The blur that is my life on the express train to Penn Station

It's been two months since I began my new job at the New York Law School. This is a total change of lifestyle for me. I had a very staggered schedule in my years at Quinnipiac - a combination of very long workdays and some shortened to allow me to get home to Long Island before everything got crazy. Here it is 5 identical workdays - eleven hours if you count the time I leave the house for the train until the time I get back to my driveway. Between the walk to the train from the parking lot and the walk from the Canal St. station, I have walked at least a half mile. Depending on circumstances, I may have also walked up the equivalent of a five story building. This has made me a bit tougher over time, but at the expense of some very sore knees and hips.

On days that I drive to the station, I take the 7:32, in which Merrick is the third of three stops before going on to Penn Station. When Donna drops me off, I take the 7:43, in which Merrick is the first of three stops before the city. Either way, I get to the library before anyone else in technical services. Lately, I listened to a Philip Glass orchestral piece while travelling through the more industrial section of Queens and it was liking having a live-action Koyanasqatsi. One building between Woodside might be taken for a prison with its gray walls and iron fences, but it is a church with gold lettering from Lamentations: "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?" The rest of the passage is: "Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow, which is done to me, with which the LORD has afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger." Must be a lot of fun on Bingo night.

In my first week here, I was presented with a long document representing problems that they had been experiencing for months or worse. In the first week, when I should have just been listening to people and staying out of trouble, I started going through the list of problems. After two months, there is almost nothing left on the list.

One of the things my new library director asked me to look at was the way the library handled table of contents information to distribute to faculty. The way they'd done it for years was to make an image of each TOC as a new journal came in, save that as a pdf and put links to those on a long html page. I found that by saving the images as jpgs rather than tifs, you could cluster twenty pages in a pdf. As part of this work, I found out that many law journals place their TOC on a web page. Not only that, but most of these pages provide free access to the content. That led me to create a file that has dynamic links to 25 top law journals. This has now gone live at http://www.nyls.edu/library/research_tools_and_sources/current_awareness_sources/top_law_reviews_-_current_issues .
With the volume of journals we are cancelling, this kind of list will be more important in the future for tracking current content. One colleague suggested making this a graphic selection. The mockup for that is being tested now - see image on the right.

I'm also working on a Google Map of the world that has placemarks that link to our library's holdings on each country or state. This is open for view at Once we've completed the catalog link for each country we can go back through and add new layers of country information. A few weeks ago, I was reminded that the library had purchased PathFinder, the Innovative Interfaces product that can take a search in the catalog and rerun it in selected databases. Getting to work on this, I created a web page with links to law libraries that had also purchased this. That is at http://www.terryballard.org/nyls/lawlibswb.html We were surprised to see that many libraries had made a very small number of databases available here. We went the opposite direction and added more than 20. You can see the results by going to lawlib.nyls.edu and making any search, then choosing the "Other resources" button at the top of the results screen.

On lunch hours I am able to pursue a project that I had envisioned for my retirement - walking every block in Manhattan and taking a picture of each one, adding those to Google Earth and blogging each entry. The only rule is that each block has to border one that I had covered previously. This work is also covered in different degrees in Google Maps and my PBase account at http://www.pbase.com/terryballard . Working in this historic and important section of Manhattan is a dream come true.