I’m simultaneously looking forward to it and somewhat apprehensive about the whole thing. The distance is one thing. Eight miles? I could do eight miles and not really be phased. In my mind’s eye, I can picture eight miles from here & it’s a ways, but it’s not too bad. I think after about eight miles, I get into more urban and more bicyclists, and the roads I’ll be crossing are more major crossings, and more people, etc, etc. After eight miles, I don’t really have a sense of the trail I’ll be bicycling on either. Not that I haven’t done it before, I just haven’t done it for something like 16 years and I’m kinda foggy about how it all goes. I think I can just keep following the yellow brick road (and all the regular bike commuters), but still. I like to be able to visualize this stuff.

I’m also not a super confident rider. I’m ok. I’m not particularly fast, even with an electric-assist, I average out at about 10mph unless I’m going downhill. You know, gravity helps everyone out there. Being slow like that means the silly lycra/spandex people zoom past me. As does pretty much everyone else, but… whatever. I like bicycling. I just don’t like going up hills & I have help with that now. Also, my bike is real purdy.

I think my best bet tomorrow is just to let myself be a tourist. That’s more fun anyway. That means instead of being all boring and serious and focused, I get to look around and stop and smell the wild roses and take pictures of the lakes and generally dawdle & annoy the boring, serious, focused spandex people. And if I’m late to work, eh, I’m late to work. It’s an experiment, after all…

In other news, got the article draft out to the people who need to contribute to it. A little (a lot) later than I wanted it going out, but… it’s out & hopefully they get it back to me in time to revise & send on to the editor so we can go through the whole process again. Also did a walk through of a webinar presentation. I’m the host… which of course brings to mind, “I am your host und sagen wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret!” I fear the presentation will be nowhere near so interesting as Cabaret, certainly not choreographed as well (I mean, really — who can compete with Bob Fosse?), but it’ll be interesting.

And if I’m going to be coherent enough to be peddling a bicycle, electric-assist or no, I need to be going to bed in the very near future. So that’s that for now.

That’s something else I’ve been thinking about lately. The volume of information both accessible “online” & unaccessible except through gatekept systems (in libraries or in books/print materials only) has skyrocketed. Part of my job is to help libraries scale up to the volume of information available to them electronically. We don’t deal with nearly as many titles as OCLC, but we track around 4000 databases (and have more that we don’t track), and have around 1.3M journals & …3M? ebooks? Everyone knows that LoC doesn’t have all titles cataloged. And OCLC considers us a competitor so though we’ve tried to work something out with them, we’ve thus far not come to a workable agreement (and OCLC doesn’t have everything cataloged either, not by a long shot!). I have two catalogers and there’s no way we have time to catalog all of it, much less the $$$ to pay outsourced catalogers to catalog all of the remaining & ever increasing content we have libraries that are subscribed to. We have a autocreate program that uses publisher info to make brief MARC records based on publisher info to cover the things for which we don’t have full records. At least there’s *some* record that way otherwise no record means no way to search for it for our client libraries. We also buy Bowker records (created from publisher info sent to Bowker as part of establishing the ISBN), which also informs LoC’s CIP program, and we’re increasingly reaching out directly to publishers for MARC records for their content with decidedly mixed results.

The long and the short of it is — no record means no access. A “poor” record may not provide all the various access points that one might wish to exploit, but it catches the major ones of title, author, publisher, and a few other data points (barring diacritics issues in various programs along the way which is something we definitely struggle with).

Libraries are backlogged in cataloging some several years behind. There’s just a lot of material out there requiring metadata and no one in the library world, libraries, vendors, or anyone else, can keep up with it. No one in the internet world can keep up with it either, but the expectation is much lower there. Library, catalog thyself! If we use “lower quality records” to provide some degree of access while we painfully slowly bring up quality (millions of records with two catalogers is not something one does over night), at least we are trying to provide some access for everything instead of waiting for everything to be fully & perfectly cataloged… Quality vs. Quantity, you can have two of anything: Time – Cost – Quality… We’re trying so hard to provide as much quality as we can, but… damn, the quantity & pace at which that quantity is growing is Freaking Insane.

