TwoPointOh

2011-11-09T13:17:00.003-05:00

“From Theory to Practice: Accessing and Preserving Electronic Records and Digital Materials”
Conference sponsored by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, held at the McKimmon Center, North Carolina State University, Nov 3 & 4, 2011
(For conference agenda, see http://archives.ncdcr.gov/news/electronicRecordsCon_Agenda2011.pdf)
Notes by Thomas Cole, Librarian, Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library

November 3
Plenary Session
Amy Rudersdorf (State Library) and Erin O’Meara (UNC Chapel Hill) made similar points about digital repositories: that they are not passive sites where stuff just sits. In O’Meara’s words, they “never go into maintenance mode.” The collection can always be edited by the addition or deletion of primary source material or of commentary. The hardware where the files actually reside may change, the service provider who hosts the site may change, and the marketing and promotion of the site may have to be redone to reach new audiences.
Rudersdorf spoke of a “life-cycle” approach to digital repositories. Planning a project involves understanding the needs it addresses at its origin, the time and material needed to develop it, the work necessary to update and improve it, and the conditions under which it will be retired.
Rudersdorf defined a digital repository as a set of processes that, among other goals, builds trust. It establishes itself as reliable, available, and authentic in users’ minds. She made reference to “TRAC compliance,” which are standards, I later learned, developed for “Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification.”
O’Meara’s presentation was more technical, but it did include this little gem: open-source software is free, but “it’s not a free lunch, it’s more like a free puppy.”

Session 1, “Planning a Digital Project: Standards”
Lisa Gregory (State Library), “File Format Standards for Digitization”Lisa made the distinction between Preservation formats and Access formats. The former are for indefinite storage. File formats for this purpose should be non-proprietary, common, and lossless. (Examples are tiff’s for images, mpeg’s for videos, .wav’s for audo.)
Access formats should be acceptable by common sites for uploading, such as flickr, YouTube, and Internet Archive.
For preservation of / access to files that were “born digital” one faces the problem of the original format becoming obsolete and the document unreadable. Set a policy on how these will be rewritten, if at all.

Nicholas Graham (UNC Chapel Hill), “Metadata Standards for Digitization”
Metadata standards preserve consistency across institutions
Metadata rely on a controlled vocabulary - Library of Congress has authority files for names, description of graphic materials , subject headings
Metadata can be Descriptive, Administrative, or Structural
Descriptive Metadata
can be more or less detailed, depending on the expected needs of the user.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use Dublin Core descriptive tags or some other pre-defined set for specific disciplines.
Administrative Metadata
give information about how the item was preserved and copied.
Unrelated to the content of the item itself – who scanned the image and when, what is the internal ID # for it, for example
Structural Metadata
Give contextual information about the item itself.
What collection does it belong to, is it item x of y, for example.

Session 2, “Planning a Digital Project: Legal Considerations”
Peggy Hoon, J.D., UNC Charlotte
Assume that things are copyrighted. Works that are unpublished, unregistered, or even without © symbol are still protected by copyright.
Works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain. That boundary year will start to move forward in 2019.
Intellectual property rights do not necessarily go together with ownership.
“Parody, criticism, higher education” – purposes under which the “Fair Use” doctrine permits limited reproduction of copyrighted material.

Katie McCormick, UNC Charlotte
Rights of ownership as well must be established as part of grants applications
Keep records to document rights to physical ownership as well as intellectual property rights
Oral histories, for example – library must have permission for all the voices on the recording.

Session 3, Planning a Digital Project: Preservation and Storage”

Earl Cahill, FamilySearch.org
FamilySearch has used volunteers to do some of the work of digital preservation: transcription, indexing. The 1940 Census, for example, has been indexed by volunteers.
Volunteers’ work is checked by character-level comparisons of different transcriptions of the same document.

November 4
Session 1, “Economics: The True Cost of Managing a Digital Project”
Susan Sharpless Smith, Wake Forest University
Include as part of the project a “pilot program”. Scan and process a small portion of the total number of images to test whether one’s cost estimates are accurate.
Wake Forest partnered with WSSU and FCPL on a project called “Digital Forsyth.” Budget administration was centralized at WFU. Partners just provided services.
90 days before the end of the year, send a reconciliation statement based on actual and projected expenses to all partners.
Once the site goes live, funds will still be needed for preservation of digital materials.

Jane Blackburn, Braswell Memorial Library, Rocky Mount, NC
In 2001 Library acquired (for $20,000) a collection of negatives and prints from a local photographer .
The Charles S. Killebrew Collection turned out to half a million images, not the five thousand they had believed at first. Lesson #1 – Know what you’re getting into.
It took two years of volunteer work to re-sleeve the negatives and get them in to cool storage in Raleigh. Lesson #2 – Preservation before access
A local foundation funded further work, and an advisory committee of volunteers was formed. Lesson #3 – Seek partners in the community (but retain control over project).
Sampling of the Collection now online (http://www.braswell-library.org:3635/). Lesson #4 – Handling this project piecemeal over a long period of time has led to a high cost per image so far.

Session 2, “Planning a Digital Project: Partnerships and Collaboration”
Victoria P. Scott, NC Genealogy Society
Discussed the NCGS Loose Estates Project , which aims to digitize the microfilmed loose estate papers currently in the State Archives.
Loose Estate papers contain information about people who did not leave wills. (Mitchell’s NC Will Index, for instance, lists only 78,000 names.)
In first phase of project, 31 volunteers worked 16 months to enter material from 223 reels.
FamilySearch became interested in the project, made “Waypointing” software available to capture and tag documents from microfilm. Productivity greatly increased. https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Waypointing_Volunteer_Hub

Session 3, “Planning a Digital Project: Successes”
Druscie Simpson, NCDCR-State Archives
North Carolina Family Records Online shows family Bibles from North Carolina. (http://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/dimp/digital/ncfamilyrecords/)
Collection includes 500 Bibles from ten counties in NC.
Thoroughly indexed.

