I Can Has Snarlz

So. Turns out that SLA - despite selections on the program planner and forms being filled out - did not, in fact, record my talk in Denver. They didn't actually record any of my division's sessions. (As you can imagine, my division chair is just a tad upset with them.) Arrgh!

Vendor Make-up

I spent the day with two representatives from the company that makes our EDMS (that we were having such problems with) and I'm quite pleased with the progress we're making. It is no longer unthinkable that we may be using the software again before the end of the year. Not only are we starting to get real results (as in, "hey, we could duplicate your problem here and found the cause" kind of results, although they would have been nicer to have last year when we had the problem) but they brought me a brand spankin' new Dell server to use as a testbed platform. (Pity I have to give it back in September!) I'm feeling very positive about what we've worked out so far and the progress we made today, and given that most of the engineers have stopped spitting whenever the EDMS is mentioned, I'm hoping things will work out all right. (I still believe in this product; eternally optimistic, that's me!)

It's currently a lovely 86° and we got 0.03" of rain today! Too bad I voted for no rain in our office pool... ah well, would rather have the actual rain than the points!

And now...

After
Originally uploaded by desertlibrarian

...I finally match my avatars!

The Expert: New on TV in the Fall!

USA Network has announced their 2008 slate of shows, and amongst them is The Expert, summarized as "A reclusive librarian with a unique condition called synesthesia works with the police squad to aid in their investigations. Synesthesia allows her to mix her various senses -- she smells sounds, hears colors and feels words enabling her to explore unconventional ways to pursue criminals." Should be interesting! (via LISNews)

It's 104° with a 40% chance of rain. Yes!

Modules & Themes

I am so pleased with how easy it is now to apply modules and themes in Drupal 5.1. Maybe it's just because I was on the steep side of the learning curve with 4.7, but it seems much more straightforward and intuitive (once you know the proper directory to put things into, at least) in 5.1 than it did in 4.7. I'm quite pleased. I've got a couple of new modules (namely front_page and image) and new themes (K2 and NoProb) and *poof* they were instantly on my module and theme administration lists, ready to be tweaked! Yay!

I still have a long way to go but I feel better now than I did a week ago... each time I install or configure something I learn a few more things. Way cool.

102.5° and plenty happening on the radar. Now if it would just head our way...

Updated: We're not what you think!

I first mentioned this site before this blog even existed, and just to get it in the local record I blogged about it last year, too - so here's a third go round! Librarians: We're not what you think! has recently been updated by John Hubbard (tip o' the hat to him for including YDLLaL) - the full essay is quite a read, and don't forget to check out the gallery. (Thanks to multiple folks for the heads-up.)

It rained last night! And it's gonna rain today, I'm sure of it. Even if it's only 20%Rh right now. (And a temp of 102°.)

Let the games begin!

According to the National Weather Service, we've hit our third day in a row of dewpoints above 54°; this means that the 2007 monsoon season officially started Sunday the 8th. And in other weather-wonky news, yesterday was our 27th consecutive day of 100° temps, but we broke the stretch today with a high of only 99°. I bet, though, we'll have another run at it -

What does this mean in the short term, other than muggy days and awesome lightning shows? Well, we here at MPOW actually start a contest to see who can predict rain the best. We vote every day by noon, you get 2 points for a correct yes, 1 for a correct no, and none for an incorrect guess. Competition runs high and hallway hassling is not unheard of. It's the highlight of our summers (sad, but true!).

Random Musings du Jour

Coffee is good.

The furor continues over the hip librarian articles. (Wow.)

Mother Nature can be a real bitch sometimes.

The Searcher's art just amazes me (both his imagery and his word-wrangling.)

Rain at 4am - even accompanied by thunder and lightning - is very soothing.

I like coffee. (wait...)

The Librarians Speak Up

Bet the authors of the NYTimes and NYSun articles previously mentioned didn't anticipate the reactions...and I have to admit, neither did I! (Maybe I need more coffee.) It's been quite interesting (and illuminating) reading what other librarians are saying about these articles:

* Caveat Lector says, "Talk about what we do", not how we spend our recreational time;
* Free Range Librarian says, "To be cool is to be young and male?" (The "guybrarian" thing is really not good; based on the comments, messages and IMs I've gotten, every guy I know who's a librarian is offended by it. Not to mention all the women who've said same);
* The Cool Librarian points out that the coolest librarians she knew were the older, more technically challenged librarians she first worked with, and they're why she went on to her MLS;
* Hedgehog Librarian points out the inadequacies of the salaries quoted in the articles (amongst other things);
* Information Wants to be Free is relieved she didn't end up quoted in the article after all (be sure to read the comments, too!);
* Pop Goes the Library wants to throw these articles across the room.

Wow!

As the self-styled Maven of All Things Librarian Image (*laugh*snort*), I just want to add two more cents to my earlier postings. (1) Both articles were in the, shall we say, "fluffier" sections of the respective papers, and I didn't expect anything serious at that point; (2) Sometimes just getting us out there in front of the public in a way that isn't behind the desk is good; (3) epithets are bad; and (4) I don't expect these articles will do much to affect the overarching image we have to Joe Q. Public. On the other hand... small steps, people, small steps, and the more of them the better - maybe J.Q.P will surprise us!

Hipper Shushers?

(thanks, Kristie!) The New York Times published an article yesterday titled "A Hipper Crowd of Shushers", about the same Desk Set librarian crowd I mentioned earlier. Excellent marketing, you guys! This article's a bit deeper than the earlier one (IMHO), and this one mentions the label "guybrarian". The male librarian in the article doesn't like being called that - I'd be interested to hear from other male librarians, what do you think about that tag?

Monsoon's not here yet but it's right around the corner - hot and muggy is the plan du jour!

Rain and the Catalinas

Bring it on!


Image from the Arizona Webcam, a few buildings over from me.

Oh, to be a librarian in Brooklyn

I'd definitely want to join this group of "new-look librarians"! "Although 'hip' is not an adjective generally associated with librarians, a stack of archivists, publishers, illustrators, librarians, and other bibliophiles called the Desk Set is out to challenge their image as staid." It sounds like they're not only having a lot of fun, they're thumbing their nose at a lot of outdated imagery as well! (via LISNews)

We just hit 100°.

Do we need libraries anymore?

Hell, yes, we do!

I've been following the postings on this article (and other blog articles about it) for a while, but only realized this morning that I didn't mention it here, and I think it deserves a mention because too many people (and sadly, some of them are in charge of library funding issues) think that the Internet is the death knell for libraries.

Written by Marc Fisher on June 22nd, this article in the Washington Post poses the title question, and asks, "Have you seen your use of libraries drop off since the computer became standard equipment at home and at work, and what would you want from libraries in the future?" Reading the answers has really cheered me up, since reading the article is a bit of a downer (Mr. Fisher seems to think the answer to his question is "No") - my favorite response has been that of "G", who replied "Are you insane? Yes, there's data on the internet, but how much of it can you trust? You can't beat a library!" Yes, G, yes!

Drupal and Themes

So, I'm now running Drupal 5.1; I started this project at 4.6, and I have to say, WOW. I'm very pleased with the improvements, especially relating to the administrative interface. It's a lot easier - either that or I've finally learned all the steps! - to install and enable modules. I know there are more modules to be installed but I have TinyMCE and IMCE reinstalled, and it was easy. I can only hope the rest of this voyage of discovery goes as well!

