Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs

I am a great fan of lists and archives. I found this very interesting list of 100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year from the BBC Monitor.
The title of this post refers to the 64th thing, which is the name for people who fear the number 666.
Also fascinating was the information in item number 68, where experts ruled that the "the egg came first."

Holds: 43 of 151, 10 of 63 and 16 of 32

London Public Library (LPL) has been a lifesaver. The resources, the people, the space and so much more make my trips to any number of branches rewarding. There are, however, one or two things that trouble me. At the moment it is the holds policy.

Recognizing the importance of getting high demand books, DVDs, CDs etc., to eager patrons the LPL, like most other public libraries, let users place holds on items from the collection. LPL policy permits patrons to place a maximum of 40 holds by simply logging on to the website and selecting the title and selecting the branch where you would like to have the book delivered. The library will then email or phone to tell you that the book is available for pick-up. You have a 5-day period to retrieve it. You then have the three-week loan period to enjoy the book.

The problem arises when there are works in very high demand. Yes, patience is a virtue. But when a particularly intriguing title becomes available and there are already 75 holds, one despairs. The title of this entry indicates where my current holds sit in relation to the total holds for three titles. Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures will probably not make its way to my hands for at least 6 months and Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion, already on the hold list for over a month, probably won’t make it to me until well into the New Year. As for Carol Windley’s Home Schooling, I am only half way down the list.

On the scale of terrible things to befall an individual having to wait a few weeks/months is really not that great of a burden. And, it has been a very pleasant surprise to discover that a hold, placed 11 months ago and forgotten, has now become available. On the flip side, discovering that while you were on vacation the hold you placed came and went can be traumatizing. A few changes in the Holds Policies will, therefore, be suggested. As it is each hold represents about four weeks that a book is in the hands of another: three week loan period plus transit time plus grace period for pick up. And this doesn’t take into account the borrower who returns the book late.

One solution would be to buy more copies. Barring that, why not limit borrowing periods on high demand titles to two weeks? And, increase the late fines to the level of DVD fines for high demand titles. A $0.15/day late fine on a book is not much of a disincentive to hold on to a title past its due date. While I am not particularly fond of increased fees for users why not consider a fine placed on books that are not picked up from a hold shelf? Finally, I am sure the technical wizards at LPL can facilitate the ability to suspend a hold while you are going on vacation. By allowing a vacation stop for a hold you will free up the item for access by other patrons and you will allow the original person placing the hold to remain in their place in the queue.

LibraryThing

Creating order in my personal library is something that has remained on my to-do list for many years. With an eye to creating an appearance of design in the chaos of my collection I took the opportunity afforded me by the recent completion of renovations to the house to start anew and reorganize the bookshelves. First, to compile an inventory: “did I really buy three copies of that book?” “Did I borrow that and forget to return it?” Second, I wished to reacquaint myself with some old favourites and to pull out those “must-reads” that were purchased over the years but were assigned to book boxes during moves or the fringes of the collection due to scarcity of reading time. Third, the project would provide the opportunity to impose order and to test out some of the library skills I had recently acquired.

Luckily, I remembered a great piece of social networking software that would help with the project. LibraryThing.com provides one with an easy to use cataloguing tool and lets you share your love of books with a larger reading community. With over 7 million books catalogued and over 100,000 members LibraryThing lets you browse the huge catalogue for your favourite authors. If you enter your own collection, a simple process that involves typing in an author or title or ISBN and finding your book in a list from Amazon.com or the Library of Congress or some other major library –then just “click” to enter -- you can look at collections that are similar to your own to see what someone else might be enjoying. The site will also generate reading suggestions based on what you have in your collection. You can use RSS Feeds or widgets to add random lists of your books to a Blog, just like the one on the right. Members of the community offer reviews and ratings of books and the Zeitgeist Page offers lists such as highest rated authors and most reviewed books.

While the actual physical arrangement of your books on your bookshelves may reflect the unique connections between the books that only you can truly appreciate, LibraryThing.com lets you create virtual order with electronic alphabetically listed authors or titles or genres. And, keyword tags give you the opportunity to sort into any number of categories.

While busily engaged in the process of cataloguing my collection my daughters, ever curious, were drawn by my interest and were themselves immediately hooked on LibraryThing. There are definitely two more avid readers in the house. Maybe there are two more librarians too?

I'm Back: Student in UCLA Library Tasered

For the two or possibly three people who look at this Blog I decided to make an effort to post some stuff I find interesting and to keep you up to date with information on post-library school events. Hopefully, you too will find it interesting. To keep with the theme of the earlier posts, the bits and pieces you find here will be mostly library and/or book related.

Since the last posting I completed my MLIS degree at the University of Western Ontario. It was terrific experience. The best part was meeting some really wonderful people. Now, as I look for full time employment, and I am busying myself with a couple short-term research contracts, I will make a concerted effort to keep this Blog up to date.

The interesting, and horrifying, library news comes from the UCLA Powell Library where, according to Bruins Nation, campus police tasered a student. From the Daily Bruin there is this:

"It was the most disgusting and vile act I had ever seen in my life," said David Remesnitsky, a 2006 UCLA alumnus who witnessed the incident.