Michelle Czaikowski, NCDCR-State Library
Spoke about the “Commemorating the Civil War” Digital Collection on state site. http://www.nccivilwar150.gov/history/digital-resources.htm
Planned the collection with the user’s needs in mind:
Users better served by bringing these materials together.
Do users want to browse or search?
Make different access points for different types of users
Beautiful collection, lots of added features – maps, timelines – to make material easier to understand.

2011-01-10T14:01:00.002-05:00

2011 Convention of the American Historical Association, Boston MA

Day 1 - Friday, January 7

On this day I attended two sessions. The AM session was #52, "Local Markets/Marketing the Local: American Retailing, 1920 to the Present" and the second was #95, "The Freedom Rides in History and Film: a 50-Year Retrospective"

I chose the first one because I hoped it would shed light on the history of Charlotte in the days of Efird's, Ivey's, and Belk's uptown. It used a lot of evidence of other locally important department stores to make arguments about the national economic and cultural trends that these stores and their lifespans illustrated.

First up was Vicki Howard of Hartwick College, who, it came out later, had organized the panel. Her paper was entitled "Remembering Main Street: Consumers, Nostalgia and Independent American Department Stores, 1930 to the Present." Localism was part of a marketing strategy, especially as stores founded around 1900 turned fifty years old. They reminded the public that they had been there since horse-and-buggy days and used images of the old country store to make people think of a merchant who sold a little bit of everything yet knew them personally. The advantages of scale, however, had dictated that bigger was better. Stores grew as big as the technology of the time would permit - technological breakthroughs in storage, transportation, or communication were applied to retailing just as breakthroughs in technologies for the consumer (above all, the automobile) shaped stores' growth. Department stores grew into chains and chains became acquired by holding companies that maintained the old names of the stores, but took advantage of the pooling of resources that a conglomerate could provide. Most interesting, when the downtown department stores started to close in the 1970s and 80s, former customers made them the object of nostalgic "Save our stores" campaigns or afterwards as the centers of memory palaces. The store stood for their recollection of a walkable, secure, thriving city. Fans of the old places can find each other online. News stories from the time and people's comments online use metaphors of death and grieving to describe the closing of the store, which language makes it seem inevitable rather than the consequence of choices we and the retailers have made. The department stores were the urban version of the old country store. They replaced the specialty stores that used to line the main streets. As I walked through the Copley Place mall in between sessions this weekend, I saw how the shopping mall recreates the feel of the turn-of-the-century urban retail environment. There are specialty stores and department stores, all within a fwe steps of each other. The interesting thing would be to compare what they sell. Were shoppers from the early 1900s as obsessed with clothing as today's seem to be?

The second paper did not address my interests so directly. It was about government efforts - particularly one piece of 1930's legislation - to save local stores from being swallowed up by chains. The law's framers were so conflicted about interfering with the free market that they left big loopholes in it that made it ineffective in achieving its stated goals.

The last paper returned to consumer behavior. Augustine Sedgwick, a graduate student at Harvard University, did a skillful job of starting with a particular anecdote and using it to illustrate a wide variety of historical forces. "'The World is Your Pantry': the Global and Home Economics of the Supermarket Revolution, 1929-1941" During this time the number of supermarkets as distinct from grocery stores and specialty food shops, increased from 100 to 10,000. The supermarkets offered the quality of the specialty shops and the prices of the grocery stores. They were big, modern places, often located out of town for consumers with cars. They were destinations in themselves that attracted the whole family. Their prices were low, but part of the hidden cost was getting there by car. That is, the last part of transportation costs were transferred to the consumer. Sedgwick had a quote from a retailer's publication in which a store owner said that he located his stores near the "homeowning class" and avoided neighborhoods of "clannish" foreigners. In other words, the supermarkets were lessons in upward mobility and Americanization. The author went into particular detail about coffee and its production and marketing. During the Depression, per capita consumption increased. High-quality Latin American coffee was available for cheaper prices to US buyers (long story) in the 1930s, enabling eye-popping bargains tnat brought people in to the stores. The owners of the new supermarkets were often grocery store chains (like A&P) transforming themselves to suit the new, demanding, mobile consumer.

2010-11-07T20:56:00.004-05:00

I attended the weekend sessions of the Southern Historical Association in Charlotte this weekend.

At the Saturday AM session - "Mobilizing for Freedom: Agency and Constraint in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas" - there were three papers of local history on race relations in the Reconstruction era. The panelists represented a generation of scholars who reached professional maturity after the civil-rights-era generation. Those earlier scholars had had to combat the myth of the passive Negro and to bring out examples of black agency as a matter of pride as well as national self-understanding. The next generation did not have to "look over its shoulder at the Dunning school," as Brian Kelly (Queen's University, Belfast), one of the panelists, put it. The commentator, Julie Saville of the University of Chicago, questioned the way in which all three papers were framed. She was of an age, she reminded us, to remember the dismantling of Jim Crow. She did not take kindly to histories that seemed to emphasize black disability instead of resistance and subversion and organization. Generational sparks seemed ready to fly. "I don't recognize my paper" in the commenter's description, said one of the presenters.

