Yearning for the Good Ol' Days

There’s a discussion on Autocat about interfaces and how they are all different, and basically mourning the loss of the totally-standardized card catalog. Yes, back in the day, a person could roll into a library and go to the card catalog and they would know exactly what they were looking at, and how to use it (if the already knew how to use it). Today, you roll into the library and sit down at the terminal and (these Autocat people say) you will have to “re-learn” the catalog in order to do any research.

I have a very basic and negative reaction to this kind of thinking. Okay, yes, it would be great if all the library catalogs everywhere in the world looked the same (I guess? I don't know if I really care that much). However, luckily, we are human beings with the ability to adapt our learning behaviors to fit the task at hand based on past experiences. So while I may not know the catalog I see before me from past experience, I *can* use my past experiences to tell me which searching behavior has worked in the past in my former libraries. And since we catalogers all use the exact same method for creating library metadata, the chances are good that my searching behavior (which was successful before) will succeed again. Maybe the online interface looks different, but there’s still a search box there, and I still see titles and authors when I do a search. I’m still using a qwerty keyboard and a mouse and it’s on a windows operating system (probably), using Chrome (hopefully! I’m biased).

In addition, users *expect* a learning curve when they access an unfamiliar website. If I need to find a tire place, and I see that there is one near me but I have never gone to their website…do I hide under my blankie and say “oh, but I've never been there before, so I will probably mess it up”? No. I click on the URL and I go there and I cast around for a bit and find what I need.

The internet and web-based catalog interfaces have been around for about 15 years now. After all that time, I think our users deserve a bit more credit and a bit more trust.

BIBFRAME

Well, it’s officially been what? a year and a half since I last posted on this blog. I’m back in the library world after a hiatus due to babies, and of course I have things to say about things again. And since this blog was just sitting around and not doing anything (figures…lazy blogs), I decided that I can start using it again for my blatherings.

And do I have something to blather on about?! Yes, yes I do.

There was a Webinar. Hosted by NISO and by DCMI, it featured Mr. Eric Miller and he talked for 90 minutes about BIBFRAME (which I hear has its own website now checkitoutlook!).

I am so excited about BIBFRAME that I actually went home and told my husband all about it. I never do this, by the way, because he’s a very nice man and also an attorney who doesn’t even know who Tim Berners-Lee is. Anyway, so I went home and started to explain why we are in the position of needing a new metadata schema for bibliographic entities, and I only got to the point of explaining MARC and he said “that seems clunky—why don’t they just make it so that the records can be searched by Google?” And then I had to say “you ruined my whole story.”

That is what BIBFRAME, if and when it gets on its feet, is supposed to do. It’s going to open up bibliographic data to the World in the form of tagged data that can be searched by the search engines on the internet. I’ve been telling all my (non-librarian, non-cataloger) friends about this, and they all get wide eyes and go “Ohhhhhh! That’s a good idea! I would love something like that.”

Yeah, no kidding.

I also had a thought regarding the paradox of vendors who say “we will change the metadata schema for bibliographic records when our customers demand it” and the customers (libraries) who say “We can’t change schemas until our vendor changes it, and every time we ask if they’re working on RDA, they say they are but we have no evidence of this!” Eric Miller seemed to suggest in that webinar that what should happen is that the librarians should march on the vendors and demand a change. And everyone in the room with me when he said that literally laughed out loud like crazy loons. So I thought to myself: wouldn’t it be more beneficial if Eric Miller went to the vendors and said “I have a solution to your problem with implementing RDA. It’s called BIBFRAME and it’s going to rock your socks.”

The Internet! Bah

A friend of a friend posted a link yesterday to an op-ed from 1995. I will quote:
"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

I wrote back to my friend "That guy must feel like such a doofus."

