I’ve noticed that library websites tend to resemble old Carnegie library buildings; many of them look a bit dated, there’s too much material in too little space, and it can be quite difficult to find what you want.  In defense of the Carnegie buildings, they possess a bookish atmosphere that can be very welcoming.  For websites, however, the effect is mostly negative.

The trouble seems to be that librarians want library websites to be created in their own bookish image-  organized by some long-dead system of classifying information, with one-click access to a dizzying array of bibliographic information, online databases, and other library bricabac.  Not easy to use at all, if you don’t have your Master’s degree in library science.

In fairness, there should be some continuity between the physical library and it’s website- that’s  natural.  But for library websites, the medium is the message.  It’s our way of staying relevant- and the time has already come that library users are expecting more than we are giving them.

Anyway, what all this was leading to is that I found a library website that impresses me- and right in my neck of the woods:

www.haynerlibrary.org

Best of all, it runs on wordpress, just like my blogola.  Is there anything that can’t be done with open-source software?

*If you guessed ‘open a Microsoft Publisher file’, then you’re right

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healthy hoops!

for our new base, we boosted organic O’s of quinoa, spelt and kamut with our raw wheat germ and amaranth blend.

warning: these whole-grain O’s are so crunchy that libraries in 40 states have banned indoor consumption!  watch these life-savers float atop your milk and know that you are throwin’ your body a life line (made of healthy fibers).  O, how [un]sweetened it is!

I love libraries and crunchy cereals- is that so wrong?

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I hope I don’t disappoint anyone, but this wasn’t a wholly conscious effort. My car key went missing on the 1st of November, and I’ve not had the time to replace until today. In the midst of my auto-abstinence, some force of nature decided to remove my driver’s side window, leaving behind a glittering pile of glass cubes. Let’s hope the next window lasts longer than the former…

Fortunately, the irony of the whole situation isn’t lost on me- at a time when gas is approaching 2003-2004 price levels, I’m driving less than ever. Like others, some masochistic part of me actually wants to waste gas just to have the satisfaction of filling it up again for under $2 a gallon.

It also happens to be a time when the company which manufactured my car is begging for it’s existence. On NPR, a commentator I was listening to put it best “The big three have sailed against the winds of change for too long, and it’s finally showing”. Succinct and spot-on in this case, with only a minor extension it could be applied to a number of legacy librarians who see the world in exactly the same way they saw it 20 or 30 years ago, and who flatly refuse to acknowledge that what they learned in library school is often no longer applicable. I understand that change is seldom easy, but American automakers are a gleaming example of sticking to a outdated enterprise. Will librarians who fail to change be on the brink someday? I think part of our complacency is the deep-rooted reverence for the library as a social institution. People who don’t ever set foot in the library will continue to support it because of it’s perceived benefit to the community. But will this idea endure?

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Of course, the Segway’s novelty far outstrips it’s practicality, but that’s hardly sufficient reason to keep you from being object of jealousy & ridicule in your home town by buying one today.

On an equally amusing note, my coworker and I were barred entry to the tunnel that connects the science center with it’s parking lot, so we had the unsavory choice of crossing I-64 on foot or begging a ride from one of the presenters.  Luckily, I wore my begging boots.

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It’s a strange thing to keep one job through the first half of your 20′s.  Things change rather quickly during those years.  I look different, think differently, and care about different things than I did when I started working at the Liberry, which is how things should be.  But the side-effect of working in one place during a  metamorphosis is the sense that you’ve worked there forever.  It’s been four years- approximately 16% of my life.

Four years of working on Gates computers, unjamming printers, helping the helpless, teaching classes, meeting weird people, and keeping books waaaay longer than is befitting a liberry employee.

Now it’s up to another brave soul to traverse the straits of the Liberrian Sea.  Will he reach the sunny shores of super-librarianship?  Run aground in the shoals of mediocrity?  Be dashed upon the rocky coast of incompetence?

Be misled by a mixed maritime metaphor?!?!?!

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The time has finally come for the Liberry to make its Flickr debut:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/edwardsvillelibrary

Setup was a breeze, although I quickly realized that the free account is inadequate for most everything.  I uploaded about 100 pictures with F-spot in Ubuntu (which doesn’t like .tiff files, fyi), and the only difficult part was giving the photos meaningful names and tags.