In that first session, I liked a paper by Bruce Baker (University of London, Royal Holloway) that discussed the history of Greenville, South Carolina in the late nineteenth century. Parallel with the political disenfranchisement of blacks was their exclusion from economic opportunity. In the immediate post emancipation period, the author documented how blacks, though a minority in Greenville, dominated professions such as draymen and carpenters and sidewalk hucksters. Once the railroad connected Greenville to Atlanta and Charlotte, the city grew in size and wealth. Regulation of public space crowded out the small-scale sellers who were largely freedmen, a local rail line obviated the work of hauling cargo from the train station into town, and falling cotton prices (this pointed out from the audience) brought more whites into town to compete with blacks for positions such as carpenter. The overall result was the "casualization" of black labor - rolling back whatever steps they had taken towards independence and making them dependent on white employers, who now owed them only for the labor they did and not for year-round care and feeding as they had under slavery. A lot of these same trade-offs can be found in Charlotte's history - efficiency came at the expense of displacing black laborers and destroying their economic toeholds. This pattern continued right through the era of urban renewal (dubbed "Negro removal" by inner-city residents). No wonder the proposal to merge two mostly black high schools in Charlotte last month evoked such heartfelt protest - there's a legacy of blacks absorbing the costs of plans imposed by local leaders. No mention of convict labor in this study, though that's not an example of making the workforce more casual, but of controlling it.

In the afternoon I attended a session on North Carolina in the civil war, specifically the respect (or lack of it) for civil liberties. Governor Vance, as a paper by Jaime Amanda Martnez (UNC Pembroke) on the impressment of slave labor explained, tried to maintain the state's right to regulate the use of labor, so that the state's own needs would be met before anything would be spared for the Confederacy. He had little enforcement power, however. In another paper, Steven Nash of ETSU went over the struggle to define loyalty in Western North Carolina after the war. Unionists who had gone over to the secession side after Sumter now wanted recognition from the Federal authorities of their patriotism. The Feds saw them as Rebs, but the dyed-in-the-wool Rebels saw them as enemies. There was a riot in August, 1865, in Hendersonville at the time of an election. Another paper - and the most interesting of a good bunch - talked about the Act of Sequestration. It was passed by the Confederate government in Richmond in retaliation for a similar act in Washington. It allowed for the seizure of land and assets owned by enemy aliens for the good of the Confederate cause. Each state appointed "receivers", who administered the sale of such contraband that their team of investigators had found. North Carolina was more active in implementing this law than other states, and the receiver for the district including Mecklenburg county was the most active of all. The researcher (Rodney J. Steward, University of South Carolina - Salkehatchie) did some great detective work to conclude that people were turning in their neighbors to seize their property and that the receiver was keeping for himself or sharing with his cronies (all members of the Southern Rights Party) much of the proceeds that by rights belonged to the Richmond government.

The vendettas, the bushwhacking, the corruption, the blindness to local differences among the occupiers and the temptation of slaves to run off to the enemy all reminded me strongly of the Revolutionary era. I am convinced that there is a great work to be done there, showing those two wars as part of the same struggle.

2010-08-26T03:26:00.002-04:00

Thanks to an alert Facebook friend, I read "What's the deal JSTOR?" by Meredith Farkas on her blog, "Information Wants to be Free." I had noticed some changes in JSTOR's look and a new box to check on their search page: "Include links to external content". Ms. Farkas explained it all. Not every library subscribes to the complete range of publications offered by JSTOR. Used to be that the others just weren't shown if you only subscribed to a few. Now, those others may appear in lists of search results, but users are invited to pay for access to them. Librarians were angered at the change because the initial default was to include the $$$ results in the search and because JSTOR made no use of OpenURL standards, which would have allowed users to find the article in other databases that their libraries did subscribe to. The first of these issues has already been resolved by JSTOR in response to the uproar set off by this article.

I understand where people are coming from, resenting the crass intrusion of money into the disinterested provision of information, but really, information is not free. It only feels that way to the end-user because the library has covered the cost before it gets to you.

2009-12-14T19:06:00.004-05:00

I have to give a talk on Charlotte in the 1930s early next year. This time I'll be on my own. I would like to tell some of the same types of stories as I brought to the radio interview, but I will also be responsible for advancing an argument. I will have to draw a big picture without simply repeating what Tom Hanchett says.

Herewith some notes towards accomplishing that goal.

The Charlotte Observer noted last Sunday that business leaders and elected officials are looking for someone to lead the city to a more economically diversified future. Growing beyond dependency on a single sector provides a sounder foundation for growth and makes the city more attractive to outsiders. Everyone interviewed agreed that strengthening the school system so that it turned out employable workers was key.

How does this compare to the 1930s? What did people then say about the remaking of the city? In the days shortly after the crash, the News and the Observer were full of hopeful headlines, as if deflation and joblessness would be bumps in the road rather than enduring conditions. They were in denial.

Acceptance came by 1931-32. There were some signs of a lifeboat mentality - cheating and mistrust.

People concerned for Charlotte's future focused first of all on binding up the community's wounds. The damage was so deep and widespread that everyone knew it had to be addressed before the city's human resources could be productively employed again. In Charlotte during the present recession, the damage has been more limited and the social safety net more in place. We have a sense of our neighbors in need, but not of our community in peril. We have been asked to dig deeper in support of existing agencies. They organized from scratch to meet the needs around them.

2009-12-07T19:59:00.003-05:00

I have spent countless hours in the last twenty years listening to public radio. I have called in once or twice, but never, until today, appeared as a guest. A local show, "Charlotte Talks", was putting together a show on Charlotte in the 1930s. The principal guest was Tom Hanchett, staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South. Tom remembered that I was researching this topic too and suggested me as a second guest. It was an honor to play second fiddle to him. Listen to the show here.

What did I learn from this experience? For one thing, that a radio interview is a contest of agendas. The guest has to work within the host's agenda. I held back some observations or anecdotes when they belonged to the previous question, not the current one. Given that ground rule, one can still advance one's own agenda. I hesitated and lost a chance to bring up some points I really wanted to make when I thought that they didn't exactly pertain to the question posed to me. A perfectly worded question never came along, though, so I never got another opportunity. My fault, not his.

