Immersion '06

[Update: It seems that the people who'd gotten their assignments already are the ones going to regional programs rather than the national program. So I'm feeling distinctly less lost now... still not happy about the tone of some of the answers to people's questions early on, but definitely less lost.]

I just realized that The Gypsy Librarian is going to Immersion this year. I am too. Who else will be there?

I'm also getting a little bit frustrated. Even with two major communication channels (email and WebCT), I'm feeling distinctly out of the loop. Apparently some people know what they're supposed to be reading for the jigsaw readings already, but I haven't gotten my assignment. In fact, I haven't gotten any official communication in a few weeks. Does anyone know what cohort they're in? I don't.

I should probably ask these question on the WebCT discussion board, but to be honest, I'm scared to. The tone of some of the responses seems to suggest that we should know better than to ask these questions since the answers were posted elsewhere. I'm sorry, but I've downloaded every Word Document on that site (Why can't they just be viewable? Why do I have to download the document?), I've read the posts, I've read the emails, and I'm still confused. All the information is too compartmentalized for easy navigation. I shouldn't have to refer back to an email we got months ago telling us how to access WebCT in order to find out about what I should be reading. That should be posted in the "Readings" section of the site, or the "Assignments" portion.

Ok, ok. I know I shouldn't get worked up about this. I just hate feeling like I don't know where to find information. That's why I became a librarian.

The Poster in All Its Glory

Ready for the Crowd
Originally uploaded by Klo.

My co-workers are back from New Orleans today (yay!), and Kristin has loaded a bunch of photos onto her flickr account. Here's one of them. She has a whole set from ALA here.

What Comes After Personalization?

It strikes me that we're in the middle of a letter-prefix fad. Have you noticed that everything from bras (no links for this one from me, but you've seen the commercials) to electronics begins with a lower case "i"? But I remember a few years back that everything started with an uppercase "X." So what's the difference?

Well, a few years back everyone was interested in marketing themselves as being eXtreme, and now we're all marketing ourselves as interested in individualization. What's next? What comes after individualization? I think it's socialization. So what letter would stand for socialization? We should trademark it NOW to help fund all the R&D that we'll be spending on social technology and social services (not THAT social services, but services that are social).

I can see it now... "Welcome to the sCat, the catalog that cares."

Piles 'O Books

If you haven't done it yet, head over to Library Stuff and add to the growing pile [hah] of captions Steven's collecting. Great reading!

ALA Drinks

I just got this picture via email (with permission to post). Apparently there were librarian-themed drinks served at area bars in New Orleans.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Work

I biked to work this morning. I don't bike as often as I should, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself for doing something that was physically and emotionally good for me. And then I was upstaged. Coming towards me, uphill as I was going down, was a guy carrying about 6 bags of groceries... riding a unicycle.

Noisy Libraries

We've got a pretty noisy library at MPOW. At least, the part that I live in is pretty lively (when there are students around, which there aren't right now, which is why I'm waxing nostalgic about noise). I don't know who came up with the idea, but a couple of years ago they instituted noise levels on each floor and then furnished the floors according to the noise level.

Before continuing, you should know that our library is built into a hill, so people enter on the fourth floor and then work their way down to the first floor. This is lots of fun to explain to new students or lost parents. It reminds me of explaining the differences between catalogs and databases. It makes sense, but not much sense. In our defense, it makes a lot more sense than going into negative numbers, or sub-sub-lower-levels. Oh, and lest you think that these are basement levels, because we're built into a hill every level has windows.

Anyway, on the fourth floor there are open spaces, grouped chairs and tables, all sorts of computers, printers, microform reader/printer/scanner/thingamies, circulation, reference and IT service (we call it the Research/IT desk), a huge smart board, couches, and lots and lots of noise.



On the third floor there are microform readers, a couple computer labs, our instruction room, some couches, tables, chairs, and study rooms. People talk, but not very loudly. The loudest noises are usually me teaching in the instruction room (my voice tends to carry when I'm teaching...) or the electric compact shelving beeping as students manipulate it or try to trap their friends in it.


