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.

ALA 2007: Capitol ideas - Saturday

We started the day with the Ken Burns speech in the Convention Center ballroom. As expected, the room was absolutely packed. I got a pretty good seat near the front of the room, but taking a picture was out of the question. Fortunately, I knew that he would be signing in the exhibit hall later, and it's usually easy to get a picture by going near the signing table. Burns had been at Book Expo the month before, and he showed a 5 minute teaser of his upcoming PBS documentary about World War 2. At the time, I predicted that this would become a national sensation. This time, he showed a generous helping of excerpts that went on for a full hour. I'm more convinced than ever that this will be huge. Burns is very articulate when he says that no war is ever "good," but this one had the effect of bringing the nation together in a way that is unimaginable in these fractured times. After the screening, Burns came back to accept a standing ovation.


We met Donna in the exhibits hall. She had slipped out of Ken Burns early to make sure that she got the latest Greenwood Press bobblehead. It turned out that this year's entry is Darwin. Our bobblehead shelf in the den is pretty full, but we'll find a way to make room for Charles. After Book Expo weeks before, it was hard to get worked up over any of the giveaways here. We went back to the hotel to check on our dog, who is notorious for not travelling well. This time, however, he had actually figured out that being in a hotel room wasn't so bad. We picked up a few sandwiches at Quiznos and took them back to the Convention Center to avoid the extra special prices in the Food Court. We got to the author reading late in Sherman Alexie's presentation. He read and then acted a passage about how his family had to kill a sick dog because they couldn't afford to get him healed. This led to a long and emotional monologue about the plight of reservation Indians whose dreams would never possibly be fulfilled.


In the afternoon, I went to a program about library applications for RFID. This would have been a better program if the moderator had held the speakers' feet to the fire. There were six speakers in the two hour program. The first two people used up an hour and ten minutes. The third speaker promised to make it quick. He used a full half hour. That left 20 minutes to cover the final two speakers. I didn't know how that turned out because I had to go to the Google books program. Anyway, the first speaker, Brian Green, covered the reasons why RFID should adhere to a set standard rather than letting each company do their own thing. In the long run, this will help keep information from Old Navy purchases from interfering with library book data. Mr. Green is on the international committee working to set these standards. The second speaker, an engaging young American working as an automation security expert in the Netherlands. She told how RFID is subject to hostile interference from people who could make machines that could corrupt the RFID data in libraries. To prove this, she built just such a machine. The third speaker had some good information that all too frequently covered the same ground as the first speaker.

The Google program was in a huge auditorium that was filled beyond capacity - pretty amazing for a four PM session. Representatives from each of the original five Google books partners spoke. The woman from Oxford ansered a question that I've had for some time. If they are doing all of the 19th century and not cherry picking titles, why do we not see Kelmscott Press editions, which are owned by Oxford? These were books printed by a group of pre-Raphaelite artists who were interested in the artistic possibilities of the book. Their work was centered around the 1890's, but Oxford will only scan titles printed before 1875. All of the libraries mentioned that books were excluded if it is deemed that they are too delicate to stand the scanning process. There is still no hard data about the technology used to turn out this incredible volume of work, and they are still cagey about giving details of the number of books that have been made available.

Afterwards, I met Donna and Bob in the Convention Center and we walked down to the site of the conference's first party - at a restaurant on 7th St. hosted by http://www.tutor.com/. They
gave out awards for the most innovative uses of their products. As in their party in Seattle, they served their company's specialty - a drink with orange, vodka and champagne called the "Raving Fan." Lots of librarians were lining up for these. Afterwards, we went to the Hyatt to meet up with Jeff Riedell and Jane Burke from Serials Solutions, who generously invited us to dinner at one of Washington's nicer restaurants, the 701, across the street from the National Archive.

ALA 2007 - Capitol ideas: getting there is 87% of the fun

We woke up at 4:30 intending to get out at 5, so 5:20 was acceptable. I had asked for Mapquest directions, and basically rejected their suggestions. However, their maps did show an interesting route. Catch 295 after the tunnel in Baltimore, and that would take me directictly to the bridge at 14th Street. Great! Everything went exactly to plan. We were running a half hour ahead of schedule. One little problem - 295 does not take you to the 14th street bridge - it drops off at 95 south of Alexandria. This led to a half hour of running around lost until we found 1 North on our own, and finally crossed into downtown Washington.

We were still early enough that our room was not ready, so we walked over to the convention center and registered. Maybe because the west coast people hadn't arrived yet, this was the easiest registration any of us could remember. Yuji the Wonder Dog found D.C. exciting. Uh oh. As is the case every time we take him to NYC, he started having problems with his digestion. Once we got to the room, he decided that this was all a threat to abandon him. Yuji is very high strung. So high strung that Donna had to drop out of our first event to stay with him. Too bad because the event, a native American dance at the Nation American Indian Museum in honor of incoming ALA President Loriene Roy was a fantastic event. When we got there, every bit of ledge space was taken up with spectators.


