Current Cites at the Reference Desk

Doing my Current Cites at the Reference Desk in between patron traffic.

UPDATE: And hot off the presses, here's the latest issue of CurrentCites for November...

Yes, It's that Time of Year: Blue Beanie Day 2008

Courtesy of Jeffrey Zeldman:

Announcing the second annual Blue Beanie Day! Show your support for Web Standards and Accessibility. Please join us on Friday, November 28, 2008 in celebrating Blue Beanie Day.

Friday, November 28, 2008 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

It's easy to show your support for web design done right. Don a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 28, switch your profile picture in Facebook and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2008/

How Dare You Call My Laptop a Technological Dinosaur

Every once and a while I come across an article which pretty much declares any device larger than a cellphone as dead because cellphones are what the teens are using and hence everything else is on the road to extinction.

This is silly.

I use my smartphone/pda/call-it-what-you-like -- all the time but even I know it doesn't replace my need for larger devices depending on what I'm doing.

I'm not going to write my research paper on one, for example, for the same reason that I wouldn't do the same, twenty years earlier, on the back of an envelope. You choose the tool to fit the job.

Ideas for Drupal4Lib IG Event at ALA in Chicago?

This is still a while off but I thought I'd put out an initial request before the holidays officially begin. It's a request for ideas and suggestions for the meeting of the LITA Drupal4Lib Interest Group at the 2009 ALA Conference in Chicago.

Feel free to leave comments either here or on the LITA Blog at:
http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicago

LAST JUNE/JULY IN ANAHEIM

Last June, we had a pretty nice BoF with librarians discussing Drupal projects they were working on. We also had a round-robin Q&A with librarians new to Drupal who were thinking about maybe using the CMS but wanting more information.

Here's my write-up of the event:

"Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim"

ALA 2009 IN CHICAGO

So next year, happily enough, we'll be meeting in Chicago (my hometown) and I wanted to poll people to see what they thought.

A BoF is pretty nice but we could just as easily have a speaker or two, or investigate an interesting theme or topic.

Time-wise, I don't think we’d get more than an hour and a half -- two hours max. Fun things might include specific modules for library application, using Drupal in a library environment -- anything really.

So if you have any ideas or suggestions, if you'd like to speak or would like to see someone else speak, if there's a theme or topic you’d like to investigate, please leave a comment either here or on the LITA Blog at:
http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicago

With just a little work, I'm sure we can arrange something that our fellow Drupal4Lib'ers would look forward to.

Thanks for any help,

LEO
(2008-09 Chair of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG)

When Design Kills

I had a very pleasurable time at the Garfield Park Conservatory on Chicago's West Side several weeks ago. Finding it however included a mishap due in part to this extremely poorly constructed map which I found while wandering around looking for directions.

You can see a larger version of the entire billboard here -- plus a close-up of the map itself.

I was at the "Gold Dome Fieldhouse", looking for the main Conservatory building. Can anyone guess why I started heading (incorrectly it turned out) west?

Time's up: You can make a map in a thousand different ways (just look at mass transit maps from various cities), but one of the few conventions is that the top generally points north, the bottom south, the left west and the right east. That's how maps are laid out.

Unfortunately, the person who designed this one, decided to ignore the convention and turned the thing 90 degrees counter-clockwise. This way, it may have been easier to fit in with the rest of the information on the board -- that's probably why they did it -- but it's really going for convenience of composition at the expense of comprehension.

Nobody looking at this is going to instinctively tilt their heads sideways to figure it out. Instead they'll do what I did and head off in the wrong direction.

I was saved by friends who, lucky for me, drove over and picked me up. Others might not be so fortunate. The whole point however is that bad design happens when it doesn't take user assumptions into consideration. The result can be not simply making things harder to find but causing users to make incorrect and possibly disastrous decisions. Just ask the person who designed the "Butterfly Ballots" in Florida.

Good News for Net Neutrality

Net Advocate and UMICH Don Susan Crawford has been named a "FCC Review Team Lead" by the incoming Obama-Biden Administration. Maybe the 'Net has a future after all...

[h/t TechPresident]

Three Events in My Life

They're selling Obama hats at my local 7-11. I know 'business is business' but this is the first time I can recall when the 'swag' from a presidential campaign was thought valuable enough to hit the retail shelves.

Three world events have affected me in my life. The first was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I was there, had been there since '84 and knew what it was like to have a police state just a block or two away. I was working construction in those days. I had finished up and had taken a nap. When I woke up one of the people living in the house told me the extraordinary news that while I was asleep, the Wall had come down.

