Here’s a video of me demoing The Elements ebook on the iPad at the Texas Library Association conference this past summer. Was just a quick tech demo of how things like The Elements will change our concept of a “book” in new ways because of the technological possibilities of these new platforms.
Categories
First airplane ride
Eliza took her first major trip, all the way to Cleveland to see our wonderful friend Titi (Chrysty). It was a big adventure, and she handled it all with characteristic maturity and grace. I forget she is only 2 sometimes. None of it frightened her, and her ears didn’t even hurt. She was perfectly peaceful the whole time, looking out the window and reading books. I think she is a born traveler. She had a bit of trouble sleeping in unfamiliar surroundings, mostly because she has totally outgrown the pack n’ play to the point where it is now uncomfortable. Otherwise, the trip was a wonderful success, and we had a lot of fun.
Her favorite activity on the trip? Build-a-Bear, where she made a pink bear that she calls Dot Dot, complete with a Sleeping Beauty dress and crown. Ah, my girly girl. How did a child of MINE become such a princess?
Categories
Inside Eliza’s Head
Here’s a glimpse inside the way Eliza’s mind works: We were walking back to the car today from a quick visit to the pool and some swimming. She was carrying her bucket, which is covered in pictures of Disney princesses. Suddenly, she stops in the parking lot, and stares at the shadows of the two of us on the asphalt.
“What’s up, Eliza?”
“Daddy…there are no princesses in the shadow. But there are princesses on the bucket!”
“Yep, that’s pretty weird, Eliza. That’s just how shadows work.”
“Hmmm. Okay.”
Seemed safer than trying to explain the properties of light to her.
In our original timeline, we were supposed to have a soft-launch of our OCLC Web Scale Management system tomorrow, August 20, where we went live with Check in/Check out functionality. We are very, very, very close…but it’s unlikely that we will actually launch tomorrow. Here’s the short list of issues we are still working through:
- Currently, the locations in our Worldcat Local instance aren’t accurate. This should, literally, be fixed tonight. But we’ll need some time to spot check to make sure they came through accurately.
- Ditto with the Local Holdings on our Serials…they are starting to show up today, but we will need a bit of time to check some of them.
- The loan rules for circulation went live today as well, but moving into circulating, even dual with our old catalog, without the chance to really run them through their paces makes my Access department want to strangle me.
- There is one issue on the backend having to do with reporting that we have to have a solution for in order to satisfy our state auditors. Said solution is, we think, there…but not demonstrated. The state will hunt us down if we don’t demonstrate before going live.
Our data (bib, holding, patron, circulation) has been successfully pulled and imported into WMS. We’re missing a small handful of records that we’re still hunting down OCLC Numbers for…but we’re talking about 2000 or so records out of 600K+. We have pushed more data into the system than anyone else, and it is still responding very well…the performance is impressive, given that it’s operating over the web.
All in all…we are very, very close. So close that it pains me deeply to think about NOT going live on schedule. But schedules are flexible, and if we slip by a week, I’m not going to cry failure. So we implement a complete ILS transfer in 7 weeks instead of 6 weeks…no bigs.
TL;DR: We’re a little behind. But we’re almost there. We are still completely on target for a full live launch on Aug 30th, and we will almost certainly have the public catalog up and running well before that (technically it’s running now, but with some UI issues). I still expect us to start the limited-live before that as well for circulation…but it won’t be tomorrow.
I just had a brief piece published over at Library Journal entitled Ebook Sanity. It was something that just poured out of my head unchecked one day, and I was lucky enough to find a home for it as a part of the build up to the upcoming Library Journal Ebook Summit. Here’s a very short teaser:
…consider the idea that the First Sale principle doesn’t apply to ebooks and other digital content. Maybe this is the fact: information in the digital age is such a different beast than in the print age that we not only shouldn’t draw analogies but we actually can’t.
I hope that you head over and read it. Also take a look at the other excellent essays linked off the side from Eric Hellman, Barbara Fister, and Char Booth (holy hell how did I end up in a set with those people? I’m so not worthy). I would love to hear any thoughts you might have on the topic…I’m still forming my conclusions around some of these issues. How do you think libraries can and should react to ebooks?
Categories
Contest over at Perpetual Beta
Just in case you follow me here, but not over at my American Libraries blog, Perpetual Beta: I’m holding a contest where I am giving away a copy of my newest book, Mobile Technology & Libraries. All you have to do is create a Google Search Story about libraries, and post it in the comments over at PB.