I've been looking for two themes I can use for my templates - one for the front page, and one for the rest of the site - so I've spent a lot of time browsing the Drupal Themes directories. My consultant dude said it's much easier to tweak an existing theme to what I want than to try and write it from scratch, which is what I was trying to do. (It seems I have a tendency to start at the hard end of a task, sigh.) I think I've found two that will work, and my goal for today is to get the front page module installed, and both these themes, and then figure out what to do next.

Thunder and lightning and roaring wind last night, but no rain... at least not at my house. Sigh. It's 97° now with a 40% chance of rain - fingers are crossed!

Shelf Check

So, there appears to be a new library comic in town (thanks, Stephen!) - Shelf Check. There are only 14 comics right now but they're worth checking out. (#9 made me laugh out loud!) Here's hoping creator Emily Lloyd (aka Poesygalore) starts sharing them a bit more often with us!

Currently a nice, even 100°.

The monsoon is coming! The monsoon is coming!

Break out the raincoats, the monsoon is coming!

OK, maybe not so much. But for the first time in AGES there's a teeny tiny chance for precipitation forecasted for the next week. I know the NWS is just using climatology and has no real idea what might happen, but hey, based on years of what happened on the next few days we might actually get a drop or two of rain soon. Can't come soon enough... my fingers are crossed for a nice, messy, fill-up-the-rivers season this year! Plus, the temps are coming down - it's strange to live somewhere where you get excited that the temps are dropping down to 100°...

Holy Cow, Part 2

So, American Libraries also wrote me up in the June 20th issue of AL Direct, in the Actions & Answers section. Wow! Bummer that I can't subscribe to it directly, not being a member of ALA, but I'm going to start reading the web page regularly - there's good stuff in here!

Currently 103° and very sunny.

Bombshell Librarians

The emails with new suggestions and info just keep coming! Yay!

Kathe has been kind enough to re-introduce me (thanks!) to Helen Marsh Shandy, the "blonde bombshell of the ALA". She and her husband Peter are the stars of a mystery series by Charlotte MacLeod; I'll be loading yet another book on the request pile at my local library and will be starting with Rest You Merry, the first in the series.

Romantic Librarians

Auburn dropped me a line (thanks!) about another book featuring librarians that I'd missed in my talk: Josephine Carr's The Dewey Decimal System of Love. The reviews I've read make it sound like one of those perky-yet-depressing (IMHO) "she was celibate for years but then found her true love and nothing would keep them apart" kind of books, but Booklist said "much of the pleasure in this wonderfully amusing novel comes from Carr's realistic depiction of the everyday pleasures and occasional downsides to working in a library." I may have to look for it at my own library and give it a read - it is summer, after all!

(Currently 99°.)

Librarians and Time Travel

Ramona dropped me an email (thanks!) to tell me about another book featuring a librarian: The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffeneggar. (Unbelievably, I couldn't find this book at LibraryThing thanks for the correction, Tim!) Anyway, this tells the story of Henry De Tamble, "a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in Chicago", who finds himself unstuck in time. It's a love story, since Henry meets his soul mate on one of his journeys, and the tale tells of their times together at various spots along their disconnected timelines. (Apparently there's a movie in pre-production, as well, with Eric Bana tapped to play Henry.) I'll be checking this out from my local library!

More Librarians in Comics

Thanks to August for telling me about another librarian-related comic: the Jack of Fables. But it seems the librarian's the bad guy this time around; August says, "In it, the character Jack of Tales is captured by a nefarious Mr. Revise and his team of Librarians and taken to the Golden Boughs Retirement Village. It seems Mr. Revise wants to 'retire' fables so that they will fade from popular consciousness and so lose their magic." It's one I'm off to investigate!

(Currently 96°.)

One for the Solar Folks

OK, so my day job is with a solar observatory, and my educational background is in astronomy; and (thanks to a Twitterfriend) I've recently discovered Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog. Great stuff! A recent posting both made me laugh and shake my head... sheesh, what were these people thinking? Go forth and check out "Is the Sun from another galaxy?", enjoy the illustrations (I've actually printed out the Evil Sun sketch), and bask in the well-written smackdown. (OK, well, I basked in it. Love it when folks can smack a stupid idea down without being our sounding stupid themselves.) And - get this - Phil posts again today with a followup about the attention he's been getting, and a correction to something in his original post. Great stuff!

Almost - but not quite - 106°.

Holy Cow!

The June SLA Connections put my talk down as the first link in the "Outside the Box" topic area! w00t! (This would explain the sudden increase in my mailbox...)

103° and there are clouds over the mountains! (The webcam will probably change, but at 2pm there were clouds, dang it!)

Weather Wonkiness

So, it was 83° when I woke up, and 92° when I got to work. The monsoon moisture is starting to flirt with us, but not enough to really kick off the monsoon season (dewpoint right now is only 47°) - although we're seriously considering starting our Monsoon Madness game next week (average start date is July 3rd). The forecast is all hot, all the time, with no rain in sight...


This week is Thunderstorm Safety Awareness week - not a bad idea to plan ahead, and here's hoping we get a truly real monsoon season this year!

Waiting on the Press Release

(A dip into my secret life of archaeology fascination!) Archaeologists think they've found Hatshepsut's mummy. She was a truly fascinating pharaoh, and Dr. Zahi Hawass discusses the long search for her tomb at his web site. I can't wait to hear what he announces at the press conference today in Cairo. (More about Hatshepsut at Wikipedia.)

Update on the 28th: Yep, it's her!

Absolutely Still Vital

USA Today has a short article titled "Librarians: We're still vital in the digital age", about librarians attending ALA volunteering in the area over the course of the conference - very cool, you librarians, you rock! - and working towards dispersing the idea that we're unnecessary in this digital age. At the time I read the article, there were two comments, both of them rather depressing - and exactly why we need to make sure folks know that just because "it's all on the Internet" doesn't mean you don't need libraries, or librarians!


Found via Jill's twitter about this - she's quoted!

Save Net Radio

Today is net radio's Day of Silence, and boy, is it loud. Royalty rates for webcasters have been tripled; not only that, but tripled and made retroactive for 18 months, effective July 15th! What does this mean for you? It means the best music online will effectively be stopped - Pandora, Shoutcast, EpiphanyRadio, basically any streaming radio station not backed by the big bucks of the RIAA. I don't know about you, but I love my net radio stations - considering the dearth of decent non-mainstream radio where I live - and life would be a whole lot blander without those choices.

Contact your Congressperson (I did) and ask them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act (S. 1353 and H.R. 2060, already introduced). Please. We as librarians are supposed to stand for freedom of speech, and freedom of choice - that should extend to music as well as to books and web sites.

Reviews of The Hollywood Librarian

Folks are starting to post about the premiere of The Hollywood Librarian at ALA last week; not having been able to go myself, I'm quite appreciative of these posts!

* The Hollywood Librarian: Nice Idea, Jumbled Execution, Dubious Marketing Plan over at the LJ Insider
* The Hollywood Librarian World Premiere at the PLA blog
* The Modern Librarian: A Role Worth Checking Out at the Washington Journal
* Hollywood Librarian: World Premier at Tinfoil+Raccoon

There are also starting to be a lot of photos of the event posted over at Flickr.

Updated to add Free Range Librarian's Constructive Suggestions, as well.