Of course, the person exaggerated. The Wall which surrounded the entire western half of the city hadn't come down. Rather an opening had been made at Checkpoint Charlie and also at the Brandenburg Gate where people from East Berlin -- the 'Ossies' -- could cross over. What followed were three days of absolute euphoria as tens of thousands of East Germans came over, swamping the local public transportation, waiting in long lines in front of banks to pick up their "Begrüßungsgeld" (i.e. welcome money) of 100 DM with which they bought items absolutely unavailable in their part of the city such as cassette radios and bags of oranges.

The downfall of that Wall and the regime it represented was the most positive experience of my young adult life.

More than a decade later, I was living in New York City. When I first heard that a jet had struck one of the World Trade Towers, I thought maybe it was an accident, albeit of horrendous proportions. When the second plane hit the second tower, I like everyone else in New York knew otherwise. I can remember walking north to work, up 1st Avenue, and seeing the emotions of people looking past me in the direction of Lower Manhattan. I finally turned around to see what they were looking at and there the towers stood, clearly visible as always, but now smoking and about to collapse. The ruins continued to give off smoke for weeks.

Now I'm in Chicago. Just three days ago, the eyes of the world were focused on our city. It was the final act of a series of events whose beginnings, I would argue, stretch back to the turmoil of the election in 2000. It was a period of abnormal excesses, exacerbated in reaction to 9-11, where we as a nation didn't always come off as a preeminent force for good. In fact, in many ways, we lost ground.

So after an unbelievably long campaign that could have ended in any number of ways, we all gathered in Grant Park, not wanting to risk fate by putting into words what so many of us were hoping and some of us had worked for. Pennsylvania was declared, then Ohio. The polls in California and the rest of the Pacific-coast states were closing at 10pm Central Standard time. At 10pm the people in the park started counting down from 10 to 0. Exactly at that point on the large TV screens, Wolf Blitzer from CNN said he had an important announcement to make, that CNN now projected Barack Obama to be elected President of the United States. The crowd in the park, all 250k of them, went wild.

It's a moment, like the two others, that I'll never forget.

NetDiver 10th Anniversary

Carole Guevin's NetDiver, a portfolio site for aspiring web designers, is celebrating its 10 year on the web. You can get the "Official" poster here...

Carole Guevin was a voice of (cutting edge) sanity during the early days of the web and it's great to see her site still going strong. She even has a Facebook Group... 

Early Voting in Chicago

So I came up with the brilliant idea of ducking out from work to go to the Early Voting location at the Public Library just across the street.

Bad move. After filling out the form and giving them my ID, I was led into a waiting room with more than 60 people! This is going to take a hundred years. My colleagues at work probably think I skipped out of town.

[Note: the above was written while I was marooned in the waiting room. And yes, I finally got out and was able to resume normal reference services.]

Drupal Camp Chicago: Wow!

Hoo baby, they got a big crowd for the Drupal Camp Chicago. Easily over 100 attendees!

We had so many people at the Library BoF -- most of whom weren't librarians -- that I had to shift into "presentation" mode -- with a wonderful assist from PLA Webmaster Doug Dawson, Brian Smith from Palsnet.info, a librarian from Brookfield Public and the owner of a development shop creating a website for one of the regional library organizations in Washington State.

If I missed anyone, please forgive me. We really could have gone on for another hour.

They were taping the session plus a couple of people had cameras so hopefully I'll have some photos or clips in a little bit.

In any case, hats off to Kyle and Matt and the rest of the CDMUG.org crowd. What a great event.

Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science 2008

Registration is now open for 3rd annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) taking place on November 2–3, 2008 at U. of C.

This is an event I really enjoy attending. Last year, it was at Northwestern; this year it's at U. of C. It brings together all people interested in Digital Humanities with a scholarly bent. Unfortunately this year I'll be out of town. Darn!

In any case, you can register by going to: http://dhcs.uchicago.edu/

Current Cites for September 2008

 

Current Cites for July 2020 is out! You can find the issue here...

Banned Books Week

In observance, I guess you could say, of ALA's Banned Books Week, NPR did a segment on how The Grapes of Wrath was banned at the end of the 30's.

It was good but I really wish they had focused on more recent titles. Going over the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2007 might have been more relevant. At least it would have helped people understand what librarians and advocates of free speech are dealing with in this day and age.