On the second floor there are tables, chairs, and study rooms. People talk, but they'd better have a good reason.


Then you get down to the first floor... As far as I know, there is only one area of comfy couch/chair seating. The rest of it is wooden. The seating is fitting of the floor's quiet level indicator: "Monastery Quiet." People have to want to study there, and study hard. Whenever a reference question takes me down there (usually to government documents), explanations get difficult because it's almost physically impossible to make a sound down there. As soon as you enter the first floor, an invisible hand seems to clamp onto your throat. If a noise does manage make it's way past your lips, students, pale from lack of sun (and food, remember no food allowed), glare at you in the certain conviction that they will fail their comps because you just interrupted their thought processes.


So that's the story of our noise levels. It's pretty self-enforced, which is great. But the best part is that there's always someplace to which you can refer students who either want more or less noise in their study-life.

Library Etiquette, Learning Some

I know I'm probably 18 months late in learning about this blog, but thanks to Library Stuff for pointing it out. It's the funniest, truest, most insightful thing I've read in ages. It's A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette. Read it and weep (from laughing, with only a little crying mixed in).

(Josh, you'll know why this one made me scare the cat when some unfamiliar noises made it out of my throat.)

In The Company of Friends

Well, today could have been less than delightful. But it wasn't. I got a bunch of raw material dumped into my practice wiki (absolutely no attempt at usability, yet, just content copied and pasted from other places). I thought more about librarianship and privacy. And I got to chat with a few kind souls who heard my plea for human interaction. Hands down, this last was the best part of the day. You guys are the best.

I also heard from one of my co-workers who updated me on her ALA experience. She met Jenny Levine and helped gut a house. Very cool.

Oh, but my wiki... I'm a little frustrated that I can't change the preferences I set when I set up the site. I can change the look of the site, and even the name, but not who can contribute or edit the site. So for now, I think you might have to be invited in order to edit anything. Hopefully they'll figure out how to let me change my preferences soon.

Librarian's Internet Index Just Got A Whole Lot Better!

Say hello to faceted navigation! ResourceShelf has just announced that LII will be using Siderean for its search interface. Yippee!!!

Hmmmm, you can tell I'm starting to slip into insanity by the sheer number of exclamation points I'm using...

Oh, the Dread

I'm dreading going to work tomorrow. This is rare. This is very, very rare. I love my work. There's always something to do and to learn. I love being around my co-workers, and I love being around people learning. But Monday will be different. All but one of the librarians in my department are at ALA having a grand old time and meeting all sorts of cool people. My one co-worker, AZ, and I have been rattling around in the place realizing that we've become too conditioned to constant interruptions and constant multitasking to be able to concentrate well when there are NO students and NO coworkers around. We were a little too un-interrupted for our own good. (Leave it to us to complain when it's busy and complain when it's slow...)

Not only that, but it was WAY too quiet. Our main floor of the library is not noise-restricted, and we feed off the energy of all the discussions that happen all around us during the school year. (Side note: In our library, which is built into a hill, you enter on the fourth floor and then descend through gradually quieter and quieter floors until you arrive at the first floor, were those who wish to can study in almost complete silence.)

So if why am I dreading Monday so much? Because on Monday AZ is taking the day off. I'll be ALL ALONE in that huge, empty, silent fourth floor. If I thought I was starved for human interaction on Friday, Monday will be the library equivalent of solitary confinement.

To try to make this day more interesting, I'm planning to start a wiki! I've signed up for a wetpaint wiki called the Pegasus Library (thanks for the tip, Nicole). I've written before about our library's ideas for building a research portal that acts like a furl/wiki/blog/database/evernote web service for our students. Well, I'm going to start doing "research" for our development plans by wiki-fying the subject guides I need to update anyway and then playing around with possible configurations. Hopefully I'll be able to see what works well in a wiki subject guide and what doesn't so that we can start learning what specific functionality we want from our portal.

