission was a reasonable $18 for a special four division show (Mini-cups, TQ midgets, 4cyl stocks, SST Super Stocks, and SST Modifieds. The heats were ran off rather quickly with minimal cautions and I was thinking I might get out of there by 9:00 which could mean stopping in Corning for a nice late-night burger. After an intermission that was a little long, but not unbareable, the national anthems of Canada and the United States were played. One thing I like about the Northern NY tracks is that they usually play the Canadian and US anthems. Then the 4 features started. While all the divisions except for mini-cups (about had a full field, none needed a consolation rates (another reason for expecting an early exit). The 4cyl had the largest field with 30, the Modifieds had 26, and the TQ midgets and Stocks had 19 or 20. The minicup race went off without a hitch and it was time for the 4cyl stocks.

This is when a well-run show went south. Lots of cautions and a long red for a multi-car crash. You can’t really blame the track for the red, or even the number of cautions but they did take longer than needed to get back to racing. In the 50 lap SST Super Stock race I counted a 8 lap caution for a car that spun by itself and was moving before the leader even came around to pass him! The first half of the SST Super Stock wasn’t much better. The 100 lap SST Modified race was better, but still had a few too many yellows. Maybe it was the full moon? The breaks between races could have but cut down a little as well. Because of the yellows and long breaks, the races didn’t end until 10:30pm. Six hours for a four division show? Without a single consolation race? In October in cold northern New York? Hmmm… If this is typical is there any reason not to be surprised by the sparse crowd. All that said, when the green flag was flying, the racing was great and I hope it was just the full moon causing problems. I liked the track and I think if they schedule the Race of Champions Modified Tour next year, I’ll make a return visit.

Exaile & Amarok. Because my original review of them...

2009-10-02T18:51:48+00:00

was not quite that good. Let's try this again...
Exaile and Amarok are very similar players as Exaile is a music player inspired from Amarok but designed for GNOME. Whereas Amarok is the premier music player on the KDE desktop.

(I'm also on Karmic now, so things might look a little different if you install on Jaunty and also look different from my original review)

Exaile in Depth
The above is the Exaile main window. On the left side it let's you navigate through your Collection, Radio, Files, and Playlists. Clicking on them only update the next area to the right (which is where I currently have right clicked on an album and am about to "Append to Current").
The next region (or main region) is a tabbed collection of playlists or music sources. The use of tabs always makes things more cool. Quite useful for going through your music once and separating into multiple playlists (for things that can't be done by smart/dynamic playlists).

The easiest way to just start playing random music, is to go the playlists tab where you will find several smart playlists. Among them are Random 100/300/500 songs, Entire Library, and Rating >3 / >4.

Blacklists, which let you exclude songs from being played, are one of the features Exaile has that I haven't seen elsewhere.

The Radio should provide you more than enough shoutcast streams to listen to, although it can be somewhat overwhelming with the number of stations. Karmic Xubuntu users will be enjoying music from Exaile out-of-the-box. For the rest of you, get it below.

Get Exaile

Amarok, Rediscover Your Music!

The Amarok motto is back! I swear it went missing when I did my first review this year. Since I first reviewed Amarok (and then upgraded to Karmic) they made some significant changes to the interface. For instance, the left hand vertical navigation is gone. The first area (going left to right) is the Local Collection (can be switched to Playlist/Internet/Files mode (sound familar?) This is pretty identical to the one in Exaile (or I really should say the Exaile one is the same as the Amarok one). However, after that things change :).

The next area with the nice "Discovery Blue" (I'm making up colors now), is the Discover your music area (I'm also making up names). You can customize this area with Wikipedia entries, Videos, Photos, etc, that will automatically update based on the artist you are currently listening to. You can mess with the layout as well, like I did below:
The last area is the Playlist section which allows you to sort and rearrange the playlist by (seemingly) every possible bit of metadata you have on your music.

Random in Amarok can be made to cheat. Which is awesome (who wants mathematically perfect random for music playing anyway). It can be made to favor Higher Ratings or songs that you haven't played in a while.

Amarok really rocks when it comes to finding music or audio online for you to listen to. Aside from the more standard ones (Magnatue, Jamendo, Last.fm) it also has access to Librivox recordings (books) and a Podcast Directory.

