Kudzu Classic

As we were lining up for the tour, we saw the taping of the 3 PM forum show with Arcelle Neville, and I noticed our own C.J. in the audience. She was leaving that as we were going in to the tour, so I didn't have a chance to talk. The tour was worth every penny of the eight bucks that it cost. They started off with some general information about how control rooms work, and finished with a look at the live news room for Headline News. The tour guide told us that every minute of CNN and Headline News is archived. Just think - scholars of the future will be able to experience every minute of the 1980's and 1990's, but it will take them 20 years to do it. I also learned how to spot the instant that the teleprompter goes out - the anchors start using a lot of adjectives, prepositions and adverbs, or they will look at a piece of paper in their hands that contains the information that just disappeared from the screen in front of them. I also hadn't realized that the park where the bomb went off is the front yard of CNN. At the end, they marched us down to a viewing room in the middle of the gift shop, and played a video with a great big Howdy from Ted Turner. Afterwards, we had dinner at Pittypatt's Porch, which served up some exemplary Southern cooking, and used the pronoun "Y'all" quite a bit.

Friday morning, we went to the Atlanta History Center, which was not far from our hotel in Buckhead. We noticed a big difference in attitudes between this museum's take on the Civil War and the one in the Museum of the Confederacy, where they strictly believe "The Good Guys Lost." Atlanta's tone was that both sides had their reasons for fighting, and the destruction of Atlanta led to its emergence as a regional power of major proportions. The museum was built around a mansion and gardens, and since the weather was nice, we took advantage of that.

As is usually the case, IUG was held at a meeting room in the Conference Center. It was dramatically demonstrated that IUG has had a complete changeover since I was on the board. Almost none of the people involved are people I know. Moreover, neither Karen Perone or Fred Gertler was present - the last time that happened was, I believe, during the Reagan Administration. The most interesting announcement was that a WebPac expert was in Atlanta, and would meet with us on a one-on-one session to solve nagging problems that we are having with our OPACs. As you might expect, he was a very busy man. Afterwards, a product manager came up and did a presentation about AirPac. This is a feature that will open up our OPAC to anyone with a Internet-connected PDA, cell phone, or Dick Tracy wrist watch. The idea seems to be that this will be important for people who are wandering the stacks and want to search as they go without returning to the computer terminals. More about this later.

That evening the combined Quinnipiac/East Meadow Public Library contingent had dinner in the Buckhead Diner. This is an interesting place because it looks from the outside like a regular old diner, but the menu is something extraordinary. After appetizers like fried green tomatoes, I had one of the house specialties - veal and mushroom meat loaf. Afterwards, we wandered the streets of Buckhead in search of a block that was said to be "Party Central." It all looked rather dismal - the place was probably a real scene after 10 at night, and I was profoundly grateful that we didn't have to wait to find out.

We got to the conference hall at about 9:30, just after the exhibits opened. Normally, the first hour of an ALA sees a number of opportunities for the greedy to pick up toys, t-shirts and other goodies. This time, no such luck - it all fell victim to the Kudzu economy. I'll never have to buy a pen or pencil this year, but that's about it. Donna found a few cloth book bags - they'll come in handy when we retire and create the Book Bag Museum of America in 2006. I found the good people at Yankee Book Peddler, who signed me up for GOBI training the next day. Also, Carol Harker was manning the EBSCO booth, who told me that they may be able to arrange for article-level links from EBSCOHOST to the New York Times. That would be very exciting if they really can do this. In another case of time marching on, I walked by the III booth and didn't see a single familiar face. As usual, Innovative looked like one of the busier booths at the conference.

Later that day, we had our meeting of the College Library Section's Communications Committee. I just started my second 2 year term, and they re-emphasized that there will be no meeting at MidWinter in Philadelphia, so I may skip that conference altogether. Apparently, this is sending shockwaves throughout ALA - the organization is against this because they apparently make money off of the high attendance at these conferences. The concept of ALA running conferences as a fund-raiser troubles me a bit, as it does to others.

That night, we attended a party thrown by the Wilson Corp. at the SciTrek Museum. Wilson parties tend to be somewhat selective, so we had a good, quiet group taking advantage of snacks, a well-stocked bar, and interesting museum exhibits. Charles joined us briefly, and we had a nice talk with a technology librarian from Brooklyn College who tipped me off about a good LITA program.

