Cuil

Cuil is a new search engine developed by a few people who left Google. It's always been my fondest hope that someone would come along and give the Big G a real taste of competition. I don't have anything against Google - I just think that competition will help bring out the best in them. Naturally, when I heard about this on the morning news, I couldn't wait to try it out. It looks really slick on first impression. Their "about us" page got my attention by adding a picture from the prehistoric stone circle on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland - I had been standing on the same spot 2 months ago. The searches go quickly and produce "big number." Here is where they start acting similar to Google - a search for my name and Quinnipiac produced more than 6000 hits, but when I tried to see them, there were only a few hundred. There is an attractive drill-down feature on the right, but the entries seem somewhat incomprehensible. For the search I just mentioned, the only suggested subtopic was "People from St. Louis." I don't come from St. Louis, so I'm not sure where that came from.

Most amusingly, they add pictures to each page description. In the case of my entries, there are dozens of pictures of somebody else named Terry Ballard. Their formula really should ensure that the picture comes from the page they are describing. Enough other people were interested that their servers were swamped in the afternoon. My verdict is that I love the concept but the product isn't quite ready for prime time.

Gone Hollywood

We debated for some time about going to National this year - after Midwinter, ACIS in Savannah, and Ireland, our dog was starting to get separation anxiety, but my director encouraged me to go, and I put in a proposal to speak (rejected, alas - breaking a streak of proposal acceptances that stretched back to 2005). On the positive side, we hadn't been to Anaheim since our son was 4, and he's now grown up and working as a librarian in Queens. Having now been to both Disneys, I was interested in confirming the notion that Disneyland was superior to its Florida imitation. Also, there were plenty of worthwhile programs.
On Friday, we caught the direct flight on Jetblue from JFK to Long Beach - Jetblue
still doesn't fly to John Wayne. We registered for the conference and then cashed in our advance ticket to California Adventure, a new theme park that seemed to have been carved out of the parking lot to Disneyland. There were a number of excellent things here, but the standout to me was a short 3d experience based on A Bug's Life. This is obviously the newest of their 3d works, and the technology was breathtaking. Another standout was the hang gliding over California ride that took you to Yosemite, over the ocean, and atop the Golden Gate Bridge.
Saturday was the sort of day that was so tightly scheduled that we were afraid to wake up in the morning. We got to the convention center in time for the opening of the exhibits. This one was, oddly, shorter on showmanship than past ALAs - no barbershop quartets or buskers this time. Just straight ahead librarianship. Also, there were no Clark Gables or Elvis' roaming the aisles - just a big exhibit room and a lot of cloth book bags and automation vendors excited about their new interfaces.
I went next to the OCLC ContentDM session, where I met several OCLC staff that I had worked with online. I was afraid that everyone else would be from a library that was thinking of buying the product, but it turned out that almost everyone was like me. They have it, but they want ideas on how to expand it. They mentioned that one of the librarians in the audience had worked out a way to interface listings on their ContentDM with Google Maps. We'd like to do that too, so I'll get to work on it when I'm back in Connecticut.

I then went to the Sheraton to attend the EBSCO lunch. They are rolling out a host of new things, including their first substantial new interface in more than 5 years. Watch for it in the next few weeks. You'll hear this from vendors a lot in the future - "Our new interface is more like Google." Also, like other vendors, they realize that they need to expand their service beyond that of providing journal articles online. This means adding some sort of original content. In EBSCO's case, they have hired content experts to write guides to research in specific areas such as business and sociology. They are also digitizing quite a bit of source documents in American history. Most impressively, they are publishing a database of more than 600 newspapers in America from the 1600's to the late 19th century.

A program put on by WebJunction looked scary enough that I almost turned tail when I saw tables covered in white paper and marking pens for brainstorming. The plan was to work with a group, talk about our experiences with Library 2.0, and then move to another table and another for 15 minutes sessions to spread the synergy, then end up back at the "Home" table to generate some sort of conclusions. Althoug I am usually too shy for such things, in this case they couldn't shut me up. The main theme seems to be that libraries will resist 2.0 tools until the day comes when they solve a particular problem at the institution. A good example was the Smithsonian Institute, where people are spread all over the world, so they used YouTube type 60 minute presentations to introduce themselves to the rest of the remote co-workers and speak briefly about their job responsibilities. Another library used a blog to replace their printed library newsletter. Then it was a night of vendor parties, followed by the Scholarship Bash. Disneyland was so mobbed that it was hard to tell there was a library event going on here.