2009-03-18T14:04:00.005-04:00

I had the pleasure last week of attending the meeting of the Society of North Carolina Archivists last week at Duke University.

I attended an all-day session led by Stephen Fletcher of UNC Chapel Hill to learn about preserving photographs in archival collections. To preserve them, one must first know what kind of photograph one has. Especially in the nineteenth century there were a variety of types, all using different chemical processes. Each one breaks down in its own way and so requires its own preservation strategy. The whole morning was given over to a quick review of photographic history with examples of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cartes de visites, early Kodak snapshots, and early experiments in color to name a few. I found the historical part fascinating and the technical challenge of conservation daunting. Photographs and prints require cool temps and low humidity, both maintained constantly. Color photographs, I leanred, keep best at temperatures below freezing.

I and another participant in the session carried on the discussion over wine and snacks at the reception following. Stephen Fletcher did not regard digitization as a form of preservation. My interlocutor, a small businessperson who digitized images for a living, maintained that advances in scanning technology had made it possible to scan a negative without losing any information. The digital version could even be used to print a new negative if necessary. Is it preservation to lift off the information perfectly or is something lost if you can't handle the material that the original photographer handled?

2009-02-19T16:14:00.005-05:00

Things fall in place

I have worked in the Carolina Room long enough now to have gone through an annual review (which went fine, d.g.).

When I began I knew the broad outlines of Charlotte history, but not the names and personalities of historical figures or the characteristics of particular places now changed, changed utterly. My colleagues' familiarity with old Charlotte still impresses me. I don't say I've acquired it myself, but at least I begin to see how it is acquired: by patient accumulation of knowledge.

A single fact without context requires the effort of memorization in order to be retained. If it sticks, though, another fact will come along sooner or later that connects to it, and then one has the beginning of a narrative. For instance, I was at the Mint Museum for a party last week and looked up at the names of the original benefactors who had moved the old Mint to its current location (with labor from the WPA). I recognized a name or two and made note of others, resolving to learn the stories behind them, too. In the following week a caller asked about Mellanay Delhom, whose ceramic collection was donated to the Mint in 1968. Looking up her story led to some info about Mary Myers Dwelle, (pictured above) whose name I had seen on the benefactors list. Another caller in the same week asked about Heriot Clarkson, a lawyer and judge with a long career in Charlotte from the 1890s to the 1940s. Clarkson's name came up tangentially as I was researching a query about the Blue Ridge Parkway: he was a developer of "Little Switzerland", an early resort in the region. The separate queries led to separate answers, but the incidental data connected to each other.

The difference between knowing isolated facts and appreciating the bigger picture is like the difference between finding an address on a map and knowing the landmarks and neighborhoods. A literal illustration of that difference occurred this week. A visitor to the library wanted to know the precise location of a spot depicted in an old photograph. With the aid of a city directory we established it and connected it to another photograph. Today a fruitless search for an image of a particular shop that had once stood on West Trade St nonetheless obliged me to fix in my mind the appearance and spatial relation of the hotels, the train station, and the church on that street sixty years ago. As I told one of my colleagues, I'm beginning to feel like I'm from here.

2009-02-05T13:03:00.003-05:00

The Shifted Librarian and the Free-Range Librarian have both mentioned a new product called "Summon" that promises to revolutionize searching within the library. It provides a Google-like interface to all a library's online data. Results of a search may be drawn from catalog records, announcements of upcoming events, or online texts. Libraries already use meta-search engines that can look for results in various databases. This, if I understand it correctly, promises to be more seamless and rapid.

2009-01-09T14:53:00.003-05:00

American Historical Association, 2009 meeting, New York, NY

What a privilege to attend the AHA convention! It provided some opportunities for professional development, which I hope to chronicle here, and some for personal rewards, which I can talk about elsewhere.

January 3

American Association for History and Computing, Session 1

"Old Stuff, New Tricks: How Archivists are Making Special Collections Even More Special Using Web 2.0 Technologies"

Jean Green, Binghamton University
Mark Matienzo, NYPL
Amy Schindler, College of William and Mary
Jessica Lacher-Feldman, University of Alabama

This was a roundtable discussion with each participant displaying and discussing examples of how his or her library had made use of blogs, micro-blogs, photo- and video-sharing, and social networking.

Blogs
Blogs expand the display space.

The "Cool at Hoole" blog (coolathoole.blogspot.com) helps market the special collection of the University of Alabama by letting readers know what's new or what's the library has on a topic or person that's in the news.

The blog of the special collections library at SUNY Binghamton highlights certain books or useful websites.

William and Mary special collections launched a blog with a life span. It was only meant to cover the anniversary year of coeducation at W & M.
Photo-sharing
flickr Commons
- is a public photo collection
- accepts metadata, but is designed for "tagging"
- partners use flickr API to upload batches of photos
- photos must have "no known copyright restrictions"
Hoole has used flickr as an online exhibit tool, W & M uses it to highlight the collection and to make "friends" for the library
"archives on flickr" - group name
Libraries send low-res images to flickr, then may still charge to share high-res copies.

Ditto for YouTube and iTunesU, where institutions may share content.
Facebook
Will facebook page overtake or replace the library website?

"archivists without a cause" - facebook group
Wikis - use for FAQ's, knowledge management

2008-12-23T15:39:00.002-05:00

A post in another blog last week gave me new insight on a subject I had commented on in a previous post.

The author, Derik Badman, Digital Services Librarian at Temple University, addresses the question of balancing text and image in presentations. I had seen the question as one of balancing slides and speech. If the speaker is dynamic enough, he or she can carry the presentation, and the slides are simple and static so as not to distract from the real business of talking (and hopefully, listening and synthesizing).