Beehives and Buns, or, Comics du Jour

The May 2007 issue of American Libraries (thanks, Mom!) has an opinion page titled "How the World Sees Us" with a panel from a WayLay comic, that states, "And I never should have drawn a librarian with a beehive or a bun, although I understand they might wear sensible shoes." Of course, I had to go looking for the original sources... the page, which includes a bunch of quotes about libraries and librarians, isn't on the AL website (at least, not for us non-members) but if you access it via a database, it's page 38.

So, hopefully you're familiar with Carol Lay's "WayLay" comics; it also helps to be familiar with the whole "Higher Power of Lucky" thing that went embarrassingly kablam a few months ago to get this. She wrote a comic, "The Word", about the whole thing, and then a second comic to apologize to librarians, called "A-Mends". (The comics don't seem to appear on her site, but they appear freely on the Salon site.) While I agree that not all librarians are like that, I hope she didn't get any rude messages about it...

Fun for Friday

(This has absolutely nothing to do with librarians!) A friend forwarded this to me; considering that (in my mis-spent youth) I've been in clubs with folks who dance a lot like some of his segments I had to laugh! Check out the Evolution of Dance over on YouTube.

It's a toasty 106° today.

Advantages to Dating Librarians

Today's xkcd cracks me up! (I must admit to my own twitches.)

Twit, twit, twittering along

ok, so I've taken the plunge into a social networking tool that most of you have probably heard about, Twitter. I've been hearing so much about it for the last several months that I finally decided to try it out... so my TwitterID is desertlibrarian. I've invited the one person I actually personally know on Twitter to be my friend, I just hope I did it the right way - I haven't found anything that allows you to "Add other Twitter friends", only an invite to join by email. Maybe Chris can help me with that... if he wants to be my friend :-D Come be my Twitterfriend! (I did add a Twitter app to my Facebook account... quite addictive... danger, Will Robinson, danger!)

All this is because I don't want to tackle what to do with a bunch of drawings that have already been assigned numbers, and exist, but because our subsystem assemblies have just been rearranged, those numbers are no longer correct *sigh* it's a big mess, and one that the folks who muck about with the WBS don't think about - they just go "Sure, make this change!" and then I have to actually fix all the various places that refer to it. (Arrgh. OK, I'm done whining for now.)

We're up to 98° now.

Morning Musings

At this point in my life there are few things greater than a big, enthusiastic and somewhat slobbery smooch from my kid, followed by "I love you Mommy!" as he runs off to his school class. One of the few things greater is his holler of "Mommy!" and a charge from across the room for a huge hug when I go pick him up.... aah.

Today is brought to you by the letters CMS and the number 3, as in third time's a charm and I'm back on the Drupal project. I've had an unfortunate encounter with SELinux and now know more about touch autorelabel than I ever did before...although I still don't know what happened to set it off (well, I do know what happened, the file system renamed httpd with a _t suffix, which is bad. What I don't know is why it renamed it.) Today I hope to get the Drupal service back up and delivering base data, then I'm off to find a theme that's close to what I want the site to look like. (This is my homework from my Drupal consultant, after getting httpd back running again!)

Currently only 86° but the heat advisory warning stays in place. I actually find myself anxious for the monsoon to start, even though I know we'll all be miserable in the humidity. Give us some rain, Mother Nature! (Please?)

Marumushi Newsmap

Now, this is just cool; the Newsmap is "an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator". It's customizable - so if you aren't interested in, say, entertainment or sports news, you can deselect them - and you can choose countries as well. Interesting to see how different stories have different interest/importance levels in different places. (found via the SLA-IT Blog)

Today: Sunny and 102° with a heat advisory in effect for tomorrow. (I'm glad I don't live in Phoenix, where there's an extreme heat advisory in effect!)

One for the Guys

Wow. Pity Guy Robinson Robertson (my apologies; corrected to proper last name!) ... or give him a really, really big stapler. In this month's Feliciter (from the Canadian Library Association) he writes a feature article titled "Keeping Up Appearances: Looking Like a Librarian in an Age of Paranoia." (If you can't get at it via a CLA login, try your library's Ebsco database.) In it, he describes the denial of his work visa by a customs official who determined that Guy didn't look like a librarian, so must have been lying about his reasons for entering the USA...

I hope he meets with more success in future attempts. This kind of thing is just... well... embarrassing. Thanks to Laurel for sending me the article!

(Sunny and hot. Yes, again.)

It's a Start

After a couple of months of feeling like we were the purple pony in the room, a couple of folks from the vendor for our data management system made a site visit today. I have to say, I'm encouraged, and once again feel a small flicker of hope that we can get this fixed and working again. It wasn't wine and roses, but I'd say it was at least beer and daisies :-D and a very good start. Fingers crossed!

So far today: sunny and 103°. Our AC at work is a bit overenthusiastic and I had to actually go outside twice today to warm up... one thing about 103°, you warm up pretty quickly!

Haiku

Cicadas are loud;
One hundred and two degrees
Finally, summer.

Old & Cranky

Well, it's been ten days since the fantabulous Gold Digger's Ball at SLA in Denver, and my knees are still giving me fits. I guess it might maybe kinda sorta be time to admit that no matter how much fun I have, and how much I adore dancing, it's perhaps time to not dance quite so long, or so enthusiastically. Sob...

104° yesterday. Currently only 89°, but supposed to hit 106° today. Thank god for low humidity. Wonder when the monsoon season is going to start? Our dewpoints are still way below the criteria (54°) ...

Spectacles Talk Now Online

The web version of my SLA Conference Session "Spectacles: How Pop Culture Views Librarians" is now online over at "You don't look like a librarian!" (Audio file will be linked in as soon as I get it from SLA.) Thanks again to everyone who came - without you, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun!

Back at Work

First day back in the office, the piles aren't too high, thank heavens... today we have almost Denver-like weather, it's grey and cool (77°) and cloudy, and it might even rain today! (Fingers crossed, we could sure use it.)

The web version of the talk is done, I just have to link in a few more images and then verify everything; it'll be posted today. And, hey, Dick Kaser wrote a brief blurb about the talk over at the Infotoday Blog - thanks very much, Dick! (Thanks to Chris Z for letting me know; catching up on blogs isn't going to happen for a few days yet!)

SLA: Day 4

The final day of the conference came very, very early for those of us who'd closed out the Gold Digger's Ball on Tuesday night... groan! But we were perked up pretty quickly by an amusing (but, sadly, generic) talk by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. He's a funny speaker - vocal disorder notwithstanding - I just wish he'd tailored it a bit to his audience. With all the Dilbert cartoons featuring librarians, he didn't use a single one...

Afterwards I attended the Astronomy Roundtable I (but missed II, so I hope someone posts a summary someplace!). Later in the evening I went on the tour of the historic Chamberlin Observatory (photos coming soon!). What an amazing opportunity this was - I work mostly with new telescopes, and the chance to see an antique still in use (albeit for public viewing only) was just cool. In addition to a brief history of Chamberlin, we were given the opportunity to view Saturn through the telescope. Squee!

Then it was time to stagger back to the hotel room, finish packing, and try and get some sleep.

SLA Day 3: After PM

After recovering a bit from the Spectacles session, I met with the PAM Book Discussion Group at the Colorado History Museum. As one of the folks who didn't actually finish the book, I didn't have a lot to share, but what I did hear from others makes me determined to finish it!

