I helped coordinate/facilitate/organize a gathering of RPL's professional librarian staff this afternoon. In the course of planning the un-agenda for this session, one of the ideas I came up with was to have a series of library-related trivia questions that I could ask through-out the afternoon to keep things lively and light.
Being a Web 2.0 kinda guy, I realised I didn't have to do all the heavy lifting myself so I posted a request for ideas on AskMetaFilter getting a few good suggestions and ideas. (I'll have to go back on Monday and post the full list of 30 questions I came up with on the site so others can make future use of it. I also have to figure out if there's a way for me to remotely log-in to my computer at work – if so, I could do that right now!)
The Pop Songs blog was set-up for the author to do an analysis of every song in the R.E.M. catalogue. This led to Michael Stipe himself contacting the site and ending up answering numerous reader questions about R.E.M.'s songs and their genesis – how cool is that?
MetaFilter has a thread titled “What is 'Try Not To Breath About?” which has lots of good discussion about what I think is R.E.M.'s best album.
I can't find it anymore but way back in the day, there used to be a really cool site where someone had made a bunch of atmospheric graphics with excerpts from R.E.M. songs attached. (In the early days of the Internet and as a big R.E.M. fan, you can't imagine how cool I found this!)
I happened to have a couple on my hard drive but unfortunately, didn't save them all (and can't find the site again – assuming it even still exists.) Here's a sample…
The third most favourited, “What Childhood Moment Most Contributed To The Person You Are Today” is one I've featured on this blog before – coincidentally when the concept of “Favourites” was first introduced a few years ago.
This post is also timely because the site's now trying an experiment during the month of November to turn off counts on Favourites as it's a long standing debate on the site as to whether this is a useful feature or whether it just encourages people to post funny/snarky comments in an attempt to get lots of favourites rather than constructively contributing to the site.
I'm not a fan of the move (though you can apparently opt out). I know people use Favourites for various reasons – from placing bookmarks as they read long threads to a way to say “me too” without reiterating comments over and over to marking well-thought out posts, even if they don't agree with the sentiment – but ultimately, it's a great way to quickly find comments and threads that, for lack of a better term, resonated with the most people for whatever reason.
“Reaching the Moon was certainly a highlight for our civilization,
but it was a singular accomplishment. The one technological thing that
most blows my mind is the one which made that lunar landing possible,
is the civilization's greatest technical achievement of all, which is
repeated every single day, and which is remarkably overlooked.
I refer, of course, to the computer, but not the computer itself as
an artifact. Rather, the industrial nature of the computer. The
computer is, far and away, the single-most sophisticated artifact human
beings have created to date. But that's not the amazing bit. The
amazing bit is that, in a span of one generation, this machine went
from being a big as a house and costing as much as -and being made in
much the same way as- the Space Shuttle to a ubiquitous mass-produced
device you can put in your pocket, has increased exponentially in
performance as it shrank, is so simple in composition that you can
teach a child to assemble one in an hour, and is so cheap that even
people who can't afford a home or a car can afford a computer more
powerful than the ones that put men on the Moon.
And that's just the half of it. This is the first whole-world
industrial product. With a just a little information, anyone can
mail-order the parts for an entire PC, with no two parts coming from
the same company or even the same part of the world, and you can put it
together and -at least 9 times out of 10- it will run the first time
you switch it on! There is no other device or product in the world you
can say this about, though as a trend many other types of products are
today heading in this direction.
But none of this is the mind-blowing part. The mind-blowing part is
that few to none of the people running the major corporations that
contributed to this astounding feat have more than a very rudimentary
comprehension of how this happened or how the industry today actually
works -which is why they keep making many of the same dumb executive
decisions over and over again. They don't see the forest for the trees.
This radically different industrial paradigm -this vast interdependent
'industrial ecology' of otherwise competitive international companies-
evolved almost entirely ad hoc, driven by a near-religious conviction
in the potential of the technology by a small community of technorati
and the need to cope with a technology too complicated and expensive
for any one company alone -not even IBM- to develop in isolation. This
is the single greatest accomplishment of the Industrial Age -and it was
largely accidental.”
This song always reminds me of one of my all-time Top Ten favourite movies “Stand By Me” – a young middle class type with an artistic bent writes about hanging with the town lowlife(es).
A couple of my toes have been a
greyish shade of blue since I got my cast on a couple weeks ago. I thought it was the
blue colouring from the cast wearing off or something. Yeah, you're not supposed to
get a cast wet so how could that happen? But I thought maybe my foot was sweating lots?
