valuing ourselves and being valued as speakers

I read Dorothea's post about reimbursement for speaking at conferences this morning. She points out the disparity between her experience with the TXLA and Michelle's experience.

I cannot even begin to count up how much I've personally spent to speak or otherwise participate in events at conferences. I taught a workshop for AAM once and encountered a similar experience to Michelle's -- I was asked to pay to register when I was teaching a workshop they'd make money from. I was on the MCN Board and MCN is an affiliate organization, so MCN gave me one of their exhibitor comps so I wouldn't have to pay to teach my workshop.

But, the year that I was president of the Museum Computer Network board, I had to attend six or seven conferences to give presentations or represent MCN at meetings or lead board meetings. It was MCN's policy never to reimburse anyone. I had a limited travel budget at MPOW, which paid for two of my six or seven trips. It never occurred to me to say no.

I've given talks at dozens of conferences. Every so often I get comped registration. On very rare occasions I get a night or two reimbursed at a hotel. I've never been offered a speaker's fee for a conference. This doesn't include the occasional gig where I've been comped and paid to teach one or two-day workshops outside of conference venues.

A couple of months ago I gave a talk at Open Repositories 07 that was very well received, and some folks approached me afterwards and suggested that I come to their institution to give the same talk. My colleague Grace Agnew sat me down at lunch and gave me a semi-stern talking to that I undervalued myself as a speaker. Always ask for something. Part or all of your travel. Comped registration. Speaker's fees. You may not get it, but you might get something when you expected nothing. If you get offered nothing and you weren't already planning to attend with institutional support, decline.

Yes, we might miss some professional opportunities. I'm going to put this in harsh terms -- conferences and organizations often take advantage of us. We want to give back to our community, but that doesn't mean that we should pay to give back to our community.

Do you still want to be my agent, Grace? ;-)

online service design and barking cats

Sunday I was at the Green Valley Book Fair, where remaindered books go for another chance to reach customers. The Long Tail applied!

For some reason this time we found ourselves lingering in the business and management section, where there were large numbers of self-help leadership and marketing books, like "Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun" or "The Martha Rules: 10 Essentials for Achieving Success as You Start, Grow, or Manage a Business," by Martha Stewart, or "The Mars Pathfinder Approach to 'Faster-Better-Cheaper.'"

Some of the titles caught my eye because they included some simple concepts that we rarely make time to consider: "The Transparent Leader: How to Build a Great Company Through Straight Talk, Openness and Accountability." "The Courageous Messenger: How To Successfully Speak Up At Work." "It's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business."

But one title really caught my eye: "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing." The title is partly rhetorical -- the book is about new modes of marketing online services in an increasingly marketing-resistant world. It's also about processes through which we can potentially identify user needs and demographics and the persona building process. The cats barking metaphor comes from expecting users to respond like Pavlov's dogs, where they're really inscrutable and self-motivated cats. I'm not sure that I'm fully on board with persona development as I've seen it implemented, but I'm not reviewing the book one way or the other (especially since I haven't read it): it's purely the title that seemed aptly descriptive of a phenomenon to me.

We launch online services and wonder why our users don't use them the way we expected. We tend to populate interfaces with jargon-y terminology and then expect our users will learn the vocabulary to use the services. We on occasion provide functionality that we would use in our work and expect our users to need exactly the same and nothing different. We have been known to complain that it's our users who are broken, not our interfaces.

We're waiting for our users to bark.

Instead, we need ask our users more about what they want and need. We may not always be able to deliver, due to resource or technology limitations. But asking improves our credibility, and provides us with insights that we didn't have before we asked. Our Library is looking at designating a "user requirements" team whose responsibility is to ask questions, hold focus groups, and interact with a re-invigorated usability team. It looks like we're learning to meow.

blogversity

Rachel threw out a meme challenge on five non-Library blogs that we read:

Boing Boing: Where else is there a single feed that provides updates on books, intellectual property law and privacy, science, technology, and popular culture?

Cinematical: All the news you could possibly ever want about films -- whether planned or in production -- plus great reviews.

if:book: From the Institute for the Future of the Book, a New York-based think tank dedicated to discourse on reading, publishing, and the media.