Well, turns out he does...this is an excerpt of what he thinks of his article now:
"Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play...Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em. Heck - trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven...
And, as I've laughed at others' foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.
Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff...
Warm cheers to all,
-Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"

Cliff Stoll's embarrassment is probably a message to us all. Whenever I think about the new future of cataloging, I have the tendency to think "RDA? FRBR? Bah." Mostly this is due to a fear of the unknown, and a general dislike of people who are optimists. I am not an optimist. I am more of a...raging bulldozer of pessmism. Seeing that there were 300 people at the RDA class, though, gives me pause. Maybe we'll really do this thing. Maybe someday, library catalogs will be the most usable and efficient way of finding information that the Web has to offer. And we'll all understand how metadata is generated and actually *appreciate* what it means to generate all that metadata. And I'll have my own pony.

Sorry. My optimism got away from me for a second. I mean, I'll have my own brain-implanted internet access chip.

Technology Fail

I would say something about Chris Oliver's talk yesterday on RDA and it's relationships to FRBR and our current database environments, but unfortunately, our internet went down half an hour into her presentation. Hurray, technology! Once again underscoring the fragile nature of the digital world. If I were reading a book by her, all I would need is a relatively light-filled day. So, screw you, computers.

Mapping thoughts

It's been a long time, blog. No, really, like 2.5 weeks! In my defense, I'm coming up on 4 months pregnant and have been feeling "under the weather" (an understatement) for some time. It's hard to think about libraries and metadata and whatnot when I want to throw up all the time.

ANYWAY.

One of my reference librarian peeps introduced me to a website the other day: Mindomo. It's a way to map research, or brainstorm, or just organize information. It uses Flash (of course) because nothing is simple these days, but it does allow you to put links and documents and graphics all into your map of whatever it is you want to look at. You can even make your maps public for others to reference...if you go to the browse tab at the top of the site it takes you to where the public ones are located.

At any rate, I think that it's a very cool take on the "brainstorming" maps we used to draw in middle school. And certainly useful for information professionals who have lots of information to organize and who would prefer to create a digital map of their stuff rather than just one in their head, or in a finding aid or something. I certainly hope to use it for future projects--maybe it could help us determine what kind of practices we're going to impose on materials before we start working on them, in a more intuitive and visual way. Or maybe I'll just finally get around to creating a map of the relationships between early modern philosophers. Whichever.

The Power of Naivete

A person (who is very nice, I'm sure) just posted on Autocat asking what skills one must possess so that one might be proficient in "installing, developing, customizing, adding records, and maintaining" Greenstone or Dspace.
I just sat here for about 20 seconds, staring at her request. Um....the skill of Knowing Perl? The skill of being able to work around the 1,000 minute details that each of these programs will require you to know and fear in order to do anything at all?
I almost don't want to say anything at all, for fear of turning her off to digital repositories (I almost typed "digital repopsicles" there). Who am I to judge someone who wants to learn about these programs? Well, I'm one who came to digital library software much in the way that this gentle soul did:
"I'm fluent in HTML and I've digitized things into image or PDF formats; I've also used optical character recognition software with scanners. I've attended metadata workshops (but need to work on getting up to speed with XML)."
Little does she know. Granted, I used Greenstone back in 2004, when it was probably a lot more of a nightmare. I had all of the same skills as above, and it prepared me not even a little for Greenstone. We use Dspace here, now, and I know that our Dspace programmer is literally backed into a corner with all the customizing work that's thrown at him (in fact, I think we're hiring a new programmer soon because of it). So my experience with both programs has been....mediocre at best.
I guess this is the problem with the digital world generally--you have to just jump into the pool and fail a lot in order to eventually succeed in getting your digital stuff organized and available. I'm sure the trying will make this person a better computer person, and a better librarian. I know that working with Greenstone helped me see what a lot of effort goes on to create a "pretty" and "useable" search interface/database.
But man, it sucks to get there.

Catalogers are not the enemy

One of my colleagues was at ALA, and sat in on a session sponsored by LITA called "There's no catalog like no catalog," or something like that. She said that she was in a minority by being a cataloger at this session, but that it was the attitude of the presenters that made her the most uncomfortable. She said that catalogers were portrayed as being inflexible, reactionary, and backward-thinking. She also said that she wanted to stand up and say "the real problem is that the library systems we use have never caught up to what catalogers actually need to do their jobs." That made me laugh. True.