UPDATE: WBEZ did something slightly more along the lines of what I was thinking with yesterday's segment, 'Celebrating Some of the Best Banned Books'.

2008 ILA Annual Conference

The Annual Conference of the Illinois Library Association is in Chicago this year.

It runs the whole week and is located at Navy Pier. Here's a shot of the entrance to the exhibits.

More Divine Intervention for the Chicago Cubs

As seen on the Blue Line this morning. The South Siders might have difficulties with this.

Drupal Camp Chicago Fri.-Sat. (10/24-10/25)

Kyle and Matthew along with a few others from the CDMUG are putting together a Drupal Camp Chicago.

It's a two-day event running from Friday (10/24) to Saturday (10/25). Location is the UIC Innovation Center at 1240 W. Harrison in Chicago.

Website for the event is http://drupalcampchicago.org/. It's only a month away but they're still taking suggestions for sessions at this link:

I'll be doing a Library BoF tentatively scheduled for early Friday afternoon. The idea is:

• Showcase library-related Drupal projects in the Chicagoland area.
• Talk about future plans and aspirations, field questions and compare experiences.

Mark your calendars today!

OneWebDay 2008

OneWebDay is Monday. Here's a link to the spiffy event site:  http://www.onewebday.org/

The idea is to celebrate the benefits we derive from the Web. The hope is the more we appreciate it, the more we'll be protective of it. You can read more on the OneWebDay's About Page...

Last year I did a video of UIC students talking about how they use the web. This year I've got a ton of commitments so I'll just have to replay last year's effort. See below.

PT Reference Gig at DePaul

Today was my first day doing reference at DePaul University Library. I grabbed a couple of volumes of the DLB and a volume of the NUC (Pre 1956) and I was in 7th Heaven. It's only a couple hours a week but I love it!

PLAspace.org - Official Launch

Okay, today was the official launch of the new community site that I've been working on for the Public Library Association: PLAspace.org

The announcement reads:

"Today marks another milestone in the rollout of PLAspace. We officially open the doors to new CoPs and new participants.

We created PLAspace to give Public Library Association members a place where they could share ideas and work together on common interests. Today, the first official day for the site, we already have several dozen members and a half-dozen CoPs."

Old Projects Never Die : Red Scare (1918-1921)

"Red Scare (1918-1921)" was a project I did for extra credit while finishing up my MLS at Queens College (CUNY). It must have been around 1997.

The online exhibit consisted of political cartoons with some photos from the period 1918-1921. There were over a hundred images illustrating the hysteria of the time -- most scanned from hard-bound copies of the Literary Digest, then conveniently housed in the stacks of NYU Bobst Library. The exhibit is hosted by Newman Library, Baruch College (CUNY) where I went after NYU.

Anyway, every once and a while, I get a request for permission to use one or two of the images. There was a lot of interest in them around the time of 9/11 but even afterwards, the requests still come in.

I usually explain that the copyright has long run out on the images and that they're free for the downloading. The latest request was from one of the College Prep Testing Services. They want to use one or two of the images for their section on U.S. History.

I guess, I'll have to upgrade the project at some point. Ten years is a long time for content like this on the Web.

Back to School at UIC

Today was the first day of classes at UIC. It was a nice summer but I'm happy to see the students back.

They had people at all the entrances giving out information. You can just make out the "UIC Orientation" table in the distance.

Amherst College Library Launches New Site

Tracy Sutherland gave us a sneak peek of the new site, then under development, at the Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim in June.

Now it's been launched for the whole world to see:
https://www.amherst.edu/library

Nice job and Congrads to all!

PLAspace.org - Soft Launch

We're doing a 'soft-launch' of PLAspace.org -- the community website that I've been working on together with some very nice people from the Public Library Association as well as a number of volunteers.

It's open to the public but it won't be officially announced till sometime in September. Anyway, have a look:

http://www.PLAspace.org

The Parboiled Rice Has Come! The Parboiled Rice Has Come!

 

Yay, the Parboiled Rice has come!  For 10 years, I lived in New York City and for 10 years I ate Parboiled Rice from the Associated Supermarket either on 14th St. or 23rd St.

So what do I do when I start running out of the cherished grains? Why I send for 10 pounds more of course -- via Priority Mail.

Here's the latest shipment.

eBook Readers Suck as eBook Readers

First people, please don't mention the Kindle and the future-of-print in the same breath. That would imply that one has something to do with the other and why do Amazon's marketing for them?