Then it was back to the Hyatt for the IT/PAM Gold Digger's Ball (my photos here and here). What a blast!

Curse of the Hotel Wifi

Yes, the curse continues to follow me, sigh - now that I'm back in the land of solid Internet access I'll have several more blog postings and pictures coming today, to catch up on the latter bit of the conference. Stay tuned!

SLA Day 3: PM

"Spectacles: How Pop Culture Views Librarians" is now over, deep breath! The talk with all the links will be on the web site by Monday.

To the 120+ people who came and shared some time with me, THANK YOU! You were a great audience and I'm glad I was able to provide a break from the conference seriousness. I will be checking into the information that some you came up to share with me afterwards; expect to see future blog postings on them!

To the folks who requested "more analysis" and "more detailed results", I would like to invite you to check out my earlier talks, "You don't look like a librarian!" and "Where's the librarian?"; both of them deal with survey results and data analysis.

And for all of you who've made my head swell with your very nice remarks (Fun! Excellent! Well done!) - Thank you!

Time to go decompress....

SLA Day Three: AM

Well, I just finished up with the annual Business Meeting, which is always a good way to find out what's going on with the division at large. Our chair surprised some of us with thank-you certificates and pieces of fossilized dinosaur bone - very cool!

While there are events going on between now and Spectacles, I'm not going to go to any of them - I'm going to go back to my hotel and run through the talk a couple more times, do some final tweaking, etc. I'm meeting my moderator at 2pm to walk through the introduction and make sure the tech support for the projector is in place, and then it'll be TIME.

Then I can decompress afterwards - woo hoo! Drinks of some type with Stephen Abram (probably coffee), then the book discussion group, followed by the Gold Digger's Ball (for which I am now a greeter!)

(Gonna be 103° back home today, but only 81° here in Denver. I love the heat, but it's lovely here!)

SLA: Day Two

After the synergy session today, I spent some time in the exhibit hall and then headed to the PAMwide Roundtable, which I was moderating. I won't post much (it was great, ha ha!) but I did get a great photo of the speakers. Then I was faced with two conflicting sessions: one by Roy Tennant, and one from Google. I started out in one and ended up in the other, then I ran back to the hotel to drop off my out-of-power laptop (I'd forgotten my power cord) and grab some paper.

Back to the conference center for the Technical Support roundtable, which was very valuable and I deeply hope will be on the schedule next year in some form.

Now I'm off for dinner with the Hawaiian Librarians, then plan to split my evening between the PAM Open House and the SciFi Open House... unless I decide to come back to the hotel room and obsessively rehearse my talk one more time...

SLA: Synergy Session

I took much more detailed notes, but I just posted a summary of the opening general synergy session on PAMblog. Now I'm off to try and talk to Clifford Lynch about how we at MPOW utilize the concept of virtual organizations, one topic he brought up and said we need to be working towards. He said he'd welcome examples, so I'm off to give him one before the PAMwide RT starts!

SLA Day One: Sunday

I'm having problems getting access in my hotel, so posts may appear the day after from the lovely Blogger's Lounge that SLA has so kindly provided...

Sunday was taken up with the Newcomer's Lunch (nicely attended in the beautiful historic Brown Palace Hotel), followed by the opening of the exhibits and the PAM board meeting (many board-y things were discussed). The opening keynote session by Al Gore was quite cool - who knew he was so darned funny? And he did a very good job of talking to his audience - no canned speech here, but a speech (primarily politics and the climate crisis, which we were expecting) sprinkled throughout with references to libraries, librarians and our importance in the coming information economy. (Lots of applause there!) I was very impressed with his speech, as were many others (given the many effusive postings on the SLA blog). The evening ended (for me, at least) with the Early-Bird Dinner at the Wynkoop Brewing Company. Tasty wheat beer!

Denver, Day One

So, I'm in Denver now...

After an unfortunate misunderstanding in the TIA airport I missed my scheduled flight; thankfully there was another one to Denver that they were able to get me on. Arrived OK, but too late for the Denver City Tour I'd signed up for with SLA - ah well.

I'm staying at the completely cool and very funky Curtis Hotel on the Sci-Fi floor - I highly recommend this place to anyone who needs to stay downtown! I ventured forth to the 16th Street Mall, randomly turned left, and started walking - and lo and behold, the Denver institution of the Tattered Cover bookstore appeared before me! So I, of course, had to spend some time browsing. They recommended Dixon's for dinner, and I had a very tasty steak there. Then I walked back along the very bustling mall, stopped in to say hi to Kathleen and Terese, and then crashed back at the Curtis.

An unfortunate start to the day, but a very satisfying one.

I'll actually write about today's events later - no weather wonkiness this week!

Old Fashioned Words

Scott Adams - who we will be hearing give the closing keynote at SLA on Wednesday - apparently thinks "library" is an old-fashioned word, and the days of libraries are coming to an end. Sigh.

Can't do much more with the talk or for the session I'm moderating now, other than show up and do it. Woot!

It's sunny and hot. Yep, that about sums up the weather report for the next three months.

No, no, no, no, NO.

OK: Nothing to do with librarianship per se, only tangentially as it (hopefully does not) affects new librarians coming into the fold. Please, tell me not all twentysomethings think like this; it just seems wrong to me. "In Praise of the Helicopter Parent" discusses parents being involved in millenials' job searches... to quote, "These parents feel they have the right to call their child’s company to discuss benefits and relocation packages and even negotiate salary. I think this is great."

*sigh*

OK, I'm not an HR person, not in a position to hire someone in any way - and I acknowledge that "who you know" (including your parents) is a very accepted way to get your foot in the door someplace - but if the parent of someone I was interviewing called me to discuss benefits and negotiate salaries, that person would immediately be off my list. And much as I love my parents, if one of them were to call someplace I was interviewing I would pass out from embarrassment, I think. Maybe I need to do some more research on this whole "helicopter parent" thing because I always thought one of the main jobs of being a parent is to prepare your child to go out in the world and stand on their own two feet. Sheesh!

OK. Enough ranting, back to tweaking the talk. (Shameless self promotion! Come hear my talk at SLA on Tuesday at 2:30, CC 704!) I'm enjoying the lovely 85° weather, thankful I have a window that opens!

Random Musings on Comics

* Questionable Content (home of the "Blinded Me with Library Science" Tshirt) does it again, asking "Have you ever seen a gaggle of drunken librarians?" The answer made me laugh, especially since I'm wearing my "Don't make me use my Librarian voice" Tshirt today (thanks, Mom!)

* Support your local comic book store! I've been unable to find Rex Libris locally so have been ordering it online, but these folks not only ordered the latest issue for me, they've set me up with a continuing subscription - for free - where they'll order it and pay for shipping, then call me when it's in. Awesome!

This constant state of single-digit humidity is wreaking havoc with my sinuses. It'll be cooler - and moister! - in Denver next week (mental note: pack a jacket).

Oops, er, great!

So, apparently there is someone other than my mom (hi, Mom!) checking out my web site You Don't Look Like a Librarian - because this weekend I exceeded my traffic quota for the site! (Should have checked my home email address yesterday....) So, um, er, it's unavailable right now. Should be back up within the next 24 hours with a nice, improved, doubled quota. I send thanks to the Librarian in Black because I think the traffic spike is due to her mentioning it on her blog. (And this is serious, Sarah, thanks for mentioning me!)

