Canadian Bakin'

ALA Toronto 2003 - dealing with a Toronto heat wave, SARS, and imperious customs agents.

For months, I had followed the ping pong game as ALA decided to stick with Toronto, then meet to take another look at the situation, then affirm the meeting again. Finally, 10 days before the conference, I booked my airline tickets on Air Canada - getting a round trip for a rather decent $180. I caught a late morning flight out of LaGuardia, and was surprised to find that the actual flight time was only 1 hour. Once the plane had crossed Lake Ontario, there was no trouble in picking out the world's tallest structure. The CN Tower looks like the Seattle Space Needle with a booster rocket atop.

In spite of a torturous wait to be seen by customs, I was checked into my hotel by 1:15, thanks to an efficient (and cheap) shuttle system. The Renaissance Skydome Hotel is built into the left field wall of the baseball stadium. When you eat at the hotel restaurant, you can see whatever game is being played. Alas, no baseball occurred on my nights there, although there was Canadian Football (Toronto lost). I asked them if a home run ball had ever hit the window. I was told that it gets hit regularly in batting practice, but almost never in an actual game.

Ironically, the weather made me nostalgiac for the good old days of Atlanta in 2002, where you occasionally got a cool breeze. I dressed light, and began walking up Yonge Street, which was supposedly the entertainment and restaurant main street. I discovered that I was using a lot of leg muscles for very little payoff. I took the subway back to city center, and made arrangements to have dinner with my wife's colleague Karen and her friend Susie from New Jersey, who we met at the Sheraton. The concierge recommended a French Restaurant on King Street, so we walked over and had a blowout meal. As is often the case, the pre-dinner drinks, appetizers and desserts outshone the actual main course, but we were all quite happy with everything but the attitude of the lead waiter.

Friday, since time began, has been the time for Innovative Interfaces folk to gather and exchange recipes. Sandy Westall got up to tell us that III.com is doing very well, and we will have Release 3 of the software very, very, very soon, but not yet. More tests need to be done. Too bad, because this release has some very exciting things in it - especially the fix of keyword searching that drops the automatic phrase searching. Then, Corey Seeman got up to speak about communication in the world of automation. The main point was to keep everyone informed about changes in the system that may affect them, but don't snow them under with more information than they want. Then, Ted Fons talked about a new product in development that will integrate online periodical aggregators into the universe of the online catalog. This involves some rethinking of the whole makeup of the online catalog. In the past, the bibliographic record was always at the top of the food chain - now they are thinking of a product record (such as Proquest) that will have bibliographic records attached to it. I'll be interested in seeing how it goes. The "single interface to all data" concept has been tried many times by many very smart people, but nothing to date has caught fire. We'll see.

Afterwards, I decided that it was time to visit the CN Tower, since it was just a block from my hotel. I had a ride up to the top that just included me and the elevator operator, who was full of facts and figures in standard measures and metric - the gist of it was that the tower was very, very tall. I could have paid more to go even higher, but 1100 feet was plenty for me. In one section of the tower, you can walk over glass, and see what it looks like to be standing in the middle of the air looking down at the antlike form of humans. One minute of that was enough.

Later, I joined a large group of my wife's colleagues from the East Meadow Public Library at the trendy King Street restaurant, "Fred's Not Here." We tried, heaven knows we tried, but somebody had to blurt out the obvious question. It turns out that Fred owns a lot of restaurants, so he can't hang around this one very much. The food, by the way, was fantastic, and quite a bit less expensive than the previous night's.

Saturday morning was the true test of the conference. At the 9 AM ribbon-cutting ceremony there were mobs of librarians milling about as the speeches began. Since this was a joint meeting of ALA and CLA, we had twice the number of introductions. Finally, the ribbon was cut with a ceremonial pair of scissors the size of a Buick - it needed to stand out for the photographer's sake. Once inside, I made a quick run to the Greenwood Press booth. I got advanced warning that they were giving away Shakespeare Bobblehead dolls. This turned out to be the emblematic giveaway of the conference. Other goodies over the next few days included book bags, a mug, a light-up pen and a ball that sparkles when you drop it. I also attended a session about the new Medline Plus, which looked a lot like the Health and Wellness Resource Center, except that it is free. Another exciting product was Otherdays.com. This is a database consisting entirely of Historical documents of Irish history. Afterwards, I caught a taxi to a hotel in the far north of the city to attend the CLS Communcations Committee meeting. The big news there was the planned migration of the Collib-L list to the ALA server. Damon Hickey will work out the conversion before retiring as list owner. Later that evening, I was taken out to dinner by Bob Nardini from Yankee Book Peddler. Bob had lived in Toronto during past engagements, so he found a restaurant miles from downtown in the Bloor district. It was fun seeing a part of town that did not consist of giant skyscrapers - Bloor was almost identical to streets I'd known in Queens.

On Sunday, I went to a luncheon presentation by Proquest to demonstrate their complete new overhaul of Proquest - Proquest Next. It has a slightly new look and some very exciting power tools - particularly Open URL - JSTOR: Are You Listening? They are scrapping their SiteBuilder and allowing people to build their own files of Proquest links. Also, the records will now allow every element of the record to be converted to a further search, just by clicking on the box beside it. They say that this will be out in July - can't wait.I wanted to go to the Tech Trends wrap-up that LITA sponsors every year, but should have shown up 20 minutes early. By the time I got in, there were 300 people in a room that holds 200. I figured I'd just check the web page to see what they had to say.

I went back to spend some more time in the Exhibits room - ran into a celebrity or two. I'd gotten a party invitation from a company called Booksense. It turns out that they have a product that sounds pretty exciting. They have maintained a catalog of the more than 1000 Z39.50 servers in the world (including Quinnipiac), and they are selling site licenses to a web product that can access any or all of these OPACs. This might allow us to make custom aggregate opac searches of the state or the region. They also threw a great party that night. Afterwards, it was the Innovative Party at the Ontario Arts Museum. I tried several kinds of sherry and wandered around looking at the pictures - including a Rembrandt. The world of Innovative Interfaces has expanded so much that I hardly knew anyone there.

The next day was Monday and time to go home. The shuttle bus arrived just as I was sitting down to wait for it, so I took my last look at Toronto for now. At the airport, we were forced to use the self-checkin machines. It went okay, except the directions were in French. When it came time to put in my birthday, I kept putting in today's date. Next, I had to fill out more forms and go through US Customs.

The customs agent looked like the Dunkin Donuts baker from years past, and he had attitude. Here is an actual transcript of our conversation:

He: "Why are you travelling to the United States?"

Me: "I live there."

He: "I need your passport and boarding pass."

I give him those things:

He: "You didn't fill out your declaration card. You'll have to go in the corner and fill it out."

Me: "But I did fill it out. Here it is."

He: "Why didn't you give it to me before?"

Me: "You didn't ask."

I hope he gets the early retirement or counseling that he so richly deserves. Then I got into the next line to show some other official some other papers and throw my bag into the hopper for checkin luggage. Next, security, which was nicer than the one at Laguardia - I didn't even have to take off my shoes. At the end of that, I asked where the Duty Free Shop was - turns out that I should have made my way there somewhere in the middle of being grilled by Customs, so I was not allowed to visit it. Flying over Lake Ontario, I hoped I'd see Niagra Falls when we hit land - actually, I got a nice view of Rochester. An hour later, our plane was temporarily diverted from LaGuardia, and spent an extra few minutes flying right over the backbone of Manhattan. As always, good to go, good to be home.

Return to

Terry Ballard's Professional Web Page