But ignoring that for a moment, I think the whole concept of a dedicated "ebook" reader is somewhat dodgy.  I mean, if that's all they do, why bother?

You can't copy out bits and pieces of the text, import them into something you're working on, share them with friends, blog about them -- or do any of the million other things you're used to doing on electronic devices that are increasingly just as small and inexpensive.

In other words, an 'eBook' reader completely sucks as an 'eBook' reader because it treats what you're reading as a complete digital dead-end.

Leo Kline in the Onion!

Workplace environment: I've been on the receiving end of this from my co-workers since yesterday. From the most recent edition of The Onion:

ROCHESTER, NY—Reported sightings of Rochester's legendary "phantom diner," a mysterious restaurant that purportedly appears only to those in the most inebriated state of their lives, are often met with skepticism and incredulity. But for Leo Kline, 24, who claims he visited the diner this past weekend, the apparitional eatery is all too real.

Like I wear green?

No Vacation for Leo

I wish I could say my lack of posting for the last week or so is because of me 'gone fishing'.

Instead, I'm working on a site for the Public Library Association that, happily, is close to completion.

The thing's looking good but it's taken all my free time away.

Flatbed CTA Buses

The Sun-Times writes:

CTA L cars could become more like cattle cars if the transit agency goes ahead with plans to remove seats on some L cars in the next few months to squeeze in all the riders leaving their cars home and turning to mass transit.

What's next? Flatbed CTA buses?

'Hell' - Too Hot a Word for the Chicago Sun-Times

I wanted to leave the following comment on an article about MillerCoors [MGD] moving its headquarters to Chicago:

"Well, it's not the best but what the hell, reason enough to order another MGD for me."

Unfortunately, the word 'hell' appears to be too hot for the prudes over at the Chicago Sun-Times since I got the following error (in red no less):

"Please edit or remove the following word(s), then resubmit your content: hell." 

Usability Guidelines from the Yale University Library

We've come a long way from the days of 'you must learn our system in order to use it'. From the Usability Guidelines at Yale University Library:

Factor:  

• Simplicity. Scale back features and dramatically simplify the experience for initial use. This should reduce unnecessary distractions, excess information, from initial screens. An initial search screen should not include advanced features, such as search by publisher or call number.

Examples:

• Avoid wordiness -- only show most necessary text, be concise.
• Initial page should include only the most important and common tasks for this service with unobtrusive links to other advanced functionality.

More here...

P.S. Remember the Yale site when the front page was one big graphic of nothing but a bunch of leather book spines?

Anthony Millionaire

I caught up with old pal and former Wonderful Guise Anthony Millionaire while in LA.

Currently, he's working on a tv show for Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" based on his comic strip, "Maakies".

Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim

We got a great crowd of around 20 people for our Drupal 'Birds of a Feather'. The above is a shot of everybody in the BIGWIG Bloggers' room -- just before we got kicked out by some group from YALSA (bums, we'll get even)!

(We then proceeded to the next available empty room and had our get-together there.)

First up on the agenda was setting up the Drupal IG, making sure we have enough signatures and asking for volunteers to serve as Chair and Co-Chair. For the first year, Leo Klein (i.e. me) graciously volunteered to serve as chair and Ian Chen as co-chair.

The name for the IG is 'Drupal4Lib' and our purpose is "to promote the use and understanding of the content management system, Drupal, by libraries and librarians".

Next on the agenda was the true meat-and-potatoes of the BoF: shooting the breeze about Drupal and demonstrating a few sites we were working on.

The group consisted of librarians at all levels of experience from expert to beginner. Some were shopping around for a CMS and hadn't yet decided which one to choose. Some had already deployed Drupal in one way or another -- if only locally on their laptop -- and wanted to learn more about it.

Jon Blackburn showed us the FSU Library site, Tracy Sutherland gave us a taste of the soon-to-be launched Amherst Library site, and finally, Co-Chair volunteer Ian Chen gave us a taste of his wonderful work from his portfolio site.

Unfortunately my nifty little projector was suffering relocation fits and kept on shutting down. [Note to attendees: if you weren't able to show us a site because of projector problems, please post them here].

All in all the surprising thing was how quickly the time went. I personally found the BoF extremely rewarding. There aren't many opportunities to meet face-to-face with colleagues united by an interest or curiosity in Drupal.

I really look forward to our next get-together -- in Chicago?

LITA Happy Hour at ALA Anaheim

Not the best quality shot but hopefully it conveys what a great time I had at the LITA Happy Hour on Friday, June 27. I got most of the signatures for the Drupal IG plus met a bunch of great people.