Random Musings du Jour

First off, in this post-Memorial Day posting, I'd like to say that I'm honored to come from a line of military members. If things had been different in the summer of 1988, I'd have most likely made the third generation in the Air Force. I have many friends in both the Army and the Air Force, and my thoughts are often with them, especially those who are in theater.

OK. Today's Random Musings are:

* A nicely-written ode to a place I spent some time: "Hilo: Hawaii's Forgotten City" (thanks, Liz!)

* This is just too darned cool: Google Launches Streetside View! I can only assume Tucson is way down the list, but it's pretty nifty as it is. I just got a look at the Denver Convention Center, where I'll be next week!

* An amusing mashup if you like Monty Python and Star Wars: King Arthur Vs. Darth Vader.

* OK, this one really is about librarians! Leonid Mamchenkov has his librarian stereotype shaken up. (Good!)

95° today but it doesn't seem that warm. Maybe it's the whole 9%Rh!

Danger, Will Robinson

OK, I have to admit it, I'm a fan of Google. It's not the only search engine I use, but I do use it (via iGoogle), and I make heavy use of GMail, alerts, Google Calendar, and Google Groups (and am seriously contemplating dipping my toes into GSpace for storage). But this article (found via Lifehacker) worries me... a lot.

"Google’s goal: to organise your daily life", an article over at Financial Times, quotes Eric Schmidt as saying " 'The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ '" I'm not sure I want Google to be able to answer that question for me...

Does this make me hypocritical?

It's another lovely moderate day, 90° and sunny... I love having office windows I can open!

YADU

That'd be "Yet Another Danged Upgrade". I've spent the last two days wrestling with a recalcitrant PC, reformatting it and reinstalling Windows and Office. (Good gravy, there's a ton of updates to do when you do that!) After much swearing and growling, it finally dawned on me that the CD/DVD drive was dying... once I replaced that things at least went a bit faster! Feel a bit abashed that it took me a day to figure it out - sigh.

I have to say, HP does a very nice job on the internal arrangements of their workstations. Easiest side panel to remove I've dealt with lately, and all the bays have snap handles for their slots (no screws or wrestling with rails, just pull a nice bright green tab and pop, it's out - or pop, it's back in!) There's also enough space to actually get a hand in to fasten connectors, which is always nice. (Can't say that about my old Vaio desktop, I don't think you could fit a cat in there if you tried.)

In between swearing, rebooting and feeding disks, I've been working on my talk for SLA. Time for more shameless self-promotion! Please come participate in my talk on Tuesday the 5th, 2:30pm, Conference Center 704... yes, I won't just be talking at you, but with you, so come join the fun!

A Good Monday

Well. This morning I was finally able to get the Drupal backup module installed and working; nice module package, I have to say, although if you follow the instructions in the install file, it doesn't work! (ARRGH. Thanks for the straight info, Cary.) And the upgrade to CentOS 5 has gone extremely well - although I ended up not exactly doing an upgrade, but doing a reinstallation (thanks, Mike, for the info) so that I could keep the data on one partition untouched (kind of crucial if you don't want to lose all your stuff). Would be interested to try an upgrade in the future to see if it gives the option to leave one partition alone, but I just wasn't interested in trying that path today, just in case.

Final package updates are installing now, and I'm feelin' pretty pleased!

It's been a lovely day weather-wise, too - our high has only been 90° and there's been a light breeze all afternoon. Aaahhh....

Upgrade Hell... again

Yep, I'm back struggling with upgrades, this time on the web dev platform. I want to upgrade to CentOS 5, as a test for our main server, but before doing that I want to be sure to get a backup of what I've been able to set up so far in Drupal. But I can get neither the command-line mysql backup nor the within-Drupal backup module to work... ARRGH.

It's now officially too late on a Friday afternoon to spend any more time beating my head against this. (Yeah, it'll be SO much better on a Monday morning....)

Looks like we're only going to get up to 96° or so today... with a whopping 7% Rh! (Yeah, yeah, "dry heat", blah, blah...)

Internet Librarian, Here I Come!

So, Information Today accepted my speaker proposal for Internet Librarian! I'll be speaking on a panel regarding Content Management Systems on Wednesday, October 31st. Woo hoo!

Casanova was a Librarian

A new book on the image of librarians has just been published! By Kathleen Low, "Casanova was a Librarian" "provides a peek at the lighthearted, humorous, sexy and intriguing side of librarians. In addition to information about famous librarians, you’ll learn about librarians in politics, porn, poetry, song, movies, and the comics. Librarian humor, librarian recreation and health, librarian underwear, outerwear and other merchandise designed just for librarians are just a sample of the information you’ll find in this book." Sounds right up my alley - I've already ordered my copy!

More Rex!

Rex Libris #8 is now available; continue the adventures of the World's Most Kick-Butt Librarian (apologies to Andrew, the original Butt-Kicking Librarian) in this "all-action-all-the-time extravaganza"! I found Rex's home page as well, and I really encourage all librarians to read about the Ordo Bibliotheca :-D

As well, I've just learned that Warner Brothers has optioned Rex for the big screen!

Conference Plug: I'll be talking about Rex (and a whole lotta other librarian pop culture stuff!) on Tuesday, June 5th starting at 2:30 pm. I hope you'll join me!

Feh... it's only 94°. Guess our heat wave is over... for now!

Trading Images

Laura Wilkerson wrote a letter to Library Journal that was excerpted in the April 1st issue's Feedback. Her husband worked for the Indiana University in the library, and was told by his supervisor that he'd never get promoted as long as he had long hair and dressed the way he did (Dockers & button-downs, surely not at the forefront of challenging attire). It's a depressing story, especially in how it ends.

As Laura said, "Many who hold these stereotypes are librarians in positions of power. Nothing will change until they do." Are you holding any hidden issues about image?

30% chance of rain today... please!

The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice

He's back... again! Noah Wyle is reprising his role once more as Flynn Carsen, The Librarian, in "The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice", aka "Librarian 3". (Nothing on TNT's site yet.) It's due to start filming in September of this year, in New Orleans. Gleaned from various sources and rumor-mills, it seems this time around Flynn is up against a group of baddies searching for an artifact that could resurrect Vlad Dracul (yep, it's a vampire story!). I'm sure the zany librarian fun will continue -

90° and, unsurprisingly, sunny.

Happy Birthday, Blog!

Wow! A year and a week ago I started this blog... hard to believe it's been a year already! Thank you, dear readers, for letting me share my musings on image, systems librarianship, and desert weather with you! (Speaking of which, it's up to 87° now.)

Ice Break: Update

"At 1:44 PM MST on May 11, 2007, Tucson International Airport hit the century mark for the first time in 2007." That just kicked off our first triple-digit weekend; we hit 103° Saturday, but were back down to 100° Sunday. Hello, summer!

The Anti-Stereotype Sterotype

Found via an email discussion, "The Anti-Stereotype Stereotype" over at Blisspix is an interesting post from 2003 that is probably just as valid today. Fiona makes some good points, and ones I must admit I'm guilty of violating sometimes... It is about the values, skills and abilities of librarians, regardless of what we look like or what we do in our spare time - but I believe strongly that our visual impression also has an impact on our patrons.