So far it’s mostly historical pictures, punctuated by a few adverts and artworks around the Liberry.  Despite not having tons of photos, the first batch does have a few lookers, particularly the fire pictures.

I think we’ll want to upgrade to the pro account, which really isn’t too expensive ($25/yr). It allows you to have as many photo sets as you like, no upload cap, etc.  The question is, will anybody look at it?

Next up: Liberry meets youtube!!1!!

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I’ve rediscovered something I wrote off a long time ago, and it’s name is LibX. It is a free tool that creates a Firefox/IE toolbar to let users search your library’s catalog. A nice feature, but LibX is even craftier- if you’re browsing books on Amazon, it will automagically create a link (next to the title) to that item in your catalog. The setup takes just a few minutes, gives you control over every option, and even has version management. I’d post a picture of the awesomeness, but WordPress 2.5 still doesn’t let me upload pictures. Curses!

Be that as it may, you can still download my toolbar (for firefox)

It’s no understatement to say that every library in the world should use this.

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The good

The XO

*edit*- This is exactly how far I made it before being interrupted by a phonecall from an elderly Chinese woman wanting to complain about the billing practices of her dial-up provider.  Le sigh.

So anyway, the good:

• The XO is cute, extremely cute.  You can’t help but love it.
• It’s also quite rugged and easy to carry around thanks to the molded plastic handle (take note, other laptop manufacturers).
• The novel interface makes you use your brain
• Converts into tablet-pc
• Battery life around 4 hours
• Small wall charger!
• The screen is crisp and easy to read

The Bad

• I can type about 11 words per minute with the keyboard, probably for two reasons:

1. It’s essentially little squares of rubber with contacts embedded within, so there’s no tactile response.  I know this is for durability sake, but it needs to be improved.
2. It’s small, as in child-size.  Not really it’s fault, I feel

• The interface can be challenging, mostly because of the wrap-around menu options that pops up every time you approach the edge of the screen.
• No touch screen.  The tablet-ness is wasted!
• It can be sloooooooow.  I’m not sure why this should be, since the XO uses the Amd Geode chipset, which I know from experience can perform very well at low-speeds.  Perhaps the flash storage is the slow car in the fast-lane?
• Webcam looks sharp when you’re chatting, terrible when you record video.

All things considered, I really liked it.  Will it drastically improve the lives of children in developing nations?  Probably not.  Here’ the rub:

The XO is the brainchild of idealism and tech-savvy, whose intent was to make laptops affordable to people everywhere.  A very noble sentiment, but the execution of such a plan is fraught with difficulty.  On the production side, there are constant delays (this XO was supposed to arrive in 2007, and only arrived 4 days ago).  Orchestrating such grand operation can’t be easy, and the give-one/get-one program may have made things worse.  But there are bigger fish to fry- certain corporate entities (*cough* Wintel *cough*) are not about to let the sub-prime laptop market go to a non-profit competitor, and have sprung into action to furnish Wintel-based laptops for the same purpose as OLPC.  On the other side of the equation, it seems that getting developing nations to sign up (and pay) for the OLPC program is becoming difficult.  I sympathize with their leaders, since at it’s inception, the OLPC was going to cost only $100, instead of the $200 it currently fetches.  Double the cost?  That can’t sit well with a nation struggling to feed and vaccinate its populous.

It continues to be a noble effort, but the OLPC program’s greatest triumph is being witnessed on the shelves of retail outlets everywhere.  I’m referring to the race to the bottom, as one myopic suit put it.  The race to produce the smallest, cheapest portable devices has scores of new competitors, each with a pint-sized product that does everything its owner needs at half the cost (and heft) of a laptop.

Using the XO in a room filled with laptop users made me feel like I was driving an MG on a road filled with Buicks.  Of course, some people need the Buicks.  The XO clearly has limitations, and genuine power-users would be appalled by it’s spartan feature-set.  Conversely, people who don’t need all the trappings of a regular laptop have traditionally been forced to purchase them anyway, since there were few alternatives.  Truthfully, most everyone would be perfectly happy using an eeepc or XO, and I’m one of ‘em.

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*This is a long post, so you may want to stretch/ get a drink/ go pee before you start.

I’m glad to return to my humble ablog after a short hiatus. Fortunately, the interruption was time well spent, and I wrapped up a few projects which have been drug on too long. First, there’s the liberry website.