Well, if something's worth doing, it's worth doing right. If a speaker is going to use visual aids at all, they should make a unique contribution to the presentation. As Badman puts it, the tools of a presentation are there to "convey information in a complete manner" - through all available channels of communication. Visuals for a speech-centered presentation serve merely as attention-getters. Not bad in itself, but not as useful as they could be.

Badman is a graphic artist as well as a librarian, so he speaks from experience of crafting words and images. "When visually appealing slides complement the speech, the presenter can engage multiple senses of the audience members." An aptly illustrated and captioned slide would serve the speaker's needs and even make sense for asynchronous review of the presentation, when the speaker isn't there to expand on the idea.

Wow, what a challenge! I thought I was on the cutting edge by reducing the content of my slides to just one heading and images. Maybe I liked that approach because it put the spotlight on myself as the live presenter. As good as a single speaker can be, hoever, the point is to serve the other participants. Minimal slides are better than boring slides, but effective slides are best of all. Now I have to think visually.

2008-12-09T11:02:00.000-05:00

The downtown public library where I am employed has unveiled a new point of service in the building. Just inside the front entrance is a small, curved countertop with a high-seated chair and a sign suspended overhead saying, "Just Ask Me". The idea is to answer people's questions right away or direct them to another desk as needed. The Just Ask Me - or "JAM" - desk is occupied by professional and paraprofessional staff who are assigned to cover an hour at a time.

I put in an hour on the first day of this new venture yesterday and it was pleasant duty. I answered a few questions but the biggest part of the job was the exchange of greetings with persons entering the building. This new desk creates a useful first impression, I hope. I didn't mind smiling and saying a few words to each person for an hour, though it would get to me if I had to do it all day.

First-time visitors would get the most out of this service, I imagine. At our location we get a lot of out-of-towners, and they need orientation. The regulars know where they're going.

2008-11-26T17:27:00.000-05:00

Three cheers for GIMP!

We get a lot of requests for obituaries, photographs, and other items from old newspapers. We have over a century of Charlotte newspapers preserved on microfilm. It used to be we would look up the article, print it out and put it in an envelope to go out in the mail. Sometimes we would place it on a flatbed scanner to create an image we could attach to an email. This process took many steps and produced images several generations of reproduction from the original.

Lately the library bought a microfilm reader that was also a scanner. It could send out images to a laser printer and could in theory send them to our branch laptop as well. Scanning, saving an image to our hard drive, then attaching it to an email promised to be much easier and greener and to produce results of higher quality. Following the salesperson's instructions I downloaded the appropriate drivers from the manufacturer's website but could go no further. I needed image manipulation software that was "Twain-compliant" and so could use the drivers to communicate with the scanner. I didn't want to ask the library to shell out the bucks for Acrobat or Photoshop, so I turned to Martin House- an erstwhile blogger. He is too busy to blog now, but not too busy to give good advice when asked.

He recommended GIMP - "GNU Image Manipulation Program" - freely available from download.com among other places. (Which is more than the salesperson did for us, btw.) Long story short - it worked! Staff will be saved labor, researchers will get results faster, the library will get more out of its investment in the new reader/scanner.

This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for freeware.

2008-11-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

"A Useful Amplification of Records That Are Unavoidably Needed Anyway" by Brett Bonfield

I just read a lengthy blog entry about five different online catalgs and how each measures up to the ideal of a universal catalog. None of them aims at that ideal, but each approaches it and so may be used that way by librarians.

Amazon - After some interesting discussion of Amazaon's business model (this guy has done his homework!) the author points that the commercial imperatives that drive Amazaon's database mean that the old and out-of-print are less likely to be found in its database.

Google - The Google Books project is just one of the many initiatives he discusses here. Google has overcome technical and legal obstacles to catalog and digitize a large number of books. Whether these remain available or not depends on whether the revenue from Google's principle venture can support it or whether the Books project can somehow support itself.

LibraryThing -- demonstrates the power of "crowdsourcing" in tagging and disambiguation. The latter is a time-consuming task and difficult for machines to accomplish. Many people addressing it at once can work wonders.

WorldCat -- not the great union of all catalogs that I supposed it was. Do not assume that all libraries are OCLC members. Small ones are less likely to belong. So, the list of libraries that own a particular item may omit a few locations and some obscure items of local interest may not appear at all. It misses the end of the long tail.

Open Library -- The Internet Archive preserved web pages and the Open Library is a further development from it that seeks to preserve the content of books. Along the way, it might also create a universal catalog. Libraries can donate their records or the Open Library could obtain them by means of some kind of spider.

2008-11-14T16:53:00.000-05:00

I was honored that Jenny Levine gave a serious reply to a comment I made on the Shifted Librarian blog. I barely expressed the germ of an idea, but she brought out the big lesson: "libraries need to adapt to the rhythms of today’s users".

2008-11-10T19:45:00.000-05:00

Library Garden: Giving Effective Presentations

There has been a flurry of posts in the library blogs I read about how to give good presentations. I highlight this one because the author (Peter Bromberg) does not prescribe one technique or another. He stresses that your technique should serve your purpose. Decide WHAT you wish to do first.

I would say whatever gives people a reason for being there instead of just reading your notes on their own is the right approach. The live experience makes interaction possible. Whatever my purpose is, it can be expanded or improved by the contributions of the intelligent, capable, helpful people who have come to hear me. For example, when I was talking about the PLCMC's use of online conferencing recently, I asked the attendees to indicate by a show of hands whether they had ever met with others through online conferencing. I asked next, of those who had raised their hands, how many enjoyed the experience? Almost every hand stayed up. There was a new datum that the attendees and I had created together.