Free book, people! Show me your creativity!
If all goes according to plan, we should have an internal testing WebScale Management site very early next week…Monday or Tuesday. There’s still a boatload to be done in the next 2 weeks, but it’s almost all tiny, tiny weird sets of data (microform bib records that have the print OCLC number attached to them instead of the Microform one). We’re still working on getting good data from our campus student information system, Banner, but I feel like that will get sorted soon.
If stuff works like we hope, we’re are still on track for a go-live on August 20th. It won’t be 100% there…we’ll still be fiddling with pieces of data for a few weeks, I’m guessing. But we’ll be 98.92% or so there, and that’s good enough for me. We will gain more functionality on August 30th, as the Web Scale software gets updated, and that’s when we’re expecting the full go-live to happen.
Categories
21st Century Toddler
That’s my girl…sitting in a 120 year old house, on a 50+ year old Brass Bed, watching a movie on her iPod Touch.
I can’t believe that it’s been 2 weeks since we announced that we were going to be transitioning to the OCLC Web Scale Management ILS, and that I haven’t blogged in the meantime. Although to be clear, the second is a direct result of the first.
We have been working like mad to make this admittedly insane timeline work. I’m pretty sure that my ILS Manager/Queen of All Data Andrea worked 100 hours that first week, moving data around and massaging it into what OCLC wanted from us for Web Scale. As the first live site, we volunteered to take upon ourselves a huge amount of the data manipulation, so Andrea has been moving MARC out of Virtua, into Access to manipulate, and then finally through an XSD to provide OCLC with the final mapped XML for all the fiddly-bits of data. We’re also dumping huge amounts of MARC directly, but for non-bib records (holdings, items, patrons, etc) we’re doing a ton of conversion.
This isn’t to say this is the way that everyone will do it…but with our somewhat aggressive schedule, we were determined to give them whatever made it easiest to make WMS happen.
I’d like to publicly thank everyone at MPOW who have really put themselves out on a big limb to help with this implementation. We’ve got three major working groups doing different parts of this massive job, and all of them are digging in and getting stuff done. I’m so, so proud of the team that I work with at UTC…serious, I couldn’t have hand-picked a better group of librarians. They freaking rock.
We’re still on track for an August 20th launch, and we’ll be rolling WorldCat Local to our patrons before the full go-live….so we’ve got just short of 3 weeks to finish this thing off. Between now and then we’ve got to finish the little troublesome data sets, get an updated patron file ready, start a marketing blitz on campus for our patrons, get a redesigned index page up for the website that highlights WorldCat Local, and kick the hell out of some really, really shiny new tires.
I am very pleased to finally be able to announce that the Library at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is scheduled to be the first live implementation of a product that has been talked about for years: a web-based, collaborative, modern library system that does away with silos of data. We are implementing the OCLC Web Scale Management library system even as I type, and will be going live with the system for circulation on August 20, 2010, and with circulation, cataloging, and acquisitions on August 30, 2010. A wiki page documenting the process, working groups, and more is available, and will continue to be updated as the process continues.
I could talk for a long time about how excited I am about the possibilities of this system…and probably will for the next few months at least. I’ve been pursuing Andrew Pace about this product for what feels like years now, and after seeing it and understanding what may come as a result of this…well, I can’t wait.
This is a major shift in the library world, and it’s one where I think the repercussions will take years to really be felt. The simple time-saving that will be immediately felt for libraries in their processes are enormous…the workflow necessary to get something from order to shelf is so straightforward and fast that I feel strongly that we’ll save several person-years of staff time in short order. In addition, there is a shared-plugin architecture for the staff-side that combines with the open API calls that give incredible access for mashups of data that directly interact with the system. One example that I’ve seen is a plugin that combines the New York Times bestseller API with the acquisitions module in Web Scale to allow for single-click ordering from a list of bestsellers that is a live call from the NYT.
Going the other direction, the architecture allows you to pull your own data out and impose it on other pages. An example of this would be a Firefox plugin that shows you realtime budget information while you shop on Amazon.com…complete with recalculation as you add things to your Cart.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t a ton of questions still. We’re the earliest of adopters on the first product of its kind…to say that I am a bit nervous would be an understatement. But the potential and promise of Web Scale is something that make it worth it.
We are literally implementing Web Scale Management in 30 days. To my knowledge, I’ve never heard of another ILS migration even approaching this level of speed…so if I’m a little out-of-touch for the next month, you won’t be terribly surprised.