So if you're at work on Monday and feel like checking up on my progress, or just saying hi, please feel free to email or IM me. I've got about a million IM and email accounts, but gmail/gtalk is probably the easiest to get started on: ijastram [at] gmail [dot] com. By checking in you might just be saving me from entering a catatonic state or from some ill-advised project (like ordering all the reference books by color, or cataloging my coworkers' mail).

My Week Without Chaos

This week is my "Week Without Chaos." The other librarians and I have been quite busy for quite some time, so our supervisor has given us each one week this summer to be at work, but not at work. We can close our office doors, take a laptop down to one of the study rooms, or do anything else that will help us get some uninterrupted time to complete whatever tasks we choose to complete. And this week is my week.



Up until today, this week hasn't been all that different from a normal week. Four of my co-workers were preparing two posters to take to ALA, and I wasn't mentally prepared to have basically no human interaction all day, so I spent portions of each day helping people with posters and handouts and whatever else they needed help with. This probably wasn't what was intended, but that's fine with me. After all, I was interrupting myself. I was in control of my schedule for the first time in quite a while.

But today... Today everyone but A and I were off to ALA. Today I took full advantage of my WWC. I took a laptop and my project out to the sumptuous red couch that has been tantalizing me all year. It sits in the center of the huge bank of windows in our reference area, and it lures students into its deep, soft suede cushions. They think they're going to study there, but it doesn't take long for the couch to exert it's soporific powers.



Well, now that no students are around, that couch looked so lonely. I vowed that it wouldn't get the better of me. I was stronger than the couch. If push came to shove, I could quit any time. And somehow, through sheer dint of will, I managed to stay awake all day. I sat on that couch and read my Immersion pre-reading. It was glorious. THIS is what a Week Without Chaos is good for.

The Vendor/Catalog Debate Continues

Click over to John Blyberg's post OPACs in the Frying Pan, Vendors in the Fire for an excellent summary of the recent catalog/vendor debate.

Trading Card Buzz

Wow! What a morning. I logged into my aggregator this morning to find that my library's Librarian Trading Cards were featured on both The Shifted Librarian and Library Stuff! If you want to see the full run (different every year since 2002), they'll be displayed as a poster at ALA. (I won't be there, but six of my colleagues will.)


These cards were a blast to make (says she who didn't have to build each one in Photoshop). And I'm really looking forward to making next year's because when we made the current batch I'd only been working here for a couple of weeks and was still a bit hesitant about building some humor into the card. (Someone noted in a comment that only the guys have funny vulnerabilities. This is a symptom of having the concept evolving while the cards were already in production. When I was asked for information for the backs of the cards they hadn't come up with the idea for vulnerabilities yet.)


Oh, and my Libraries and Living Memories post got included in this week's Carnival of the Infosciences (which is hosted by ...The Thoughts Are Broken...). How much link love can one blogger stand in one day!!! This is quite the banner day for me, I tell ya.

Wikipedia's Editorial Structure Evolves

This morning's New York Times article points out that there is set of articles on Wikipedia that cannot be edited by most people.



Wikipedia's policy says that people can request to have pages semi-protected so that new and unregistered users cannot change the page's information. There are some pages that are permanently semi-protected, but most are temporarily categorized that way in response to vandalism. Here is a list of pages that are currently registered as semi-protected.

[Update: Steve of Blog About Libraries writes an excellent reflection about how this jives with the concept of Radical Trust.]

Empathy, But Not Sympathy for Innovative

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the state of the catalog, both here and on other blogs. It's such a hot topic that I get double or triple the number of messages from ngc4lib than from other lists. (If it weren't for the incredibly interesting and insightful posts on that list, this kind of volume would force me to unsubscribe instantly, but luckily it's worth every minute.)

People like Michael Stephens and Nicole have said that Innovative is not very innovative.

John Blyberg of blyberg.net has responded to this and similar complaints by penning an ILS Customer Bill of Rights.

