ALA 2009: Layoffs, Luxury Suites, and Librarian Tweets

More ALA 2009 news from the city named after the Graham Nash song -

• from Library Journal
  
  
  
  
  • "The first of two ALA membership meetings...a discussion of 'Libraries in Hard Times', barely net its quorum of 75... attendance grew to about 120 members spread out in a[n] ...auditorium that could have accommodated 2000."
  
  
  • "...Treasurer Rodney Hersberger then reviewed the "challenging revenue environment"...told of budget cuts... and of plans to lay off some ten ALA staff. "
  
  
  • A former ALA treasurer questioned Executive Board expenses for travel. Regarding allegedly "lavish" hotel suites for ALA officers, ALA Executive Director Keith Fiels "quoted one of his predecessors in ALA as saying, 'An ALA suite is really a meeting room with a bed attached.' "
  
  
  
  


• My pick of LJ's Picks Of Saturday's Tweets
  
  
  
  • "#ala2009 has confirmed what have suspected for years. Librarians mostly function on sex, alcohol and wifi. Everything else is meh"
  
  
  • "we think in MARC. It's our native language. But look at all the gray heads in the room. "
  
  
  • "Chewing off my own leg wouldn't really get me out of this dreadful session, but it might be a suitable protest"
  
  
  • "Rick Anderson (Utah): 53% drop in circ stats per enrolled student since 1997. 73% decline in reshelving too."
  
  
  • "far fewer computers in this meeting than normal, but also far more iPhones."
  
  
  
  

Former Playboy CEO Hefner Speaks At ALA

Christie Hefner spoke at ALA about First Amendment issues, the ALA, and the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) Roll of Honor Award given to Illinois Library Association executive director Robert Doyle. After buying the papers of John Peter Zenger and donating them to the University of Chicago, Playboy founded the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards (presumably to convenience stores that don't obscure the cover completely). Trina Magi, president of the Vermont Library Association, was honored a Hefner First Amendment Award for fighting the USA PATRIOT Act. (Note that both of these librarians are from "up north", as "down south" the First Amendment, like herring in wine sauce, has never had much market penetration.)

Clever librarians, scheduling this thing when the state legislative session is over...

Inefficient, creative people = Quality!

Achieving quality in your life can be seen as inefficient: you must work hard, devote plenty of time and resources to it, and pretty much defer other things not so serious. I sometimes think the eschewing the “efficient” path may often lead to much valuable achievements and probably a more rewarding life.

I stumbled across a little blog post on WLC by Shane McCarron entitled "Work and Life vs. Creativity". He talks about his experiences working with teams that create computing standards. He has noticed you cannot manage these people to be “efficient” and expect results. Only through being inefficient and allowing these creative people to run their course do they end up with quality.

Daryl Furuyama at White Hat Black Box has expanded on this thought:

How Efficiency Has Decreased Quality

Lately I’ve seen many instances of people stating the hidden costs of efficiency, which usually results in the degredation of quality. Here are a few examples:

• Food: I was watching a video about the movie, Food, Inc., and they discussed the efforts of the United States to reduce the costs of food through various programs and subsidies to corn and soy. The result is the average American only spends about 9% of their income on food, when 40 years ago it was 15%. The hidden cost is that the food is less nutritious. It looks nice on the outside, but is lacking of substance.


• Leisure: I finally had a chance to read Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s book, Finding Flow, and it was amazing. Csíkszentmihályi states that a reason people are unhappy is because they do not know how to spend their free time. It often takes up to a half an hour to “get into” what they are doing and reach a state of flow. Many people do not have the patience to overcome the initial obstacle and get into a state of flow. Rather, people choose the activity that is more accessible (i.e. easy) such as watching TV that leads to distraction, but not fulfillment.
  

  Bill Cosby also noticed that people don’t know how to enjoy themselves. There seems to be a confusion between what people enjoy and what they think they should enjoy. Csíkszentmihályi states that nothing is interesting in itself, but it becomes interesting once we focus on it and begin to notice the subtleties that we didn’t notice before.
  

• Shelter: I was out with my girlfriend a few weeks ago looking into apartments for her. We were looking a wide range in quality, with some being 40 years old and some being 4 years old. The 40 year old complex was recently renovated and looked nice on the outside. On the inside, the elevator wobbled and made noises, the halls were dark and enclosed, and it generally felt not secure. Once again it looked nice, but lacked substance.
  