During an intermission, we looked through the museum, which I've always found to be magnificent. At the end, I got close enough to take a picture at the final march, and, synchronistically enough, happened to catch a picture of Loriene looking very pleased with things, as she should be.

Getting ready for ALA

We're driving to D.C. Friday morning at 5 A.M., so it's time to clear off my sticky pad as much as possible. Now that my son has graduated with his MLS, it is suddenly more of a chore to coordinate programs and, by the way, make sure that the dog does not destroy the hotel. I programmed in everybody's schedule in my Google calendar, and it looks impressively dense. ALA has done a great job lining up speakers this year, although several of the best include authors that we saw at Book Expo such as Ken Burns and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We're all looking forward to seeing Garrison Keillor for the first time, and Donna was thrilled that Armisted Maupin was added at the last minute.

Back at the office, I'm keeping my student worker Matt busy with an assortment of projects, including the VERSO pages. Although this is still in a sort of test phase, we are confident that we are approaching the final look of the thing. When this phase is complete, we will have about 130 titles linked. We now have working pages in History, Business and Social Science. I have a query out to describe this effort in detail for Library Journal.

Funny enough, two writing projects that I'd done last Fall for peer-reviewed journals were accepted days apart. I'd written a rather snarky web page about the quality of referees in peer-reviewed library journals, but now I'll have to take some of that back. The reviews I got for both articles were on point, finding a few things that needed correction. Either the peer review process has improved in the last ten years or I'm writing better articles, but it was a pleasure to read reviews that were free of posturing and sarcasm.

Recently I met Leith Johnson, an archivist for the Wesleyan University Cinema Archive. It turns out that they are housing the papers of Elia Kazan. Since East of Eden is my all-time favorite film, I finally got around to scheduling a visit and making the half hour drive to Middletown. Leith brought out a box with all of the materials about East of Eden, and what I saw just totally boggled my mind. I've read quite a bit about the making of this film, but most of what I saw today was new to me. I have a web page about East of Eden at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/eastofeden.html , and I've begun adding material from the notes I took this morning.

I still need to pick up medicine, get a haircut and straighten out my hotel reservations, but I'm almost ready for Washington. As Mark Twain said, "Never put off until tomorrow that which could just as easily be done the day after tomorrow."

General Store - 1, Mapquest - 0

We were headed up to Vermont on Monday to visit a friend of my son. His parents graciously agreed to put us up for a few days so we could unwind from New York in general and Book Expo in particular. To prepare for the 5 hour drive, I put my address and their address in Mapquest. The first 70 miles I rejected out of hand. I agreed that I should probably take I-87, but not by slogging over the GWB. I have my own ways of catching I-87 North. After that, everything seemed to fall into place. I had to change highways about 15 times once I got onto the local roads. That's good because we had enough stress driving through tropical storm Barry. Finally, we had it licked. We were in their town. All we had to do was drive .8 of a mile and turn on Butts Hill Road, except that it didn't seem to be there. We made a left on some other road, but that wasn't it. Finally, I decided to head back to town and ask at the General Store (they had a library but it wasn't open at the time). The store people looked at my directions and told me 'You don't want to drive on Butts Hill Road. Not unless you have a four wheel drive and a death wish." Not only did she know our hosts, but she knew what they ate last night and their dog's state of health. They let us use the phone to call Bob's friend, and we were given perfect directions. Their house was half a block off the main road. The Mapquest directions were not just wrong but horribly, hopelessly, mind-bogglingly wrong. Next day the general store got a big sale, and Mapquest got probation until further notice.