But here's the thing: my colleague wasn't witnessing some small, misguided group of people who think of catalogers as Luddites and reactionaries. She was witnessing a microcosm of the thought of most of the information technology people out there today. I feel bad for all the catalogers when I hear talk like this (so I guess, really, I just feel bad for myself). Catalogers aren't backwards, they just want to create metadata for their objects, like anyone who has an object that they want other people to see. We use MARC for that. And let's face it, there isn't another metadata format out there that can rival the completeness of MARC. Most of the new metadata standards are still working out problems that this standard figured out 20 years ago.

I don't like the idea that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. MARC is not the greatest, I realize that. Neither is AACRII, or LCSH. But they're not terrible, either. Speaking strictly from metadata schemas, MARC is still pretty awesome. It still does things that DC has never even dreamed of (and which we've been trying to squeeze into qualified DC with mixed results).

The need to create metadata is not going to go away just because someone decides that catalogers are obsolete. I don't know how some people think that we will get our information about information in the future, but one great example of the need for metadata comes from images. An image doesn't actually tell you anything about itself without you looking at it. So how do you search a database of images? You search the metadata that was created by someone who cared about creating metadata--ie, someone from the family of catalogers. You can call them something else if you want; data analysts or metadata-creation experts or whatever, but it's the same thing.

Anyway. This is my soapbox. I sigh a lot when I think about how abused catalogers have become at the hands of the techies. It's not like catalogers have created the downfall of civilization or the corruption of technology. In fact, we often wish that the search-mechanism creators would find a way to use the information we give them more profitably. Does that make us reactionary?

JHOVE again

So luckily, we have an awesome IT guy here who can work Java magic, and who installed JHOVE for me. Of course, the user interface is, well, not that great, but it does the job if you can work around the fact that it's not intuitive at all and gives you no instruction or prompting. But I digress.
I ran a tiff file through JHOVE, and it pulled out all kinds of preservation metadata. Like, it pulled out the number of pixels per line of the image, and listed it all for me in the xml document. EVERY LINE. Sound crazy? I thought so too. However, I will say: Job well done, JHOVE people. This program is the most thorough I've ever seen for extracting preservation metadata. It just takes an expert to install.

JHOVE

Okay, I have to say this...we're looking at preservation tools here, to automatically identify formats and spit out metadata about the size of the files, etc. And one of the tools we're looking at is JHOVE. And I quote: "JHOVE provides functions to perform format-specific identification, validation, and characterization of digital objects."
Which is right up our alley in terms of what we need. So I download it, and start to read the installation instructions when I click on the file and nothing happens. And guess what? JHOVE doesn't have an automatic installer?! You have to go into the config file, and the home directory, and change lines to get it to work.
Um....hello? It's 2008. I don't mind doing this to set up a piece of software, but if you want people to use your system (especially in libraries), you might want to make it just a TAD easier to use.
Did I mention that you can use the command line to use this product? They have a GUI, too, but come on...any system that says "you can use command line!" is not going to have a great GUI. It's just a gut feeling. This reminds me of early Greenstone software, where you had to know PERL just to make it work at all. The GUI was a joke.

Textbooks and conne(x)ions

Ever since I had Kinkos print out a copy of the PREMIS data dictionary and bind it for me (for just $16!), I have been longing for a comparable piece of literature to come out for MODS and METS. I mean, didn't PREMIS win an award or something for putting their information in such a wonderful and useable format?

YES. THEY DID.

I know that all computer geeks think print is just sooo 1993, but seriously, it's very comforting to have a paper version of the PREMIS tags within arms' reach. And I don't even use PREMIS very much (for the record, I also have a bound copy of FRBR, but it kind of doesn't seem as cool as PREMIS). Imagine if we had neat, easy to print-off-and-bind copies of the METS terms, instead of the interminable webpages, and mouse clicking (by the way, if there is such a thing as a printable METS dictionary and I'm just too dumb to find it, please tell me so that I can go out and get it. Don't let me stay a fool).

Oh my God, am I getting old? Did I just say that a webpage was clunky?

Yes, of course I did! Traditional webpages ARE clunky. There's a reason that everyone's so excited about web 2.0 (and now 3.0), and it isn't because webpages are staying static and obtuse. It's because we have this new ability to make something GREAT with our technology. Not just a list of items, but something that's more dynamic and can grow and is intuitive to use.

