Today was the big day when RPL joined three other library systems within the province who had already gone live as part of a province-wide library system called the Saskatchewan Information and Library Services consortium (SILS).
When all systems have joined, SILS will be the largest library consortium in the world in terms of geographic area covered and also number of individual sites (300+).
For RPL's Go Live day, I split my time between three of our smaller, inner-city branches (the trainers I'd been working with for the past month plus our Deputy Director were each assigned to a different RPL location to help with trouble-shooting and any questions that arose during the day) and for the most part, it went incredibly well with only some very minor glitches (literally, most were on the level of “How do I make the font bigger on the Holds Slip?”)
This was due to a combination of factors including:
– RPL was able to learn a lot from the three systems that had gone live before us about how to prepare and what snags to watch out for
– RPL management creating a great team including a very experienced systems librarian who had been through four (?) different system transitions before in places ranging from Texas to Ohio
– and of course the fact that we had pizza delivered to every location so everyone had sustenance to get them through the day!
(I'd also like to think that the staff training sessions and other related activities I was directly responsible for such as preparing a manual and FAQ of commonly asked questions raised during our month of training helped!)
So anyhow, it's been a great learning experience to be part of not only the transition to a new ILS but to also be involved with a province-wide project of such enormous scope and complexity.
But then again, I've always been somebody excited by big, bold ideas and although I had very little to do with SILS coming to fruition, believe it or not, this was my major Advocacy project in library school three years ago. Spooky, eh?
It's February which means Freedom to Read Week is coming at the end of the month. Every year, I try to do a few posts during that week to celebrate and draw attention to this important subject.
For the past year, I've been bookmarking various stories I've come across that I thought had potential for the week. I've got more than seven but less than thirty but I think I'm going to try to do an entire month's worth of Freedom to Read Week posts (give or take – since I'll exempt myself for a few of those days – some of the Music Mondays, most of the Friday Fun Links and some of the Saturday Snaps – though maybe a pic of Pace reading “Where The Wild Things Are” would be appropriate. That or “Lolita”. )
To start things off, here's a bit of background about something I've always wondered – why do some artists prevent the embedding of their videos on YouTube? Buzz band, OK Go, who saw 50 million people watch their “dance routine on treadmills” video on YouTube and catapult them to, well if not massive success, definitely a lot wider recognition.
This story isn't really about censorship or Freedom of Expression per se but really is about how business models are changing and confused by technology – the band's label refuses to allow the videos to be embedded (or even viewed in certain countries) because they don't get a share of revenue from ad clicks unless people watch the video directly on YouTube. The band naturally wants to reach the widest possible fan base and explains their side of the story.
“four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and
they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our
bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and
5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for
EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our
own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s
like the world has gone backwards.” The lead singer was also recently interviewed in Time magazine on the subject.
(And here's a semi-related story as a bonus – a member of The Roots which is the house band for “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” – discusses the behind-the-scenes of walk-on music – the themed music that plays for celebrities as they walk onto talk show sets. In most cases, this is straight forward but some music is so expensive to license, even for a few seconds, that house bands are forbidden from using it. This came up because Conan's band played the Beatles' “Lovely Rita” for one of Conan's guests on his last “Tonight Show”, Tom Hanks whose wife is named Rita. That ten seconds cost NBC something like $400 000!)
An AskMetaFilter thread which may be of particular use to those in academic libraries. Nobody's posted the top Library Science journals and I can't remember the names of the ones that were supposed to be the tops in their field (though I do remember getting lectured by our 501 professor when he realised that most of his students weren't regularly reading LIS journals outside of our assigned readings – oops!)
WikiHow is a site where anyone can add instructional guides on pretty much any topic you can think of. There's lots of good information (in between the tons of Google ads) from How to Teach Yourself Piano to How To Treat A Snakebite – although the usual caveat about the guides being user-submitted and editable by anyone applies.
Apple's newest product wasn't a huge secret – the majority of observers predicted some form of tablet computer. So the speculation mainly centered around what form their tablet computer would take: like an iTouch but “better”? Some sort of iPhone/netbook hybrid? Something revolutionary with technologies we've never seen before? (Touch on both sides of the device? Lasers to zap your enemies?)
From the announcement today (and ignoring the patented Steve Jobs hyperbole), it sounds like an iTouch but bigger (with a healthy swirl of Kindlge thrown in too.)
We watched Ricky Gervais' “The Invention of Lying” tonight and it's a fairly subversive comedy in a thematic area that doesn't get a lot of attention from Hollywood.
You can imagine the pitch: “It's like Jim Carrey's “Liar Liar” except nobody can tell a lie, not just the main character.”
Except instead of sticking with that easy out and resulting cheap comedy, Gervais takes it to a pretty dangerous place – in a world where no one can lie, religion doesn't exist because that's too big of a leap of faith to be possible in an otherwise completely honest, logical world. But when one man discovers the ability to lie, this literally leads to the creation of religion since no one has the capacity to understand that the tale he spins of a “man in the sky” could be anything but true.
(Now if Hollywood would just make a film version of one of my all-time favourite novels which also has “the Big Lie” as its main theme, we'd really see some subversive ideas on celluloid! )
I don't listen to as much country music as I did in my smalltown youth but this song caught my ear when I heard it.
I love how the first couple verses are just typical “I remember this, I remember that” cuteness but then the tone changes slightly leading to that whopper of a last verse that seriously brought tears to my eyes the first time I heard it. Fun video too!
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