Over on One Big Library, dchud has been arguing that there's a problem with this bill of rights because we signed the contracts so we've only ourselves to blame. And surprise, surprise, this has sparked off more discussion.

Someone has even put together an Amazon interface as it would look if Amazon were an "OPAC"(via TTW).

Now, don't lynch me before you hear me through to the end, but I've got to add another bit to this whole discussion. At our last users group meeting Dinah Sanders was talking to people at the reception, and the topic of conversation was pretty predictable given the general state of things. These users all wanted to be able to do stuff with the catalog... web 2.0 stuff, fun stuff, necessary stuff, stuff that should be do-able. And Dinah's response was always the same. She's been wanting to do all that, too, but there's no time, and they aren't supposed to fix stuff unless they're actively supposed to be working on that module or code. Her refrain was (and I quote), "As we touch it, we can fix it." YIKES!!!!!! That's the definition of over-extended! It must be horribly frustrating to work on a project where you can see necessary fixes but can't do anything about it.

Wait! Don't tar and feather me yet. Hold off for a few more seconds. Remember, I said I can empathize. But this undesirable situation is exactly why we need to rethink the ILS. If it were modular, each part could be engineered by people who had time to keep up with technology. If it were modular, the discovery system wouldn't have to be designed by companies that excel in collection or budget management, for example.

There would be new problems with this modular approach, of course, and standards would have to be clear so that the modules could be seamlessly interoperable. But having a system that's so big that obsolete code can't be fixed unless the entire section is being reworked anyway is a long way from a perfect solution.

Libraries and Living Memories

Today the annual reunion extravaganza is beginning at the college where I work. Alums from almost every class year ending in a 1 or a 6 are converging on our little town for a long weekend of revelry and memories. The librarians always put on a whole host of activities during Reunion (including a reception for former library student workers) and it's fun to hear how many alumni end up choosing careers as librarians.

But probably the most heart-warming part of the whole weekend is watching the college archivist interact with the older alums. Often, these alums don't have anyone there from their year, or any of the surrounding 10 (this year there is one alumnus here from the class of '36!). The archivist, though, reminisces with them as if he had been alive and in school with them. He knows the names of professors and classmates. He knows what things looked like. He knows the issues that were important topics of discussion at the time. He's AMAZING.

And he proves that libraries are more than just repositories of information; libraries are centers of living memory. Living memories enrich our lives of today and help us build towards our lives of tomorrow. I raise my glass to you, Eric. Thanks for clarifying yet another glorious aspect of this wonderful job.

Obvious?

This morning was the second of three mornings spent reading portfolios. I have to say, this could grow on me. We sat there at round tables reading paper after paper after paper. Every once in a while someone would giggle at a particularly humorous turn of phrase (some of these were even intended to be humorous). Every once in a while someone would ask those sitting nearby to help decide what grade would be appropriate, or what comments would be most helpful.

Two moments stand out for me. I read one portfolio by a student who was a very good writer... but he knew it a little too well. I couldn't figure out how to write a comment that basically said "You're a great writer, but try to humor your readers and pretend you're not a god." My favorite word of the entire day, though, came when I was reading the most incomprehensible piece of writing I've ever read. I was literally just looking to see if the sentences were complete because I couldn't understand a thing that was going on. And then, in the midst of this, the writer started yet another incomprehensible sentence with the least perfect word possible: the word "obviously." I burst out laughing, and (when I'd shown it to the other readers at my table) pretty soon my half of the room was laughing. Nothing was less obvious than the points the writer was using to support the argument, except perhaps for the conclusions the writer was drawing based on those points. (I'm still giggling as I write this...)

Adding to my Furl

Google Book Search is implementing a new feature which I applaud as the first feature that will make a significant contribution to my life and work. This new feature is a landing page that gathers together all the works of Shakespeare. (Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing this out.)



Cool! Into my Furl it goes, along with three sites on music cognition research and one site of Greasemonkey scripts.

