The skies just finished dumping quarter-sized hail on the 48334. What was bizarre was the relative calm, sudden storm surge, and then immediate calm – captured here:

Suddenly stops?! on 12seconds.tv

Afterwards – shot a coupla pics with Moses in tow:

Bizarre

Offical Symposium Weblog – the webcast should be available soon…I’ll post here when it is…

With the copious amounts of documentation available there, why should I even bother? Cause I’m pretty sure I have to write up a review of it anyways for the job – and this’ll probably bring my brain back around to it. These are notes I scratched down — and are not nearly as detailed as the above. A little personal flair, if you will.

To start with — a summary: Disruptive Technology > Change > Copyright. Those are probably the three biggest themes…with Collaboration just behind…and Library as Space…

There was also ample discussion concerning Wikipedia. It seemed nearly all speakers made a reference to it at some point.

I attended in person on Friday – but watched the webcast in my pj’s on Saturday — and the notes very much reflect that…

Panels: Library | Keynote | Research | Publishing | Adam Smith / Google | Economics

People: Barbara Allen | Suzanne BeDell | Paul Courant | Daniel Greenstein | Jean-Claude Guédon | Michael Keller | Tim O’Reilly | Karl Pohrt | Adam Smith | Ed Tenner | Hal Varian | Alicia Wise | Karin Wittenborg | Ann Wolpert |

Panel Session: Libraries

Josie Parker (moderator) Director, AADL -

• “first library director to blog.“
• Price of not changing: irrelevancy
• Proof of return on public investment

Audience QA: Audience member provides one of the best points of the conference — a matter of linguistics — we should speak about materials RISING into the public domain — not as FALLING.

Barbara Allen – Director, Committee on Institutional Cooperation

• Research Library Trends
• Changes in User Behavior
• Building Collections
• Actions

2003-2004 ARL Report
• Circulation / Reference Below 1991 levels – fewer people coming into the library
• Interlibrary loans are up 148% [wow!]
• Users demonstrating clear preference for digital format, even if available in print – for example – JSTOR – print items were used 692 times, in the same period – the digital format was accessed 12,000 times.
• Expenditures for collections up 4x while staffing per student is down, and 17% fewer products available.
• 1994 – 63 libraries – $11million dollars in electronic resources
• 2004 – 100 libraries – $270 million dollars in electronic resources — 14 libraries, 50% entire budget e-resources – mostly commercial publishers – journal literature
• OCLC database — 32 million records – NEARLY 40% UNIQUE PRINT BOOKS – 50% FROM BEFORE 1977
• Opportunity for collaboration in digitization.

Converging Trends
1. University Libaries must rethink their space — democratic OPEN space — bringing people together
2. Organizing principle: coherent ACCESS — partner with others – commercial and public collaboration to digitize unique records across organizational boundaries
3. Develop intelligence about our collections

A means to acheiving public happiness. We have the keys — without corrections – we are half monks — half beasts.

Michael Keller — University Librarian, Stanford University
Litigations…

1. Change terms of reference…
• The notion that the library is a building…
• The library of the mind
• The effect of the library on the scholar.
• The library is also an ethereal ideal
• Electronic card catalog — 50% increase in use
• Indexing by google increased hits on Highwire – from 10 – 15 million to a 1 – 1.5 billion
• Increasing ROI
2. Beyond Intellectual Access
• Sales of current books increase when you can search the books
3. Beyond Indexing
• Increase stock of knowledge – find new connections
• Not just about snippets, INTELLECTUAL ACCESS
4. INNOVATION
Taxonomical index:
• Informatics
• ***citation linking from footnotes in books***
• — Navigating information topographys —
• information in an explicit context
• A “who’s reading?” service — (AADL already has something going on with their HOT items).
• highlight names — direct link to biographies
5. Copyright and Fair Use
• Orphan works decision – amendment – 1923 – 1964 books not registered
• Section 108 – Copyright law — for archival reasons – to allow for reading online
• FAIR USE
• Intellectual Freedom
• Access to Information
• Alexandria library — Discussion of 500,000 books in the Arabic language waiting to be digitized revealing a more liberal history of the Middle East — Jenica pulled a nice quote so I’ll grab it as well — “If the people in these embattled lands can see the importance of preserving the universe of information in their culture, surely we can do the same.”