Ubuntu Users, Get Amarok Here

Read my old review of 2007 Amarok

Susan Currie named Library Director at Tompkins County Public Library (Ithaca, NY)

2009-10-02T17:16:21+00:00

I am happy to hear about the appointment of Susan Currie as the new Tompkins County Public Library director. Having worked for and with Susan at Binghamton University for the last year and a half, I am convinced that she will do an excellent job. Not only is she very knowledgeable and a good manager, she is also very passionate about libraries and about the Ithaca area. It would be very difficult for me to imagine a better candidate for this position. At the same time, I must admit it will be sad for me to see her live Binghamton University because it will be a big loss for the Binghamton University Libraries. However, this is great opportunity for her and I am happy for her. Congratulations and best of luck Susan!

2009 College Football Top 10

2009-09-28T12:38:01+00:00

Someone asked if I was going to do my College Football top 10 again this year The answer is yes, but I am not going to start it until the end of next weekend. My rule is to start the pole after the first weekend of play in October. While I am not going to start my poll yet, I am going to take a shot at the coaches poll. If the coaches can’t take their poll seriously it should be ended. Two examples: How do they vote Houston (#15 in the Coaches Poll), who beat 2 of the top 4 teams in the Big 12 on the road, below Oklahoma State (#12 in the Coaches Poll) who they beat by 10 in Boone Pickens Stadium? Even worse, how is an undefeated Iowa (#17 in the Coaches Poll) four spots below Penn State who they pretty much dominated except for the first couple of drives in Happy Valley. Not to mention, Iowa also have a nice win against Arizona, and who has Penn State beat? Temple. Wow, that’s impressive - NOT. The coaches should be ashamed of themselves.

India, 4th of July

2009-09-17T14:41:00+00:00

I went to the US Embassy for the 4th of July and got a beef cheeseburger and french fries... In the red circle is the US Ambassador to India. He gave a short and sweet speech.

This is during the pledge...There were fireworks as well! (btw, do we let embassy's in DC use fireworks?)
And then there was cake..

Note: Pictures not actually in chronological order.

India, the park

2009-09-17T14:02:40+00:00

I love this park and it is about a 2 minute walk from the office... these are pictures from a bit back...
Look "normal" park stuff:
The best part is this is a medium size park here :), and just walking around it you can usually find a....

Gecko! And sometimes discarded legacy stuff. :)

India, living and working

2009-09-17T13:21:18+00:00

About 2 months after it was requested I am finally providing a couple pictures....
This is the MIA office building we only have 1 floor, which also (luckily) happens to be the only floor with air conditioning.
And this is where I live.. (bottom right balcony is mine)
And last but actually interesting :), is the view from my office window when there is a bit of rain outside.

Getting back to the blog after a summer hiatus

2009-09-16T02:59:07+00:00

I had been spending most of my public posting time on my Twitter account (@jabolins). The microblogging format worked nicely with a busy summer schedule. Now that I am back on a busy fall schedule, I'll get back to blogging here.

One of the things I was tracking this summer was the July DDoS attacks upon South Korean and US sites. Very interesting how quickly some people were blaming North Korea for the attacks and even suggesting strong measures against the dictatorship. Cyber-attribution is a tricky matter and there's a big risk of "Ready, FIRE, oh, well, aim...." mishaps.

Another interesting thing I was look at this summer was the Internet activities following the disputed Iranian elections. This included net censorship and counter-measures, people (including me) "greening" their Twitter avatars, etc.

These two things often raised the "cyberwar" theme and I will address the topic in a few weeks.

Jonathan D. Abolins

“Digital Preservation: The Next Library Frontier” IGeLU presentation slides

2009-09-15T12:31:19+00:00

I have uploaded the PDF of my IGeLU presentation, Digital Preservation: The Next Library Frontier to my personal repository, as well as the Binghamton University Libraries digital repository. Enjoy!

IGeLU 2009 thoughts

2009-09-14T20:30:03+00:00

From September 5 until September 9 I attended the International Group of ex Libris Users (IGeLU) 2009 annual conference and associated Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) Steering Committee meetings. I had to attend the ELUNA SC meetings because of my role on the ELUNA Steering Committee. There were many topics discussed including how ELUNA can improve communication with IGeLU, and with ELUNA members. Communication with IGeLU actually is going really well and we just need to continue to build on the level of cooperation we have established in the last couple of years.