Ok, first the gatekeepers issue, or… we’ll start there because that’s what struck me first. I can’t remember what I was reading or overhearing or … what. I think the context was how it was great that libraries/librarians are the gatekeepers of information and knowledge and how librarians vet and serve out The Best™ Information, that pep talk we give ourselves about the service we provide to our various communities.

I think I might be in a minority in that I mostly use my library card for searching for articles that come up in Google behind paywalls. Now and again I’ll get a book, but like an increasing amount of people, one of my earlier stops in the information gathering process is to check out what’s online in the great unwashed, dirty masses of Google. Maybe I’ll ask Google to take me to the Wikipedia article – it’s still somewhat unwashed, but it usually gives some pointers to some relevant and somewhat better sources. Or maybe I’ll just see if something fits in the top ten to twenty results (unless I’m really obsessed – I’ve been known to go hundreds of pages deep poking at what’s out there, less so more recently though).

The majority of the time, for my personal purposes, I find what I’m looking for without busting out the library card. For professional purposes, I… well, I follow largely the same pattern. Don’t need a library card because I’m in the library/publishing industry & I have access to certainly not all of what I need, but a fair amount of it & if the price is right, I can buy what I need, if I don’t have access through work or a library or Google. But most of the time I can find what I need online.

I get it when people say “I can find what I need online – why do we need libraries?” I can find what I need online to my authority qualified standards. I may disagree with someone else’s assessment of what’s an authority but that’s going to be true still if I’m standing behind a ref desk helping them try to find something too. Librarians may be gatekeepers of information, but with the internet seems to be a low barrier to information & an easy fence to jump. Might not get into the ivory tower, but there’s plenty of goodies in the king’s woods.

What I worry about with the gatekeeper metaphor is that “normal people” will start seeing the ‘gatekeeper’ mentality is less one of Information For The People! than truly a gatekeeper mentality of Information For Our People. There’s a tension between The library is free! Information wants to be free! and the reality of the cost of that information and who, in reality, pays for and gets to use that information. Libraries have their audiences. Public libraries are funded and supported (or not as the case sadly seems to be increasing) by their local tax base and it’s hard, if possible at all, to get a library card for the next town over. Libraries do provide interlibrary loan, for which I’m thankful. I’ve gotten good books that way (and interlibrary doc delivery supports my brother, for which I’m also thankful, he does some awesome stuff).

I think libraries are really important. I have to believe that libraries have a place in our future. Maybe not because “that’s where we keep our books, our trusty knowledge repositories” but we do keep our knowledge repositories there with professionals who can help us find and retrieve them when we can’t find them. If we know they can do that. Yeah, and here is where my thinking breaks down because nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

I do wonder about the assumption that “everything is online” and think it would be really awesome if libraries could get localized matches in search engines. Somehow. I know. And then there’s WorldCat. Still never seen that show up in an internet search result despite that being kind of the point of it. Weirdly, I do see LibraryThing fairly frequently. What is LibraryThing doing right that WorldCat isn’t?

I don’t know – it’s rambling; there are holes in my logic big enough to drive a parade of MACK trucks through. But I think there’s something there at the core, that might be true, and that little piece of truth nags at me. And there was a small bit of illumination that just came to me & left again. It’s been a long week of thinking about things.

The keynote by Axel Roesler was excellent. Of his many good points, one of his sidenotes was that he had been a designer, then an engineer, and was now back to a designer. It was at this point that I started thinking about how management is at least partially about designing an experience for the employees that allows them to be as productive as possible, in both directions — I want the folks above and below on the org chart to be happy and productive. How can I facilitate a work experience for them that will set them up for success? With that in mind, I thought about why I’d been hired again and what sorts of things I would be able to find at this conference that would aid & abet me in meeting some of those larger scheme goals.