The website claims the title of greatest duration, having been started nearly a year ago. After settling on Silverstripe, the task at hand was design. The current site is a nightmare, with buckets of broken links, impossible-to-find items, and no search capability. I rested on the efforts of the default Silverstripe layout, but heavily edited the css and graphics to be as clean and simple as possible.

After that came content creation. So much of the current website is outdated material (and was at its naissance difficult to comprehend), so heavy editing was needed. There was also some hassle with Question Point, our online reference service. The form provided to us by OCLC was about 96% javascript, which is difficult to implement on a single page within Silverstripe. Fortunately, the stars aligned so that OCLC upgraded Questionpoint on March 2, which allows us to host our Question Point form on the Question point website, and they saw that it was good.

Finally, the Liberry needed a new host. I chose Linode, since it was highly praised by most of its users (plus, it uses FOSS). The prices are fair (not especially cheap, though there are perks for buying long-term hosting), and setup was extremely simple. The SSH console is a little slow, but download speeds on our server are phenomenal.

This is the finished product: 70.87.222.155

Then what happened?

I spent nearly every morning-afternoon of this week at LCLS, working on the Youtube video (followed by an evening working at the Liberry). Working at the system is nice for a number of reasons. The greatest of these is probably the distraction-free environment. When given the chance to work unhindered, I’m amazed at the progress made in short time. Of course, I was just working in the building, not for LCLS per se. If I were employed there, it probably wouldn’t be so simple. I picked up some new tricks with Adobe Premiere, which makes video composition about 83x faster than how I was doing it previously. All told, I finished the project a few days ahead of schedule, and the results (which will soon be available) were, in my opinion, quite convincing.

Anything else?

My greatest accomplishment was nothing less than a coup de bibliotheque, involving the ever-popular OpenOffice.org. My plan to drop M$ Office from the staff computers was not without controversy. Some (but certainly not all) of the liberry matriarchs were extremely resistant to the notion of switching office suites. For reasons they couldn’t articulate, OpenOffice was inferior to M$ Office. Unfortunately, they reckoned that their puerile attachment to M$ was weightier than logic and reason, and insisted that M$ Office would remain on their computers. Such an arrangement being the worst imaginable for myself and the Library, decisive action would have to be taken.

All hope for OpenOffice rested in the hands of the Library board, a panel of citizens responsible for the well-being of the liberry. Every month I write a report of my machinations and accomplishments in the Liberry, which is then submitted to the Board. This was really the only vehicle suitable for explaining my reasons for choosing OpenOffice, so I grabbed my driving gloves and strapped in. The result was a gleaming page of technical explication, accompanied by some shocking numbers (the cost of upgrading to M$ Office 2007), and a rationale that any sensible person could not refute. It seems the board agreed, and with their full support, resistance crumbled.

Although I paint it as some kind of great accomplishment, the whole affair was really sad. I like and respect the people I work with, and railroading opponents into submission is not something I enjoy. I would feel worse, had the opponents of OpenOffice shown an ounce of professionalism and given it a fair shake. Blind opposition to change is regrettable in life, but inexcusable in business.

I’ve also learned that it isn’t manifested through age; I’ve met much older people who embrace even crazier things than switching from M$ Office to OpenOffice. It’s really not even a personality tenet, since my opponents have embraced other disruptive technologies without a peep. I’ll leave it to psychologists to discuss (and synthesize a drug that suppresses it with mild side-effects).

Overall, a very good couple of weeks.  I’ve been rich with the feeling you get when you finally finish off that thing you’ve been working on for so long (there’s got to be a better name for it; euphoria, maybe?).

Of course, OpenOffice is only the linchpin of much greater plans for the Liberry : )

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It’s easy to install, but I’m spinning my wheels in the design of the site.  Charging me with the design of a complex site like the Liberry is like giving a rubiks cube to a dolphin.  He’s probably smart enough to do it, but it’ll take more than a few seasons.  The designs that seem logical and usable to my eyes aren’t nearly so convenient for other people.  I’m content with the current layout, but I have a sinking feeling that when I open it up to critique from my fellow liberrians, the changes will be nitpicky and banal, instead of substantive suggestions for how to make the site more appealing or usable.

Such is the curse of design for pay, I guess- the design is only as good as the underwriters deem it.

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