  The 4 year old complex had a security patrol, open and well lit hallways, and felt study and comfortable. Going on price alone, the 40 year old complex was a more “efficient” choice, but she would have sacrificed comfort, security, and general peace of mind.
  

How to Obtain Quality

Efficiency is often interpreted as being “what is easy”. When things are easy, they often suffer from a lack of quality. To obtain quality in your life, you must determine your worth and what is appropriate to you. If fast food is good enough for you, you can continue to eat fast food. If it isn’t good enough, then you will look for something better.

Tina Su from Think Simple Now wrote about her experiences in overcoming her limiting beliefs and realizing she is worthy of having a nice laptop. Often the costs (both monetary and effort) act as a filter for those worthy of obtaining quality. If you believe you are worthy, you will be willing to spend the extra effort, time, or money necessary to obtain the quality you seek.

Having quality in your life beings with picking the things that are worthy of you and choosing to reject everything else, even if it comes easy

While The Cats Are Away At ALA...

...the Raptor Cams in the eyeballs of Marty the Matrix Owl send images of industriousness to That Toddlin' Town.

Status Back Baby

Wherever one works, window offices come and go, but the constant is that none of the windowed ones ever face the window while they're in that office. Top secret stuff on the monitors, or just an attempt to avoid the temptation of Tom Sawyer-esque reveries? If an organization placed photovoltaic cells over these unused windows, the energy generated could be spent on the power required for dual SLI video cards in all computers to enable staff to play resource-intensive games or run Vista.

Kindle now under $300.

Amazon has lowered the price point of its original Kindle to $299. The Kindle - which debuted in 2007 - was initially priced at $400 and subsequently reduced to $360 in May 2008.

Amazon Spokeswoman Cinthia Portugal told the Associated Press that the reduction was not just a short-term promotion. "We've been able to increase the volume of Kindles we're manufacturing and decrease the cost of doing so," explained Portugal.

Nevertheless, the above-mentioned price cut does not apply to Amazon's recently unveiled widescreen Kindle DX which is still priced at $489.

The Fascination of New Bright Shiny Objects

Regarding the type of early adapters who would be most inclined to check out the upcoming Google Chrome OS, CNET analyst Peter Glaskowsky says they will be those with "...the usual interest in novel computing platforms...the information-technology equivalent of the Coolidge effect".

Mobile Wikipedia

Wikipedia has launched a mobile site. iPhone, Android, Palm Pre and Amazon Kindle are officially supported. (Maybe they figure BlackBerry users already know everything?) View this site at m.wikipedia.org. Default view shows the article of the day. Today's article of the day is a bit inappropriate, so here's a screenshot of yesterday's article.

Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education

This March post from Lifehacker lists great tools for online education. If you want to learn to code, start learning a foreign language, master Ubuntu or more try this list of top ten online tools. As Lifehacker says, "It's easy to forget these days that the internet started out as a place for academics and researchers to trade data and knowledge. Recapture the web's brain-expanding potential with these free resources for educating yourself online."

The Centered Librarian: ALA Mobile for iPhones and Others

The Centered Librarian: ALA Mobile for iPhones and Others

ALA Mobile for iPhones and Others

Keep up with news and events at this year's ALA Annual Conference with their Boopsie-powered mobile app.

This screenshot is the iPhone web app, but you can also download a version from the iTunes store.

Google Chrome Operating System

In a move that's been predicted for some time, Google has announced the upcoming Google Chrome Operating System. It will be available next year.

Seminole Revelation

Today's Tallahassee Democrat has an article about the budget-driven removal of telephones - you know, those land-line things - from some FSU departments. One prof is quoted as saying "...every new assistant professor across the country is reading the press about what’s going on at Florida State and other schools in Florida....This means they will take a job here only if they can’t get a job someplace else."
Dude, that's the only reason anyone takes or stays at any job. If you don't like the way it is or what's offered, you're free to vote with your feet.

Only a year! The iTunes app store turns one!

Personally, I can hardly believe the Apple app store is only a year old! It seems like it has been around forever and my list of downloaded applications would only reinforce that conclusion! And what a year it has been... more than 50,000 applications available, over 1 billion downloads and a seemingly endless stream of "what will they think of next" applications. Every time I think there is no way a particular app can be surpassed for "wow" factor another comes along that I wonder how I ever lived without. Great job guys, and we fanboys look forward to even more amazing stuff from Cupertino.

"Design is not about democracy, design is about quality."