To that end, the first presentation I went to was Designing Experiences Beyond the Screen (Ariel van Spronsen) — services design. It was during this that I jokingly told one of my former co-workers that for the weekend I should change my title to Employee Productivity Designer. She laughed at me and said, “It sounds like you’re a manager that doesn’t want to say you’re a manager!” Totally. She then said, ‘and you’d have to work with a lot of people to design that experience, facilities to set up desks, IT to set up computers, HR arranging onboarding…” Um, yeah, I’m a manager, what do you think managers do? Heh.

Then it was lunch. Yay lunch. Met up with P who went to WikiLeaks: Information Between Legal Borders (Brian Rowe), which was the other one that looked interesting to me, but not as likely to provide the lateral ‘I Can Use This’ sort of thing. After lunch we both went to Intro to Sharepoint (Quentin, Greg) — it was *way* intro for us, but as we both have staff we’d like to pull over to SharePoint, it seemed like an optimal time to step back and see what other folks were telling noobs about SharePoint. I also got some good ideas of things I can tweak SharePoint to do, helloooo key performance indicators. I’d love to figure out a way to ping off the incident management stuff to SharePoint to track my team specific metrics there, but have yet to figure out a way that won’t just add a zillion additional steps to the workflow. Still, in time…

The third session of the day, we went to Google Book Settlement (Brian Rowe) — it was good. Kind of a coaster session with fairly minimal cross-over immediate ‘can use’ stuff, but interesting from a copyright and intellectual property standpoint. The final session of the day was Discussion/Idea Generation: Next Gen Internet-making taxonomies & social media work (Pam Green). We didn’t actually get around to the social media aspect of the session, but there were a lot of my peeps there, and Pam is awesome. Looking at how to organize a massive intranet effectively is an interesting exercise. There were a lot of assumptions that had been passed on to Pam by people who tend to make the decisions, and there were a lot of assumptions by people in the room who lacked background and context (not the least, how long Pam had been doing work along these lines). But there was some good signal in the noise.

We went down to the info parties — I had a tasty Manhattan, although the bartender asked me a question a couple times and I just couldn’t hear her, or rather I could hear her, but not distinguish quite what she was saying, to her annoyance. It got made sweet, which is fine. It was tasty. We stood around and talked about random things, then headed to a place down the street with the claim that they had better beers (plus you didn’t have to order food at the bar). That was fun. Would like to do that more often with those folks. I really miss working with them, though I think ultimately I’m in a much, much better place, that’s a much better fit for me.

This morning the presentation was a presentation on search engines, search & the like by Vanessa Fox. It was also a great presentation. She in relation to tracking real time search trends based on tv advertising, she asked how many of us watched the Super Bowl last February. In an audience of around 300, only four people raised their hands. This reminds me of the PM that started out using sports metaphors in a meeting I was in where there were a couple of librarians, a nice content lady, and an Israeli database guy. We all gave him blank stares. He shifted to military metaphors and the database guy got what he was saying and started laughing… I can’t remember if he ever came around to a metaphor that the rest of us would actually get. But Earnest Tom was so earnest that we didn’t really mind. We kinda got it, the metaphors were just really not well thought out for the audience… ANYWAY (it’s my blog, I can go on a tangent if I want to). Apparently 50% of people are on both the computer and tv at the same time (I don’t know where the statistic comes from or the full context, I’m just sayin’ that’s what I heard). I leaned over to P & whispered, “That’s because we only have one computer in the same room as the tv right now…” But search trends and information seeking behaviors are an interesting thing to take a look at, I find my interest drops fairly quickly when the only interest in them becomes focused down to “how do we use this to push traffic to sites”, but that’s not what this presentation was about.