2008-09-22T18:58:00.001-04:00

My library colleagues enjoy enjoy meeting in a web-based conference. The PLCMC subscribes to Wimba Classroom through Web Junction. A team I'm on convened a meeting of eleven people today using the Wimba classroom. The meeting itself produced nothing remarkable - some conclusions based on previously shared information and some discussion of how to move forward. I was running the technical aspects of the show and another librarian was leading the meeting itself. I asked the participants after sixty minutes of talking and viewing content together how they would rate the experience. The chat transcript captures the emoticons used in their responses. (I have deleted last names):

Karen_*** is clapping
Amrita_*** approves
Tiffany_*** approves
Linda_*** is laughing
Bobbie_Sue_*** approves
Claudia approves
Dana says, "approves"
Beth_*** is clapping
Cassandra is clapping
Heidi_*** is laughing
Linda_*** approves
You approve
Beth_*** is laughing
Carol_*** is clapping
Karen_*** is clapping
Tiffany_*** says, "thanks Tom!!"
Amrita_*** says, "This is so efficient!"
Karen_*** says, "Thanks Tom!"
Amrita_*** says, "And saves on gas!"
Amrita_*** says, "Thanks Tom and Claudia!"
Linda_*** says, "Thanks, Tom and Claudia!!"

Wow! They loved it, eh? I shouldn't get carried away with their approval. I think the gee-whiz factor will make any reasonable attempt at a meeting look good the first time we try it. This meeting was thrown together at the last minute and would have suffered from fewer pauses and "oops!" moments with more planning and rehearsal. Still and all, it's nice to think that next time, when our users will be more sophisticated and demanding, we'll be more expert ourselves, thanks at least to this practice.

2007-11-12T15:37:00.000-05:00

Never did talk to anyone about Google Books, but I did get a tour of the campus and ate some of the free food. A big thank-you to my sister, who works there and set up the tour for two out-of-town librarians. We were there when a bigwig guest came in and said, "I've heard about all the good work you do." to her. I was impressed.

I described some specifics of what we saw in my other blog. I've had some time to reflect on it some and will include the professional reflections here.

Everything that I saw seemed designed to address the individual needs of engineers and the company's need for collaborative work. People there use the adjective "Googly" to describe the creative, collaborative feel of the place. All the famous amenities and the flexibility of the work schedules allow people to be comfortable in their work, but they also keep people on campus, never too far from their work. When we were there, a trailer had been parked within the grounds offering "worksite haircuts". Eating, grooming, fitness, laundry services, self-improvement, even napping are all possible on site.

The work space - at least as I glimpsed it - seemed geared for collaboration. A recent New York Times article described the way ideas in this organization percolate upwards from formulation by individuals to elboration in "grouplets" to implementation. I could picture this taking place in an environment with few doors and lots of whiteboards and reminders above the urinals about transposing code from 32- to 64-bit environments.

"Does Google have a librarian?" I asked, and the answer was - not that either of the two employees I was with knew of. If there really is no such position, I told mayself, that's a hole in the organization. The more I tried to define the role of a librarian in such an environment, the more I puzzled at it, though.

I began with the visual image of all those thick code manuals. Surely, they aren't all online, are they? They should be maintained as a collection! But on the other hand, why would Google care about saving money that way? If an engineer needed a code manual he could just order it, right? Maybe if he or she had to go the library, check it out, and feel responsible for depriving others of it while he or she has it, that engineer would hesitate before using the reource and exploring the paths where it lead. Circulation controls are necessary in environments where physical items are scarce and relatively expensive.

OK, OK, maybe Google doesn't need a librarian for outside technical resources. Wouldn't they need a librarian to do knowledge management in-house? What happens to all the notes on projects in alpha or beta stages? Who keeps them, who has access to them? What keeps engineers on a new project from getting stumped on a problem engineers on a different problem have already solved? The record of the company's own efforts is a resource in itself. For all I know, however, Google has solved that problem by dumping all those records into one big data warehouse and making them searchable. It would be like a Google Desktop for internal use.

So I'm left with the idea that the support services - legal, financial, PR, etc might need librarians to research questions or check facts. Periodical and reference work collections would all be online. I don't know. I wonder how I would research this question.

2007-11-01T09:41:00.000-04:00

Day Three of Internet Librarian 2007

This final day of the convention was a less intense day for speeches and sessions. I spent more time talking with other librarians.

I did attend two sessions and enjoyed both. Darlene Fichter led off with a talk about mashups and data visualizations. In short, some wonderful graphic tools are at the disposal of librarians. Maps have lent themselves to use in mashups most of all so far, because the map data is freely available and the resulting information is so handy.

Steven Cohen followed with a tour of RSS-related tools. He demonstrated Google reader most of all, persuading me that I should give it a try again. Among other revelations was Tumblr, which brings together all your personal uploads and posts into one spot, and page2rss, which can make an rss feed out of a page that doesn't have one.

Lunch with librarians (mostly public) from Massachusetts, Kansas and Alabama. Dominant topic at my end of the table was reimagining the OPAC, followed by the need to keep pushing for change. Encouragement in that area came from the most experienced librarian at the table, who said that what one is told is possible will change if one can demonstrate sufficient need or opportunity, though it may take repeated demonstrations.

Off to Google on Nov. 1. I will have a chance to meet with an officer of Google Books. That service has more frustrations than rewards for me right now. Even as the database grows and results improve, I think it still needs improvements in the search engine. Maybe, on the other hand, I am expecting it to look too much like the OPAC I am familiar with and that the public loathe. Maybe keyword searching is enough just to get snippets of info out of a book whose formal subject heading may be about different matters altogether. But the weird thing is, they've started adding subject headings and acting in that respect like an OPAC. By that standard, Google Books is a poor OPAC.

