Congrats to LII

"A hearty congratulations goes out to Karen G. Schneider and her staff at LII for the indexing of their 10,000 entry. Let us also not forget Carole Leita, the originator of this wonderful resource." [Library Stuff]

NYPL eCards

"Check out the eCards from the New York Public Library." [LibraryPlanet.com]

This is great! It's what I always wanted to do for SLS libraries. Instead, my lack of programming skills, time, and artistic ability produced a different type of postcard script. I think it's been running for three years now - wow. (Please don't write to tell me that I need to rotate out the "taxes" one. I know. I'll take care of it next week. I know.)

"My TechCentralStation 'CyberLaw Maven' column on the library filtering case -- mostly based on my earlier blog post -- is now up." [Volokh Conspiracy]

For Jenny and others who no doubt are interested.  Volokh is sharp, and speaks in a human voice about difficult legal issues." [Ernie the Attorney]

At our quarterly administrators meeting today, Alison Atkins Denton gave a demo of the web site for the Illinois Public Library GIS Project. It reminded me of why I am so entranced by Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The Illinois State Library sponsored a grant to the GIS Lab at the Illinois Institute of Technology to determine the boundaries of all public library districts in the State. The ultimate goal is to determine which areas are unserved and don't receive library service. It's a very cool project, and I still think there is a way to use GIS to visually display library metrics (database hits, web site hits, foot traffic, circulation, reference questions, program registrations, bookmobile stops, etc.).

On a side note, the administrators in attendance today held a lively discussion of the non-resident library card debate because Illinois legislators have mandated that public libraries have to opt-in or opt-out of selling library cards to non-residents for whom they are the closest library. If the library opts-out, they become ineligible for construction grants. I don't know enough about this to comment on the law and its ramifications but at one point today, the debate centered around patrons that purchase a card at a particular library and then rack up bills at a different library. This is a point of contention because the library that sold the card is ultimately responsible for reimbursement of items not returned by that patron.

So some librarians don't want to sell non-resident cards because of the potential liability for those items. Listening to the debate today, it sounded much like recent blanket statements by entertainment industry execs that their customers are thieves. One person disputed the view of non-residents as potential thieves, saying that general experience suggests these folks "aren't exactly pulling up in Winnebagos."

So a gentle reminder to librarians that our patrons are not the enemy. That's an extra heaping of reminder for entertainment industry execs, too.

Polaris First ILS to Incorporate LSSI Virtual Software

"Gaylord Information Systems (GIS) and LSSI announced today that Polaris will be the first library automation system to seamlessly integrate the functions of the library?s public access catalog with live reference service through LSSI?s Virtual Reference ToolKit. The exchange of data between Polaris and LSSI will enhance the experience of library users by providing access to a librarian at multiple points in the search process." [Charlston Advisor, via Library Stuff]

This is a great development, one that I hope other ILS vendors emulate. There's no standard yet for the foundations of live reference service software, but they're working on it. Once adopted, this should accelerate this trend.

Charles Sebold sent me a great story:

"I was just listening to my local NPR station, and they had an interview with a lawyer (here in St. Louis) in his 90's who played a large strategic role in D-Day.  Apparently at some point the military realized they didn't know enough about the tides in the Channel (the worst tides in the world, apparently), and they asked this man, a recent Yale grad before he was drafted, to research them and write what we would now call a 'white paper' on them for the upper echelons.  He parked himself in a British library for months reading everything he could get his hands on, in English and French, about the tides.  He said in the interview that he couldn't have accomplished it without a British man, one of the librarians, that was sworn to secrecy.

Eventually they finished a 70-80 page paper, with footnotes and all, outlining the tidal problem and giving recommendations as to when to land (they advocated going in at high tide, I guess?  I was in the car when I heard this, and couldn't take notes - apparently landings like this were usually at low tide), and where.  High Command apparently liked the paper and edited it to give the beaches code names, and offered the author the post of beachmaster during the assault.  Later they decided that he was too important as a source of information, so they stashed him in an underground bunker (presumably in England) with a radio so he could direct the forces and answer questions as the assault progressed."

Listen to the interview for yourself. Thanks, Charles!

Addendum: Rafe provides a correction that the landing was at low tide.

Whew - I made today's deadline and got the SLS Union List of Serials up and searchable using ColdFusion MX and Dreamweaver MX. It lists the magazine and newspaper holdings of 170-something libraries in SLS, some 43,000 records. Microsoft Access totally choked on it, so luckily we're keeping Oracle as the back end. It took me a while to figure out that the tables were screwy after going through eight different database software programs in 25 years. I finally just started over in Oracle, re-populated the tables, and voila!

Okay, so it's not the ninth wonder of the world (I still have to dress it up and convert it to CSS), but it was quite the accomplishment for me. And the combination of Dreamweaver and ColdFusion was one-thousand degrees easier than using Oracle Portal. Color me impressed with the Macromedia software so far. I just wish there were more books about MX available right now since I'm jumping head first into those versions.

Librarians should be duly impressed with our plans for the ULS. I'll add searching by ISSN and OCLC number, as well as by individual library. Results will also include FirstSearch holdings with direct links to FS databases for retrieving full-text articles. We'll probably add in the EBSCOHost title list, too, and today someone suggested Elsevier in case the user wants to purchase the article right then and there. We'll authenticate our members so that they can update their own holdings, and provide them with links to display their own holdings on their own web sites.

We'll also display photocopy request guidelines for each library, as well as full contact information. Best of all, if you're logged in as a SLS member, you'll be able to make a photocopy request online by clicking on a library's holdings and pressing the submit button. It will truly be a thing of beauty!