ALA Midwinter was my first ALA conference. It's not something I normally attend, but given that my cousin lives 4 blocks from the convention center and I could attend at the student rate, I felt like it was an opportunity I needed to seize. All in all, it was a positive experience. Here's some of my thoughts:

• The New Members Roundtable was a little intimidating. I got there late because I went to the wrong building. By the time I arrived, they were breaking because the speaker had not shown up. ALA is pretty much this big, unfriendly mass to me, and this didn't change that impression any.
• I found things to be very esoteric. It was impossible to know what sessions to attend. Some of them were useful, others not so much. The catalog was very confusing. But when I did get to a good meeting, it was worth it. It's nice to be surrounded by very smart people who are doing cutting edge work (other than those I see every day, of course).
• As with most conferences, the most valuable part was meeting people and getting some face time with vendors. I was able to meet the people at CONTENTdm, and even go over to their offices to work on a few problems I had been having. Got a Primo demonstration (which is no longer vaporware). Very productive.
  

As of yesterday, Google is now allowing full book downloads of some classic works in public domain. I was just perusing my PDF download of a roughly 240 page volume of Charles Dickens' letters.

I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about Google Books. As an IT professional, I love it. The more information I can get at my desktop, the better. And I'm also in graduate school, so I'm a student. I'll admit that I'm just as much a part of the if-I-can't-get-it-full-text-at-my-desktop-then-it-doesn't-exist student mentality that frustrates most librarians. So, from a research point-of-view this is great.

As a personal user of the information, I'm not so thrilled. I have a lot of trouble reading large amounts of text form a desktop screen, and I know I'm not in a minority on this. I'm not going to read a novel on my desktop. I have trouble even with small e-books with regard to this. And I'm certainly not going to print out 240+ pages to read it (although I can picture environmentally unconscious people doing this). Rather, I'm more likely to skim through it and decide whether I want to own a copy or get it from a library.

I'm certainly not opposed to putting full text documents on the web. In fact, I like to consider myself a pioneer in this area. Yes, that's right. As far back as 1994 I was involved with a project at Hanover College called the Hanover Historical Texts Project which is actually still in existence if you want to follow the link. Myself and my fellow student works spent hours manually transcribing Old English documents and out-of-copyright authors like Petrarch and Dante to make transcripts of works. It's really not that different than Google Books, just that we didn't have the images to go with it. And it was extremely labor intensive. Ah, but just to think what could have happened if we could have turned that into a successful business model at the time. I could have been a Google guy!

The Washington Post today has a nice article on the Google Digital Library project. Nothing particularly new that I could tell, but it does give a nice summary of the history of the project and status of where things are today. Well worth the reading.

Sometimes it's important to remember that computers are *not* incapable of making mistakes. Take a look at the following picture taken from my Amazon recommendations page:

See what's wrong? This was what Amazon "recommended" to me today due to the fact that I had added "The Charles Bukowski Tapes" to my Amazon wish list. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the writings or life of Bukowski, but let me assure you that Gerald McBoing Boing and Charles Bukowski having nothng in common. In fact, I'm just going to say that Buk fans are going to be highly disappointed with the works of Mr. McBoing Boing, and any parent reading Bukowski poems to their kids are probably unfit, to say the least.
I actually do find a lot of good recommendations through Amazon, but this is a nice reminder that it can just never take the place of human interaction. I get far more recommendations for good media from my friends (both virtual and real-life) than I could from any computer-generated list, and it's hard to see how a screw-up like this could take place anyplace else other than the bowels of impersonal computer code.

Amazon is now into the library processing business. Libraries can get books ordered from Amazon ready to go on to the shelf. Also, through partnerships with The Library Corporation, Marcive, and OCLC, libraries can get MARC records for itmes they order from Amazon, have them spine labeled with covers for the shelf, and even have their holdings sent to Worldcat automatically.

