How's the commute?

After almost a year of commuting from Long Island to Lower Manhattan, I have refined this to a science. Each day begins at 6 and I'm off to the station by 7:15, to catch either the 7:32 or the 7:43. On the 7:32, we are the last of 3 stops before Penn Station, and it can be a bit challenging to find a seat. On the 7:43 we are the first of 3 stops, so the stampede to get on the train is far more relaxed. Hardcore commuters here know that the train door will most likely open at around the 'W' of the painted "Watch the Gap" sign. For the 7:32 I wait for the rear door of car number 4. This is important because this stops directly in front of the escalator at Penn Station.

Once inside the train, I open my briefcase and pull out a badge holder and hang it around my neck. Then I open my wallet and pull out three cards. First my law school id badge, then my monthly subway pass, then the train pass. When the conductor goes by, I move the train pass to the back. Then I settle down to either read a book or listen to a playaway. Playaways are Ipod-like devices that contain an entire book - a new delivery system for existing books on tape or cd. I alternate a book with a Playaway - there is a great supply of these at the East Meadow Public Library. This week I'm reading Barbara Ehrenreich's wonderfully depressing "Nickeled and Dimed," about how this sophisticated woman with a PhD in biology went underground to work as a minimum wage drone. She used her real name getting jobs and never lied - just didn't mention that she was researching a book.

When the train pulls in to Penn Station after a 45 minute ride, we get out to the escalator (assuming we came in on tracks 15 or 16) or the stairs (if it's tracks 13 or 14). Then I walk to the C and E downtown subway stop. At the top of the stairs before the turnstile, most days there is a man of Middle Eastern extraction who gives out daily copies of "Metro New York," one of two free (and very good) newspapers for commuters. I slide my monthly subway card and return it to the lead position for now, because it's not cool to display your name tag in public. Usually, one of the subways arrives within a couple of minutes. I walk down about 20 yards because the C trains are shorter than the E's. E trains are superior in terms of cleanliness and happiness level. It's about a 12 minute ride to the Canal Street station where I go up 2 more flights of stairs. By this point, I've usually climbed the equivalent of a six story building. I assumed in January that I would toughen up and breeze through these paces without feeling the pain, but that didn't quite pan out. Some mornings (particularly if I've taken the 7:32) I'll go one more stop and get out at Chamber's Street. Between the subway station and work is Mike's Papaya, a hot dog place that has a morning special of a salami egg and cheese sandwich with coffee for 1.75. Hard to beat.

Now there is a seven minute walk to Leonard Street and West Broadway. By the time I get within a block of campus, I take out the subway pass and move it to the center position. I slide my id card at the school turnstiles and have to wait 3 seconds for it to be recognized. When I turn in to the library, my colleague Joe Molinari is always at the reference desk with a friendly greeting. My office is on the 3rd level below ground - about 40 feet below water level on the Hudson River. It's now about ten minutes until 9 - I try to get here early every day so I can, with good conscience, take the 5:19 on the way back - Merrick is the first stop. By the time I walk back in the house, eleven hours have passed.

Open Source

I was just at a demo last week of Koha, an open source ILS. They've been having a lot of success marketing this to northeastern libraries through the Westchester County WALDO system. In all but one case, it has been the smaller liberal arts colleges who have given up their expensive ILS sites for Koha. The WALDO representatives went head on for the big drawback that I'd consistently heard - "You don't have to hire extra networking geniuses at your library to make open source work." We were told that the servers are operated off-site and everything is taken care of in the contract.

Looking at some of the web sites, Koha doesn't take away much functionality that the patrons would ever notice. The screens had facets on the left for users to drill down to a more specific search. It was attractive, with book covers displaying in the browse screens. The real differences are in the more technical services areas of cataloging and acquisitions. New customers take some of the considerable money they've saved and feed it back to the company to develop more functionality in these areas. We were told that more than 50 improvements were in the process of being dealt with. The tactic of funding development was a strategy for library directors who might have had some explaining to do when two thirds of their ILS budget suddenly disappeared.

I noticed that among the 20 or so local academic libraries who had migrated, there was St. John's, where I used to work. I called Charles Livermore there because he had been a valued colleague and somebody who was well aware of technology issues in libraries. He told me that Koha has gone over very well at St. John's. I asked specifically about the cataloging and acquisitions areas which seem less developed than the KOHA opac, but he said that those people were very sanguine about the future of this. They told him that every migration comes with an adjustment period and this one didn't seem any worse than the one they had before.