Manolo's Shoe Blog: While not a frilly girl by nature, I cannot deny my inborn admiration for all sorts of shoes, especially when paired with extremely clever writing.

Slashfood: Named as an homage to Slashdot, a group blog about food trends, products, and restaurants.

the traditional and the digital

Every day when I fire up my FeedReader, I now expectantly look for new posts from Peter Brantley's blog shimenawa II.

In a recent posting, Peter outlines some thought on D2D and libraries, with which I strongly agree.

In the past, we've had many discussions at my institution about the divide between the "traditional" and the digital. We still talk about our "digital library" as if it's a separate entity. I have often advocated that we stop using this terminology because it's all THE Library. The "traditional" work of acquisitions and cataloging are huge parts of our online services, populating our catalog and OpenURL Resolver, and generating metadata for our digital objects. Our public services staff select and work with physical collections and online services and content. Our interlibrary services staff deal with electronic document delivery and digitization for reserves as well as book retrieval and physical ILL.

I know it's human nature to express ourselves in structuralist binary oppositions. To extend the Lévi-Strauss metaphor, we need to move forward in our analysis of the thesis and the antithesis into the resolution that is the synthesis. We need to reunite our perspectives on the traditional and the digital into one Library. We are not and cannot be dual organizations any more -- let's stop thinking about ourselves that way.

catching up

I just realized that I haven't posted in entry in close to a month. I haven't disappeared from the face of the earth; rather, I've been nose-to-the-grindstone on some projects.

The Virginia Heritage Project went through an overhaul of some of its underlying functionality.

The text delivery in our Repository hasn't failed in quite some time.

Some milestone legacy text sets were migrated into the Repository collections.

We're planning logistics for our Google Book Search project activities.

Now I can re-surface and join the world again. I can catch up on what happened at code4lib 2007, and at the Users and Uses of Bibliographic Data Meeting, finish my contributions to the glossary that I'm supposed to be working on for the Fedora wiki, and think about what the future holds for us as customers with SirsiDynix's announcement of "Rome."

success is a double-edged sword

Since we launched our repository its success has revealed some server issues. We discovered previously undiscovered capacity issues that three very patient and experienced programmers and sys admins have been working very hard to troubleshoot. To allay fears, no, we had no problems with Fedora. But Fedora kept thinking that Tomcat/Cocoon wasn't responding, so Fedora would decline to complete its disseminations. The most puzzling thing was that our image delivery worked just fine, but our texts would fail. Actually, they'd work for a while and then fail. The texts are much larger and have much more complex disseminations and rendering, so we knew it was a capacity issue of some sort. The much increased number of such complex renderings was causing something somewhere to intermittently give up the ghoast.

We ended up doing a number of things: adding more retrys when requesting objects found through text search results. Moving Cocoon and Tomcat onto a newer box with upgraded versions and a lot more memory to allocate. Upping timeout limits in Tomcat and Apache. We found a log that kept filling up. There was a Cocoon STX bug that we needed to take into account in one text disseminator. We have one remaining mystery issue -- some Apache connections that aren't being released. It may be from Cocoon errors that aren't being properly identified as such and going into a wait state.

It's interesting what we never found in 2 years that we found in three weeks when more people started using the service.

unveiling of our repository

It seems like I've been working towards the unveiling of our Digital Collections Repository forever. participating in architecture planning. Collecting functional specifications. Coordinating production standards. Watching workflows come together. Watching teams coalesce. Implementation. Meeting with faculty for testing and feedback. Working with Library staff on testing and feedback. More implementation. More testing.

Finally, after 2 years of alpha and beta versions, we unveiled the Digital Collections Repository yesterday. We had been calling it a launch, but after two years it's really an unveiling.

There were a couple of glitches. High traffic caused issues with text rendering, seemingly due to server timeouts. Some updates hadn't gotten added to the index so a couple of faculty couldn't find some specific images. Expectations exceed some of our search capabilities (I can't index what I don't have in the metadata). But it's out there. We can rest on our laurels for a few days, then start planning the next release and the production and delivery of additional formats. And likely an entirely new indexing infrastructure.