Speaking of which, have [you] seen Connexions? It's a Rice University project that has turned into a huge success. Open source, online textbooks. Apparently some of the textbooks that have been created are being used as the national curriculum of Mongolia. The quick and dirty layout of Connexions is that it takes too long to write a traditional textbook, and the sciences especially can't keep up with the new information by creating textbooks in the old way. So this guy from Rice (electrical engineer, maybe?) decided that why not create something like Wikipedia, but you can create full textbooks instead? You start by creating modules, smaller snippets of information (like, say, for a physics book, a module on Acceleration and then a module on Torque, and then a module on angular momentum, etc etc), and then you pick and choose which snippets you need for your textbook, select them, have the website generate a textbook for you, and then you ORDER IT PRINTED by an overnight printing house, who creates a real, honest-to-God hardbound set of textbooks for you for about $20 each.
Not $350 like you might expect for a physics textbook or a bio textbook. No. $20.

It's pretty cool.

Hmm....maybe we should start writing a metadata/cataloging textbook...with all the tags that we use, and all the rules we follow, and maybe entries on FRBR and AACRII....a library "textbook"? Intriguing.

The Computer as a Communication Device

My predecessor left me a bunch of articles about all kinds of technology/library issues. That is cool, but since I don't know what he left me, I decided to make a spreadsheet of the articles. A catalog, if you will. Hee.

So, I'm going through the folders and what do I find, but J.C.R. Licklider's "The Computer as a Communication Device." (warning: it's a pdf) A veritable classic in our field, akin to Vannevar Bush's Memex machine.
So of course I read it (again). And was struck by the ending paragraphs (again). At the end of the article, Licklider paints this utopian computer world for us, where "life will be happier...communication will be more effective and productive...communication and interaction will be with programs and programmed models...and...there will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of information...will be open to him."

Aside: I love that he puts the caveat of being wealthy in there, in order to benefit from this greatness.

Licklider was a little....eccentric. And, from the looks of it, a utopian. I find it very amusing that he assumes all information and all computing will always be for the higher ideal of creating and supporting learning. I find this especially amusing considering how much of the internet is useful only for wasting time.

But consider his ideal--it's beautiful, in its own way. Everyone learning, everyone making connections. Of course he's a little off in a lot of places...such as assuming that employment will disappear because there will be so much work in adapting network software to the new generations of computers (he never imagines that businesspeople will find a more efficient way of handling this problem). But still, the ideal of making information freely available, AND FINDABLE, is a really nice thought. Unfortunately for us, it still hasn't happened yet. Maybe it never will?

Then I look at the actual title of Licklider's article--The Computer as a Communication Device. He was right about that part.

Episode IV: A new hope

I've been trying to find some information on what kind of workflows are out there for metadata creation. Let me tell you, it is harder than you think. But I did stumble across a new piece of software that will hopefully be coming out soon: Rutger Libraries' Workflow Management System (inventive title, no?). Code4Lib did an article about it awhile ago, so it's not like super-new news, but I've noticed that not everyone and their mom reads Code4Lib. No offense to the C4L guys--you all seem quite awesome.

Anyway Grace Agnew and Yang Yu wrote an article about it, and it's pretty interesting stuff. WMS is really just like Archon or Archivists Toolkit, except that it's for anyone that's creating metadata, not just archives. I like that aspect very much, since here at our instiution, most of the digitization projects are actually hybrid projects that use staff from archives, the library, and the digital people. I imagine it's probably at least a little more user-friendly than the archives software, mostly because of who created it. Archivists can be....not so user-centered sometimes. Again, no offense (I'm offending lots of people today!).

