I'd rather be in Philadelphia - Day 2

Saturday morning it was back to the exhibits, after a breakfast of croissant and strong coffee at the Reading Market. Actually, Donna had started her day walking the dog all the way to the steps of the Philadelphi Museum of Art, and stayed for a few minutes while Rocky wannabees ran up and posed at the top. Later, it was fun seeing the Man himself at the Swets booth. This guy actually sounded more like Rocky than he looked like him.
I went to OCLC and the Innovative booth, but both of my questions were a bit out of range for the people there, who tended to be more sales oriented than technical. At some point, I ran across our old vendor, Putnam Morgan from what had been Spalding. He was showing off a new machine that could
read and digitize microcards. Any library that still has a nightmare format like that is surely in the market for some sort of solution. The giveaways at this conference ran the full gamut from free pens to free pencils, with the occasional Halloween candy.

To be fair, there were more free books than usual. However the most troubling sign was the absence of a Google booth. They have had a presence at every ALA since San Antonio in 2006, but now they are simply absent. I'd also hoped I'd see a booth for the people who sold us the excellent LibGuides program, but no such luck. After an hour of this, we decided to take advanatage of the Convention Center's proximity to Chinatown. We started on Arch Street, but soon cut over to Race. My criterion was that the restaurant should have duck and chicken hanging in the window. There were several of these to pick from, and the one we chose did not disappoint.

Afterwards, I went to a program at the Radisson - a LITA interest group of librarians concerned with the JPG2000 format. I decided to forgo bothering with a cab and walked down. I could have made it easy, except for something they call the Ben Franklin Parkway, which cuts like an ugly scar across the city north and west of City Hall. There is no way I can go anywhere south of my hotel without crossing it. Unlike normal streets, even in New York, where you wait for the light and cross at the crosswalk, crossing the Ben is about a 17 step process. Anyway, I was a few minutes late, but a few people were later. A happy surprise was the group's chair - Peter Murray, who had worked with me at Innovative Users 10 years ago, and now is with OHIOLINK. The new format allow a lot more functionality than the traditional jpeg.

This can be used for moving images, and lends itself to features like zooming in and rotating an image. This disussion lent itself to another new format - the PDF-A, which can use jpg2k in its formatting. There was discussion, some of it over my head, about whether this could be set up to compress a file and then build it back up again to be identical to the original. There was even talk of adjusting settings to make the reconstructed file better than the original. This runs counter to the thinking of some archivists, who want a faithful copy of the original, warts and all. On the other hand, the enhanced images can test better in OCR, and who wouldn't want that?

Who wouldn't want to spend the rest of the evening attending receptions and parties? Maybe someone who was out of energy. This night's slate had 3 events - two of which were fairly close together. The first was put on by a consortium of book publishers, including Perseus Press. They had rented the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art at Broad and Cherry. The museum was just magnificent, and they let the party-goers roam through any of the rooms as long as they did not carry their wine glasses with them. The bartender gave me a tip on the most important painting - Thomas Eakins' masterpiece the Gross Clinic, at a nearby room.

Afterwards, we walked through City Hall to the Ritz-Carlton for the reception given by tutor.com. These are always a must for the good society and for their specialty drink the "Raving Fan." There was more partying to go, so we only had one fan each. We talked to a very friendly pair of librarians from a public library near Chicago.

The final party was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I'm embarrassed to say that in 18 years of living in the East, I've never gone in this building. With a generous wine and beer selection, 8 tables of food and a good steel drum band, this was the highlight of the evening. There are some people that one always runs in to at an ALA - one of these is Elliot Gertel from the University of Michigan. We have seen him at every ALA since Orlando, four years ago. I got Elliot's picture in front of a favorite painting, but will have to fix the image back at the shop.