Today, I got a message from a faculty member who I have never met. The selector for her department had emailed the announcement. She liked what she saw and wanted to know how to get her image collection selected and added. I am thrilled.

http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/collections/

Open Repositories 07

I traveled to San Antonio on January 23 to attend Open Repositories 07. I actually attempted to travel on January 22, but was stopped by severe fog. I almost didn't get there on the 23rd (no planes coming in the day before translates to none that can leave), and my bag didn't get there until hours after I did. But that's a lengthy entry for elsewhere.

Because of my travel woes, I missed the entire first day of Fedora sessions, including my own -- Sandy got someone to switch with me, so all was well on that front.

Wednesday morning I gave my Fedora best practices talk, focusing on the process for the development of content models. Wednesday afternoon I gave my talk on UVa's principles of digital curation. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who were really interested in what I had to say, requested copies of the talk, and/or asked me to give the talk at their institution. It's a framing of our goals and activities in the digital curation realm, and seems to have struck a nerve with many as a good approach. I'm in the process of expanding this material into a chapter for a book.

Not surprisingly, I'm a big fan of James Hilton. I recommend Peter Murray's synopsis on his blog, as he;s already said everything that I could say.

I hope that presentations are going to be posted, because there are a number that I recommend. Kaare Christiansen's talk on object validation strategies at the State and University Library of Denmark presented some really promising workflow tools. Atsuko Takano's talk on the CURATOR institution repository at Chiba University discussed some interesting categories of data that they're collecting, including overlay journals, e-science, and output from alumni. MacKenzie Smith's talk on PLEDGE presented interesting experiments in policy enforcement in a grid environment. Joan Smith's talk on mod-OAI presented some interesting experiments in enabling web sites to better describe themselves for preservation purposes. Christiaan Kortekaas's talk on the Fez project is increasingly relevant to me, as I know we need to set up a self-deposit environment. Carl Lagoze's talk on the OAI Object Re-Use & Exchange (ORE) initiative clarified many issues for me. Julie Allinson's talk on the Eprints Application Profile presented an interesting FRBR model for eprint representation.

We had an exciting content model working group meeting where we appear to have become a formal-ish working group. One set of us will be working on documenting practices, content models, and disseminators. Another set of us will work on formal representations of content models in an architecture. I'm looking forward to working on the former and seeing the output of the latter.

screencasting

I want to give a shout-out to our Library's user education team, who have started screencasting. They've developed some great tutorials on our catalog, on RefWorks, setting up proxies, etc. Give it a look-see!

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/usered/tutorials.html

5 things you don't know about me

I don't often do memes, but ...
1. My first library job was in the 4th and 5th grades. I had to pass a test on alphabetization and the top level Dewey Decimal classes to work as a shelver and at the circ desk at my elementary school library.
2. During my freshman and sophomore years of college I worked at a Baskin Robbins in Los Angeles. Among my duties were cake decorating and making ice cream cakes and pies. I could still make a grasshopper pie if asked.
3. The previous item wouldn't be peculiar if it weren't for the fact that I'm lactose intolerant.
4. I trained as an archaeologist in graduate school and worked for museums for many years before moving into Library work. All my work was focused on digital collections and automation so my transition to digital libraries is not so odd. My first job while in graduate school was a recon project to transcribe written acquisitions records into a database, and to create digital images of a major Moche pottery collection. In that previous life I also spent seven years on the board of the Museum Computer Network.
5. I collect Mexican folk art. Not in a systematic way, but when I see things that I really like it's hard to stop myself from buying them. I'm looking forward to hitting some galleries while in San Antonio for the Open Repositories 2007 conference.

new del.icio.us for uva dl

For years I've been forwarding notices on articles, reports, sites, and what-not to to various lists and groups at the Library. My colleague Cyril pointed out the obvious to me the other day when he and Ronda was presenting a session for library staff on del.icio.us -- that while the email messages were useful, an annotated and tagged del.icio.us set would be even more useful (and more persistent than messages in folks' inboxes).