Current Cites for June 2008

[From O'Hare on my way to ALA in Anaheim:]  Roy just posted Current Cites for June 2008. I wrote up an article by Erica Reynolds called "The Secret to Patron-Centered Web Design: Cheap, Easy, and Powerful Usability Techniques" which appeared in this month's Computers In Libraries. You can find the issue here...

LibSite.org (More than) One Year Old

I've been involved with so many different things that I completely forgot the one-year anniversary of LibSite.org !!! Shame on me.

Yes, April 10, 2007 was the historic launch of the user-generated Library Website recommendation service. I was reminded of it recently by the number of sites posted -- increasingly -- from all over the world.

Most recently, and most wonderfully, we've had a collection of interesting examples of Web 2.0 à la française.

I'd like to thank everyone who's listed their site there. The experiment continues.

LITA Drupal Interest Group?

A couple people from LITA have helpfully suggested that we set up a Drupal Interest Group (IG).

I think this is a great idea since, as I understand it, IG's get a slot at one of the officially sanctioned meeting rooms come convention time.

Aaron Dobbs, Mary Taylor and our friends at BIGWIG have been very supportive in allowing us to have our Drupal4Lib BoF in the Bloggers Room but by having the IG, we can do a couple of things more, including as I said, maybe getting a room of our own next time round.

In any case, all IG's have Chairs and Co-chairs. I'd be happy to offer myself up as the initial Chair. (The thing is open so basically anyone can throw their hat in the ring.) We'd also need someone(s) interested in being Co-Chair. Term is a year.

This is all something we can discuss at the BoF -- on Sunday, June 29 (3:30p-5p). All we need are 10 signatures to get the thing off the ground.

See the Info Page on LITA IGs...

P.S. for the BoF, I'm bringing this nice little projector so people can show off their sites and projects if they want.

Old Friend Mark Stewart Up For Tony Award

 Finally someone I know is famous!

In the 80's in crazy Kreuzberg, West Berlin, a bunch of us belonged to this good-time group called the 'Wonderful Guise'. Mark Stewart was one of the lead musicians.

Well, Mark Stewart is now up for a Tony award as "Best Musical" for his show 'Passing Strange'. According to a write-up in the Village Voice, this Bildungsroman in musical form "takes him to Amsterdam and then to Berlin, where he's indoctrinated into hardcore bohemian life."

Hardcore bohemian it was! Above is a shot from a concert we gave at the venerable SO36. Mark's on the left, followed by Enrico, Freie, Art and me. Not pictured were Marek the drummer and Anthony Millionaire (of Maakies fame) who did the costumes and sets.

UPDATE: Results are in. 'In the Heights' won out over 'Passing Strangely' for Best Musical which kind of makes sense considering the subject and location of each show. 'Passing Strangely' did get the 'Best Book' Award which is still pretty good.

'Conversation' Fails Hillary

Not to be too political here (I really try not to be) but I was reminded by a segment on NPR's Weekend Edition, that the original opening line of Hillary Clinton's campaign was the almost unbearable cliche:

"Let the Conversation Begin"

It's interesting to read in most analyses of her loss to Sen. Obama (here's one), that it was specifically a lack of imagination, flexibility, and attention to detail that proved her undoing.

Perhaps the two are related...

New Library Web Project

I've got a neat job building a community site for one of the library organizations here. I'll talk more about it at our Drupal4Lib BoF in Anaheim but basically the idea is to promote online collaboration. Needless to say (for those in the know), I'll be making great use of Drupal's Organic Groups.

Best Rib Tips in Chicago Moves to Armitage

I don't go very often but the best place for rib tips in Chicago, Calvin's BBQ (formerly Smokin' Woody's) is moving from near Lincoln Square to Armitage just west of Western.

Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA in Anaheim

I got a number of enthusiastic and helpful suggestions on the Drupal4Lib list as to when and where we could hold our Drupal4Lib BoF.

It's increasingly looking like it'll be Sunday after the LITA Top Technology Trends in the LITA Bloggers' Room. 

Drupal Talk II at UIC (5/30)

I'll be doing a follow-up to my talk on Drupal at UIC on Friday, 5/23 5/30 (1:30p-3pm) in Burnham Hall 308. The title of the Talk is: "The Wonderful World of Drupal Modules". Basically I'll go into some of the more important modules: CCK, Views, ImageCache, Panels, etc.