[Update: The Reflective Librarian points out that there is some very sloppy scanning going on for this Shakespeare collection. I wonder how systemic this is in the project as a whole?]

It's Official... I'm Blind

Well, not blind in the anatomical sense, just in the perception sense. I read this post about del.icio.us being embedded in Firefox, glanced up at my menu bar, and whadya know... I've got that menu, too! No telling how long it's been there. I guess I just don't often expect new menus to appear in my applications.

What Writing Can Teach Us

This morning was the first of three consecutive mornings that I'll be spending reading the sophomore writing portfolios at my college. This is my first time reading such things, and I must say that it's kind of daunting.

You see, each year, all the sophomores turn in three to five examples of their writing from their first two years of college. Each year, some time soon after school gets out, a whole bunch of faculty and some staff (all volunteers) gather to read hundreds and hundreds of portfolios over the course of three mornings. And this year, I'm included in this bunch of readers.

Readers volunteer for a number of reasons. They want to see examples of assignments from other professors. They want to re-calibrate their own grading by reading masses and masses of writing. They want to intervene with students who need help. And the list goes on. It's really fun to see a bunch of people taking on a task that just has to get done, but rather than just do it they reinvent it as a powerful professional development tool.

I'm there because my college is thinking of coming up with information literacy benchmarks for first- and second-year students. So another librarian and I are helping to read the portfolios not only to help make it through the boxes and boxes of papers, but also to find examples of information literacy at work and see if we can generalize our observations to help us develop an assessment matrix or a first-year info-lit initiative.

So far, after reading only a couple of portfolios, I've learned that:

• underclassmen don't understand citation, but that they can do it if guided
  
• they are happy to use outside sources, but the sources control the writer rather than the other way around
• that they think of "fact" and "interpretation" as much more distinct categories than they really are
• and that I'm a very slow portfolio reader (I'll really have to pick up the pace tomorrow... it's been a long time since I was a regular writing tutor and could do this in my sleep.)

On a somewhat separate note, I'm quite happy that I can walk into a room full of faculty members and not only greet and be greeted by name, but also carry on conversations with them about everything from libraries to pedagogy to gardening and not feel out of place. I've worked hard this past year to build this kind of relationship, and it's finally feeling less I'm "just staff." In fact, all the librarians have been working at getting involved in all sorts of things across campus, and now we're beginning to be invited to meetings as less of an afterthought. Slowly but surely...

(The Pinky and the Brain song comes to mind...) Tee hee hee.

Search Motivation and the Expert/Novice

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading, lately, about what makes an expert and what makes a novice, especially when it comes to information seeking. There are all sorts of theories out there, but today I ran across one that really makes sense to me. There's a discussion happening on the ngc4lib listserv at the moment called "What's Better? Dumbed Down or Loaded with Functionality" (don't get me started on the ideology of "either-or" that's inherent in this question). Anyway, one responder made a comment that completely resonated with me. It's a teeny little comment of just a couple of lines, but packed with implications. This person mentioned that even when he fails at a Google search, he continues looking and tweaking his search string because he's "pretty darn sure" the answer's there somewhere. This motivates him to keep looking.

And there you have it: one more piece in the expert/novice discussion. Novices have less knowledge of what's out there to begin with, so they have less motivation to keep tweaking search strategies, so they are less likely to find what they're looking for. This would also hinder their efforts to come up with viable research topics.

I don't know how many students have come to me frustrated because they're having trouble finding good stuff on depression in PsychInfo, and yet they're unable to narrow their searches to a workable sub-topic because they don't know what they'll be able to find. To make matters worse, when they have spent 15 or 20 minutes not finding what they want, they ask if maybe they should change their topics, by which they do NOT mean refine... they actually mean CHANGE to a completely different topic. And then the cycle is repeated.

So file this away in the "how can I help with this" section of your brains. I don't know how I'm going to help develop experts, yet, but I'm going to give it the old college try (just as soon as all the students get back from their summer vacations...[insert some pining for a summer vacation here]).