Client Care for SirsiDynix

I haven't talked about this, mostly because I hadn't visited the site yet, but the old Dynix "customer care" website is in the process of switching over to the Client Care Portal. This is a joint client care website for both Unicorn and Horizon. I assume it's in place to get ready for Symphony. But it has this great added benefit to any Horizon customer (and Unicorn customer, too, I imagine), which is that you get to see how Unicorn works (and thus how Horizon works). Unicorn uses "patch clusters" instead of what we just called "updates" in Horizon, and I can get overviews of various Unicorn modules and such. I can see known issues with Unicorn, read white papers about the modules, etc.
I mean, granted, its all basically marketing nonsense, or things that I could find out very easily if I solicited some brochures and whatnot, but since traditionally, Horizon and Unicorn users weren't allowed to connect at all through the company, its very nice to see the other side. I know, I know: I'm saying something nice about SirsiDynix! It feels weird to me, too.

Perceptions 2007

New survey out! I saw it on Dave Pattern's blog this morning. It's a survey on ILS customer satisfaction. Pretty relevant, right? You can find the survey here, as well as at DaveyP.
Well, the most interesting thing to me was the question about open source ILS. I think that they're coming up strong, and I think I've probably mentioned that before, although the time is rapidly approaching that I stop thinking about writing about the open source stuff and actually write about it. Anyway, the question was this:
How likely is it that this library would consider implementing an open source ILS?

I would answer: "OMG! It's TOTALLY likely!!" (if I were thirteen years old again, which thankfully I am not)

However, the responses from most of the people who responded to the survey were decidedly....lukewarm. Even among Horizon users, those most disgruntled species of ILS user, this received a 4.12 out of 9. Now, to be clear, Horizon people weren't the most interested in open source. Voyager users were. So....Voyager must be on a bad road, as well.

But that's not really the point of my story. I think the point is that people are still relatively afraid of open source, wary of its effectiveness. But really, what's there to fear? The bugs? That can't be it, since I run across bugs in Horizon all the time, and its been a system for what? 10 years now? Maybe its the support issue, but it takes very little research into open source systems to see that there are companies coming in to fill that need.
I don't know. But the overwhelmingly lukewarm response to open source ILS is sad to me, because it shows very clearly that libraries still aren't comfortable with making sweeping changes. Maybe this is just typical director-of-the-library-wariness, but it reflects to other people in the community when our library directors (or ILS administrators) show distrust of open source systems. And it doesn't reflect in a good way.

Medieval manuscripts and born-digital

Do you read Cataloging and Classification Quarterly? Well, I do. Sometimes there are really interesting articles like Joy Humphrey's this quarter--"Manuscripts and Metadata: Descriptive metadata in three manuscript catalogs: DigCIM, MALVINE, and Digital Scriptorium." (whew! long title, eh?)
Anyway, Humphrey makes an interesting point at the very beginning of the article about how difficult it is to digitize medieval manuscripts, and not just because they're old. Handwritten manuscripts are as valuable to researchers for their physical elements as for their content. Did the creator use different fonts, are there different authors within the manuscript, what kind of paper did they use, etc. etc. But when you digitize the manuscript and put it online, some or all of that data can get lost. There is simply no substitute for looking at the manuscript in person, if you're not as interested in content as you are in the item itself.
Which made me think a lot about born-digital materials, and how we may never see this kind of interest in the "who, what, where and why" of digital objects as we do in antiquities. I mean, most of the interest is in the content of born-digital objects, not their construction. We really care about construction when we're trying to access or migrate or emulate it. There aren't a lot of historians yet who say "remember when we were using LISP codes? Man, who were those guys? What kind of computers did they use?" There are some, but not a lot. Who will that breed of historian be? The ones who do digital archaeology and write papers about the look and feel of php databases, and who the creator was and what we can glean about them from their personal stamp on the information contained in the database. As databases and other born-digital objects become more and more the product of a community action, will the creator fall by the wayside? Will this type of diplomatics even be possible anymore?

