A bunch of my colleagues are dressed up today. I considered donning my khaki-colored dockers, denim shirt, and brown loafers, but was afraid that no one would recognize me as being a vendor. I needed too many props to pull off the costume, like some PowerPoint slides that look like a real website. I have mastered the ability to smile, rock back and forth on my feet while swinging my arms, and exuding that look of "Boy, do I have a solution for you!"

It's getting harder these days to determine whether what libraries are getting is a trick or a treat. We tend not to take "trick or treat" too seriously . . . as in give me a treat or I will play a trick.

Sometimes the trick is figuring out just what the heck is going on, like when two competing vendors join forces to offer products and services. We've seen this ad nauseam in the ILS vendor world in the last couple of years. It's even present in the open source community where openness is the shared structure despite the fact that the products themselves compete. This week, we see it in the self-check and security arena.

3M and Checkpoint have apparently joined forces. It's not quite a merger and I am still trying to figure out the techno-political ramifications of the partnership: 3M will be an exclusive reseller of Checkpoint technology, and Checkpoint will continue to sell directly to libraries. The partnership is described in this press release (pdf).

Reading between the lines a little, it seems like 3M is enamored of Checkpoint's technology, and Checkpoint likes 3M's support and customer service infrastructure. How they will reconcile their products might be akin to how the entire self-check and security market reconciles its standards, something that has been contentious for the last few years. 3M and Checkpoint are both on the NISO RFID for Library Applications Working Group, chaired by VTLS's Vinod Chachra. TAGSYS, an RFID maker, is also on the group. The extent to which competing vendors have input into the standard is unclear.

In my opinion, the discussion around RFID has been too philosophical (privacy, data leaks, etc.) and not technical enough (interoperability, technological lifespan, etc.). Establishing a relationship with a self-check and security vendor has too often been a life-long relationship for technological reasons. Interoperability is the only hope in being able to choose the right vendor with whom to establish a relationship.

If you've been on a conference call with OCLC lately, you might have experienced that awkwardness of not knowing who you're talking to sometimes—OCLC? PICA? Former Fretwell-Downing? Actually, the confusion is small compared to many of the name games that have been going on lately, whether it's corporate identity, code-names for new products, or the revolving door of corporate leadership.

Well, in an effort to get out in front of the impending confusion, OCLC has rebranded itself . . . OCLC. There's a new logo and a new tag line.

Branding and marketing aren't really my thing, I have to admit. I'm much more interested in other news coming out of OCLC, and that is the publication of its latest report, Sharing, Privacy, and Trust in Our Networked World.

I have not read the entire report yet, so a detailed review would be premature. Suffice it to say that this thing has a huge amount of data behind it. Sharing, Privacy, and Trust reports statistics and perceptions in six countries. I got my hands on a copy and it's long, so prepare yourself. If you're fatigued by all the talk about social networking, I suggest skipping to section 3-1, where the discussion of privacy begins. See if you can leave your library ethos at the door and read these sections with an open mind.

Finally, keep in mind that this is a report to the OCLC membership—this is our report; we paid for it. We should take some pride in its production because there are few library organizations producing reports of this magnitude for free consumption.

I've never really grasped the whole "meme" thing that seems to be so popular in library blogs. When I see a new meme emerge, I feel as though I've already missed the boat—like the cliche of reading about trends in Time, by then it it too late.

As a lover of words and phrases, though, I am intrigued by what I would call lots of pre-meme activity—the use (and often over- and mis-use) of words that become part of the growing library lexicon. Recent examples include: seamless, disintermediation, open, and the like.

Borrowing liberally from Entertainment Weekly's "What's hot":

Currently, there are three words that strike my fancy—workflow, life cycle, and governance. Mostly, I've been thinking about governance. The not-very-well-thought-out musings (what else is blogging good for?) were spawned by two seemingly unrelated things. The first was a conversation with Roy Tennant about his recent move to OCLC; the second was this well-written post by Care Affiliate's Carl Grant.

Carl's post reminded me that the open source crowd often talks about "ownership" in sometimes dangerously loose terms—mainly vendor vs. free software provider. I think that the pejorative nature of the discussion plus the mis-alignment of "vendor" with "proprietary software" confuses the notion of software governance. What are Equinox, LibLime, and Index Data if not vendors? They cannot by the very nature of their wares "own" the software that they service. They can (and do, for the most part) govern the software that they support.

I've said many times that who owns a company is an important factor to consider when choosing software. I think that what I always really meant was that who governs the company is what matters. I have said this other ways—"not all equity companies are the same"—and danced around the touchy subject of ownership. But regardless of who owns the companies or owns the software, what we really want to know is who runs them.

The other angle on this has me thinking about member-governed organizations—ALA, LITA, DLF, NISO, and yes, even OCLC. Because I have had some level of involvement with all of the above, I've been giving lots of thought lately to the areas of "overlap," which is a nice humanistic euphemism for "competition." It occurs to me that the overlapping problems of these organizations are also solved by the thing they have in common—governance.

Why is it that membership in a group grants unfettered license to complain about the organization but creates no clear responsibility for fixing its perceived problems? Seems all too convenient.

Granted that scale, scope, reach, and even bank-account size of those listed above are all different. Nevertheless, whether proprietary or open, member-driven, board-directed, publicly or privately owned, the nimble, innovative, and well-governed will win the day.

I'm in Denver for the the cleverly named 2007 LITA Forum. This is the first in a while that I have not been giving a talk at, which is nice. I can enjoy Denver, enjoy my colleagues, and begin my new role as "committee recruiter"...one of the first duties that comes along with being Vice President of the division.

So, yes, I am taking time out to talk up LITA a bit. It is one of the best conferences for IT networking that I know of (that's small 'n', lest you think I refer to the days of LAN and WAN administration and actually meeting to talk about it). Long breaks and a diverse crowd of administrators, managers, techies, and newbies make it a great setting. And for those who can't be there, almost every session is covered by an army of volunteer bloggers at the LITA blog.

My favorite session yesterday was from Gregg Silvis from Delaware, who opened the floor with "Library 2023: A Provoked Discussion on the Future of Libraries." Basically, he lit the fuse and got away to watch the fireworks, while ably guiding the discussion and keeping it civil. It was a frank discussion punctuated with just the right amount of contrariness.

Silvis posited that in 2023 there are 100,000,000 freely available texts; what does this mean for librarians, scholars, copyright, and even Kinkos? There was a lot of discussion about the library as a place for study (a third place) versus the warehouse of books. And way too much discussion—including by your's truly—about the value of metadata. It got me thinking about the library as place. Short of there being barista and XBox training in library school, I am struggling with the librarian's role in this 2023 library.

Quote of the day from UIUC's Michael Twidale:
"Public libraries are the gateway drug [to freely available content]."

Ron Gardner, Contentdm specialist for OCLC, made the point that libraries are getting a lot more involved in the creation that goes on in libraries. It got me thinking that we are still a little fixated on what comes into the library (metadata creation, organization, even the library website) rather than caring as much as we should about what goes out.

In a profession full of humanists and expert researchers, is it time for us to be thinking even more about what people produce in libraries, rather than simply finding them the right resources and leaving them to their best devices? Could the library profession be a key player in the quality of information that with or without our help is going to wind up available to millions through search and discovery mechanisms that are not of our own flawless (ahem) design? We're already playing a role in the production of mass digitization of our existing resources and the creation of digital portals for our unique resources. Isn't the next logical step to be the stewards of the things that are created from access to those things?

Maybe I'm just high....altitudinally speaking, that is.