Book A Month Challenge for March: Craft

Morris, William. 1894. The Wood Beyond the World. A facsimile of the Kelmscott Press ed. New York: Dover, 1972.

Although Morris was a late-Victorian contemporary of Conan Doyle and Kipling, he affected a 17th Century style of English in this romantic fantasy about a young man driven to a quest by misfortune at home and by visions of a beautiful Lady and her two mismatched servants.

Golden Walter, our Hero, is an honourable and handsome, but common, young man. Cursed at home by an unfaithful wife, he leaves on a trading ship to avoid causing a feud between his father's family and that of his estranged wife. While trading in far lands, he sees visions of the Lady, her beautiful maidservant, and an ugly dwarf, but resists the natural urge to hunt for the source of these visions out of his sense of duty to his father's ship. In the farthest reaches of the empire, he receives word that his attempts to avoid a feud have failed, and that his father has died, so he sets out to return home. Unfortunately, the elements conspire against his honour and drive him into strange heathen lands and the country ruled by the Lady of his visions and the maidservant with whom he falls in love. The novel has a strong episodic structure, with Walter moving (or being moved) from encounter to encounter, meeting all of the usual fairy tale tropes until the typical "happily ever after" ending.

A note on the edition: While many libraries have The Wood Beyond the World, my copy is a photo-facsimile of the Morris's original Kelmscott Press edition, which takes some time to get used to reading for the modern reader, but is very pleasing to the eye.

Social Aggregators

With Google's OpenSocial API, we're starting to see hints of the social networking interoperability I talked about a while ago, but the idea of "social aggregation" seems to accomplish some of the same goals. Feed aggregators, which gathering together information about updates to websites and present them all together for the reader's convenience have been around for a while, but these new social aggregation sites provide a simple way to gather together information about social network participation and online identity into one place.

There are two basic models of social aggregation services:

• I aggregate my identities into a portal, which might be a public site I can share with friends as a "portal to all things David", or a private starting point for tracking and accessing my online activities;
• I aggregate all my friends' identities into a portal, so I only have to go to one place to go to see what they're all up to, taking stalking to a whole new level.

(I came up with the name "social aggregators" independently, but it's pretty obvious terminology.)

Aggregating oneself seems to be a fairly basic way of handling online identity management, especially if one has a broad portfolio of online content and a common name (not a problem for me). The simplest example of this kind of aggregator is the site ClaimID, which doesn't provide information about updates to sites, but just gathers together all of your information into something like an online CV.

Aggregating all your friends is the more useful service: I don't have to go to every social network that my friends are on to find out what's going on with them. The service that provides the creepiest example of this is Spokeo. Once you create an account, you can either upload your address book, or, more simply but much less secure, give it your hotmail/yahoo/gmail userid and password and allow it to harvest your address book directly. Once it knows who's in your address book, Spokeo will go out and harvest all the social networks it knows about and reports to you what your contacts are doing on those networks. Spokeo goes to great lengths to explain that it is only accessing information that is publicly available on the net for anybody to see, and thus isn't an invasion of your privacy. But having Spokeo trawling the net for everything about oneself just feels qualitatively different from connecting with friends as one becomes aware of their activities in the various venues.

Between services like Spokeo and google alerts, the possibilities for Total Information Awareness aren't limited to just the government. Maybe privacy really is dead.

On Keeping a Reading Journal

I'm usually not very good at keeping a journal or diary (see, for example, the regularity with which I write in this particular venue). I've tried several times over the years, because I think that I should, and I never last for very long. At the beginning of the year when so many blogger were posting various stats about their reading habits last year, I decided to keep a log of what I read. "Nothing could be simpler," I thought, "it's just data gathering!"

And so it is. I've got a spreadsheet on google docs. Whenever I start reading a book, I fill in the author and title, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, and the date I started reading. When I finish, I fill in the end date. And I get to do some simple spreadsheet programming to keep various statistics, which is always fun (no, that's not sarcastic, although some people may think it ironic).

There are some operational problems. Whenever I start reading a book, I have to remember to record it, at least within a day or so, so I get the start date right. For some reason, recording the end of a book is easier for me to remember. And, of course, I need to be near a computer; I foresee this causing problems during my summer reading binge, when there's not a computer in sight on the upper reaches of the Ottawa River.

More interesting than these mechanical issues, which are fairly obvious, I've already started to notice some effects on my reading behaviour. I normally read quickly: for my vacation I usually plan to read one book a day (if nothing else, that means I won't run out of books), but so far this year, it's taken an average of six days to finish a book (of those I've completed). The book I just finished yesterday took seventeen days to complete, but that has nothing to do with the difficulty of the book or my lack of interest in it, and everything to do with the fact that I've started a big project, and don't have as much spare time to devote to reading.

Which leads to the biggest effect of keeping a reading journal on my reading habits: I am loathe to start a new book until I know that I'll have time to devote to it. It seems that the incomplete books on my list (two right now, one dating from Christmas), impart a certain weight, and that, for me at least, recording data has moved me from "always have a book on the go" to "promptly finish the books I start." I suspect that I'll read the same number of books regardless, it's just that I won't start them until I have some spare time, so I'll have short reads with large "illiterate" gaps, rather than continuous slow reading.

Of course, if I really wanted to rack up the numbers, I'd just stop reading The Economist every week (but then, I'm falling behind on that too).

BAM Challenge: Heart

Bennet, Alan. The Uncommon Reader. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.