The first, and only session I attended today, was Using Humor to Convey Information (Jess Hagy & friends). It was put on by Jess of Indexed, a site I’ve been following for about three years now. One of the things I need to do is present information about what my team is doing. While at the moment, I need to present my information seriously and get taken seriously, I think that using humor and the unexpected in other areas helps engage people and bring stuff home that would be otherwise much less accessible. For instance, this example of what’s changing in a MARC record is completely amusing to me & made much more of an impression than it would have had the example been, for example Lawrence Whelk.

Then to lunch, where we met a nice library student from PDX, and a SharePoint widget designer & a SharePoint dev, all of whom we had good discussions with. Then when we were done eating, we wandered over to KW and talked to him and I got from him what I was hoping to hear someone at the conference talk about — namely, storytelling and creating compelling narratives. Got some book recommendations, or rather, re-recommendations because he’s talked about them before (and that’s why I asked him, I knew he’d have some good resources). His opinion was also ‘maybe not so much employee productivity designer, but productivity engineer.’ Which lead to an entertaining, brief discussion on design v. engineering. “Don’t call me an engineer! I’m an artist!”

And with that, we went home a little early. It was good, but we needed an infonap & at least a *little* bit of a “weekend”. Also a chance to recover from being around that many people. Introvert much?

Kind of general stuff, we saw more whale tails & ass cracks than we really needed to. Pull those pants up or wear longer shirts, yo. All in all, it was good. From an lateral usability perspective, I got what I needed. Networking and keeping in touch too.

Next week I am free! FREE!! FREEEE!!!! I have to get the front bearings in my car fixed, go to the spa, try to find a home for various things in my house, get new fish for the bedroom tank (and a new right light for the living room one)… and more stuff than anyone should probably pretend to try to cram into a week. Which means I won’t get a bunch of stuff done. Ah well. Maybe at least watch some bewitched… Heh.

So I’m just off the BG Trail at home & 13 miles down BG is where I start work come the 22nd. I want an electric bike. Really badly. It just seems like a good thing to do rather than trying to find parking or bus an hour and a freaking half each way. I know. 13 miles — 1.5 hours. LAME.

Oof. M1 wants to know what the tooth fairy does with all the teeth. We also had the discussion last night about whether or not tooth fairies were like dentists — ie, not a single tooth fairy for the entire world, but a number of tooth fairies serving a local region. This whole fairy thing is starting to get complicated! We’re on our third envelope now, although lately they’ve been leaving notes on the white board we brought home from storage. Crap. I don’t know what the tooth fairy does with all the teeth!

I thought the use of Wordle by the Obama transition team to summarize the primary concerns arising from the discussion on healthcare was interesting with respect to using tag clouds for subject analysis of a discussion. While Wordle produces a static image, rather than links that can be followed to find content, it gives a good idea of what type of content a site, document, or discussion has available while simultaneously allowing one to quickly gauge the priority of topics – at least by word count. 

The cool thing about using Wordle is that it does the screen grab, then allows you to adjust the graphic for direction of words, fonts, color, layout, inclusion/exclusion of words (be they redundant, misleading with regard to "aboutness", or otherwise inappropriate).  If you’re tracking changes to a site’s content over time and want to talk about that, using two different Wordles can help display the shift in topic in a creative way.

Just for fun, I put together a Wordle for this [the work] blog, reflecting the content at this time. (Though it’s getting cut off in *this* location…).

Lots to do tomorrow so I don’t know why I’m procrastinating going to bed except that going to bed means I have to attempt to wake up in the morning. Probably too early to the sweetest little monkey-muffin crawling all over me… but what with the lots to do, that’s probably for the best. Hopefully neither girl tries the busting out in tears at the slightest drop of a hat (or “no”) tomorrow. That’s been annoying lately.

Gonna go check out the PCC in Edmonds. P is going golfing with his brother, so I’m on my own in the ayem. Which is fine. We’ll have a grand adventure attempting to get motivated enough to get out of the house before he gets home. Also, checking out the PCC. A *grand* adventure, I tell you what!