Karin Wittenborg – University Librarian, University of West Virginia

Google Project
• One of the most important projects — mass digitization will CHANGE everything
• Changing the status quo is a good thing
• Major redeployment of resources

Space
• Physical library – much depends on what we as librarians do in our reinventing
• “Libraries are sinkholes for space

Things we might do differently
• What are we going to do with our own space? Utilizing
• Libary as an Intellectual crossroads
• To discuss ideas
• Programming

Role of libarians

Q&A

More group study spaces…fewer paraprofessional staff…more professional staff…digitization resulting in index to contents…democratization of information…digital repositories…

Most works go out of print w/in 5 years of publishing…Article I of the Constitution — Section 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Disaster Planning Question
• What needs to be redundant?
• Resource disruptions – great opportunity for collaboration
• Comment from Smithsonian Institute: Katrina is an argument for digitization…
• If information is in digital format – I can get it – by driving to the nearest network — or just getting to the network
• If information is in print — imagine trying to xerox a 342 page document

• ♥Putting a copy of the Fair Use statute next to every copy machine♥

Keynote

Tim O’Reilly

What Job Does a Book Do?
• If a book is immersion – World of Warcraft is a book

Hacks series
• Teach and appeal to entertainment
• Make Magazine

Britannica vs Wikipedia
• Showed several graphs of wikipedia trouncing britannica

• A device that has a lot of DRM will not take the world by storm
• 1988 – The Davenport Group
• — SOM links – self organizing maps — looks for material that is related
• Safari U

What Job does a Library do?
• The preservation of information
• Archive.org vs Library of Congress — shows graph of archive.org dwarfing LOC in hits…

Why the Google Project matters
• Free is replaced by commercial ecology only when you let it go
• Last.fm vs. Pandora — Both suggest new music — but last.fm has the plugin Audioscrobbler which listens to what you actually play when you’re not listening to the service to better gauge your listening habits.
The Orphaned Works problem
• Books:
  • 4% in print – [amazon search inside this book]
  • -75% or more – The Twilight Zone © Not for sale, rights reverted to author, may be in the public domain
  • -20% public domain – Open Content Alliance
  • 32 million unique titles in all U.S. libraries
• Fewer than 4% of books are commercially exploited
• ***DRM is a lot more like a cat than a dog — When you take a cat to the vet – you hold it loosely – whereas you take a dog to the vet — you hold him tight***
• The near term opportunity

The Long Tail
Does Online Search Drive Discovery?
• Compare sales of physical books versus e-books
• Print Books show 6% spike in sales with online library searches
• Safari tech books show 23% spike in sales
• Google Print v. Bookscan

Building a Digital Economy
• Incentives for turning books free
• Depending on the job a book does – Reference may eventually be entirely online

How will publishing itself change? Visions of the future
• Web 2.0 – The Internet as a platform – Information Businesses
• Software as a service, harnessing collective intelligence
• Once you’re on the network, how do you gain value from your users? COLLABORATION
• Amazon — 10,000,000 user reviews – on every page – amazon asks the user to add value
The Perpetual Beta – Ongoing Services
• Rough Cuts — giving access while the book is being written, watch it grow and comment while it is being published
• Asks how many people use linux? A few raise their hands. How many people use Google? Everybody raises their hands.Google is a linux application.
• Data is the next Intel Inside – applications are increasingly data driven
• Concern of the publisher — all of the data lying with one producer
• An internet of interoperability
• Platform beats an application every time
• Safari API – A Web Services Based Help System
• Bookster?

Panel Session: Research

Ed Tenner — Professor & Author, Princeton University

Unintended Consequences: The future of search; the future of libraries
• Literacy level controversy – several stories on the low levels of literacy amongst the incoming college freshmen
• Google searching and the “good enough” syndrome of relying on the first page of hits
• Comparison with Clusty
• World History: Wikipedia v Britannica (there is no entry
• Everything Bad is Good for You – but does this mean that everything good is bad for you?

Academics and Open Source
• Search Engine Optimization? – In the 21st Century – “Good Enough” isn’t

[It should be noted that Superpatron pressed Mr. Tenner on his remarks on Wikipedia's version of World History -- which Mr. Tenner found to be inadequate -- asking if Mr. Tenner then contributed to the page. Mr. Tenner said he hadn't - but that maybe now he would, and write a paper on it. Looks like he could be pursuing that avenue].

Jean-Claude Guédon – Professor, University of Montreal

Mass Printing v. Mass Digitization

Digitization of our culture — Possibilities
• Dissertations and theses – citation metrics – reorganizing the map of knowledge…
• Concordances — finding the least used 100 words
• H.G. Wells – The World Brain
• Wittgenstein - language games — communities — the semantic web

Ann J Wolpert – Director of the Libraries, M.I.T.
Research / Teaching / Learning

[There were lots of audio problems here -- and I found this to be the slowest part of the entire symposium - so not much noted...check the others]

BREAK

Publishing Panel

Suzanne BeDell – Vice President, ProQuest Information and Learning

Alicia Wise – Chief Executive, Publishers Licensing Society

Publishers and Google

Vision
• Growth in digital markets
• value added services

Daniel Greenstein University Librarian and Executive Director, California Digital Library

Open Content Alliance
• Placing the information into a single player’s hands

The Publisher’s panel left me wondering — if you’re so concerned with one player having all the information – and you keep talking about collaboration and the expansion of the market – Why aren’t you contributing as well, and if you are – why aren’t you doing it better?