Today, Shea goes “Wow, your toes are still bruised quite a bit” and I'm
like “Oh, is *that* what that is?” I mean, they hurt but I didn't
really put two and two together because I broke my leg, not my toes,
right?
I've been on crutches for the past two weeks so we decided to just hit a couple local malls for trick or treating today. That meant I could take advantage of their free wheelchairs as that's a lot easier on the arm pits then hauling my butt around the neighbourhood.
One good thing coming out of this injury – I've always known how we often think about library accessibility issues in a very theoretical way but this has really brought them home in a real, tangible way. For instance, at work, we are accessible for patrons via a ramp and we have our Outreach Department immediately inside our front doors. But on the other hand, our staff entrance requires people to either go up or down about ten stairs before they can get to an elevator. (Edit: There is a workaround for this – a colleague who had to come to work on crutches earlier this year told me that she was going to make arrangements to be met by someone at our main patron entrance each day if the stairs proved too burdensome. Presumably, the same accommodation could be made for a wheelchair bound employee.)
Then today, I got to try my borrowed wheelchair in one of our library branches that happens to be located in a local mall. Very happy to report that I had very few issues – there was only one place where I was blocked and if I'd nudged one chair aside, I'd probably have been fine. The other slight issue is that the aisles in the library are wide enough for a wheelchair but if a patron is already there looking at the bookshelves, it looked like it might be a tight fit to get by in a wheelchair! (I didn't try that – just wheeled to the next aisle until I found a clear route to the magazine area where I hung out while Shea and Pace finished their lap for loot.)
One presentation I attended at CLA about seniors in libraries also suggested that it was worthwhile to have items like wheelchairs and/or walkers with baskets available for patrons although this is quite rare (including at RPL as far as I know), both for cost reasons and also space reasons.
I wonder if you could take it one step further and have staff maneuver around the library in a wheelchair as part of their orientation or a training program, similar to how we teach cultural sensitivity and how to deal with mentally ill patrons?
The big scandals in libraries tend to happen out in front – somebody looking at porn, somebody else wants to censor a book, maybe a group trying to book a “how to kill yourself” workshop at the library – you know, that kind of stuff.
But there was a minor scandal within the library world recently when a position paper written by Stephen Abram, Vice-President of Innovation at ILS vendor SirsiDynix, was posted to WikiLeaks, a site where whistleblowers can post secret documents. Abram responded to the controversy on his blog yesterday (and continues to respond to comments today which are definitely worth a read.)
The truth is that the paper itself doesn't contain many secrets – it's just the expected arguments from a well-established proprietary vendor against the rise of open source. In fact, if you substituted the words “SirsiDynix” for “Microsoft” and “Evergreen” for “Firefox”, this document probably wouldn't read much differently than some of the material Microsoft has released about their own open source competition.
I'm not an expert but I suspect that Abram is correct that open source ILS's aren't as robust as other open source success stories such as Linux and Firefox in comparison to their more established corporate counterparts. But I also think he's exaggerating some arguments to help make his case and discount open source.
I also think that the pace of improvements in open source software is *very* frightening to anyone who works with a proprietary product – including library ILSs. (I know the Government of Canada has departments using Evergreen, many BC public libraries are moving to Evergreen and almost every library in the State of Georgia involved in an open source consortium using Evergreen.)
I'm not an open source evangelist (not completely anyhow!) but I do believe in the ideas that inform the open source movement – sharing, openness, freely accessible information. (Hmm, remind you of anything else that espouses those values?)
This discussion is especially interesting in light of Saskatchewan's SILS consortium, which, as it goes live over the course of the next year, will bring together 10 library systems consisting of over 300 library branches – maybe the largest consortium of its type in the world (definitely in terms of geographic area if not individual members. Actually I see that Georgia has 280 so we might just be the biggest in terms of number of branches too!)
I think Evergreen (via the vendor, Equinox) was considered early in the process but the decision ultimately came down to a number of established vendors (including SirsiDynix) with Innovative Interfaces winning the contract. It will be interesting to see how quickly Evergreen and open source continues to advance and if the SILS consortium might ever reach a point where they want to migrate to an open source solution. In fact, not to be ageist but I wonder how the decision might've gone if a few more next-gen librarians who tend to be more open to open source (ha!) had been involved in the decision?
This will possibly be the end of GPS companies such as Garmin and Tom Tom (their stocks have already plummeted since the announcement):
Google also announced that soon, any search for a song or band will result in a stream of the song being returned from various partners which will be able to be played in full once and then will revert to a 30-second clip on subsequent listens (similar to what you get from the iTunes store.)