More info here: http://tinyurl.com/6exfs9

UPDATE: I had to postpone the talk by one week -- to 5/30.

Mayor Daley Speaking at the UIC Forum

Mayor Daley speaking at UIC's Daley Urban Forum named after his father Richard J.

The Forum featured a number of Mayors from Arab countries. Many of them have troubles that are common to countries in the 3rd World (lack of funding, infrastructure, etc.)

Particularly moving however was the account by the Mayor of Mosul, Iraq.

He talked about the challenges the Municipal government faces there. These include setting up a "prostheses factory" to deal with all the people, including children, who've had limbs blown off due to bombs. The Mayor reported with pride that a number of Healthcare Centers had been set up despite the fact that many of Iraq's original medical workers had fled the country.

Even here, success was not complete however, since one or two of these Centers had subsequently been bombed.

Despite this hell, the Mayor was optimistic. He would have shown us pictures only they stopped him from bringing them at Baghdad Airport.

Slides from Talk on Drupal at UIC

[Adobe Flash no longer supported]

Earthquake in Chicago

Well, the bed started to wobble and I thought either I should've gotten a better bed or maybe the floor in my new place wasn't as intact as I had assumed.

And no, I did not run down to the street screaming.

Leo Klein's Top 10 Most Favorite Drupal Modules

Someone on the Drupal4Lib list asked what Drupal Modules were "most useful" for creating a library website.

Here are some of the ones I couldn't live without:

1. Content Construction Kit (CCK) - Gives you the ability to model your own data types.
2. Views - Gives you the ability to display those data types any way you want.
3. Panels - Allows you to position your data anywhere you want on the page.
4. ImageCache - Allows you to make as many copies of an image as you want at any size depending on location or anything else you specify.
5. Organic groups - Create as many groups as you want (e.g. users, staff, etc.), restrict content by group.
6. Captcha - Keeps the spam couties away.
7. Community Tags - Allows users to create and assign their own tags to content.
8. Tagadelic - Creates a Tag Cloud.
9. Clone module - The name says it all.
10. BUEditor - Simple HTML tag editor. 

Moving: Packing Up

Yup, it's that time again: I'm moving to a new apartment. Here I'm doing some prep work.

More Ugly Money from the U.S. Treasury

I really think the US Mint (coins) and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (dollar bills) have lost the art of designing money. The fine detail and overall sense of composition that used to distinguish our currency is now no more.

Case in point is the new $5 dollar bill with that big ugly purple '5'. It looks like they just got out a huge rubber stamp and banged away.

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing praises this as "Safer, Smarter, More Secure". Apparently 'visually impressive' so it conveys -- who knows? -- the idea of actually being worth something is no longer a requirement.

Meanwhile someone has created a website called "Get Helvetica Off Our Money."

Formatting Catastrophe: 'UIC Announce'

I mean, they're not even trying:
http://tigger.uic.edu/announce/ [web archive]

Current Cites for March 2008

Current Cites for March 2008 is out!  I posted on an article in this month's Online called "The New Rules of Web Design". You can find the issue here...

Online Anonymity is a Human Right

Lest we forget, from the blog, Technology Liberation Front:

"Despite the appeal of combating defamation by banning online anonymity, lawmakers should be wary about restricting anonymous speech in the name of fighting libel. The same laws designed to deter defamation can also be used to target political dissent or silence whistleblowers for whom the option of remaining anonymous is critical. While Mark Klein and Babak Pasdar elected to reveal their identities, they remind us that whistleblowers are crucial safeguards against government excesses. And as Chinese dissidents know all too well, governments around the world have a long history of suppressing political opinions that undermine state legitimacy."

1st Day at OAR

Today was my first day as Web Coordinator at the Office of Admission and Records at UIC. Bunch of nice people and lots of possibilities for the site.

On a totally unrelated note, here's a shot from the day before of my sister blowing out the candles on her birthday cake.

Simplicity vs. Complexity in Design Rematch

Don Norman's at it again! Here's his wonderful description of the balance that designers need to observe between complexity and simplicity:

"The mark of the great designer is the ability to provide what people need without excessive complexity, without feature bloat. Simplicity should never be the goal. Follow the famous Einstein quote: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Complex things will require complexity. It is the job of the designer to manage that complexity with skill and grace."

He says this unfortunately in the context of a completely gratuitous squabble with Chicago-based developers, 37signals (here's their response). Nevertheless, it's an approach I find quite appealing -- certainly more than his earlier attempt which led to this post.