Given that it's the week before Christmas and work was winding down for the break, I went through three years of outgoing messages to particular internal email lists (yes, I'm a compulsive email hoarder) and created a del.icio.us set:

http://del.icio.us/uva_digital_library

I have a lot more to add, it needs some work on the tags, and I haven't created any bundles or set up any networks yet, but it's a start at pulling together things that I find useful and think my colleagues should know about.

FictionFinder

I've spent way too much of my day exploring OCLC's FictionFinder prototype. Read more about the project.

The subject tag cloud that you encounter when first entering the system intrigues me -- the most commonly used subject appears to be "Marriage." I followed the subject "Missing children," vaguely thinking that I might encounter From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Nope. I searched for it and found that it's actually the subject "Runaway children." I wonder if I could have found it without knowing the title or that subject term? How do you know what subject term is the right one when browsing or searching? When is something under "Quakers" and when is it under "Society of Friends"?

I think that defaulting to genre for browsing is the right choice. It's a manageable length for browsing (at least for now), while the "subjects" list is quite long and "characters" is huge. See Thom Hickey's post on the difficulty in creating that character list. The awards list frustrated me momentarily -- I had to remember that the "Edgar" awards are actually the Mystery Writers of America awards and look under M.

The "settings" browse list results could be frustrating for some. I clicked on Mexico and found books where the subject was actually "New Mexico." It was great to see that books where the subject was "New Mexico -- Santa Fe" showed up under "New Mexico."

I searched on "voodoo," which is not the official subject terms (It's voodooism, if you care to know). I got books where voodooism is a subject. I got books where voodoo is in the title. And I got books where voodoo is in the description, such as "By the author of Voodoo, Ltd." I know it's a tough problem to index the assigned terms and other fields where relevant subject topics might be found.

The FRBRization display for a work is a sensible one. Who knew that Gaston Laroux's Fantome de l'Opera was available in Thai? Nice to see that I could follow the edition into WorldCat to see that Cornell owns it.

I did come across many examples of works that should have been identified as the same but were not for a single author -- H. P. Lovecraft. When I had the same experience in LibraryThing some months ago, I spent some time cleaning up the work relationships. I wonder why his works are difficult to identify and combine programmatically?

How do I combine browse types? I'm looking for books set in England that feature ghosts. There's an advanced search but no advanced browse. Maybe something like at Amazon, where one can narrow within facets: jewelery --> rings --> gold --> emerald.

I don't want this to sound like a rant, because it isn't. I think this is a really promising prototype, both as a FRBR experiment and as a subject browse environment. The fact that you can generate the browse lists at all is exciting.

current issue of D-Lib

The December issue of D-Lib has two articles in particular that I found very worth my time.

The first is David Bearman's review of Jean-Noël Jeanneney's Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe. I've known David almost twenty years and I always find his issue pieces thoughtful.

The second is a very interesting article on the proposed draft audit checklist for repositories and OAIS. The Audit Checklist is still a draft after maybe 2 years. The outcome presented in this article that even after annotating the checklist for use in an NDIIPP project, there were still issues in scoring the results and interpreting them.

We began this process by annotating the Audit Checklist and enlisting our team members to gauge their software installation experiences against it. Currently we are concluding a series of meetings to reach a consensus on the interpretation of checklist items. Using a test example scenario, we also experimented with applying an existing scoring instrument to the annotated Audit Checklist. This was an exercise that clarified the need for a more meticulous refinement of our annotated Audit Checklist, one that should be undertaken with the developers of the common repository software applications. Our experience thus far suggests that the application of 'weights' to the Audit Checklist items, specifically according to an institution's own needs and priorities, may also provide a framework for guiding a reiterative self-assessment process of an institution's repository services. Aside from this, as more institutions explore the possibility of providing trustworthy digital repository services, the evaluation of repository software applications increasingly will necessitate a more extensive, community-based expression of technical functional specifications needed to support the requirements of Trusted Digital Repositories. With an ever increasing array of potential software tools, services, and infrastructure configurations, the time is ripe for an evaluative approach to repository software that considers the array of items found in the Audit Checklist.