I hate to say it - and it's why I keep this site going - but the trend continues that when a student walks up to a reference desk to ask about something related to the computer (even if it's just for help with Google), chances are they're going to approach the more "hip" of the librarians behind the desk, regardless of skill set. I see it in my campus library, I see it when I'm in my public library after work, and family and friends report it happening in their libraries.

I'm absolutely not saying my mom (the sysadmin for her library - hi, Mom!) should run out, dye her hair purple, and get a nose stud so the students will talk to her more. But I am saying I still see the stereotypical effects out there. I think if we swing too far the other way - towards the anti-stereotype stereotype - we'll be in exactly the same situation. But if we can keep convincing people that we do know what we're talking about, whether we've got a grey bun or a green mohawk, then we'll be on the right track.

I think we're on that track, and going in the right direction. Let's keep it up.

Institute for Librarian Evolution

Found via one of those random link wanders, the Hedy Siroty Institute for Librarian Evolution is a fun look at the change in the outlook, adaptation and habitats of librarians over time. (Be sure to check out all the tab options, as several have multiple subsets.) Fun!

Currently 93°; today's fun desert weather fact is that at midnight, it was 82°!

lolbrarians

Ha! Boy, this one's taken off like a shot... the LiveJournal lolbrarian group. (Slightly NSFW in the title.) Like the always-amusing (to me, at least) lolcat meme, or the highly-creative error messages some web sites provide (i.e. Twitter and Bloglines), only this one is even more inspiring. Sooner or later (maybe sooner!) I'm-a'gonna do one of my own.... heh.

Updated about 5 minutes later: OK, so I did one!



Feh... it's only 95°.

Ice Break on the Rillito

Well, it's that time of year again - the forecast is for our first 100° day tomorrow, and it's supposed to be 100°+ all weekend long. Wonder when we'll actually break 100?

Ah, summer's here!

"The Hollywood Librarian" Trailer

The trailer for the much-anticipated "The Hollywood Librarian: Librarians in Cinema and Society" is now available for viewing! The World Premiere of the movie will be at ALA in June.



Read more about the Hollywood Librarian project!

Updated to actually include the link for those reading this in a feed... sorry 'bout that!

What kind of information user are you?

The folks over at Pew Internet Life have posted a quiz that allows you to "place yourself in one of the categories in the Pew Internet Project's Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users." I, myself, come up as an "Omnivore" (thought I'd be a "Connector", instead!). Where do you fall in these categories? (found via Free Range Librarian)

Overcast and, a few minutes ago, it was gently raining! Yay!

Super Librarian vs. The Virus!

"When villainy threatens readers, Super Librarian springs into action." Thus says the new comic book from the always-amazing New Jersey State Library, released May 5th (Free Comic Book Day). Wish I could get my hands on one!

It's a (very) cool, beautifully sunny 71° this morning.

Oh, I WANT one....

(Yes, the post title is a recurring theme.)

Star Wars Flash Drives. Yes! (I can't decide between Chewie and R2D2.) I can only imagine that owning one of these would up my Geek Score. found via Folderol

Web Design Survey

"People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession." Want more data? Then contribute some data! A List Apart's first annual Web Design Survey is now available - go take it!

I want... to be a... librarian...

OK, late off the block but I just have to share this: Librarian, by HauntedLove. Every librarian stereotype, rolled up into one cheezy-yet-catchy song! The ending made me laugh out loud...

My favorite line is: "Don't you find me appealing, in a nerdy sort of way?" Ha!!

It's a lovely, sunny 86°. Aahhh...

Happy Birthday, LoC!

Today is the Library of Congress' 207th birthday. Many happy returns!

It's only gotten up to 75°. I'm still cold.

Systems Librarians are people too!

Yes, indeedy we are - people too, and librarians too! Came across this LiveJournal posting by FabGrrl (and followon comments), "Systems Librarians are people too!" and had to share. However, I have to say that I don't have it anywhere near that badly; I guess partly because I've worked with this team for years, so they know what I do and what I'm not likely to do, and partly because I'm a solo librarian and don't have to explain (or justify) to an "old guard". Thank heavens!

I love being a systems librarian and, having done the more traditional librarian route for a couple of years, I'd choose systems librarian again as a career path in a heartbeat!

Sunny and 70°; just a bit on the cool side, but nice.

Catching Up, Part 1

Thanks for the well-wishes, folks! The battle continues but I think I'm starting to win it...

I'm still catching up on things, but here's the first round of items that caught my eye:

* Computers in Libraries was, apparently, a blast - once again I'm bummed to have missed it. Check out the blog posts about it via Technorati.

* This is just cool: "Space Tethers: Slinging Objects in Orbit?"

* Somehow, I think I already knew this: Daily Show viewers are more informed than Fox News viewers. Check out the Pew Research Center's report.

* The First InfoTubey Awards happened April 17th! Check out the winners!

* Another video contest, this time for "Library Love" - from Thomson Gale's librareo project.

It's a sunny 73° and I'm heading home for the rest of the day.

Not dead yet...

...just flirting with the idea. Did you know adults can get tonsillitis? I started out last weekend with pinkeye, was diagnosed with the tonsillitis Monday, and now have an ear infection too. Needless to say, not a lot of librarianship is getting done this week. Mostly it's just whimpering.

Am sure I'll have lots to post about after I get caught up sometime next week. Until then.

The Library Hotel

Now, that's just plain nifty. Check out The Library Hotel in New York City - over 6,000 books arranged, by floor and room, according to the DDC. If I ever got to stay there, I would of course have to request Room 500.006 (Astronomy)! Read a Washington Post article about the hotel at "Your Room is Booked".

found via LISNews.org

When Servers Die

When servers die, especially unexpectedly, the server caretakers suddenly have pressure, panic, and lots of "That's not acceptable" flying around. Of course, the server that went belly-up was the one with the most amount of data on it... And learning that the controllers and power supplies for the server are so old that they aren't made anymore, well, that was fun too.

This is why regular backups are important, people. Even if it's "old stuff" that you may think no one wants anymore, back it up. Because as soon as it's unavailable, you'll find out just how many people are looking at it. Much scrambling has been done to get the data on a different server and back accessible to the public again; we seem to be in decent shape now, but there's still a lot of work to be done. At least folks are getting web sites again instead of "Site not found"! Thank heavens terabyte storage is coming down in price. We're gonna need some more on the new system.

But, hey! It's not an EDMS crisis (everyone actually seems happy right now, which makes me nervous). Nice to have something different to stress about for a while. (OK, not so much.)

It's a gorgeous, sunny 80° outside, with a light breeze. Aaah, springtime in the desert!

Oh, I WANT one....

Check out Perceptive Pixel's new multi-input touchscreen technology for HCI* (not much at the website yet but I'm assuming that's going to change). ZOMG!! I am in such drooling technolust for this thing... Read more about Jeff Han and his vision for the future over at FastCompany. This is not your father's touchscreen interface...

*Human-Computer Interaction

Ah, Mondays...

And it's only just noon!

Got in this morning to a zillion error messages from the RAID arrays on our major data archive machine, which also happens to host some of our web sites. It seems the SCSI controller is failing... what joy. The RAIDs are still rebuilding... guess migrating those last few web sites to the other server has just moved up on my priorities list.