Current Cites for February 2008

Okay, the latest edition of Current Cites is out the door. I've got a cite on the tag-tussle concerning IE8. Unfortunately I wrote the thing up before the most recent decision by MS to go with "standards-mode" as default. (An update is on the way.)

In any case, you can see the issue here... 

Drupal for Libraries - Slides

[Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported]

First, I'd like to thank everyone for coming. I appreciated the energy and enthusiasm -- plus the good questions.

Above are the slides for the first part. For the second part, see the screencast "Creating a Library Database Page with Drupal".

I should have the audio file up in a few days. [Done 3/4/08]

NOTE: the 'full-screen' version at SlideShare actually looks pretty good. Have a look...

For the person who was having trouble using the "Sandbox" at opensourcecms.com, try the demo at http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/

If anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me.

Again, thanks both to MLS and to the people who came!

UPDATE: Nice news from Slideshare:

"Hey leoklein!

Your slideshow Drupal for Libraries has been included in the Spotlight section on SlideShare.

Enjoy your day! the SlideShare team"

Must be the picture of me hanging upside-down that did it.

New York Times Does 'Live Blogging'

 

You know we've come a long way when the 'Grey Lady' herself starts doing 'live-blogging'.

Screencast: Creating a Library Database Page with Drupal

In anticipation of my talk 'Drupal in Libraries' that I'll be giving to the Metropolitan Library System on Fri., 2/29 (1:30p-4:30p), I'm releasing the screencast 'Creating a Library Database Page with Drupal'.

The talk will be about Drupal in the context of Open Source Software and Content Management Systems as well of course as its application in a library environment. (more info and rsvp...)

The screencast goes over the points I'll be making in the second part of my talk.

Have a look an tell me what you think.

-- Link to Smaller Version (400x300) here... --

UPDATE: The slides and audio from my presentation are now available. You can access them by going here...

Drupal 6.0 Now Available

 I just noticed over at the Drupal site that Drupal 6 has been released: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0

You can find a pretty good screencast on new features here...

It's interesting how a number of the new features are in fact integrations of ideas that originally were developed as separate modules (Updates, Blockcache, etc.)

The pattern seems to be: people contribute new ideas as modules and then the best ones are incorporated into Drupal itself. Good plan.

The performance improvements, column headings and drag-and-drop features also look interesting.

The Digital Life

1.  Try to install Adobe Captivate on my new Mac Mini. (I've got an important 'sceencast' that's got to be done pronto.)
   But Captivate only runs on a PC.
   
   
2. Load Captivate on my old Dell Notebook.
   But it's too much for my old Dell Notebook. The thing keeps crashing.
   
   
3. Load Apple's Boot Camp on my new Mac Mini. With Boot Camp, you can run both Mac and Windows!
   But Boot Camp only runs with Windows XP Service Pack 2 ('SP2'). My copy of XP (from my old Dell Notebook) is older than that.
   
   
4.  "Slipstream" (i.e. integrate) the updates from SP2 into the earlier version of XP and produce a new bootable CD.
   But 'Slipstream' doesn't work so well on OEM (as in Dell specific) versions of XP.
   
   
5. Walk three miles to a friend's house. Grab his copy of Windows XP, go home. Install it on my Mac Mini and finally load Captivate on the PC partition.
   
   Does this sound like a productive weekend?
   (And I didn't even mention the part where I completely erased my backup drive. Don't ask.)
   
   UPDATE: The fun continues....
   
   
6. Try to add an audio track to the slides in Captivate.
   But my new Mac Mini only has "line" input -- which as anyone who's ever been through Audio 101 knows, isn't the same as a mike input
   
   
7. Rush out of the house. Go downtown to the Apple Store, buy a Griffin iMic, and just because I've become paranoid at this point, duck into a Best Buy on the way home and get a Logitech headset with build-in mike that plugs into the USB port.
   
   
8. Mission accomplished!

Old News

So I just installed MS Office 2008. (It's nice -- nothing special that I've noticed so far.) Anyway, apparently there's some messaging system that comes with the package. Here's the reminder I got. (And yes, I have a legal copy of Office.)

Change of Hosts

It took me the whole weekend so I'm not quite sure why I forgot to mention it but I've got a new Host!

Yes, that's right, my vast online empire is now in the hands of Site5.com. Since time-immemorial I've been with Pair.com but they didn't seem to be upgrading their hardware or software, their performance was sluggish, and support wasn't as good as it used to be. So over the weekend I made the switch.