Adam Smith – Google – Funny how difficult it is to find a bio page for him…

Google Books
• Full Book View – Public Domain – 20%
• Sample Pages View – 5%
• Snippet View – 75%

Graph that showed that when it comes to Google Books — google is doing the digitization, hosting, indexing and authentication of the materials. In google scholar — google is only indexing.

Discovery
• Full-text search
• Serendipitous Discovery
• Comprehensiveness requires collaboration
• 67% of monographs known by OCLC not held by current partners
• 60% titles are unique
• Discovery metadata and Google — URL LCCN
• Examples of way people are using googlebooks to make lists

Here’s where I asked my question – and somewhat bungled it. Something to the effect of — You showed us the greasemonkey script that allows one to look up materials in the local library, and your books in the libary project have “find in a library” links in them — but ALL of your books – or at least most of them — have ISBN’s — and therefore should be able to have a “find in a library” link. I’m just wondering -why the discrepancy — and why are you letting your users write your programs for you?”

I SHOULD HAVE SAID: Why do your users HAVE to write your programs for you?

What I remember him saying: We love that our users write these programs…It is part of our agreement [the find in a libary links]…

Why I don’t remember anything else:
Everything went black except for the microphone — which pulsated in front of me…Stagefright? Adrenaline? I felt like I was in fight or flight mode…

Anyways — Saturday –
I woke up and logged on in my pjs and only took a few notes:

Panel Session: Economics

Paul Courant – Professor, University of Michigan

Hal Varian Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Like I said — not many notes on Saturday…
I did, however, take Karl Pohrt up on his recommendation and checked out Accelerando from my library…

Panels: Library | Keynote | Research | Publishing | Adam Smith / Google | Economics

People: Barbara Allen | Suzanne BeDell | Paul Courant | Daniel Greenstein | Jean-Claude Guédon | Michael Keller | Tim O’Reilly | Karl Pohrt | Adam Smith | Ed Tenner | Hal Varian | Alicia Wise | Karin Wittenborg | Ann Wolpert |

I set up camp on the Adult Nonfiction floor – and checked Netstumbler for a Network — and came across only a very strong encrypted signal. I asked the man at the reference desk (not sure if he was a librarian or not – but I sure hope so) whether or not they had wifi. He responded in the negative with a lil info about Starbucks having one and maybe that’s what I was picking up. I thanked him and went back to my window seat.

Then all hell broke loose.

It started with thunder. Intermittent at first. Then the sky went pitch black. I MEAN DARKNESS. The wind began whipping trees sideways and branches were flying around. WALLS OF WATER. I was stranded.

I approached the desk again, observing as I did that the gentleman was in the process of reading some website flashing a Minority Report Banner. Definitely not busy.

Me: “Excuse me. Do you know how big this storm is?”
Him: “No.”
Me: (Puzzled) Well, do you know if it was supposed to rain today?”
Him: (Somewhat annoyed, perhaps?) “I don’t really keep up with the weather.”
Me: Blink. Blink. (pick up jaw from floor)
Him: You can go down to the 2nd floor and use our internet terminals if you need to.
Me: Blink Blink. Uhhh. Ok. 2nd floor. Right. Thanks.

So I go down to the second floor – and remember that signing onto the terminal in Dekalb requires a library card — which in my case is tucked underneath the glass cover on my desk for fond remembrances and posterity. Signing on requires that I go to the desk and get a desk pass – which I do – and then sign on – for all of two minutes — to check the weather…

Lesson learned — or better said — lesson known but reinforced:
If you can help the patron — help the patron. You are the conduit between the patron and the information they desire. My request — or at least my hint of a request — was not something outrageous – and not something I should’ve been sent to a different floor to accomplish on my own. A minute long request wound up taking nearly 20 minutes…

It may be a tad bit spoiled of me — but I’ll remember this experience, and employ it – if ever I am to be employed…

BTW — Storm passed about an hour later. Several trees were down and the houses at the head of the street where I was staying were completely without power — a tree having crashed down on Coventry Street – knocking out the street light on Scott as well…

Now there is an article out in the New York Times that hints at a changing tide. A groundswell of support.