Ajax Applications: Jotspot

When I first considered this assignment I thought that AJAX applications were simply other, more current, examples of push technologies such as PointCast. Around the time that PointCast was being bundled with the Internet Explorer browser I set up the system on my PC. Initial intrigue quickly waned, however, as it appeared to simply clutter up the desktop, was loaded with ads, was very slow and was an incredible memory hog. As one article on the demise of this application argued, PointCast built its business around proprietary software but the Web allowed for innovation at a rate that was much greater. (Himmelstein) An inability to keep up with the changing technology (and bad business practices), therefore, resulted in its demise.

On re-examination I have come to recognize that several Ajax applications, unlike PointCast, truly offer useful and potentially time-saving web tools for the average user. Some of the Ajax application that I looked at include the “originals” Gmail and Google Maps as well as Backpack, JotSpot, Writely, Net Vibes, Rallypoint, Digg, iCal and Basecamp. I was hoping to examine Writely for this assignment but the developers have currently closed off new registrations. (If you submit a request to the waiting list they anticipate new account will be made available in early July, 2006) Some of Writely’s features include: the ability to upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text and to create new documents from scratch; share documents and edit them online with multiple users (invited through email); see the revision history of the document; publish to Blogs and; download the documents to your desktop.

Ultimately, I opted to look at the collaborative application JotSpot. The application, in the free version, offers a personalized Wiki that allows access to up to 5 contributors, with 20 pages, 5MB attachments and 100MB of storage. Paid upgrades will remove the ads and increase the allowable attachments and the storage memory to 10MB and 10GB respectively. Additionally, the premium packages allow for secure data encryption, and domain mapping.

Immediately, I was struck by the ease of the setup. The registration process took less than two minutes, with confirmation email. After you create an account, JotSpot provides the user with a "yourwikiname.jot.com" address. A person with the most rudimentary skills would find this an easy resource to manage. There is no need to learn the rules of Wiki markup language with this application. The skilled user is given the option to edit using markup but I found it a lot more user-friendly and intuitive with the WYSIWYG. In a library setting, with inexperienced users wishing to share impressions about a book, this would be useful technology.

Following setup you can personalize your page by adding a range of business productivity, collaborative and community applications, selected from about two dozen options. BlogApp allows you to create and publish multiple blogs; Contact Manager enables the user to manage and share contacts with other users; Knowledge Base allows the user to build a database of questions and answers on related topics; Project Manager will facilitate multiple user collaboration with shared to-dos, due dates, discussion, and shared files and; Jotspot Spreadsheets allows users to publish and track spreadsheets on an interactive wiki page.

For this assignment I installed the Forum application, the Contact Manager and the Spreadsheet. The installations of the application templates were straightforward and swift. The learning curve is very shallow for this technology: which is a useful feature for a smaller library with little IT support. Upon selecting the application the program asks if you really want to install the package. The user clicks yes and program takes you to a graphical interface that prompts the input of specific information for that application. The spreadsheet, for example, asks the user to copy rows from your Excel spreadsheet and paste them into a box on the application. Once that simple task is completed you can then share the data with members of the organization. The program, as might be expected, has the look and functionality of an earlier version of Excel. The JotSpot program does not import formulas, although formulas are in the Spreadsheet. The program offers a reasonable means of securely passing Excel files outside of the usual e-mail system.

The JotSpot applications could allow co-workers in a library to securely share information with each other and with patrons. And, as with all of the Ajax applications, JotSpot will work in your browser from any location. However, the appearance and the ease of creating an integrated site, where the Wiki and the other applications appear as a seamless whole, are less than ideal.

Each of the applications within JotSpot offered effective means of communicating within libraries and between libraries and patrons. The public face of the application, however, is a little less appealing. I found that the pages are not very attractive and the navigation from and within areas is not clear and consistent. Once in the Spreadsheet, for example, it is not clear how to exit, short of using the back button. The means for fixing the appearance and creating an intuitive architecture, where users with fewer skills can easily navigate, is not as simple as the initial set-up. (Assistance can be found at JotSpot Developer Connection which is an associated wiki with information for developers along with samples, including the ability to add new features through plugins and themes.) These web interface issues could create a problem for the library if the design skills and resources were inadequate. Notwithstanding these reservations, it appears that JotSpot as a business communications tool offers an excellent resource for creating an intranet, removed from the public. With better public interface the application would be ready for use with the public. At that point the library would have to convince patrons of the value of the technology.

Works Consulted

Garrett, Jesse James. (18 February 2005)"Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications," Adaptive Path, Retrieved July 2, 2006 from <http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

Himelstein, Linda and Richard Siklos. (1999) PointCast: The Rise and Fall of an Internet Star. BusinessWeek Online Retrieved July 4, 2006 from http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_17/b3626167.htm

On being heard!