Flickr-ish Goodness

After spending the day playing with my new tech-toys, I've loaded photos into Flickr (while listening to the radio, no less). Then I ran around trying to figure out the Flickr identities of anyone I could think of and making them into contacts (still can't find some people that I KNOW have accounts, but I'll keep sleuthing). What fun!

I'm still a little miffed that it doesn't let me order the photos on the main page my way, or if there is a way to do that I haven't figured it out. But hey, I'll live. Let the photo sharing begin!

Now my little head is buzzing with ideas for using my camera and Flickr account in the library. The possibilities are endless... though as yet un-articulated. All I know is that this could be FUN. The first things that came to mind were kind of pedestrian (things like creating illustrations for my web pages or instruction sessions). But now I'm wondering if there is any way to work this in to the idea that some co-workers and I have. We want to build social communities around research. We want communities that have an online space that allows for sharing, helping, commiserating, discussing, and generally HAVING FUN (are you catching my theme?). We have no concrete plans, but when has that ever stopped us? So anyway, I'm wondering if there's some way to work the visual into all of this. Has anyone else tried this sort of thing? What did you do? What worked? What didn't work? Are you still sane?

Well, after a long day of doing absolutely nothing, it's time for P and me to wind down.

Rocketing into the Late-20th Century

I finally caved to a deep, dark desire. I finally bought a digital camera! Now that I've got my brand new Flickr account and this oh-so-cool camera, I can start sharing pictures like never before.

Oh, and I'm currently enjoying another essential of modern-day life that I bought today: my new tuner/DVD/CD player and speakers. They not only work well, but they look so very stylish (photos coming soon). Finally I have a sound system in my very own home, and the sounds is amazing. :)

[Update: You can see a picture of my new sound system, taken using my new camera, here.]

Google Spreadsheet Sharing

I haven't played very much with Google Spreadsheets, yet, but I did share a test sheet with my co-workers, and it seems that I've given them automatic access to the beta test. So if anyone wants to have a peek, email me or leave me a comment (only gmail accounts work, though, so be sure you have one of those first [Update: I can get you one of those gmail accounts, too, if you need one. Just drop me a line or a comment]).

Audience Level Information

When I was at Computers in Libraries this year I saw Lorcan Dempsey's presentation on "Exploiting the Value of Structured Metadata" (ppt slideshow) in which he showed a Greasemonkey script that inserts audience level information into Amazon records. At the time I just filed it way in the "huh, that's interesting" part of my brain, but today it's consumed more time than I'd prefer.

The backstory: At MPOW the Reference & Instruction librarians are responsible for collecting for the reference collection. Faculty members do most of our collecting for the main collection (with help from both an automated system and our collection development department), but the R&I librarians select the reference books. Well, it's coming up on the end of the fiscal year and it seems that we've all been too busy to think much about this part of our jobs. I can't speak for my colleagues' organizational and piling skills, but I had a hanging file full of "unprocessed" (by which I mean "I haven't looked at these at all") Choice cards, Blackwell slips, and promotional postcards. Then I had a stack about 6 inches deep of catalogs and the larger promotional mailings. Most of you don't know me and my office, but I don't tend to let things pile up. I'm one of those who deals with things and then either files or throws them away.

So this was really starting to get on my nerves, but it just wasn't very high on my priority list compared to all the other things I've been doing lately. Not only that, but I don't consider this the most enjoyable part of being a librarian. I just don't have enough of a sense of how to select the "good" stuff sight-unseen, and I don't yet have a feel for the reference "gaps" for my liaison areas to go out and look for stuff (except that I know I want more encyclopedias and dictionaries for Asian literature, and specialized dictionaries in a couple of languages, but they're pretty hard to come by).

To make a long ramble shorter, it turns out that we all need to concentrate on this task and spend our budget before next Tuesday afternoon or else the money disappears, so we're all sitting in front of Amazon and sorting through catalogs and review cards and looking distinctly annoyed. I'm not sure if unsuspecting patrons would get better reference help today because we all want to do anything other than what we have to do, or if they'd get worse service because we're all in such disgruntled moods. (On the up-side, I found a 272-page monograph on the history and development of the ellipsis... who knew?)