Once again, the sun came up over an Atlanta that was a delightful 62 degrees. We caught the shuttle that took us straight to the Convention Center, and finished up our missions in the Exhibits Room. I went to several sessions from OCLC. The first concerned their new service, QuestionPoint. This is their attempt to create a network of experts who can answer difficult and specialized reference questions. Membership in this service runs about 2000 a year. Also, I attended a session about OCLC's work in digital preservation. If you join their digital coop, they will host up to 500 images for your library to demonstrate what it can do in the field of digital preservation. They have invented Content.DM software for this, and we could run it off our server or buy space on theirs. OCLC is hard at work digitizing local newspapers, and converting them to text.

Afterwards, I went to a session from Yankee BP about their new and improved GOBI software. After a few minutes of training, I found it quite intuitive to use. The only thing missing was some indication of which books were being heavily bought by libraries. They said that we weren't the first to ask for this, and look for it next year.

My wife had signed us up for a luncheon session hosted by SIRSI, at Pittypat's Patio. I figured that it might be interesting to see what other opac vendors were up to. Interesting to say the least. They seem to be after the same type of one-search-for-all service that Innovative is providing in its MAP product, but they aren't quite as far along. Some people started drifting out to get to their next meeting, and the company speakers sent a few verbal jabs at them like "I hope you enjoyed the lunch anyway." After the company spokesman did his thing, there was a talk from a university that was trying out SIRSI's new product. You might say that they were sparing in their compliments. The whole thing reminded me of one of Arthur Dent's lines in the Hitchhiker's Guide: If that was their sales pitch, whatever must it be like in the complaints department?"

A session hosted by LITA turned out to be a real eye-opener. They put a table full of the experts and turned them loose to describe the trends that we should watch for. Marshall Breeding said that one-stop-shopping searching looked like the big trend. The problem with this is that you can have results sets of Googlesque proportions - 900,000 hits for your query about Mark Twain. Another important feature is open URL, a system that will further allow us to link directly from citation databases into full text. PDA cats are big with the vendors, but there isn't a groundswell of demand from actual library users to search for books using their cell phones.

Roy Tennant - 5 not-so-easy pieces. One-stop-shopping searches are still in their infancy. Online reference assistance is at the toddler stage. "Golden Age of Interoperability" is opening up, thanks to the ability of XML to deal with rounding up various kinds of resources. This may lead to the slow death of MARC and AACR2. Union catalogs should merge more records. That way, you wouldn't have 50 difference OCLC records for what is essentially the same paperback edition of "Sweet Thursday." Wireless libraries should be "Islands of Connectivity." That's the democratic thing to do.

Eric Morgan - XML is a good thing, and we should go to axkit.org and get their software for developing our own XML apps. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) allows the easy sharing of metadata between machines. Finally, we should pay more attention to the ways that our community looks for information.

Clifford Lynch - OAI release 2 came out last week. This will be long term and less experimental. He said that the new catch-phrase in Washington is "No matter how cynical you get, it's hard to keep up." Computational Linguistics, or verbal AI can be used to create metadata without human intervention. Nothing can go w@r%o*n&g, of course. Learning management systems such as Blackboard are becoming very important on all campuses. Also, he said that some vendors are talking about harnessing the highly motivational aspects of computer gaming for educational purposes. Didn't we get on this train in the 1960's? Where did the time go?

That night, we attended two vendor parties - the first was at the Velvet Underground, hosted by Ovid/Silver.

In past ALA's I have several times noticed somebody running by who looked exactly like Charles. This person turned up at the Ovid party, and people kept going up to him, thinking he was Charles. Then the real Charles showed up, and we got a picture of the two of them together. Except for the fact that the real Charles is two inches taller than the Anti-Charles, the resemblance would have fooled anyone. Until the Anti-Charles spoke. He is a New Yorker from City College.

Afterwards, we walked next door to the Innovative party. I saw Peter Murray and proposed something that had been on my mind for some time - a gathering later this summer, hosted by us, for every III library in Connecticut. This happened on August 13 - by most accounts it was quite a success. After the party, we went back to pack for an uneventful flight home on Monday. In my life, uneventful is what you always hope for....

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