Because it is open source, libraries have the right to tinker and develop extra features for their catalogs, if they have the technical capabilities to do this. On the whole, I'm not sure this is entirely ready for prime time, but I can understand why this has become a factor to be dealt with. This is something to keep your eye on.

The Judge Judy Effect

Last week, we were preparing for the arrival of the New York Law School's most famous alum - Judith Sheindlin from the class of 1965. Her bio says that she has written six books, so I did a keyword search "Judge Judy" and found two current titles displayed. However, when I did an author search of Sheindlin, three of her titles came up. It turns out that there was a variation in the author information, and one of the titles had no reference to "Judge Judy." We had just purchased Encore, so I used this as a test case for "Social Tagging." I called up the book that had not displayed in keyword and clicked on "Add a tag." I was reminded to log in. Once that happened, I got a data box to enter my own search for this title. I added "Judge Judy" and saved it. Then I searched in Encore and all of the titles came up. My understanding was that this would only happened when the machine was logged in to my account. My understanding was wrong. The extra tag was present for everyone to use in a search.
I soon found out that this technique could have a more serious use. My director recently complained that a student searching in Encore got no hits for the Supreme Court case "Pennoyer v. Neff." While this case is mentioned in many of our books, there is no chapter title for it in the catalog, so the user came away with nothing. Without at least one hit, the student could not follow a link into WebBridge to search the case in other sources such as JSTOR or Hein Online or even Google Books. To address this, I found a copy of the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court and confirmed that this contained information about Pennoyer, so I logged in, called up that record and added a tag for Pennoyer. Now when anyone searches the catalog for Pennoyer, they get references and links to other sources through WebBridge. A committee of librarians is being formed to strategize the appropriate use of social tagging here.
Did Judge Judy stop in to the library and look at the catalog? She did not. She was running a few minutes late so she raced through the lobby and up the elevators to give her speech. I did catch a glimpse of her in this run.

Encore, Encore: Or, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown

When I was interviewing for my current position at the New York Law School, I was told that the library had just purchased Encore from Innovative Interfaces, but they hadn't implemented it yet. It probably didn't hurt my chances that I had already brought up an installation of Encore at my past library. Once hired, I explained to them that the decisions they had made in bringing up Webpac Pro would carry over to Encore, so they had already done most of the work. We wanted to install the server in May so we would have the summer to learn it and then show it off to the incoming students in August.

Unfortunately, this was also the time that we were moving into a new facility. Holly Murphy, who had given us our Encore training at Quinnipiac, was scheduled to fly out and do the same for us in New York. However, due to problems of scheduling and various uncertainties, we did not have a working Encore server when Holly was about to leave for the airport, so we had to take a rain check. Then came the actual move, the mind-numbing construction pounding around us and, finally, the American Association of Law Libraries conference in Washington. In the last of July, we finally got our training. I had been working with Encore for months, but I felt obliged to keep this away from colleagues, since I didn't want to spoil the kickoff session for anyone. During that time, I noticed a problem that had to be addressed before we went public. The location displaying on the left were in alphabetical order by their labels. Our main book location is Stacks, which means that it would almost never display without someone clicking on a dropdown for more locations. The solution - we renamed it Book Stacks, so it is always at or near the top. Locations like Administrative Reference had just enough titles to intrude where they didn't belong, so we gave them names like "The Administrative Reference Collection."

Christine Haggstrom was our trainer, and she came out from Boston. Since there was severe weather the night before, she had to take a 6 AM flight in, but she made it in plenty of time. She got to be the first person to try out one of our new electronic classrooms for the library. We know she was the first person ever to use the room for a web conference, because we soon found out that the phone did not work with the sound system. After a feverish visit from our AV crew, all was working. Holly was on the line, but Christine hardly needed her. Encore looked very impressive and our librarians peppered Christine and Holly with questions. At the end, Holly announced that I was the only person so far to bring up Encore in two separate libraries, and she dubbed me the "Encore King." I'm trying to keep from this going to my head, but it's tough.

A week later, we made our final presentation to the entire librarian group, came to decisions, and brought the service up live at encore.nyls.edu. For now, we are taking Innovative's advice and leaving the option for our users to rate titles and even add tags. We set up a usage report with Google Analytics, and note that people are already searching this. Book covers will be added within a few days. The only thing missing so far is the throng of students checking out their new library. That is just days away.

Themework - Google does it again

I hated "themes" in high school English. I hated them so much that I opted out of senior English and took journalism instead. My classmates would expound "Moby Dick is an illustration of Man vs. Nature," while I am thinking "Moby Dick is a book about a guy that obsessed about catching a fish and went off his nut."