Anyway, I thought that this Greasemonkey script would really help me as I sorted through specialized dictionaries. I needed some clue, any clue, about how comprehensive and scholarly the works were. So I installed the Greasemonkey Firefox extension, installed the Amazon script, and restarted Firefox. All anticipation, I clicked over to Amazon, salivating over the wonderful new descriptive information on what types of libraries collect each book, opened a book record, and... nothing. What did I do wrong? None of the records have the promised "Audience Level" indicator. I'm so disappointed. [Update: Jeremy from OCLC research pointed out that the OCLC test server was down that day. Now everything works PERFECTLY. Yippee!!!]

Does anyone have any idea what I have to do other than have the extension and script installed?

All the Pretty Pictures

Ever wonder what your blog looks like as a graph (or a flower, depending on how you look at it)? This is mine.


Here's what the colors mean.

• blue: for links (the A tag)
• red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
• green: for the DIV tag
• violet: for images (the IMG tag)
• yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
• orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
• black: the HTML tag, the root node
• gray: all other tags

You can get your own graph/flower here, and see lots more graph/flowers here.

p.s. Blogger's going haywire at the moment, so if you don't hear from me for a bit, it's not for lack of trying on my part.

Google Takes Over the World... With My Help

I did it. I signed up for Google Spreadsheets, and I just got my acceptance letter.

I don't know why I feel a little sheepish about adding to the Google mania, but I can't really justify not playing with something simply because the company comes out with a new product every two or three weeks. I always was a stubborn one, though. If everybody says I have to see a movie, I don't see the movie... One of my less-admirable traits, I suppose.

Ah well. It's only a little feeling of sheepishness, easily ignored, easily dismissed. Let the playing begin!

NextGen Catalog Listserv Debut

Yesterday Eric Morgan wrote to the Web4lib listserv wondering about starting up a new listserv exploring the catalog of the future (a topic that is becoming one of my de facto research areas because, well, I'm interested). Today it's up and running and I've subscribed. You can join, too, by going here.

One of the interesting discussions that came up while deciding on the name of the list (ngo4lib for "next gen opac" was nixed because it sounds like a government agency... but I'm glad it's gone because I HATE the acronym "OPAC." It just smacks of everything that's wrong with our current discovery system. It's incomprehensible to non-librarians. It specifies that this system is online, which only makes sense if you're differentiating between this and the card version. And by specifying "public access" it makes it sound like there's a whole bunch of other good stuff out there that we just don't let the riff raff see. But I digress... a lot.) Anyway, the question came up whether a listserv was really the best format for this discussion, and the answer was very quickly and decisively "yes." Hmmm. Really? Someone pointed out that email is integrated into our lives while checking blogs isn't. But my aggregator is now a part of my day, from beginning to end, just like my email.

Oh well, I don't really care that it's email. I was just interested in the speed with which other formats were dismissed. And I guess this way it's more apparent that anyone can post, so that should help foster interaction.

Anyway, I'm signed up and look forward to a lively discussion. I wonder if any of the major vendors will sign on. Innovative Interfaces? SirsiDynix? Listening in could be not only a great source of ideas, but also a great PR move.

Laptopping in Style

After reading Rachel's post over at the Liminal Librarian, I got bag lust. I admit it. It's the most impulsive impulse buy I've ever made, but I bought that beautiful, sleek, and - ahem - utterly useful bag in Olive Brown. My rational, developed while ferreting out my credit card, is that I'll be doing a lot of traveling soon and it'll be nice to have while I'm at Information Literacy Immersion this summer. It's a good story, and I'm sticking to it.

DOPA's Still Not Dead

I learned (via LawLibrary Blog) that DOPA, H.R. 5319, has been referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. So far DUCAS hasn't even been mentioned on Thomas... which must be some kind of oversight on Congress' part.