So says Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design, in this video. (Does that mean you can't have quality when twelve guys jam endlessly in E, all at the same polite volume?)

Frog Design has been responsible for such things as the Apple Snow White Design Language, the Victoria's Secret Retail Display System, and the Windows XP and Media Player interface. Thanks to web guru Mike Houghton's post on Tallahassee Refresh for this one.

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (It was a dark and stormy night....) 2009 Results

I look forward to this every year and this year's results certainly do not disappoint. The winner of 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. A contest recidivist, he has formerly won the Western and Children's Literature categories. McKenzie is the 27th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982. His winning entry:

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

The runner up, Warren Blair of Ashburn, VA:

"The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor--the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn't use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride. "

Complete results here: bulwer-lytton.com

World's Oldest Bible is online via The British Library

Visitors to the British Library's website can see high resolution digital images of the pages of the 1,600-year-old manuscript. As a result of collaboration between institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt, and Russia which hold parts of the original, the images are being published for the first time.

The book was written in Greek on parchment leaves by several scribes, and shows that the Bible as we know it today is very different from the earliest versions. Some of the pages were found in a blocked-off room at the Monastery of St Catherine in 1975.

The manuscript shows thousands of alterations, and includes two New Testament books that have since been dropped, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas. The latter is particularly controversial, as it clearly states that it was the Jews, not the Romans, who killed Jesus - indeed, it quotes the Jews as crying "His blood be upon us."

And, like other early Bibles, the Codex also omits references to the Resurrection and to Jesus' ascension into heaven. Nor does it contain Jesus' words from the cross: "Father forgive them for they know not what they do."

From the site:

“This 1600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the bible was transmitted from generation to generation," said Dr Scot McKendrick, Head of Western Manuscripts at the British Library. "The project has uncovered evidence that a fourth scribe – along with the three already recognised – worked on the text; the availability of the virtual manuscript for study by scholars around the world creates opportunities for collaborative research that would not have been possible just a few years ago.”

Second Life as an educational resource: Is it worth it?

For more than three years the College Center for Library Automation (CCLA) has had a presence in Second Life. It is a modest site (click for the SLURL if you are a resident), but from there you can access information about the organization and link to CCLA’s online research resources and the library catalogs of all 28 of our represented Florida colleges. We have just renewed the lease on our virtual property for another year so we will remain there until at least next July. Is it worth it?

That is hard to answer. The returns are almost impossible to measure since web usage statistics do not let us easily determine how many users access CCLA resources from Second Life, directly. We typically get only IP addresses that can not easily be resolved. Nonetheless, it is apparent that the usage is insignificant to the point of being almost non-existant. We visit the site regularly and though the visits last only a few minutes to check that all is working at the site, it is apparent that there are no “residents” anywhere nearby and, anecdotally, their numbers appear to be dwindling in the area we inhabit (Eduisland3).

Second Life’s parent, Linden Lab, has been around for nearly 10 years, and with its product Second Life celebrating its sixth birthday since launching publicly in June 2003, we thought it would be a good idea to take at how the company’s doing according according to the analysts.

During the past 30 days, one million users logged in, according to Second Life’s own statistics. Second Life in fact trounces all other Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPGs), In average time spent per user per week, including World of Warcraft and Civilization IV. The number of hours users spend on Second Life has been increasing steadily and is currently at historic highs, totaling approximately 124 million hours in the first quarter of this year. Perhaps traffic to CCLA’s site will benefit from that growth and there is obviously a marketing opportunity there we need to exploit.



So, what does this mean for CCLA? Two years ago, in its strategic plan, made a commitment to be “where and when” our users were. As a result our services are available through conventional web access 24/7 and we have produced applications and access for both Facebook and many mobile devices (smartphones). Our commitment to “mobile” is strong and we will continue to make our products and services mobile-friendly. Our presence in the “sociosphere” will also continue if for no other reason than it is “done” and is inexpensive ($300 annually) and is relatively maintenance free. We have also made a commitment to such social-friendly technologies as tagging, user generated content and will continue to monitor the social web and develop or adapt products that meet the needs of our customers.

Semantic Markup With HTML 5

New structural tags in HTML 5, like header, footer, nav, article, and section, give the web developer tools for more semantic markup. This Sitepoint article on HTML 5 demonstrates the use of some of this markup in a blog example. This HTML 5 markup works with current versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. A little javascript and some conditional comments will make it work with That Other Browser.