If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

Quote of the Day

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I though it might sober me up to sit in a library.
— F.Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby, chapter 3

Public Access Computing: Live CD

My initial encounter with the Ubuntu liveCD (Gnoppix) was not particularly inspiring. The version I used had a refresh rate of 60 Hz for the display that produced images that shimmered to the point that the screen was impossible to look at for any extended period of time. With the screen resolution set to 640*480, and apparently unchangeable, and a low refresh rate, I found images and information that did not fit the screen and a quivering screen that threatened to induce a seizure. After some fiddling around and advice I was able to improve the screen resolution and the refresh rate issue improved. My thought was that for users to be really comfortable with this technology the switch between the Windows operating system and a liveCD version must be a little more seamless.

I proceeded to test the open source live CD with a view to using the PC as if I was in a public library. I would never use a public access terminal to perform tasks such as security-sensitive computer banking and was not inclined to do so with the live CD, so I cannot comment on how easy or difficult that process would have been. I suspect many people do use these terminals in this manner. It would seem that a live CD offers reasonable security for the user unless there was a hardware-based keylogging device attached to the keyboard. Since the Gnoppix live CD makes it unnecessary to start the Windows OS a software based keylogging device would not work.

I performed some basic computing functions on the PC that might be undertaken on a public access computer (PAC). I searched the Web using Firefox, looked at numerous Web sites, grabbed a screenshot, posted to my LIS525 Blog, downloaded files as PDF’s (with the “evince” program) and saved them to my memory key. Since I could not access the FIMS network I could not print the files. I opened and saved files in the Open Word program, checked and sent email through my Gmail account (The load time for Gmail seemed to be fairly long – about 45 seconds – but I am not sure if that was a Gmail problem rather than a Gnoppix problem). I used the “GIMP” open source software to manipulate a graphic image and looked at several other utilities. All were highly satisfactory. Familiarity and name recognition are issues that occurred to me when using the open source software. Will people in a public library setting be comfortable with the slightly different interface? Despite the value of the open source software there is probably a sizeable portion of users who would prefer the Photoshop, Adobe and Microsoft Word programs simply for name recognition.

The reasons for using a PAC in a library are as vast as the reasons for using a computer in the home or office. The library, therefore, must be able to guarantee that the PACs are available on an ongoing basis. That is, they must operate relatively free of breakdowns, over long periods of time, and with different users (Sendze). Constant breakdowns would be expensive for the library because of increased maintenance costs. Also, it would be an inconvenience for the users if there were fewer PACs available. With a live CD operating system the computer would be less likely to be subject to inadvertent alterations by novice or malicious users.

As with more traditional library functions the library’s PAC policies and procedures must be able to ensure user privacy. As has been suggested in class, the possibility of legal action might exist if a library offers services and, as a result of those services, a user has his/her transactions/privacy/passwords compromised. The library must also maintain the integrity of the information contained in the computer system: staff information, OPAC and other library service information. A “terms of use” page where the library can warn patrons against certain uses of the technology and where they can alert patrons to potential risks associated with use of a PAC is helpful. The terms of use contract may provide some measure of security from legal action if acceptance of the terms implies an understanding and acceptance of the risks. However, these instruments are probably no more useful as legal protection than the little warnings printed on the back of hockey tickets that attempt to reduce liability should you be injured by a flying puck.

The live CD seems to offer a reasonable likelihood of a secure computing environment. From the users point of view I would prefer to carry the secure operating system with me, perhaps on a memory key, where I can load my preferences, email and other utilities and not have to worry about what might be on the PC and where my information might be going. To be able to use this technology one would have to be able to reboot the PC. Would libraries be amenable to people doing this to their machines? I tend to believe there would be a great deal of hesitation.

There are numerous commercial resources available to libraries to secure their PACs. CybraryN Solutions , Userful’s DiscoverStation, LockDown Rx by Horizon DataSYS Inc., and Faronics Anti-Executable and Deep Freeze offer security, management and patron authentication software for PACs. The software makers suggest that their products will block “unwanted content access, downloads, and system changes… [And they are] virtually immune to all viruses.” (Userful) However, it occurs to me that anything that suggests that it is “the standard in bulletproof disk protection” is simply inviting a challenge to have their systems hacked. Ubuntu provides the services that the proprietary software sells only it does so free of charge. Ubuntu provides immunity to virtually all viruses without the hassle of looking for and downloading all of the anti-viral fixes and updates that would be necessary for a software solution.

I am a little hesitant, however, to enthusiastically suggest that library IT departments look to switch their proprietary software to open source. The average library user has a comfort level with the name brand software that cannot be overlooked. I am also concerned about the need to work out problems with the open source software. Is the librarian in a small operation equipped to perform these tasks? Are they sufficiently technologically proficient? Ubuntu states that it can provide support services. Is this service available for most other open source materials?

Works Consulted

Moore, S. R. (2001). Libraries to labs: Managing public access computer labs in an academic library environment. The Reference Librarian, (74), 207-220.

Sendze, M. (2006) The battle to secure our public access computers. Computers in Libraries, 26(1), 10-16.

Wayne, R. (2004) An overview of public access software management tools for libraries. Computers in Libraries 24(1) 24-6, 28-30.