Array is right. The checklist has 86 items and four possible scores for each. This instrument is challenging to use and exceptionally experienced and well-qualified people still have issues in agreeing how to score it. Such a tool is definitely needed -- why is it so hard to design one?

project management software

Yesterday I was commiserating with a colleague about the complexities of MS Project, and how it was overkill for what we often needed -- tracking of a small number of tasks, the people assigned to them, deadlines, and a comprehensible dashboard type of report.

Today, I have seen a potential solution, and its name is dotProject.

For all I know I'm the last person on the planet to know about this, but another colleague just introduced me to dotProject, and it is highly intuitive to use. Create a project, add tasks, create task parameters, create reports. It's web-based and highly shareable with a team, and group editable.

It was demo'ed for our sys admin this morning, and he's agreed to a test install for us. He also found it super easy to use and was particularly impressed by its dashboard reporting features.

Check it out at http://www.dotproject.net/. System requirements are at http://docs.dotproject.net/tiki-index.php?page=Minimal+System+Requirements.

children's book week

Not too surprisingly, I was a constant reader as a child. When it came time for Scholastic book sales at my school, I would pore over the little catalog and select dozens of books, which my mother would usually make me pare down to no more than a dozen per order. Even so, teachers would express amazement over my orders, asking "How long will it take you to read all these, dear?" Stunned silence would follow when I'd reply with a very small number of days. Hey, these were my teachers -- didn't they know how fast I read?

I read way beyond my grade level, reading Hawthorne and Poe and Lovecraft in elementary school. I remember a short story in an Alfred Hitchcock-edited collection that terrified me, and still likely would today. I bought every book of folklore and ghost stories. I read A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, Roald Dahl, Madeline L'Engle, Andre Norton, and Maurice Sendak (Higgelty Piggelty Pop!). I loved the Alfred Hitchcock 3 Detectives books, Ruth Chew's Witch books, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, The Little Prince, The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E, Frankweiler, and The Phantom Tollbooth. There were some real oddities like The Forgotten Door and Stranger from the Depths.

If I could name _a_ favorite, it would be The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E, Frankweiler. I still want to live at The Met. The Phantom Tollbooth and Higgelty Piggelty Pop! tie for a close second.

I still buy children's books occasionally. Every so often I come across one that I just feel the need to buy, like Armadillo Rodeo or Frankie's Bau Wau Haus. I only read The Mouse and His Child two years ago.

Check out the "childrens" tag in my LibraryThing tag cloud. Sadly, my mother got rid of many of my books while I was in college. I still have some of them. A few I've replaced. I recently got a copy of a cookie baking book that I still think has the best recipe for snickerdoodles.

Children's Book Week

google news

It's now official -- the UVA Library is joining the Google book scanning initiative.

Here's the UVA press release: http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=1053

And the identical Google press release: http://www.google.com/press/annc/books_uva.html

We're very excited here. Still feeling a bit overwhelmed as we get ready to think about the scale of the process, but excited nonetheless. It's not yet set when we're starting or what materials we're sending. It's going to make quite a change in our local digitization efforts.

uses versus users

Something else came up in a number of discussions here recently that really struck me. We were talking about different types of users -- faculty, graduate students, undergraduates -- when the topic turned in a interesting direction. No user is a single type -- a faculty member might be ordering reserves one day and looking for a DVD to check out for the weekend on another day. A graduate student might a faculty member's proxy one day, doing their own research another day, or looking for beach reading in July. We all know this.

So, why don't we talk about uses rather than users?

Browsing. Searching. Research. Reserves. These cross many demographics. Let's analyze our services and interfaces from these standpoints, and not in terms of what "the faculty" or "the undergraduates" need. In other words, not a persona but a category of use. I don't have these ideas fully formed yet, but as someone who has spent a lot of time doing individual usability testing, I'm going to continue to give this some thought.

discussion of blogs and rss

I led the second in our "Not for Geeks Only" discussion series last week on blogs and rss -- 40 people signed up! We really seemed to have struck a nerve , and our Library staff seem really pleased to be introduced to these topics in a personal, targeted way rather than wandering through every random page on the web trying to find what's relevant.