About 5 weeks ago, I had noticed that Google added a new interface on their Igoogle themes page that allows the rest of us to add new theme bars to the directory. This was in keeping with the easy interface that they added to Google Maps that allowed the non-XML programming people in their audience to add pages with useful and graphically interesting material. As someone who had an archive of many hundreds of images concerning Ireland and New York, I couldn't wait to get started.

They make it easy, yes and no. You start with a simple interface that says "upload a file" that allows you to browse for a directory of images on your hard drive. They don't tell you this in so many words (or actually, any words at all) but it won't take your file if there is a space or nonalphanumeric in the name). Then you get to the really hard part. They put up your image and you get to mark out the area to be covered, and then it shows you what you got. Then you find out that the picture of the bridge you thought you were loading shows nothing but sky. Get ready for some trial and error. The best technique, I found out after many, many errors, was to create your original file with the dimensions 1400X190, then use the entire picture. That will get you a banner that fills all of the needed area, but will also display in full wide-screen monitors.
Before that, I found that the picture you okay and allow to be added to the directory may have wide blank spaces to either side, and then it is too late to take it back. Your image is reviewed, and almost everything is chosen within a week or so.

When the themes show up in the directory, you will see that there are fewer than 100 subscribers. At first, I thought "Sure thing. Me and my dog." After a month of this, I found that four of them were going past 100 subscribers at one time or another, so these do get used. By October I had more than a dozen with countable subscribers, including one theme with more than 9500.

One final thought - avoid the natural instinct to make the center of attention display in the center of your theme, or you'll find it blocked by the search box.

Opus 100

Those of you of a certain age will recognize that title from the 1950's when Philip Wylie used it as the title of his 100th book. This is the 100th posting of Librarian on the Edge. It began on March 14, 2005 when I was automation librarian at Quinnipiac University. In the ensuing years, Quinnipiac would send me to Ireland twice, England, New Orleans, Nashville, San Francisco, Savannah, Cocoa Beach, Salt Lake City and Anaheim. Many of those trips involved speaking engagements. In 2005 I held faculty status and speaking engagements were counted as scholarship by the university. That changed abruptly a year later when the university president got rid of the faculty union and then declared that librarians were no longer faculty. Because he said so.
I still did the occasional speech whenever I had something to say.

Also in this four year period my son went to library school, graduated, got a job as a reference librarian at the Queensborough Public Library, and seems to be on his way. Since my wife is a public librarian on Long Island, that completed the Trifecta. When we attended Book Expo last month, we noted that this was the first conference we'd attended when all three of us were certified librarians. After faculty status went away at Quinnipiac, I went through a time that I was happy to put behind me. Anyone who has lived through a situation of being treated like someone administration had to put up with knows what I mean.

I January I took an opportunity to work at the New York Law School's Mendik Library doing what I do best - systems librarian work. I've been like a kid in a candy store working through a vast backlog of problems that had built up in the months and years before a systems librarian arrived. This gives me one last chance to use the knowledge of Innovative Interfaces systems that I've built up over the last two decades. I may hold the record for being the first librarian to bring up Encore in two different libraries. Also, it doesn't hurt that I go to work in one of the most fascinating parts of Manhattan. The things we are doing here are interesting enough that I may be writing Opus 200 in another four years.

Saving a library

Recently, Library Journal announced that the Queensborough Public Library had been named library of the year. That's not a surprising choice overall - in more than 60 branches they have an annual circulation that often leads the entire country. Their branches are thriving social centers - vital to their divergent communities for employment information, access to the internet, ESL and countless other services. One other important fact about the library - Mayor Bloomberg had created a doomsday budget that would eliminate most weekend service in Queens and force the library to lay off more than 200 employees. Many of those were young librarians hired in 2007.

In the news release announcing the award, Library Journal said they would fight to save the library every day. Now the fight seems to be over. The mayor and council worked out a plan this week to put back most of the money and save the library from layoffs and major service cuts. As New York librarians, we are grateful to LJ and to the mayor for seeing the light of day. As parents we are extremely grateful, because our son Bob was one of the young librarians hired in 2007. Unlike librarians who moved to Queens from other parts of the country, Bob would have been lucky enough to have a Plan B option on Long Island. More to the point, he works in a branch that serves a Korean neighborhood in Flushing, and he absolutely loves what he is doing.
I can't remember ever getting a better Father's Day gift.