Networking and Subject Headings

I got to meet some new people yesterday. All of them were technical service librarians/digital librarians. And twice I heard the same comment/question: "What do you think about folksomonies?"
Um...?
I think that they're a fad? I think that people only use them because they have no idea that other subject searching is available? I think that LCSH needs to stop being a browsing list?
I got the feeling, though, that the idea of controlled language "death" is very scary for librarians.
And then TODAY, I see this:
University of Chicago Libraries

Which is EXACTLY what I've been thinking about! Do a search in the UC catalog now, and you get not only the list of things the catalog thinks you might want, but the ability to refine that search within the LC classification schema. We have the classification scheme already laid out for us, which roughly corresponds to the LCSH , and why not use it to help make LCSH more hierarchical? I've been gushing over AAT since as long as I can remember, because it takes the headings and makes them hierarchical. I can actually use the headings to help me find more headings! What a concept!
Now, obviously LCSH hasn't always been this way. The books are actually pretty useful when it comes to finding other headings that might be useful. But when everything went online, we really lost that ability. There aren't nearly as many cross-references anymore, or see alsos.
We need to reclaim that heritage, and make our LCSH work FOR us again, instead of against us, and I think that folksonomies will end up following. All people really need is a way to understand a system for them to use it.
I mean, if enough people adopt it, everyone knows what "h8r" means, right? Why not understand subject headings?

A short history of Horizon, part II

Turns out, by "tomorrow" I meant Monday. Psych!
At any rate, back to Horizon. So the stage was set for Horizon to die off, all the libraries to go stomping off in anger to open source systems or the other big library companies. The people who bought SirsiDynix obviously hadn't thought about this eventuality. A lot of librarians like to make the investors out to be complete jerks, who think that librarians are all lambs to the slaughter. I don't think that's exactly right. I think they just underestimated the market. Lots of libraries had been with Horizon for many, many years (since it was called Dynix Classic; we're talking pre-1995, at least). And library systems are a lot like cars--if you've had the same 1995 Corolla for the past 12 years, you're at least open to the idea of trading it in. And once the transmission goes out, you're definitely in the market. You might buy the new Corolla, but then again, Nissan just came out with the new Altima and it's pretty hot-looking.
This is how libraries reacted, initially. Horizon was dying, they started looking at Symphony, but then--to stretch the analogy a little further--the Toyota salesperson turned out to be really insincere and kind of pushy. The SD people also turned out to be insincere, to many people. There was obviously a backlash from the people whose contracts were nullified, and what did SD do? They issued a press release (you should really read it) where they basically said that everyone who didn't like the new system should just learn to live with it, because that's how things are.
Of course, almost everyone jumped up and said "I'm buying an Altima!" (or a Ford Fusion, or maybe even a VW Jetta). Once it became clear the libraries would just take their toys and go home, SD did an almost exact 180. Fast forward a year, and we're at the conference of users of Horizon (this wrapped over the weekend). Now the tune is completely different.
Upgrading to Symphony has become just that--an upgrade. Not a migration costing almost $100K, but an upgrade, which costs nothing, and a 40% discount on support if you sign a three-year contract. I do believe that someone has changed their minds about librarians. Of course, even with that kind of financial incentive, my library is still thinking of going to open source software. The tide has officially turned, and I don't think that SD was really the cause. Just a push in a more egalitarian direction.

A short history of Horizon, part 1

As the Technical Services librarian, my job entails not only cataloging, but also database administration. We use a system called Horizon, that is supported by a company called SirsiDynix. I haven't talked much about Horizon on this blog, but it's dying. A brief history:
Sirsi and Dynix were two separate entities, and decided to merge in 2005, I believe, or 2006. They brought their two systems into the relationship: Sirsi had Unicorn, and Dynix had Horizon. Most people agree that Horizon is the more modern system, with more bells and whistles and such.
In 2007 at some point, SD was bought by a company called Vista, who immediately decided that having two Integrated Library Systems (ILS) was a really bad idea for business, and it would be so much more cost-effective if everyone just used one system. This is sound business practice, actually, but the whole thing was a public relations nightmare. Horizon was about to be updated to Horizon 8.0, which was to be this totally new system, a rebuild. Customers had already signed contacts with SD to go to Horizon 8. But....Vista decided to pull the plug on Horizon, and instead of informing the customers who already had contracts privately, just put out a big press release about it so they could find out along with everyone else.
Vista also decided to scrap Horizon entirely, and to tout a "new" system called Symphony. Thing is, apparently it looks just like Unicorn, but with some minor cosmetics. It's generally agreed all over the library community that Unicorn is old. Old old old. Like, its core system was created in 1985 and has never been changed kind of old. Who wants a system like that? No one. Plus it's a turnkey system, which usually means that you have little to no control over how your system looks. Horizon, on the other hand, is one of the most customizable databases I've ever seen, and you don't have to call customer support in order to customize it. You can do it within the system if you want to. You can also create custom SQL queries, from any of the tables. It's really pretty awesome when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it.
But I digress. The other thing that we all found out when we were told about the death of Horizon was that going to Symphony would be a migration, not an upgrade. The difference? You have to pay for a migration, and don't pay for an upgrade. Um, what? we all said. We have to pay to go to the system that you're making us go to if we want to stay with your company? (Keep in mind that Horizon, 10 years ago, had an upfront cost of $75K.)
This pushed a lot of people to rethink their systems. The explosion of open source, of course, just happened to coincide with this announcement, and the other library vendors in the business started salivating when thinking of how SD was about to go under and that left 20,000 libraries looking for new systems. Jackpot.