Chicago Winter Wonderland

This one won't go into the record books -- not even close -- but we did get a couple inches. Here's the charming view from the back of the courtyard house where I live.

Cart before Horse with Aquabrowser in Columbus

They recently installed the Aquabrowser at the Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML). This is how the head of IT over there explained it to the Columbus Dispatch:

"We're accommodating what people are used to seeing -- people who just want to plug in a search term and get their list." [h/t Lorcan Dempsey]

What people are "used to seeing"? That animated tag-cloud doohickey?

Unless they really do things differently in Columbus, I can't imagine anyone (other than library staff) ever seeing one of these things or knowing the least what to do with it.

I mean, you can almost predict that the color-coding of the whirlin', spinnin' topics will be totally lost on the average user. Equally as bewildering is why they bothered to include what suspiciously looks like instructions (instructions?) on the main search page that attempt to explain enigmatic terms such as "Search", "Discover" and "Refine".

Confused yet? The newspaper article quotes one user as calling it "distracting" while another thinks it may not be "as intuitive as they think it is".

Touchée. Like Second Life and the Kindle, we have the implementation of a technology that has yet to receive the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" from the public. In other words, there's no indication of widespread acceptance or adoption on the part of our users. This is precisely the wrong approach to take.

Lastly, it doesn't help that a keyword search on "Treasure Island" only turns up the book by Robert Louis Stevenson on Page 2 of the search results.

Maybe they were focusing on the wrong thing?

P.S. In contrast, check out the results for Google and Amazon.

The First Thing to Learn is to Forget the Technology

We all have our moments of epiphany. John Blyberg had his recently regarding Library 2.0. In a post called, "Library 2.0 Debased" he pulls no punches:

It's very evident in the profusity of L2-centric workshops and conferences that there is a significant snake-oil market in the bibliosphere. We’re blindly casting about for a panacea and it’s making us look like fools.

He goes on to warn against "arbitrarily introducing technology that isn’t properly integrated into our overarching information framework". Our choice of technologies needs to make sense, he argues, ultimately to our end-users.

This of course is completely true. As a survival tactic, if for no better reason, you'd think we'd all be trying to work out our core competencies long before shopping around for technologies.

Unfortunately a lot of what passes for "L2.0" seems to go in the opposite direction.

All too often it's how to build our libraries around blogs, wikis and social networks -- rather than the other way around. Add to this a level of individual affirmation and self-discovery more appropriate on occasion to a revival meeting than a PD, and you have a picture not of innovation but of its caricature.

Worse, there seems to be a certain element of one-up's-manship in play, at least among the more ambitious, with whoever adopting the largest number of 2.0 technologies in the least amount of time being perceived as most "cutting edge".

This isn't going to work. You might as well have a chicken with its head cut off picking technologies. At least the results would be harder to predict.

[h/t Blake]

Congressional Campaign Site: DebbieHalvorson.com

I'm still kind of knocked out -- been working 24/7 on this for several weeks. That said, I'm pleased to announce the availability online of DebbieHalvorson.com .

Debbie's running for Congress in the 11th CD of Illinois.

The site is fully automated using Drupal for content management. Campaign staff can add images to any content type (eg. press release, blog post, etc.) They can also designate any post as "spotlight" for the 'In Focus' section on the front page.

Even the main slideshow which is meant to present broad campaign themes, can be changed simply by uploading new images to the site. Resizing is done automatically.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results.

New Sony eReader Ad: 'Smarter than a Doofus'

 Advertisement near the escalator at the Clark & Lake El Stop in Chicago:

"Smarter than a doofus who bought one of these things (your doofus may vary)."

The Moment

I don't watch television very often. In fact, I watch it so infrequently that I keep the set hidden away in a closet for most of the year. It only comes out at times of national disaster or an election. In this case, it was the latter -- happily -- as I wheeled the thing out to catch Barack Obama's speech in Iowa with the memorable words, "This was the moment when it all began".

(NYU) ITP AlumniBlender Blog

I got a nice note from Rob Faludi saying he had added me to the ITP Alumni Blog, 'ITP AlumniBlender'. I thanked him and told him I thought it was a great idea.

I graduated from ITP in 2000. I think the best thing I got out of it was the contact with my fellow students, some of whom were easily the most talented designers and software developers in NYC.

The graphic by the way, goes to a spoof I did of ITP's website at the time. The thing really suffered from an overdose of black (yeah, I know, everyone was doing it) and sans serif fonts.