I used to work with Blackboard learning software back in my days at Wabash College. They were still a small company then, with only a couple of hundred clients. I really liked working with the software, and the folks at the company seemed nice enough (myself having gotten to know a couple of them personally). However, even at that early stage, it was clear that Blackboard was out to own the CMS market and to make a powerhouse company.

That's why it wasn't very surprising to me today to see the news that Blackboard claims to have invented and own all learning on the Internet. Well, that they invented the LMS at least. Take a look at the patent application. Looks pretty all-encompassing to me. Blackboard has already sued one of its competitors, and you are sure to see them go after more. There is much rumbling in academia about the threat this poses. Could this patent pose a threat to open source software like Moodle or Drupal?

Next week I'm off to Minneapolis, MN for a PHP training class. Not a moment too soon either, as I can hopefully use it for plenty of things around the office. The class was supposed to be in Indianapolis, but they cancelled it and offered to pay for my hotel and airfare to attend in MN. Not exactly my idea of a vacation, but a good excuse to get out of town nonetheless. Besides, seeing the Mall of America has always been one of the big goals in my life.

I'll admit I had not heard about Clusty until yesterday. Of all places, I saw it mentioned in a copy of 2600 while shopping at Borders yesterday. Clusty is a clustering search engine, and its results supposedly rival those of Google's. Yes, that's right, Google is not the only search engine around. In fact, I've heard lots about Ask.com producing better results than Google, and certainly their maps are better. But not doubt, Google dominates.

But Clusty is more than just a cool search engine. The reason Ex Libris users should know about Clusty is that Clusty is powered by Vivisimo. Where have you heard Vivisimo before? Ex Libris just made a deal with Vivisimo to use their clustering search engine in Metalib. So if you jump over to Clusty, you'll be getting a sneak preview of the search technology behind the future search mechanism in Metalib.

And on top of that, the clustering capability looks pretty cool. I haven't played with too many of the features beyond the web search, but it does seem to do a nice job of breaking topics into general categories.

A nice thing about the ELUNA conference is the opportunity to share. During the Systems and Reporting session I attended, it seemed clear that there was enough of an interest in SQL to warrant an interest group, so I agreed to coordinate such a group. Basically, I think people just want a place to share. Luis at Ex Libris has started full-force with this idea by creating a portal to share information. Any Ex Libris customer can share SQL scripts and view other's scripts by creating an account. The portal is located HERE.

I'm excited about this. I think this site will be useful for technical folks for the scripts, but also for users so that they can get ideas of the kinds of reports that are possible with the system. It's clear to me that SQL is the way to go for reporting. Reports on the ARC product at ELUNA were less than encouraging. Lots of problems, slow response time on the data pulls, and many of the data fields just aren't available. It also seems like ARC would really need to be managed centrally to be even remotely useful. Meanwhile, here at PALNI, I think we've been pretty successful so far with automating SQL scripts through the services for basic reports, and its much more flexible.

Got back from ELUNA Wednesday night. First, let me just say that Knoxville is great. I probably would have never thought about visiting there without having a conference to attend. My wife, Pam, came with me and she was just as impressed as I was. Good restaurants. Nice parks. And we had fun going for walks along the riverfront. Thank goodness my wife did not make it to the outlet malls in Pigeon Forge, or my credit cards could have taken quite a hit!

I just wanted to throw up a few comments on ELUNA. I have no desire to provide a commentary on each session I went to - some of them weren't all that interesting. I'm sure other bloggers are doing this though (I know NeoArch blogged the conference too). ELUNA is a smaller conference (about 400 attendees). I think the group is beginning to mature somewhat. The accommodations and food at the conference this year was excellent, by the way, and the University of Tennessee deserves a big thanks for helping make it all happen.

Some highlights for me:

• Ex Libris, as a company, continues to see growth. They consider themselves one of the last three major ILS vendors standing, and intend to keep gaining customers. By far, the most interest right now is in their Primo product (which can run as a standalone product). A close second would be their Verde product. Electronic resource management is very hot right now.

