That first afternoon, we reacquainted ourselves with the downtown San Diego streets. We caught a bus to Balboa park and looked at everything except the zoo. One section of Spanish-style buildings was, we were told, the location for exterior shots on the TV series Zorro from the 1950's. We eventually spent some time at the compact but excellent Japanese gardens, and took advantage of half-price sushi near closing time.
On Friday, I went to the Innovative Interfaces gathering - they were enthused about their new release - Millennium Silver to commemmorate their 25th anniversary. At the IUG introduction, I was struck by the fact that the organization's numbers have held exactly steady over the past few years, even though Innovative is signing up customers hand over fist. Interesting trend, and one that will bear watching. The "user" presentation was an effort by the combined San Jose Public Library and San Jose State University to build a combined main library, and merge their two cultures into a single OPAC. If you've been in this line of work very long, you know that it wasn't easy.
At the break, I was approached by the people from the University of California at San Diego who would be sharing the podium with me at the Saturday program.
Millennium Silver is the name of the new release of Innovative - helping them to get away from the embarrassing "Release 2002, Version #) scheme, and to highlight their 25th anniversary. It looks like a fairly major release - particularly for technical services. In the III presentation, they said that the headings reports will be much more flexible, and will work with review files. Also, diacritics can now be added by simply highlighting the drop point and using a drop-down box. Nice.
After the Innovative program, I dropped by the Internet Cafe, and was reminded that people have no sense of responsibility in these matters. ALA is going to have to put time-limit software on these machines. After waiting for 10 or 15 minutes and still being nowhere near a computer, I gave up.
Afterwards, we headed downstairs at the convention center for the ribbon-cutting. I hate these events, but I seem to be a part of each and every one of them. While waiting for that, I was spotted by list member Dustin Larmore from South Dakota. He was the first LIBTYPOS-L person that I had ever met in person, so that was a good omen for Saturday. Displaying my vast talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, I made a remark to my wife about the speechifying that was to come, and it was overheard by an ALA board member who spent the rest of the waiting time flashing me dirty looks.
Each morning we would wake up and look towards the water to see one or more giant cruise ships. We have never been on one, and thought it would be fun to take a look. No such luck after 9/11. So we did the next best thing and admired the monsters from a safe distance. One of them left such an interesting reflection in the waves that it launched me into profound Steinbeckian thoughts about man and nature, so I snapped a picture:
I found out late in the game that I was wise to carry my PowerPoint presentation with me in a portable storage "keychain" device. There would be a laptop there, but no network connection. Once I arrived on Saturday, everything went like clockwork. I was the first speaker, and the program was underway within 2 minutes of the announced starting time. As I may have mentioned in a previous posting, a PDF version of the talk is on the web at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typos.pdf . This was a clear case of preaching to the choir, as I described how the work advanced from a quality control project in one library to a popular web site and online discussion group. It went well, as far as I could tell, in that nobody was visibly falling asleep or walking out. Afterwards, the folks from UCSD did an excellent job of describing a full-service quality control program at a major university.
The first person to talk to me afterwards was Jeffrey Beall, who is also a member of Libtypos-L. More importantly, he was the cataloger who wrote the sidebar article in American Libraries that got me started on OPAC cleanups in the first place. He has since moved from Harvard to the University of Denver, and he mentioned that he has several new articles coming out that will mention the work that we are doing. I then met several other catalogers who made it a point to let me know that they use the list regularly.
For the rest of the weekend, we did the usual ALA things, but Monday morning, we carved out 3 hours to visit the San Diego zoo and got a look at the new baby panda. Since only two zoos in America own pandas, and healthy babies are mind-bogglingly rare, we endured the hour-long wait gladly as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I took 6 pictures of the cub and his mama - here is the best one:
After that, it was one last seafood lunch at Anthony's, and off to the deep freeze that is New York. When our tram was leaving for the airport, a man stuck his head in and asked for directions. I remarked a minute late that the fellow looked exactly like ex Yankees pitcher David Wells, and then another passenger reminded me that Wells had just been traded to the Padres. It makes one think.
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