Sunday was another major marathon day, including a breakfast for Daniel Ellsberg, hosted by Alexander Street Press. Ellsberg began by reminiscing about his days of being a fugitive from the FBI while dozens of newspapers were getting copies of the Pentagon Papers from a network of anti-war volunteers. On one of the days when he was being sought by the government, he was on television for a half hour being interviewed by Walter Cronkite. He then went on to give his views about our current situation. He said that the framers of the constitution specifically did not want a monarchy, so they set up a system with checks and balances. Ellsberg said that the current administration, in concert with a spineless congress has crossed the line and allowed tyranny to take hold in America. Very heady stuff.

We went to the exhibits for a time, and then I headed over to see the Sally Ride speech. I got there 10 minutes or so early, and that was good enough to get me a seat in the front row. America's first female astronaut from the early 1980's, Ride is now developing an educational book program to break the barriers that keep women from living up to their potential as scientists. Her latest project is aimed to getting young people more involved in the issues of climate change. Her talk was interesting enough in itself, but she also enhanced it with stunning pictures from space.

At a Gale luncheon we learned that they, too are getting their product more in line with Library 2.0 principles .One of their new projects, an international information site, has a built in interface that allows the user to get involved - write a congressman or an embassy. Their all-new interfaces will start to come out in July and August. Interestingly, they will start allowing users to create their own logins and passwords while in the library that will be valid after they go home - much the same way that RefWorks is set up.

Later that afternoon was the Top 10 Tech Trends panel that is a must at any ALA. This time, the media was the message as the room resembled a 3 column web site. At the left was a display of a chat room set up for librarians out in Cyberland. In the middle was the normal array of panelists. On the right was a projection of two blogging librarians, Sarah Houghton-Jan and Karen Coombs. The whole thing looked vaguely Orwellian to me, but it mostly got the job done. I felt bad when one panelist was giving it his all and a chat room comment flashed "Make this more interesting." Karen Schneider mentioned that open source was becoming entrepreneurial as a nation of libraries finds that the free ILS software they just loaded needs somebody to come around soon and make this all work. Small literary journals are contributing to the open access movement - they weren't making money anyway with printing paper journals and mailing them out. She hopes that the next big trend will begin on January 20, 2009 - a remark that got considerable applause. One of the bloggers mentioned that API is becoming important to libraries. That made me feel SO 20th century, because I didn't even know what API is. Another interesting concept to come out of the panel was "The semantic Web." This is a way for web pages to automatically improve themselves. Sounds far-fetched, but who knows.


One of the video bloggers mentioned that there are a lot of dormant library blogs out there. Library blogs can fall prey to bureaucracy. Libraries in general are not innovators. She said this, not me. Clifford Lynch is waiting for the backlash against open source as libraries realize what they've done. I particularly appreciated Roy Tennant's remarks. He wants to get out of the trendspotting game because he has been wrong too many times. "look for an age of game changing surprises." You can't argue with that.

Sunday night is often taken up with vendor parties, and tonight was no exception. The highlight was a concert by a "Library-friendly" indy band called the High Strungs. I can mention that Gale threw this one because we found it later on the open Web. The highlight was when they created a song from scratch, blending quotes supplied by the audience. When they were ready to perform, they added more audience participation by getting volunteers to work simple instruments such as tambourines and cymbals. I found myself on stage somehow with cymbals, trying to look cool. Actually, it was a lot of fun being in a rock band.

Monday was mainly made of revisiting the vendors. Later in the day, I met up with several of the most active members of the library typos group - Tina Gunther and Wendee Eyler. Tina has been the heart and soul of the group for years, maintaining the list of typos found in opacs all over the world Wendee has helped with the grueling work of writing the Typo of the Day for Librarians. Appropriately, we met in front of the OCLC booth.

As far as L.A. goes, I'd often found myself on the opposite side of the fence from Randy Newman, but this time I had a very enjoyable conference. You never know.