Tomorrow eve we’re going to go have dinner at some friends’. I’m making the potato-chive-cheddar bread & bringing soup. They’re providing the salad & dessert. It’ll be lovely. Oh, and we’re bringing some of the beer we made as a work team event. We named it Taxonomic Impediment. I hear from people who know such things that it’s very good. Woo!

Yeah, that little monkey is going to be crawling on me early. I need to get to bed. Sigh.

I’ll wring something out eventually & feel better. Much like I always worried in school that the paper I just turned in was epic fail and it was usually returned with an A or B+ grade. It’s just getting through the process of getting something, nearly anything, written up. But until I do, it’s going to be a nagging irritation.

I’ve also set out an ambitious course of stuff I want to learn at work over the next year or so. Almost a terrifying amount of stuff to learn. But I think it will give me more of the kinds of work that I’m suited for rather than the hit & run projects my people seem to usually get pulled in on. It’s all there just waiting for someone as far as I can tell, so what the hell. Now if I can just convince the devs & technical architects to let me sit on their shoulders and give me scraps now & again that they would rather not do… Do my own homework & convince people to let me feed them my dogfood… And spend some serious time brushing up on XML & XSLT & some other things to help smooth the tweaky… I’m looking forward to it. No end of stuff to learn though.

It’s late! I have to get up early! And tomorrow at the end of the day at the end of the week I’m being forced to network! EEK! Am I out of my comfort zone? Oh yes, I’m out of my comfort zone. But she’s a nice smart lady and I think it will be good.

The service itself was nice. My parents’ longtime friend & former pastor did the service, the same fellow who married us, so of course it was nice. The veteran’s part of the service, gun salute/Taps & presenting of the flag to the family was oddly touching for such a highly ritualized ceremony. And Amazing Grace is increasingly a song that I really love. I don’t know why.

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Yesterday I got a rise & shine with, “ZOMG! WE HAVE A SHOWING IN 45 MINUTES!” That was 8:45. They showed up at 9:10 which is a short 45 minutes, if you ask me. They circled the culdesac like vultures, paused in front of the house & peered in as I yelled, ‘They’re here! WTFOMGBBQ!’ Then they drove off. We left on time & they were kind enough to leave a card unlike the other two realtors who wanted to show the house this weekend. We worked in the yard a good chunk of the day, then I went and found birthday presents for my dad.

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This morning there was supposed to be a showing between 10 & 11. They didn’t leave a card, so I don’t know if they bothered to come by even though we scrambled this morning to make sure everything was suitable for showing and managed to get everyone out of the house before 10. And in doing so, we spend a ridiculous amount of money at the local bookstore. Alarming almost, except for the 40% off all used books. Perhaps alarming anyway as we walked away with a shopping bag full of books and… our shelves are in storage. Then someone was supposed to come by with their clients during our open house. Of course, just as I was getting out of the shower around noon they called and said they were five minutes away & could they stop by NOW? Um. How about no? Come on, people! I know my house is for sale, but you’re still freaking guests. If they dropped by when they said they would, they didn’t leave their card either.

This whole house thing is incredibly, stupifyingly, exhaustingly depressing. All the feedback we get is, “oh gosh, that cute little house hasn’t sold yet? < expressions of amazement >” Frustrating. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that one yet. It’s probably obvious though. It’s really sapping my energy. Meh. Stupid house.

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During the open house today P and The Girls went with my parents & aunt & uncle & my cousin’s daughter to the Museum of Flight. M2 was transfixed & fascinated. She even went in the flight simulator & thought that was pretty much The Best Thing Ever. P stayed out with M1 who has occasional bouts of motion sickness. Apparently my mom said something to the effect that M2 has no fear. I frequently think that might be true, except that as mommy, I’m privy to such conversations as her deep & abiding fear of smoker’s lung, dying, and the occasional statement when I say we should go bike riding that ‘what if I fall?’ Like that’s ever stopped her from doing anything else. Anyway — they all had a grand time.