Book Expo 2007 - It's like Deja Vu or something

Book Expo seems to have settled down to a pattern lately - every other year it is at the Javits Center in New York. It is so regular that we have set up a regular routine about it. On Friday we wake up early, drive to the city, and park near the Javits. This year we were lucky enough to get a spot directly across the street. That way, when Donna and her colleagues pick up more books than they can carry, they just go across and fill the trunk and do it again. The initial stampede did not disappoint. Many free books and other goodies. I went to the Google Books booth but did not find the people I know. I did chat with a very personable young Googler who admitted that this was her first big event. The next day I talked to one of her colleagues who had been pictured in my Seattle ALA blog. She admitted that she had seen the picture. The aisles are sometimes so crowded that it is nearly impossible to walk, and sometime even to breathe. Among the publicity gimmicks I saw this year were Elvis, Elton John, a beared man in a gray robe claiming to be God and bemoaning the fact that he is out of work, the Michilen Man, a giant parrot, huggable dogs and cats, and various people with really weird hats. In other words, your basic mass insanity. At every hour of the day there are at least 25 simultaneous book signings - the books are always free except for a one dollar donation. On the first day, I got books signed by Sherman Alexie and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While I got a good line position for Kennedy, I noticed that the current signed in that line was Ron Powers whose books about Hannibal Missouri are favorites of mine, but I had to keep my position in line. Also at that time period I could have got an autographed book by Dave Barry if I didn't mind getting in a line that stretched halfway to the East River. After that, I was done with autographs for the day. The restaurant situation near the center is amazing. You have to walk many blocks for any alternative to the food court at Javits which is to be avoided at all costs. The place we'd tried two years ago has since been bulldozed, but we found a pretty good Irish pub at 33rd and 10th. Afterwards, we went to a program about the making of the upcoming film "A mighty heart," about the wife of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. We were convinced that they have made a movie about a real person that is acceptable to the one person who matters. I went off on my own for a time and ran into my friend Paul from New York Law School in lower Manhattan. I checked that off the list since Paul is the person I always run into at any conference. Also heard my name being called in the lower level - it was Les Witter who is one of the survivors of my Spring library science class. At one point we walked up to the main floor, and chatted with Formey Mayor Ed Koch who was sitting outside the CSPAN bus. At 5 we lined up to hear the main event of the first day - a keynote presentation by Alan Greenspan and his wife Andrea Mitchell. Instead of a standard speech, the two sat down and the reporter interviewed her husband. He talked about his impressions of the many presidents he had served, and talked about the thinking that led him to write his first book - coming out this fall. She asked him how he avoided talking about things from the office to his reporter wife. He answered that many things were going on that he would have loved talking about, but it would have been a federal crime to do so. It reminded me of jury duty - there is a line you can't cross over and so you just don't.
One of the most vivid stories was his account of his first days as Federal Reserve Chairman - while he was on his way to Texas to make a speech the stock market crashed. He said that for weeks after, the economy was teetering on the brink but finally pulled back to stability. We went back to the car, bracing for a Friday night nightmare drive to the Midtown Tunnel. Surprise! We went crosstown in 5 minutes. The Long Island Espressway was busy but we expected that.

The next day also began about 5AM. This time we met at Merrick station and took the train in to Penn Station. I was headed for the taxis, but Donna's boss Marcia pointed out that we could catch a conference bus around the corner. It was nearly empty, and we had to wait about 10 minutes for a few others to arrive. Things were already pretty much in a buzz because the first event was the authors' breakfast hosted by Steven Colbert. Massive lines had already formed in the special event area. Somebody from the conference went by shouting the unwelcome news that we could not take any pictures, or even aim our cell phones at the panel. There is a great Book Expo tradition out the window. I've watched Colbert's show many times and, frankly, don't find him all that funny, but at this event he had me laughing from start to finish. He introduced Ken Burns, who bantered with the host nicely, and then showed a clip from his World War Two spectacular coming to PBS in late September. I guarantee you that this will cause an absolute sensation in the Fall. He was followed by Lisa See (the only one who didn't join in the fun), who had written a novel about 17th century China that sounded fascinating. Finally, Khaled Hosseini, author of the Kite Runner, mixed it up with Colbert after the host made fun of the author's fabulously successful book. We had seen Hosseini 3 years ago at ALA when he was an up-and-coming author at the FALUSA breakfast. Unlike the breakfast 2 years ago, the panel immediately left the stage after the performance.


I decided to make up for the camera ban by finding the table where Colbert was to be autographing and got his picture. Even though there was a big line behind the table, I was able to get within 3 feet of the star beyond the table. Worked like a charm. Then I found Donna and we wandered to the far end of the room to the media area. Somebody held up a package and invited us to get an autographed ebook by Dave Barry. Sure thing! After being mobbed yesterday at the book signing, anyone could walk right up and talk to Dave. I tried to go to the trends in science fiction panel, but the room was mobbed. The conference center in general was undercooled, and this room was 15 degrees warmer than anywhere else. I slipped right back out and spent more time on the floor. My back was starting to go, and I found that I was spending more and more time at the Librarians' Lounge, generously supplied by Library Journal. Donna introduced me to one of the editors, and we talked about an article that I had in mind for the Journal. The editor told me to be sure to mention that I'm Donna's husband when I send in my query.

Eventually I hit that moment when you know that you can't take another minute of this craziness, so I headed to the #4 bus back to Penn, and the train home. We'll likely miss next year at L.A., but they're back to Javits for 2009, so if my health holds up, I will be too.