We have come up with a number of action items regarding communicating to ELUNA member institutions (and potential member institutions). One of the ways we hope to do this is with a new, and hopefully vastly improved Web site. We are planning to replace Drupal with a combination of three tools: For news and our main Web site we will be using WordPress Multi-User, for sharing conference proceedings and other finalized documents we will use E-Prints, and for corroborating on documents we will use Google Apps (mostly the Google Docs portion). Being that I am the ELUNA Web master, I think I have a busy Fall ahead of me.

The IGeLU conference itself was very nice. The local organizers did an excellent job and there was hardly any local arrangement issues. Kudos to the great job the folks in Helsinki did. They raised the bar to almost unattainable heights for those who will follow after them.

The conference itself had two general types of sessions: Ones that Ex Libris put on, and ones the customers put on. The Ex Libris sessions could farther be divided into sessions about the URM and sessions about the current products. The URM sessions did not have a lot of new information in them since ELUNA. It is obvious that Ex Libris has a clear vision and are working towards that, but it is going to take time before they can talk about specifics. Now that the development partners are in place, I expect a lot of work to be done between now and ELUNA 2010 and that they’ll be a lot more meat on the bones at that conference. The sessions on the existing products, Aleph and Metalib, that Binghamton University has also did not have a lot of new developments since ELUNA. Aleph enhancement voting for ELUNA just took place and IGeLU is in the process of voting so they didn’t have any announcements about new enhancements.

The news about Metalib was that Ex Libris is still planning on rolling Metalib functionality into Primo (and providing the Metalib functionality to existing Metalib-only customers at no additional costs). This should happen in Primo 4.0, due out in 2011. Primo and Metalib customers will get some improvements in Primo version 3.1. Since Ex Libris says that they are not going to release a new version of the existing Metalib in order to concentrate on Metalib, Next Generation (yes, that is what they are currently referring to it as), this means non-Primo Metalib customers will not have to worry about upgrading Metalib for a while [1].

There was also some talk about whether or not Primo Central (a product similar to Serial Solutions’ Summons) would be available to Metalib only customers. The IGeLU SC discussed this with Ex Libris and Ex Libris latter announced in the company Q&A session that they are going to consider making Primo Central available to Metalib only customers. My hats off to Ex Libris for listening to the customers about this.

The costumer sessions I went to were very good. Probably the best and most relevant one for Binghamton was “Easy OPAC enhancements” by Matthew Phillips, Systems Librarian, University of Dundee. Mathew should a large number of enhancements to the stock Aleph OPAC that will greatly improve the look and feel of an Aleph OPAC, as well as add some desired functionality. I plan on looking over his slides when the UISC begins to look at making some changes to our Aleph OPAC.

As with any conference, sometimes the personal connections you make can be important. I had interesting conversations about Aleph and other library software with many people. Among them was one of the people responsible for the new Library of the University of Amsterdam Aleph Catalog http://opc.uva.nl/F who offered me some pointers and ideas about how they designed their Aleph interface. Between the presentations and contacts I made at the conference I think it will be much easier to get more out of our Aleph OPAC than it otherwise would.

All and all, a productive, educational, and enjoyable conference. I hope I am able to go to IGeLU 2010 in Belgium.

[1] This does not mean at all that Ex Libris will not be doing knowledge base updates. They are continuing to come, and from my perspective, Ex Libris has been doing a very admirable job with the knowledgeable updates. With new procedures being put in place by Ex Libris, IGeLU, and ELUNA for determining which new resources to create connectors for, I expect that this will even improve more.

Flowcharts!

2009-09-06T21:48:21+00:00

Any now for something completely different.

Can flowcharts be scaled up to cover some of the more complex social interactions, we know it can cover Creating an AIM Profile.

http://www.okcupid.com/flowchart-to-my-heart?g=icDV86SY94A

Grokker gone :-(

2009-09-01T15:15:50+00:00

We received an e-mail from Binghamton University Libraries has been one of the few Academic Libraries using Grokker for visual search of scholarly materials. Binghamton began collaborating with Groxis on the project in Fall 2004 and went live in January 2005 (more than 3 years before I arrived here). Since starting at Binghamton, I have really liked the visual search interface it provides and used it rather often. It is not to say I don’t like our other federated search product, Metalib, I do and in many ways it was better. However, they both had the strength and weaknesses and I will miss the visual result sets from Grokker.

For more information, see Groxis CEO Randy Marcinfo’s comment about the financial situation of Groxis on Steve Arnold’s Beyond Search Web log.