(continued tomorrow)

Archives Deathmatch

For years, there have been no real archival management systems built that are specifically for manuscript archivists. There are museum systems, and obviously library systems.
And in the last year, TWO archival management systems have been released: Archon and Archivists Toolkit.

Since I am on the Archivists' Toolkit listserv, I see all the posts that get made about that particular product. AT comes from a group of universities (The University of California, San Diego, New York University, and the Five Colleges), and is supposed to revolutionize the way that archivists look at data. And I think that it does. Although to me, it looks an awful lot like a cataloging system with a really easy user interface. But I would never tell an archivist that. Archivists are notoriously touchy about being compared to catalogers (except for me, since I'm both). I've actually written about this before, in the guise of the "uniqueness" argument.

But, at any rate, archivists are trying stuff out, and it's not going so well, methinks. Lots of buggy issues with Archivists Toolkit. Some people can never get their computer to let them install the software, some can never figure out how to publish the information that they put into the database, and I don't want to think about the people who may never be able to extract the information that they put in. But of course, Archivists Toolkit is just one of the products; the other is Archon.

Archon was developed by the U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Archon is web-based, instead of software based. I haven't played with it as much as AT, and since I'm not on the listserv I can't speak to its usefulness now that it's hit version 2.01. But from the descriptions---it just sounds so much better. Web-based? Automatic publication onto the web? Automatic search functionality? Yes, please! And they even appease archivists--"With Archon, there is no need to encode a finding aid, input a catalog record, or program a sytlesheet. " See that? NO NEED to catalog. Just like archivists like it.

We'll see which one wins. I actually put my money on AT, but only because everyone's touting it as a wonderful piece of wonderfullness that will revolutionize archival work. And they only say that because UC and NYU are involved. Not that I'm jaded or anything.

The Rise of the "Web 2.0"

I hate to start talking about the "generation gap", but sometimes it becomes increasingly obvious. I'm not an undergrad anymore, but I still use the tools that lots of undergrads use: blogs, facebook, text messaging, online document handlers, etc etc. I like technology, and I like knowing about the newest things to come out and how people are using them.
But many people insist on using software to do things that could be done so much more effortlessly through the web. They call it "web 2.0" and seem not to understand that it's the same thing as it always was: social interaction. People find the path of easiest communication and then use it until something even more useable comes along.
Why use Blackboard technology when you could be using blogs? Forget emails; use RSS feeds, or even pinging products to send out text messages. This stuff isn't hard; in fact, it's ridiculously easy, because people are thinking of things all the time. Why use a paper or email survey when you can just put a poll into your website that generates automatic results that users can see? Or why use Java-enabled chat rooms when you can use an embedded widget?
The opportunites that are out there, and are free, are amazing, and yet I feel like many people aren't seeing that these are awesome solutions. I blame Windows operating systems on this, because people believe firmly that software is designed to crash. It really isn't, you know. It's supposed to be designed NOT to do that, but Windows probably WAS designed to mess up a lot, so you'd continue to buy the new, "better" version (Java, anyone?).
At any rate, I think it's kind of sad that people feel like they're trapped in boxes of software and ownership, when the web is exploding with things that make ownership and licenses basically irrelevant.