Bennet starts with a simple premise: "What would happen if the Queen suddenly developed an interested in reading for pleasure?" This short novel, a mere 120 pages, is a light exploration of that question, and shows how reading leads to neglecting one's duties and avoiding human companionship.

But it also shows how she grows through her reading. The Queen, after even just a brief exposure to fiction, seems to think more about the people around her, and show genuine concern for her staff in small ways that she never did before: reading, and exposure to the human condition, has given the Queen more of a heart, made her more compassionate.

(Sometimes it can be a stretch to fit a book into the theme, but I know I can do it!)

Where the Users Are

Two of the technology trends that I talked about at OLA this year are really parts of one over-arching trend: making it easy for our users to integrate the library and its online collections into their normal workflows. That is, going to where they are, in an online kind of way.

Over the Christmas break, I started playing with Google Gadgets as a way of incorporating the library's catalogue into my home page at iGoogle. It was surprisingly easy. In fact, it was surprisingly easy to set up a prototypical "Western" iGoogle template. Shortly after I started working on this, I discovered, via the Panlibus blog, that the Dublin City (Ireland) public library is doing something similar with a different service called Pageflakes. Netvibes is another service that does the same sort of thing. Google and Netvibes both claim to provide programming interfaces that allow their gadgets and widgets (respectively) be incorporated into all sorts of different sites. Then, just a few weeks into January, Proquest announced their widget builder, which simplifies creating Proquest search boxes in library (or other) home page. Of course, this sort of embedding is more about making the starting point more convenient, since it's not hard to get to the catalogue, or to a database just by bookmarking them.

The more interesting way, for me, of embedding our services into our users lives and workflows is the newer area of mobile web access. With the launch of the iPhone in the US last year, and the much rumoured launch here in Canada (supposedly any day now), with it's large screen, it suddenly makes sense to search the web standing wherever one might be. Just before Christmas, Bell Canada launched the new HTC Touch smartphone with the option of unlimited web browsing on the phone for a mere $7/month (this should not be confused with unlimited data, which it probably isn't). Suddenly, surfing the web on your phone isn't really geeky, but is actually useful: I have actually searched Amazon.ca's mobile interface while standing in my local Chapters store, just to see how much cheaper the book might be online. The Thunder Bay Public Library has purchased Innovative Interfaces's "AirPac" mobile web interface for their catalogue. If my local library had a mobile interface, I'd probably use it instead of Amazon's when looking for books in Chapters.

Discovery happens everywhere. We need to make sure that when our users discover something, that we're there too, to deliver it to them.

My Top Technology Trends Slides

I've already written a bit about my top tech trends, and I have a couple more posts to make about them that will go into more detail, but here's a slightly modified version of my slides (only modified to make it simpler to see what's going on without me rambling).

Library Technology, Cable-Actuated Excavators, and the Collapse of Bethlehem Steel

Imagine that you are a senior executive in a successful company selling high-end equipment to all the major consumers in your market. Now imagine a product manager approaches you with the following suggestion:

"We aren't selling to the smaller, niche, consumers. Why don't we create a new, stripped down product so we can move into that market segment. It would take a year or so to create a new design that would be underpowered, lack significant functionality that our major accounts consider critical, and fail to conform to industry standards. Oh, and because the target market is made up of smaller players, we'd have to be satisfied with a lower profit margin."

You probably wouldn't react to favourably to this idea, now would you? But that could be a problem in the long run, according to Clayton Christensen, who first explored the idea of "disruptive technology" in his 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma.

When hydraulic excavators were first introduced after World War II, they were were too small to be used by the mining, general, and sewer contractors who were the major users of excavators, so the big manufacturers ignored the hydraulic technology; they were focused on supporting their primary market. So the makers of the new “backhoes” sold them into the agricultural and residential contracting markets. From 1947, when hydraulics were introduced until 1960, when the transition from cable-actuated to hydraulic excavators was complete, the power and reach of the hydraulic systems gradually improved until they were able to do the work that the mining, general, and sewer contractors needed. They still weren't as strong as, nor could they reach as far as, the cable-actuated excavators, but they were strong enough and could reach far enough. More importantly, they broke down less often, and when they broke down, it was less dangerous: “[T]hose who had experienced the life-threatening snap of a cable while hefting a heavy bucket embraced reliable hydraulics quickly, as soon as it was capable of doing the job (p. 72).” The cable-actuated excavator manufacturers were doing great the year before hydraulics were “good enough”. After that, sales of new excavators went exclusively to the hydraulics and the old guard was gone.

Christensen finds the same pattern in the steel industry: when minimills were introduced, they could be built cheaply and they used scrap steel for inputs, but they were limited to making poor quality steel, suitable only for concrete reinforcing bars. Concrete rebar is a very low-margin product, so the major steel manufacturers with their integrated mills didn't particularly care if the minimills took over that work: they were focused on high-quality steel products for major clients like the automotive industry. Over time, the minimills kept getting better at producing steel, and kept improving the quality of their output until they were producing steel that was good enough for the high-end customers. And because the minimills were born in an environment that demanded low profit margins, as they moved up-market, they were producing equivalent quality steel with lower margins than the integrated mills could manage, allowing the smaller companies to charge less and still make a higher profit. The large integrated mills lived in an ecosystem of suppliers, labour relations, and investors that required a certain level of profitability to sustain the mills. When that business model was undercut by the minimills, the big steel companies collapsed.

These examples don't match the current situation in the ILS marketplace exactly, but there are some interesting parallels, which will have to wait for another day.