All the staff, in both locations, is now (as of two hours ago) back working with our data in the new flat shared network drive format. We'll see how that goes this week. I'm going to scrub the server of every vestige of the old EDMS product, right down to the registry, and then do a fresh, new installation with the latest service pack, then start to rebuild the vault with the data in the flat structure. We'll see if that helps with some of our past problems. And we just had a lovely hysteria moment (at least I did) - one of the assemblies was opened out of the flat structure on a machine that's had the old EDMS completely wiped from it - and it gave *exactly the same errors*. Ha! (Whimper...)

In the meantime, as if this wasn't enough for a Monday, the big color printer has decided to stop talking to anybody...

At least the weather is beautiful - 78° and sunny, with a light breeze. Aahh...

Rex Libris: Movie Star!

Yes, it's true - Warner Bros. Pictures is making a movie about Rex! Too fun - I'll be keeping an eye on this project, that's for sure. Wonder if it'll be live-action or animated? (My bet is on animated.) Get the Rex Libris comics, action statue and Tshirt from SLG Publishing.

It's a cool, overcast 83° and I'm about to start a long weekend! Happy Easter, everyone.

At last, we haff returned

So. At long last, my staff is back in our data files... via a shared network drive instead of our EDMS software. It only took two weeks... arrgh! We had a small venting opportunity this afternoon with playground balls dressed up in the logo of the product, a pickax, and some knives. (Really.) It was surprisingly satisfying.

Maybe now I can get back on board with the CMS investigation....

hello, second day of 90° temps!

Learning From Amelia

Yes, it's another story about a tattooed librarian, a topic near and dear to my heart! Over at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Laurel Walker writes, "Interested in tattoos? You can learn a lot from Amelia." I wish I'd been able to attend Amelia's talk, as the history of women and tattoos isn't that far behind tattooed librarians as a fascination of mine.

85° and sunny. I suspect repetition is on the way.

System Rebuilds R Fun

Or, not... At least this one is going well. New drives are in, and the RAID array is 50% rebuilt. We should be back accessing our data files by Wednesday, I hope! After that, a break, and then after that, continued work with the vendor to fix our EDMS. Either that, or I start investigating a new product for us to use... whee.

ObGeekRef: A Brief History of Programming Languages. I had no clue C++ has been around since 1983. Article is from 1995; how many more entries would it have now?

Spring is over; summer is ascendent. It's 90° and sunny, and that's pretty much the forecast for the rest of the week. Time to break out the shorts!

Random Musings du Jour

* It takes for-freakin'-ever to copy 27GB (give or take a couple of gigs) of data on a USB1.1 connection.

* I have TWBB (The World's Best Boss). He told me this morning that, after the current going-on-four-weeks crisis is over (hopefully next week), he wants me to TAKE A BREAK from wrestling with this product. Just walk away for a while, and work on some of my other yummy-yet-postponed projects (like my CMS project, which I miss and has been put on hold for this current crisis). Awesome!

* Nothin' to do with systems librarianship, but everything to do with my life: A mommy friend sent this article to our discussion list: The Opt-Out Myth. Very interesting read, especially as one of those women who wasn't willing to give up a career to have a family. I'm thankful I wasn't forced to make the "choice" to stay at home.

* I always feel better (and like dancing) when I watch Daler Mehndi's "Tunak Tunak Tun" video.

After a windstorm Tuesday, we have a calm but very dusty 60° day today. We need some rain to wash all this dust out of the air!

Goddess of Mercy

No librarianship, no politics, just.... WOW.

The China Disabled Person's Performing Art Troupe performs a dance called the "Thousand-Hand Guanyin", or Goddess of Mercy Dance. It's stunning in its beauty, precision, and grace. View it over at YouTube.

It rained all night and is supposed to rain off and on all day, and it's a lovely crisp 61°. Nice!

Blogversity

Tagged (kinda) by Rachel over at Liminal Librarian, here are five of my regularly-read non-library blogs:

* Neil Gaiman's Journal, because, hey, it's Neil Gaiman.

* John Scalzi's Whatever. Great writer, funny man, wicked posts. I'm currently in a "Get everything he's ever written" modality.

* WWdN: In Exile. Wil Wheaton (yes, the geeky kid from Star Trek: The Next Generation) is a interesting read, any day: poker, parenting, gaming, being the geeky kid from ST:TNG, poetry, User Friendly... it's all good stuff. (Word choice is not always SWF; you have been warned.)

* Thomas Dolby's Blog. Music, tech stuff, geekery. What's not to like?

* New Urban Legends, from Snopes. Always good for either a "Huh, I didn't know that" or "You've got to be kidding me!".

Bonus blog: The Dilbert Blog. If you think Scott Adams is only about Dilbert, read on and learn otherwise.

It's not raining yet...

Coming Soon: A Smarter Web

A neat read by John Borland in Technology Review, "Part I: A Smarter Web" discusses how we've progressed from Melvil Dewey towards the Semantic Web. It's great to read about how Eric Miller (a big kahuna in the Semantic Web world) got that our (that is, librarians') skill at organizing information is necessary to bring some kind of order to the chaos that is Web-based data.

"Part II" continues with a discussion of the issues facing bringing the Semantic Web into the real world - lots of folks are doing lots of things but most of it seems to still be behind the corporate scenes. And there's a big question as to whether the unstructured data of the Web can, or will, ever truly become structured data. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.

It's a brisk, windy 69° right now - and we had rain last night, and the promise of more to come today and tomorrow. Hurrah!

A Moment for Fun Amongst the Craziness

Yes, technical hell continues. Let's take a break:

* "Godzilla vs. Nancy Pearl". I think Nancy needed to use her Amazing Shushing Power on Godzilla! found via LibrarianInBlack

* Darn, we're just everywhere, aren't we? "Oh, it's that kind of library." found via Library Stuff

* Create a Visual Profile... an interesting visual profile quiz. Mine was actually pretty close to reality!

We broke some record highs this weekend, and had our air conditioner on for the first time Saturday. Yes, it's March. Welcome to the desert!

The end of an era?

We've been using this one particular electronic document management system for going on three years now. It sounded like the perfect tool - manages CAD and Office files, provides for version and revision control, has a very customizable workflow to manage various processes, etc etc - but there's only one problem.

It's never really worked, not the way it was supposed to. Some problems have been small ones, easily fixed, while others have been rather hugely mountainous; yet we keep chugging along, applying upgrades, and blowing time better spent on actual productive work on trying to fix whatever the Problem Du Semaine is. I think we were handed the last straw today; my staff gave an almost unanimous vote of no confidence in this package. Next week I'll be investigating how to manage certain processes automated by this program and moving all our files back to a basic flat file system.

I'm really torn. I think the potential here is awesome, and after all the sweat and tears I've put into it over these last few years it's hard to think about walking away. On the other hand, my users are not able to get their work done. We've just lost - just this week - 3 days total worth of 4 FTE's time. That's effectively 12 days of work lost. We seem to have approached - nay, smacked full into - the "it's just not worth it anymore" wall.

I'll be spending some significant time Monday on the phone with my dedicated technical support person, but unless something astonishing and amazing happens in the next week, I think much as it pains me we're going to be walking away from this product. Even though I can't find (yet) anything else that does what it does, we'd be better served with a networked flat file system than by this mess.

What a rotten end to a rotten week. TGIF, baby. And it's only 94°!

Upgrades R Us

Well, so far nothing's blown up...