Has The Cruise managed, or been managed, to do the unthinkable? Is it possible that The Cruise’s sister has taken us to the brink of stardom, made a leap — and has now breathed a sigh of relief as the emergency chute has opened by way of praising a rare case of presumed celebrity honesty?

It seems The Cruise is weathering these waves – and will ride this storm out. It may even lead to a healthy debate concerning the merits of Psychiatry — something this country in particular seems to be lacking. (I can’t quite recall the numbers, and would be interested in finding them, as to what percentage of the U.S. is currently medicated – but this is a quick post before heading downtown to finish researching the completely unrelated Charles Martel.)

So as we watch The Cruise emerge in the role of The Phoenix, it may be that the media will be following suit. A tabloid story may suddenly become true investigative journalism on an important topic.

But I doubt it.

Update: Allow me to clarify here. I, personally, do not doubt the merits of Psychiatry. I do, however, believe that pharmaceuticals is a VERY powerful industry – with a LOT of money behind it – and money has the power to corrupt. Ergo – there may be more than a handful of unethical practicioners out there — unwilling to invest enough time to truly get a feel for the NEEDS of their patients – rather than just writing off another Rx…Just a thought…

The chain-link backstop of a baseball diamond emerges…
The sounds of gravel under tires rises…

A bright taxi, alternating between yellow and orange colours, alien to the area, rumbles up…
The back door opens and spits out a stranger…

On the rear window is scrawled a message in what at first appears to be a non-sensical amalgam of letters and numbers. There is a sense that the message is intended.

The cellphone rings. The text message splashed across the screen matches the gibberish which is now being annihilated by the taxi’s defrost.

Looking around offers no answers.

Suddenly called onto the diamond as an emergency replacement, the glove won’t fit. The thumb insert has been reversed, rendering the equipment useful only for swatting at the warmups thrown from the first basemen.

Rescued at the last moment, the original second basemen takes his position. A return to the dugout offers the sounds and smells, but eclipses most of the sights. The sun is behind, the shadows are deep, and the sound of the crowd loudest from the right.

Meandering to the edge of this hold, relatives are gathered amongst the many faceless onlookers. Some have long since left the earth.

Anti-semitic epithets spill from the opposite end of the diamond. An obese figure leads the cacophony.

His face is suddenly mere inches before…
A fist soon reaches it, and the roar subsides…
Blood begins to trickle from his right nostril, and his eyes go empty…

The heavens crack open…
Clouds rumble in…
The sunlight emerges as white outlines to wavy billows reaching down…

The torrent starts suddenly…
The ground begins to shift…
Like the pool scene in Poltergeist, the displacement of earth is fast and furious…

The game is called – but the storm continues.
The undulations of the cloud are soon overpowered by a great tide that sweeps in from the forest in centerfield…
Great crests and liquid ridges burst across the outfield, jarring loose the dirt and flinging the granules like bullets across the sky…

Home plate has become a wide hole in the gathering brown viscosity, holding a fetid pool reflecting forms looking in…
Players are scrambling…
The coach is smoking cigarettes, indifferent…

There is a cabin offering retreat…
It has long been abandoned, but is now resurrected as a hopeful haven for a small group of survivors…
One wrestles open the door slowly, expecting danger from within…

The ferret steps over his feet, muzzling its young…
It goes unnoticed by the lead, but sends the others into momentary retreat.
There is a musty smell…

The rain has slowed.
The field has receded into the distance…
Time stops.

Saturday evening I arrived home to find half of the power off in the house. Apparently something is amiss with the transformer outside — and the Con Ed guy came by Sunday afternoon – installed a jumper – and now everything that requires 110v (microwave, fishtank filter…) is operational while more power-hoggy things (the AC, the oven…) are not. The Con Ed guy said they’d probably get someone out here today to take a look at it — but that was before the severe thunderstorms rolled through yesterday – knocking the crap outta Oakland County – and putting about 90,000 people completely into the dark – which in turn knocked this house off the high rung of the urgency ladder.