It's not comprehensive, but covers some blogs that I and my colleagues here use every day to help us do our jobs.

http://staff.lib.virginia.edu/HR/training/classdocs/blogs.ppt

Coming up in the future -- GoogleScholar and Google Book Search, flickr, del.icio.us/social tagging, and firefox extensions.

planning our future(s)

For the past few weeks we have been planning for a visit from some folks from SirsiDynix, our ILS vendor. A number of people prepared presentations on various topics -- ILL requests, circulation, acquisitions, cataloging, user expectations -- and presented them over a two-day period.

It was highly illuminating.

We have a lot of staff who are very engaged with how we might improve not only our business operation and transactions, but how we might improve the user experience for our community. I was particularly impressed by the presentation on user expectations, which incorporated many Library 2.0 ideas that make sense for us -- rss feeds, "did you mean?" search facilitation, faceted browse, personalization, and recommender systems. While I was forewarned, it was still a amusing to see the content of my blog entry of September 5 (and my picture) illustrating the first slide describing the ubiquitousness of digital services as informing user expectations. I was described as the Library's "ubergeek." I cannot deny that I like being thought of that way. It's similar to the time in a job long ago when we we looking to create a new job title for me, and my boss suggested that it could simply be "Maven."

Another presentation that impressed me was the one dealing with cataloging. In part it was about improving efficiencies in the software used, but much of it was about how to best create shareable metadata that can be used for many purposes and by many systems. A great discussion followed about context and repurposing metadata and how to deal with authority control across systems.

There was also an excellent discussion about how our systems require too much data duplication. Why do we need to create and maintain tables of course names and numbers for reserves when students services already maintains such a data source? Why do we need to create tables to track payments when our procurement office already does that? Why do we need out own authentication system when the university has its own?

There was also an interesting presentation on ILL requests, and crying out for better implementation of standards and protocols so our systems can better communicate and our staff don't have to do as much work manually as they do now. OCLC was mentioned many times.

If the presentations from that day are ever made publicly available, I'll post links.

it's all about the metadata

Last week I attended the NISO "Managing Electronic Collections" workshop. I spoke about our Digital Library Repository implementation, and was gratified to have a number of people ask me questions over the course of the two days that I was there. One question really struck me -- "What is the most important thing that you learned in your process that we should take into account in our project?"

It could almost be a one word answer: metadata.

Of course it's a more complex answer than that. What metadata do you need to capture? Technical, preservation, administrative, descriptive? In what format? What's the minimum? We have experimented a lot in this area, and there has been a certain amount of "lather, rinse, repeat" as we've refined our metadata. In some cases, encoding standards have changed so mappings had to change. Or workflow tools have changed, requiring review of what metadata we can automatically capture, and in what form. Or standards have developed, such as those for the preservation or rights, so we need to review what we're capturing.

One of the most significant change agents has been evolving end-user services. Why? Because you can't support functionality and services (and often usability) if the needed metadata isn't there, or is in the wrong form. Having an extensible architeture is vital. Identifying standards to be used, and having production workflows that can process appropriate content in a timely fashion is key. But really, it's all about the metadata.

Ex: We want to be able to support sorting and grouping of search results by creator or title, which is easier if there are pre-generated sort names and sort titles (doing it on the fly takes a lot of processor overhead).

Ex: We want to create aggregation objects that bring together multi-volume series or issues in a serial title, which is easier if you have the most complete enumeration possible and identify scope to as granular as level as possible (e.g., volume, issue, article).

Ex: We want to supported faceted subject navigation, which is easier if the subjects terms are broken out in a granular way from their post-coordinated forms, such as identifying geographic vs. topical vs. temporal parts in the subject.

Each of these requires a change to our DTD and/or the patterns of our encoding, and, sometimes requires us to regenerate the metadata from the originals sources. But each time we both better document the objects and improve the services and the interface that we provide, so it's worth it.

If you're interested in what we've delved into so far:

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/metadata/