Today is the much anticipated Electronic Document Management System Upgrade Day. I kicked off the day with a very large cup of coffee and a series of backups of the SQL databases and the vault archive itself (always back up everything you can think of, and then everything else just in case, at least twice before doing a major upgrade). Then... the server upgrades. Woo hoo - they went very smoothly! There was much joy. I even had a good connection to our replicated server in New Mexico and was able to upgrade that server on the first try. That brought on the first happy dance of the day. Whew!

Along with the upgrades to the EDMS, we're taking this opportunity to apply service packs to the Windows servers; one down, one to go. Also, the new EDMS offers a Content Index service, so I've just gotten that set up and started... it'll be nice to be able to search within our document vault not only by title or state, but also the actual contents of the files themselves. Very nice - can't wait to try it out.

And, thanks to a batch of change requests that were finally approved Wednesday, there are a substantial number of structural changes in our WBS, which leads to many, many changes in our systems database, ICD charts and most importantly, our vault structures. So since everyone is locked out of the vault anyway, I'm using today to get those file moves done. They can take a very long time to do because 90% of the files being moved are SolidWorks 3D CAD files - if you've ever had to re-path a part in SolidWorks, you know how important the referenced paths are; the move function is designed to repath the references as part of the file move, so theoretically after the files are moved, the assemblies that call the files already know where their new homes are - but it takes quite a while for assemblies as large as we have. So while I'm waiting, I'm able to get the clients updated on all my staff's machines, and read some journals and blogs that I'm way behind on.

Today is turning out not to be the Hell on Wheels Day I fully expected when I left the house this morning. For this I am immensely thankful!

It's 90° out there with a whopping 9% Rh. Wheee!

Something to Think About

While my computer grinds away at vault file moves, I've actually been able to read a few blogs and try to start catching up with what's been happening in the library world these last two weeks I've been stuck in Tech Support Hell. So that's an up side, right?

Karen Schneider, over on the ALA TechSource blog, wrote a thought-provoking entry about, well, our future (kind of) titled "Dear Library of Congress". Go forth and read it. I don't even - kinda sorta - work in that flavor of the library world, and it made me think.

Currently 88° with an RH of 8%. No wonder lotion and lip balm sell so well here.

RefGrunt, 14 March

An interesting exercise...

8:30am Arrive at work. Make coffee, the nectar of the gods.
Email.
Install software package on user's laptop.
VNCviewer fix on Macbook.
IM: Track down someone.
Print several sets of change request forms.
Email.
Video capture/recreate problem for technical support.
Install new USB KVM switch and wireless KM combo on user's desktop.
Phone.
Email.
Enterprise Rights Management research, view demo.
Review & proof newsletter draft.
Lunch!
Blog: USA Today's Tech_Space (new to me)
Phone.
Windows update, with inevitable reboot.
Change Control Board meeting
Update change request forms after meeting, submit for approval, file hard copies, update systems database.
Verify workflow notification setup for user not getting notifications. There's a problem somewhere...
Summary email of forthcoming changes to document vault, WBS and ICD chart to staff (this also serves as my to-do list for the next week).
System upgrade timing issues and discussions.
Install software package on user's laptop.
Email.
Leave at 4:00pm for doctor's appointment.

Weather yesterday was wicked for mid-March; we hit 87° and are likely to hit 90° today. Sigh. It's too early for this....

The Struggle Continues

So, here it is Friday afternoon and I've not blogged one entry this week! Sheesh!

I was successful in upgrading the webdev server to Drupal 5.1 - but boy, is the admin interface different! I'd just finally gotten used to the options in 4.7 and where everything was, and it's not quite the same. I installed the same modules that Cary installed with me during my tutorial - tinyMCE and IMCE - except even after checking that authorizations were set and the modules were enabled, they still aren't showing up in the actual content entry page. I don't know what I did wrong, and I can't find anything about a similar problem. Am I the only one who's messed up in this particular way? I can't believe that. I've even been in and out of the "Administer by Module" section (which I do like very much about 5.1) and verified that they are enabled, for administrator and authenticated user, but still: nada for the content entry. Sigh.

But, the basics of the system are in place, I have vict^H^H^Holunteers to test it out, I even managed to set up the new user accounts properly. Now I'm just waiting to hear back from them after they've messed around a bit. We'll see what folks have to say, although based on my own experience I think I'm going to send a gentle inquiry about whether a quick tutorial would be welcome...

In the meantime, I'm on to the next CMS candidate: WebGUI. I've got the package downloaded and Monday (if all goes well and no other crises arise!) I'm going to start the installation. I figure if I need outside technical support, well, I got the OK to do it for Drupal, so I should be fine to get it for this as well.

I think for the wiki packages I want to evaluate I may not install them locally to do it. Both candidates - MediaWiki and Twiki - have installations at MPOW, and I think I'll just ask the administrators for accounts and permission to mess about in a sandbox area. At this point, it's taken me almost as long to get the first candidate up and running than I expected to spend on the whole project - silly me! Ha. At least now I know... and as long as we have a functioning site (which we do) there's no real urgent push or deadline for having this in place. If I want to putz around for the rest of the year on this project, I can... except for the fact I put a speaker proposal into Internet Librarian for this, so I guess I have an October deadline instead!

I won't brag about our current weather conditions. Suffice it to say that this week was spring for us, and a glorious spring it has been! (I say that because we're predicted to hit 92° by Monday.)

Woe is me

OK, maybe "woe" is too strong a word... but I'm a wee bit frustrated. I had a really great Drupal training session last Wednesday with Cary Gordon of The Cherry Hill Company; remember that rosetta stone I was lamenting missing? Well, he was it! After getting an overview of the site as I had it set up and hearing what I was aiming for, he went through the administrative screens with me, explained that without certain additional modules I wouldn't be able to do what I was wanting to do, then showed me how to install modules (it's not nearly as complicated as I thought it would be). We then discussed 4.7 versus 5.1, and he strongly recommended (since I was starting from scratch and not dealing with a legacy system) that I mosey on up to 5.1 and set it up from there.

I finished the training session with gladness in my heart; and then promptly got sucked into a series of problems with our EDMS (which I am not going to go into, save to say I'm very glad our technical support guy is now in San Francisco instead of outside London). Here it is over a week later and I'm only just getting around to downloading 5.1! Ah well. At least I feel pretty confident that I can get it downloaded and the basic system installed by CoB today, and maybe next week I can get those modules installed and do some real messing around with it.

Lessons learned thus far:

* Don't be afraid to ask for help!
* Modules make the system
* It's not a bad idea to start with the most recent supported version.

Currently a brisk and windy 60° - but hey, the sun is shining, so it's not all bad!

The Librarian, circa 1946

A fascinating look (at least, to me!) into the world of librarianship in the mid-20th century (~10 minutes, on YouTube). We've both come a long way and haven't changed much - we're using new tools to do the same job, provide information to the patrons. It was a kick to watch this!

"...Librarians are always developing newer resources..." how true this still is!

Thanks to Liz Bryson for the link!

Internet Librarian Call for Speakers

The Call for Speakers has been sent out for Internet Librarian 2007. I just submitted my proposal; now my fingers are crossed as I wait to see if it gets accepted. (I hope so!)

Winter is having a last fling at us; it's been cold! (OK, well, our high yesterday was only 61°; that's cold for us, at least. Currently it's 56°.) Next week should be much much nicer, with forecast highs in the low 80s. Aaahhh....