I can’t cook without the stove. I can’t stand to microwave food. It’s just one of those things…When the winter storms inevitably rolled through Atlanta – knocking everything offline for hours or even days — I was ok in the apartment because I had a gas range…Microwaves cook food from the inside out — which is just wrong. I like to be able to watch the food turning into a meal – and you just can’t put your face that close to the microwave oven. I like to smell the food, to hear the food sizzle, I like to feel the heat — I love flipping it into the air while sauteeing and snagging it on its return…You just can’t get personal with the microwaved meal…

Gas stoves are better. Screw these electric ranges and their evil microwave cohorts…

I also unpacked the old Proview monitor from my deceased desktop, dusted it off and attached it to this laptop so that I’m able to work with two views concurrently. It’s kinda nice having my last.fm connection up on one screen and my surfing window open on the other. Of course – where this will come in extremely handy will be in designing and touching up this site. Speaking of which – Did some back-end design earlier today. I’d sent Cousin Jennifer an email asking if she’d like to have a little guest appearance here in the coming days so that she could tell her tale of Brown Recluse horror in response to the response Ariel got from her poison control center when they told her not to worry, Brown Recluse bites are really overrated. Well – when I sent J the link, it led her nowhere – and I was alerted to the problems that the sideblog archives were going through. So I did a lil rearrangin and the link is now minus some extemporaneous digits, and works. As should any of the permalinks now – which for some reason were leading people a little south of their intended destinations. The sideblog archives page is a little prettier, as are the monthly pages — but I still need to work out the individual entries, which suffer from a blandness akin to a winter cloud cover.

One other exhaustive note — I’m gonna try to start entering all the sideblog links into one date — they’re sweepin by so fast on the side there, most anyone reading wouldn’t have a clue they’d ever been there. I’d like to figure out how Kottke got his remaindereds over to the main post — and have gone to the library in search of answers. A Perl manual now joins the XML vocabulary on the bedside, whilst Proust still accumulates more dust, and perhaps the inclusion of a coupla nifty scripts will allow for some entertaining additions.

All that said – I spent the past hour rummaging through old photographs in search of the perfect accompaniment for my cousin’s byline in tomorrow’s “edition.” I’m gonna have to rummage some more. WAY too many Harper pictures in that mix. (Speakin of which — good luck to mom’s and the grandparents — looks like y’all got a couple o’ hurricanes bearin down on ya.) The Falcon’s preseason opens tonight, and following that I’ll be workin up a lil introduction for Jennifer so y’all will have some acquaintin before she gets to her bloggin. Not that most of you need it. Bein family and all.

Following J’s guest appearance we should have – and I know I’ve said this before a few times — so I’m tempted to bite my tongue here and keep it to myself – but we should have another presence over on the One Grover Over portion. It seems See-store’s laptop got nailed with the pop-ups — and she sent an email today saying she’d handed it over to the tech guy – that he was gettin on it – and that as soon as he finished she’d be bloggin.

So that’s the news. I’ll be back with that intro in a few hours. Until then — keep yourself occupied by watching this circus develop. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I really don’t think I want to comment on the wedding except to say that I had a really good time and feel honored to have been invited. No matter how I construe the story I’ll be leaving certain details out — so I feel it’d be better just to leave the moments crystallized on the fibres of the mind, and hope that certain others can break off and shatter away forever. St. Lucia is entertaining two very lucky people right now — if only I were so lucky as to have escaped to another country, escaped the hangover and the guilt that commonly thrives in post part depression. Instead I’ve been confined to my home, keyless, as in some sort of karmic wonder, my keys were grasped by hands later bound to a steering wheel set on a course for Louisville, Kentucky. It took me two days to figure that out — and I’m still recovering. My car, meanwhile, still sits in the hotel parking lot.

Don’t get me wrong — I was one of the happiest cats at that ceremony and afterwards…I really enjoyed seeing and meeting everyone. Some I hadn’t seen in many a month — some I’d never seen. Some I may never see again. Then, that shooting star passed out of the night and landed in a big vat of tapioca pudding the next morning.

Cosmic forces are laughing at me. I think they’re responding in kind to that moment when Stephen awoke in Athens to my face glowing orange from the reflection of the flames that were surrounding his socks. Or perhaps they were responding to my prancing around in articles of the ex’s clothing that showed surprising support, an event I can only hope has not been documented on film. (It’s much sexier to use your imagination.) Oh yes, there are plenty of other moments that could be listed — but as the blisters on my feet can testify – their occurrence is damning enough without having to be sketched out completely here. There are pangs of guilt that come on every so often, strong enough to force out audible apologies. They’ve been made in the middle of the night to an empty room several times in the past few days, apologies only to the night air. Yes – I’ve been talking to myself. I’ve lost my mind.

The hours of my tour here in Georgia are dwindling. The waves are threatening to topple this battered schooner. I fear I may be going in circles as I tighten the sashes of my eyes against the razor rain, unable to recover my bearings as a fog has formed under the glass of my compass. Wiping with sopped clothing, even were it a productive activity, would be rendered doubly useless by the ferocity of this storm. I can only strengthen my grasp, digging my fingernails into my palm, clutching close to my heart the only relic of direction I have left.