2007-10-31T09:11:00.000-04:00

Technorati Profile

2007-10-31T06:45:00.000-04:00

Day two of IL2007

The keynote address of Day Two was from Joe Janes, who shook up the crowd when talking about himself as a librarian. He said something like "I was born to do ready reference. I love it, I'm good at it, and I think it's kind of over.." As the audience reacted he exclaimed, "Ah, there's the nervous laughter I was looking for!" Rather than needing help finding scarce bits of information, people can now bring up rafts of facts on their own - not all of it reliable, but good enough for most purposes. Librarians must first of all accept the magnitude of the change around them and then find a way to apply their skills in the new landscape. When all information is digital, librarians can still be handy as searchers for people doing "deep dives" into the information pool rather than skimming over the surface. Also, the variety of creations in Web 2.0 - the blogs, the avatars, the wikis - may be managed as a collection - or really a collection of collections. Even so, the need for a public space that the library meets will still exist. The library must be "somwhere and everywhere" if it is to matter in the future. I gotta say, he's right, at least when it comes to diagnosing the problem. Even at the forward-thinking PLCMC, the reference librarians' role is shrinking. Ever more of our time is spent on routine queries while our skills get rusty.

During the day I went to some sessions on Second Life. One librarian has set herself up as a librarian in a fantasy nineteenth-century village, where she goes by the name of "JJ Drinkwater." It made her laugh when I said that if one longs for the days of old-fashioned librarianship, the place to practice it is Second Life.

I attended some sessions on knowledge management. I learned a new phrase: "knowledge stewards". These are the persons responsible for maintaining the organization of information within a community of practice. I had to get a neighbor at the session to clarify the term community of practice. It's the group of people who use a certain body of knowledge. One person can belong to many CoP. In some of them, the individual will know steps A and B, but others will know A through C or A through E. In others, his or her knowledge will overlap others' areas of expertise rather than be wholly subsumed by others' knowledge. That is, I might know A and B AND J through L, and though someone knows A through E and someone else knows H through M, I may be the only person with all those letters in my knowledge set. The latter groups will be the most important for that individual to participate in, whereas the first kind wouldn't rely on him or her so much.

I found myself leaving more sessions early today than yesterday, hoping to find one where the presenter wasn't misusing PowerPoint.

I liked the evening session, with the slide show of gadgets and the presentation of video highlights of the "Shanachie tour". The portions of their film that covered PLCMC were all interview. Matt Gullett showed and talked about some of the music and video creation stations we have for teens, which was fine as far as it went, but the film never showed the tools being used, nor any of the works produced with them. The whole thing will need some editing to increase the ratio of action to talk. They really believe that libraries need to get in to gaming to build the user base of the future. The library is all about information, they were preaching, whatever the vehicle for information. I believe it, though I have to get over a Puritan disdain for gaming.

2007-10-30T10:45:00.000-04:00

Day one of Internet Librarian 2007 completed.

The day began with a keynote address by Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet Project. He spoke briskly about transformations in information and society - nothing surprising there. He won my trust by bringing up examples of his own teens' behavior. He seemed to view them with sympathy and understanding. The Pew Internet Project has studied Americans' patterns of online behavior. For my purposes, the most valuable part of the talk was Pew's Internet typology. Internet use falls into distinct patterns, which he characterized and to which he assigned percentages. For a library planning online outreach to remote users, this kind community assessment gives a realistic idea of just whom you might reach. On the other hand, even though only 30% of the people are regular Internet users, a library shouldn’t feel discouraged from migrating partially to the medium they use. After all that number will only grow as the digital divide moves up and out the demographic pyramid and as the price of technology falls.

The first session I attended, Online Marketing for Libraries, was also a winner. Sarah Houghton-Jan and Aaron Schmidt had PLENTY of ideas of how libraries could raise their Internet profile and, most interestingly, check what’s already out there about them.

The midday sessions were not as rewarding for me. Some were far from my area of interest, some of the presentations were listless, and some of the conclusions seemed obvious to an employee of the PLCMC. I found myself not taking notes so much because I kept saying to myself, “We do that already.” I did meet a public librarian from Glencoe, IL, who explained the interesting combination of state mandates, meager state funding, and local autonomy and responsibility for libraries in that state. Each community gets the library it pays for, which seems like a recipe for unequal services, but then patrons of different libraries in Illinois can use each other’s facilities and materials, which levels out the differences somewhat, I expect.

The last session of the day proved worthwhile. Two of Hennepin County’s web services people – the manager and a web administrator – talked about their new online venture: bookspace.org. It takes the idea of Readers Club into the world of Web 2.0. Librarians' blogs, librarian- and user-generated lists, cover shots and reviews are all brought together on a page that looks like an online magazine. It uses tag clouds and suggestions for further reading based on what other readers have chosen, but its database is not LibraryThing, but its own users. Whatever they derive from the local database will more likely be skewed and incomplete, considered as a description of the literary universe, but it will have the virtues of reflecting their user population – as much as the online users reflect users as a whole – and of being germane to the collection. Social OPAC’s seem like an idea whose tipping point has come.

Another Illinois public librarian, whom I met at the last session, expressed gratifying interest in my project, then told me about Bouchercon, a convention for mystery writers and readers that sounded like plenty fun. We adjourned from there to a reception in the exhibitors’ hall. I met lots of interesting people and heard about other libraries’ endeavors until I thought my head would overflow. Should have taken notes.

2007-10-22T09:06:00.000-04:00

I have decided to resuscitate this blog as a record of professional learning.

