ALA 2007: Political Capitol - Sunday

Sunday morning we got up nice and early to attend the RUSA author's breakfast. These can be a good way to learn about authors on the way up, as was the case 3 years ago when we heard the author of the Kite Runner before that book hit big. This year's event had Melissa Fay Green, a woman writing about Ethiopian AIDS orphans, and how a woman who lost her daughter carried on an effort to improve the lives of these orphans. The book title is "There is no me without you." In the talk, she spent much more time relating her own adventures in adopting a houseful of Ethiopian orphans, while acknowledging that this is only a solution for a miniscule fraction of suffering children. The second was Kathleen Flenniken, a poet from Seattle who was very pleasant. She read some poetry from her book "Famous," and then explained where the ideas came from. She was so poetic in her normal delivery that on a few occasions I wasn't sure if I was hearing poetry or speech. The third was a New Orleans Times Picayune Jed Horne editor who wrote about the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. He had vivid images of the plight of thousands of people in the dry but unlivable convention center waiting around for a government that had become invisible. He described the moral choice of a photographer who was observing a rescue that wasn't going well and having to make the decision of helping the victim or getting a really good shot. He helped. The author then recounted the Great Press Photographer Joke - "If you had the choice of saving a human life or taking a Pulitzer Prize winning photo, what type of film would you shoot?" I noticed that a gentleman behind me walked out the second that Horne got up and rejoined the table as he was being applauded. One suspects that the talk contained things that he didn't want to hear.

We walked back to our hotel to get ready for the 10:30 sessions at the Convention Center. In my case, it was Ben Bunnell's talk about new features in Google. I got to know Ben last year at Midwinter in San Antonio. He spotted me in the front row as the room was filling up, and kidded me about being the one who should be giving the speech. Since I'd been to a similar talk in Seattle, he hoped that I would get something new out of this one. No problem. In terms of innovation, a month at Google would be like a year anywhere else. He mentioned that Google is moving away from pigeonholed searches and will start to bring in results in a web search from Google Images, News, Video, etc. He showed how every book in Google Books has an "About this book" page that seems to be the equivalent of a marc record. It contains a map with pins of places mentioned in the book. Click on the pin and it takes you to the page in the book that mentions that place. I wondered if this was machine generated, but didn't have to wait long, because the first place he clicked on in Moby Dick was a misread of a name that it thought was a place. This page can also include links to reviews in Google Scholar and links to Worldcat to find nearby library holdings. The Google co-op that allows you to created a specialized search engine just got easier. They've created on-the-fly coding that you can add to your web page or blog. This creates an instant search engine that searches every page that is linked on your own page. To see this in action, look for the Google search bar on the left of this page.
The five libraries who partnered with Google Books in 2004 have grown to more than 30, and this has led to much greater content in non-English. At the question and answer session I asked when we would see a language limiter in Google Books advanced search. As I suspected, they are so busy plowing ahead with new features and content, that nobody thought to add it. The biggest surprise of this session was the News archive. Like everybody else, I look at Google News and set up customization for favorite topics, but they have just added a news archive. I'd assume that this would be a year or two worth of things that had dropped off the current page. I would be wrong. The news archive includes many decades of stories from major news outlets. Ben searched the topic Sputnik and limited to the 1950's, where he found complete articles in Time Magazine about the satellite. I searched James Dean in the 1950's and got 200,000 hits. Articles from the New York Times only display the first paragraph, but you can subscribe for $7.95 per month to get 100 articles.

I had a few minutes to take a quick look at the exhibits room, and then it was a cab ride back to the Mayflower for the Tech Trends session that LITA runs at every ALA. The big buzz this year is "The death of the OPAC." One speaker said that we should stop calling it the OPAC. With the exception of Innovative, vendors are in the red and playing the hot potato for corporate mergers and acquisitions. Some libraries are taking a look at open source systems that are vastly cheaper but have little support if something goes wrong. RFID was another hot topic, with its concerns for privacy.



Back at the Convention Center, I met up with the other Ballards for the keynote speech by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I'd seen Kennedy briefly at Book Expo and heard his radio show on Air America, but I was not prepared for the intensity of this talk. He said that he works for both Republicans and Democrats who are willing to help the environment, but his criticism of the current administration was particularly sharp. He named the key office holders in the E.P.A., and showed a pattern of filling these positions with lobbyists from polluting industries. He then went on to dismantle the idea of fundamentalist Christian religion, saying that these people have corrupted the message of the bible, and want to lead the world into a new Dark Age. "Jesus was murdered by fundamentalists." By the end, the speech had taken a pep rally atmosphere that led to a thunderous standing ovation, with scattered cries for him to get into the race.

Afterwards, we sent Bob to the hotel to check on the status of Yuji the Wonder Dog (He was fine), and we went to party. First it was the Thomson Gale party at the National Press Club. It was a fine party with tasty prime rib, good wine and good company. They announced their new split-level interface for Web of Science that had an option for every type of searcher from the Power User to the Student who has a paper due the next day. After that, we walked over to a Brew Pub a few blocks to the East. It would have been a short walk save for the face that George W. Bush wanted to get out of the house and they had to set up massive security alerts and detours to protect him from well-wishers who may get out of hand. By the time we got to the pub, we were plenty thirsty. We had a nice chat with Bob Nardini of Coutts, who was hosting the event. We then went back to the hotel to round up Bob and took the subway three stops to Arlington for a visit to Tom Sarris' excellent New Orleans style restaurant.