*I* went and did my ladies’ thing. We sat around and ate cookies and strawberries and strawberries mostly. It was a very laid back, low key thing today. It was lovely to get away from the house & listen to people talk about things that were mostly not work & mostly not home. Very, very lovely. There was some talk about kids & birth as there was a pregnant lady there, but I’m finally well enough socialized to know that I should just not talk about my experience of having two very non-eventive (except for the length of the first) home births. It just gets everyone’s judgmental panties in a twist and I’m too tired right now to feel like explaining & it’s just so easy to say nothing at all. So I didn’t say anything at all. And it made me kind of sad because diversity of experience is what makes us all interesting, but… apparently I wasn’t interested in being interesting in that way today. I was having a lovely afternoon & I just didn’t want to go there. The very nice pregnant lady’s first pregnancy was, as I understand it, supposed to be a home birth, but she ended up transported, rightly, to the hospital. I tend to think the midwifery model worked as perfectly in her situation as it did in mine — the midwife recognized a situation that required transporting & did so, everyone came out alive & stuff. Ok. Good. It all worked out — right? Right! And anymore than that & I have to start qualifying & justifying & explaining & beating back strawmen & meh.

There seems to be no tack I can take that doesn’t make me come off like some kind of defensive wacko unless the people I’m talking with are already predisposed to accept home birth as within the norm of acceptable birthing situations. So, slowly, I’m learning to hold what’s precious to me a little closer to my heart (shush that part about wearing my heart not on my sleeve as a parent, but two unshielded bundles of girl running about frequently outside of my protection). I had my births, they were what they were & they were lovely & I wouldn’t trade them in for the world. I can’t condense the discussion into a nice tidy sound bite that comes across nicely in a casual social situation. Not yet anyway.

I think that might be a personality defect on my part. I spend so much time so very deep in the gory details of things, making very fine distinctions, and when I miss a fine distinction here or a qualification there, sometimes it doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does, very much so, so I’m sensitive to making sure I cover all those qualifications, and the fine distinctions and it makes it very hard to speak from a… overview point of view? Um… what is it when people pull back and look at the forest? Whatever it is, I don’t do it very well & it’s not that I can’t see the forest for the trees, but that I note that not only is there this forest, but there are also these trees, and these plants, and these animals, which break out into mammals, birds, and insects, and insects aren’t really part of the animal kingdom but part of the insect kingdom and that’s different from the animal kingdom in these ways, and then the interaction between these plants & animals & stuff & the local weather & geographical topology… uh. Yeah. So… It’s a huge asset for what I actually do, not so much in the explaining it all to people…

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I have to give a presentation at work about what it is I do. I hope to have it ready by this Thursday, but… see, there’s this forest? And it has these trees? And some plants? And these animals, and… I know the people I’m presenting to are only really interested in the mammals (user experience) and not so much the birds (standards-based controlled vocab/authority lists), but the birds are really a very, very important part of what I do in conjunction with all these other things & I have to figure out how to make this all relevant to them, help them understand when it would be advantageous to use the corporate taxonomy for this particular company (and sometimes it isn’t). Urgh. My dream next week would involve me, a long list of terms to research, rationalize, a big huge complex import spreadsheet to create, & an unlimited budget.

There. Multiple plates of beans: terribly, terribly over-thought. I go from not saying anything at all about what’s going on in my life to the forest, trees, plants, animals, stuff, local weather, geographical topology, and in general probably TMI. And not even the *interesting* TMI! Yeh, no, there isn’t really any interesting TMI to speak of, no sin of omission.

Yes. I think I’m done now. I mean, I’m not, but enough has probably been said for now. It was a surprisingly pleasant long weekend, only the last few hours have been so angst-y. I’m blaming ALL of it on the fact that I’m tired of having the house for sale & I’m fretting about my work presentation. I will now resist the urge to play tetris & sudoku until I fall asleep on the couch in an effort to escape my own brain. Wheeeeee!