Just finished a good book on the history of the 60's counterculture and its influence on the evolution of the PC. The book is by John Markoff and is entitled What The Dormouse Said. Perhaps it's because I don't have a formal education in computing that I didn't know many of the things in this book. Sure, I knew the inventors of the PC were a bunch of hippies, but I had no idea that the whole LSD subculture really started with the engineers in California before most hippies even knew what LSD was (and this was before The Grateful Dead, Kesey, and the Acid Tests).

This book ends with some good questions about the influence with greed on the computing industry. It does seem that there is very little free-thinking going on these days, as everything is run by the almighty dollar. So, what will be the next revolution in computing now that everything is so constrained by the investments of large companies and psychedelic drugs aren't influencing things anymore? (And yes, this is a valid question, since almost everything about the modern PC as you know it was conceived of by the mid-60s when most computer visionaries were using mind-enhancing drugs.)

Tom Keays has a really nice blog post with detailed goodness on how he wrote a Firefox plug-in to circumvent the search box for SFX.

Check it out here.

There is an excellent article on digital scanning of texts published on May 14 by Kevin Kelly. Find it here. (Requires registration.)

This lengthy article is an excellent overview of the state of digital scanning in publishing today. In addition, it has a good lesson about copyright towards the end of the article. I think that Kelly is right on, and he backs up what we have covered in library school. Basically, copyright law is woefully outdated. (I know, news to you, right?)

But this is serious business. Thousands, millions, of careers and livelihoods depend on the current copyright model and the revenue brought in by this outdated model, but it will need to change. It will change. But unlike 'no child left behind', some artists and intellectuals will be left behind for sure. Among the more poignent comments of the article: "The reign of the copy is no match for the bias of technology. All new works will be born digital, and they will flow into the universal library as you might add more words to a long story."

Guess what? The business model of the library is based on copies. This doesn't mean that libraries are going to go away, but in the new 'universal library' things are going to look much different. It's an exciting, or terrifying, time to be in the library business, and the ride is just leaving the platform.

Steve Leary asks in his blog The Reflective Librarian about Google’s strategy with librarians. Google is supposedly reaching out to librarians. Aside from their digitization project (which we all know about), they are now reaching out librarians by asking them to submit their Tips of the Trade at the Google Librarian Center.

In answer to Steve’s multiple-choice question, I would say a bit of all of the above. But even more so, I would argue that the point of Google’s Librarian Center is to turn librarians into marketing tools for the company. Let’s face it, their efforts to create a ‘librarians center’ have been pretty poor since its announcement last year. Their one big contribution has been a printable PDF poster that librarians can put up in the library to give users quick tips on how to use Google more effectively. Now they are soliciting comments from librarians that they can excerpt and put into their marketing literature. Come on, does anyone really see a partnership in this effort? It seems pretty clear to me that Google is just trying to say to librarians, “Come on, we’re not so bad. Here’s a piece of candy.” But we all know that bad things can happen when you take candy from strangers.

Lately I've been spending some time perusing this site: Statistics of Indiana Libraries. This site provides analysis of all kinds of statistics in public libraries in Indiana. Okay, so the most interesting to most people is the salary information. Who doesn't want to know what they make compared to others?

I must say, as a library science student these numbers are pretty depressing. It's not that I'm studying librarianship for the money (and God help me if I was), but I do think these numbers reflect the value that a community places on its library. And in a lot of these cases, the answer to that question is, 'not much'. Libraries are certainly not unique to this problem, but it's still kind of depressing to see it reflected back at you in the raw data.

Certainly librarianship is not the only profession in which you can't support a family on one salary alone. However, how are public libraries supposed to attract the "young, vibrant" professionals that they profess to need to replace all of the retiring librarians? How are they supposed to attract young employees with technology skills that can develop tools to relate to 'Generation Y' when they pay barely above minimum wage?