In the past three months, I've learned plenty. I have been tasked by my employer, the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, with researching ways the library can use online conferencing technologies. In the next three months, I will have to take what I've learned and implement a new public service offering using this new medium. Other libraries and businesses are already using web-based conferencing products for staff training and meetings. My project has a limited scope - just six months - so I'm trying to get something up and running quickly. I plan to launch a series of adult library programs that can be delivered in this new medium. My model would be a local public radio talk show - but with graphics. I could interview authors, highlight library resources, hold book discussions. Among other goals, I hope these programs will inject an awareness of the technology into the library system. Once people know about it, creative folks can see how to use it in ways I haven't imagined or worked on, and the library will enjoy an additional channel of communication.

In studying these services, I have learned that they offer similar packages of features. Some have more bells and whistles, but each offers audio and text chatting with a shared space for viewing slides, a whiteboard, and shared web-browsing. Some of these have little windows for displaying videos, but none of them offers true videoconferencing: live interaction by video. I read a blog post about videoconferencing, in which the librarian/blogger noted that unless it looks really good, videoconferencing is too distracting. Television has given us high standards for that kind of thing, (unless it's YouTube and the participants don't claim to be anything more than amateurs).

2007-08-30T15:42:00.000-04:00

Well, I changed my avatar in Yahoo! I gave myself shorter, grayer hair, and bedecked myself in Eastern dress. The hair is accurate, the costume is aspirational: my fashion model is Hamid Karzai.

I have been working on a technology project for PLCMC and put all my notes for it on a pbwiki. Its pretty awkward and hard to use, I must say. Now I have discovered Zotero, a note-taking and citation software that one can add on to Mozilla. No need to reinvent the wheel. I look forward to more consistent citations and readable notes.

2006-10-21T16:23:00.000-04:00

I have set up a librarything account. I look forward to adding titles. I was going to include reviews of books I knew well, but then I realized that the reviews wouldn't matter so much in this database. As a librarything user I wouldn't need to read one person's opinion of a book. I would rely on the wisdom of crowds and see what hundreds of other people with this book have chosen to buy. The sum of many simple decisions tells me as much or more than one well-considered opinion.

2006-10-18T16:35:00.000-04:00

Making use of my Bloglines account, I subscribed to the contemporary literature blog at about.com and learned about a YA novel, "Cathy's Notebook", that's taking full advantage of social networking sites to market the book. Someone is using websites, a MySpace page, and journal pages on AIM to create this character named Cathy and give her some presence in the wired, young adult world. To avoid repeating the "Lonely Girl" fiasco of a few weeks ago on YouTube, the web sites make sure to note that Cathy is fictional, but then invites people to play along. What's interesting to me is that the pages don't identify the publishers of the book. This could be entirely generated by the author. In fact, who's to say there is any book at all? The marketing could have a life of its own.

2006-10-16T14:12:00.000-04:00

I discovered a fun piece of third-party software at flickr.com. A search feature called "retrievr" allows users to search for photographs by making simple lines and dots. It retrieves photographs that have similar colors and patterns. Thus, a diagonal line drawn across the box led to images in which which a shadow or a model's hair fell at a similar angle. It was interesting to see how this non-verbal search engine worked. I can imagine using it if I were making a collage or choosing a photo to fit into an existing color scheme.

2006-08-22T20:56:00.000-04:00

I created accounts in flickr and librarything since my last posting. I don't get flickr, despite the enthusiastic posting by one of my library colleagues. Is there more to it than just posting photos and sampling others' pictures? Librarything looks more promising, a chance to follow links to new reading.

2006-08-20T14:47:00.000-04:00

I hit upon a way to modify the display of the blogs in bloglines.com. I created a folder called "L2 blogs" When adding friends' blogs to "My Feeds", I specified that they should be located in this folder. That way, instead of having 20 lines each showing one new post, the folder shows as one line with 20 new posts. And all the new posts from different blogs are displayed in the same window. One click and you can scan ALL the new postings of blogs you group together.

Hoo-wee! How 'bout that?

Now if only I could figure out how to include a screen shot, like that cool Questing Librarian.

2006-08-17T12:10:00.000-04:00

Registered for a bloglines account. I did find one good blog: the Shifted Librarian, which talks about Web 2.0 technologies. The Cherry Hill Library in New Jersey has "ripped" its entire CD collection to a hard drive for borrowers to download as MP3's. I wonder how they cleared copyright on that? Perhaps users can listen only in the library. Also, how do you browse through a catalog of disaggregated singles? I rely on the CD liner to guess whether I'd like the contents or not.They also lend IPods preloaded with particular kinds of music.

2006-08-14T10:17:00.000-04:00

Dave's Long Box was on Blogger's list of "blogs we've been reading." I followed their link and read Dave's comments on a comic book reissue - "The Haunted Tank."
I noticed the little link at the top of the page saying "Blog This!" I clicked and it automatically opened a little window in which I could enter comments that would be added to my blog. I like the shortening of the distance from impulse ("I've got to tell someone about this blog.") to action (actually blogging it).

2006-08-09T12:23:00.000-04:00

Checking out other PLCMC blogs, I find that I like useful and visually appealing blogs. The authors of these blogs seem to have a purpose to their writing and an understanding of their audience. I've learned about Web 2.0 tools, Charlotte literary events, and the threat of DOPA. Thanks for the lessons, Martin, Lesley, and Ian! I will blog again when I have a discovery or a funny story to share, and maybe an illustration.

2006-08-07T12:26:00.000-04:00

I'm a lifelong learner who has imagined many learning possibilities, started some, and finished very few. Once I get past the initial thrill of a steep learning curve I have a hard time keeping going.

The PLCMC presentation on lifelong learning gave me one explanation for this pattern when it pointed out that one's fellow learners are a resource. I think I have too often tried to teach myself something on my own, waiting to share it with others until I have a finished product or a polished skill. Going solo, I can kill a project and no one's the wiser. Letting people in on one's learning secret provides a reason to keep working at it.