Twas the night before migration, when all through ‘brary
Not a creature was stirring, not even Homeless Harry.
The doors were all locked and the reading room bare,
In hopes the IT department soon would be there.

The good books were nestled all snug on their carts,
They seemed random to those without library smarts.
With Starbucks in hand, the IT crew stood tall,
The director had retired to sleep through it all.

When up at the front desk there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the server room to see what was the matter.
Away from my command prompt I flew like a flash,
A sprint down the stairs—a librarian dash.

The monitors on the new glass-topped tables did glow
Like the lights on the stage of a cheap Vegas show.
When what should appear as I wandered the stacks,
But a fancy new Prius, and eight geeks with Macs.

With a spanking new system, all open and slick,
I knew in a moment it must be a trick.
More rapid than vendors their improvements they came,
The geeks whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

“Now Facebook! now, Flickr! now Tagger and Mash-up!
On, MySpace! On, NextGen, on Filter and Pop-up!
To the top ARLs! to the Publics and all!
We’ll launch this new system and the others will fall!”

As old systems that before the new one comes in,
Make new things look sexy, and cool, without sin.
So into the ‘brary this new system came,
With facets and word clouds and nothing the same.

And then, with a sense of unwilling surrender,
I heard through the door the sound of our vendor.
As I shrugged to the others, and was turning around,
Through the side door the CEO came with a bound.

He was dressed in light khakis, and golf shirt with logo,
In his ear was his Bluetooth, on his belt some new gizmo.
An iron-clad contract he held in his hand,
And he looked like a hustler, all cap-toothed and tanned.

He feared not the new system, though to him it was strange,
He relied on the fact that all staff hated change!
With his droll little mouth drawn up like a bow,
I could have sworn that he whispered, “Pshaw two point oh.”

The strength of his system, he defended till death,
It would do us just fine till we drew our last breath.
He’d fix all of our problems. What—tape, string, and glue?
But we’ll wait months and months and then pay for them too!

His demo was snappy and hot off the shelf,
But I wept as I watched it, in spite of myself!
A twitch in his eye and the cock of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had something to dread.

We’d be stuck with his system, till nigh kingdom come,
And we’d wait for the features, but I stood deaf and dumb.
With a pat on my back and what looked like a wink,
I’d agreed to his upgrade before I could think.

He sprang to his Hummer, to the geeks gave the finger,
But they would not go lightly, for years they would linger.
But I heard him exclaim, 'ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy upgrade to all, and to all a good night!”

Happy Holidays everyone!

See last year's "The Grump Who Stole Libraries."

There's nothing especially special about the date December 12, but this one was my last day at NCSU Libraries. It was a hard and happy last day. Hard to leave. Happy to see all my friends and colleagues join the department for food, fond memories, and farewells. Rarely at a loss for words, I was moved by the send-off given to me by NCSU. I am going to miss my colleagues greatly, but am confident that I will see them often at conferences and on trips back to Raleigh. The relationships and accomplishments that I have enjoyed with my friends and co-workers at NCSU have set the bar high for the rest of my career.

Here's a brief look back on my last nine December 12th's

Dec 12, 1999
I was busy setting up netlibrary account creations for remote users. Hey, we were early adopters!

Dec 12, 2000
After 14 months as Assistant Head, I applied for the Head of Systems job at NCSU Libraries. Boy, was I scared and excited.

Dec 12, 2001
I announced the finalization of the merger of Sirsi and DRA to library staff. A year later, we would be Unicorn customers.

Dec 12, 2002
Finished prepping the DRA Web2 catalog interface to work with Sirsi Unicorn. This is about the time I decided that dressing up the OPAC was like putting "lipstick on a pig."

Dec 12, 2003
Found out that "Dismantling Integrated Library Systems" would be LJ's cover story in Feb 2004. Next step . . . putting things back together again.

Dec 12, 2004
Scheduled a meeting with ARL reps to talk about the challenges of metasearch. Boy, sure am glad that's all solved. Ahem. Cough.

Dec 12, 2005
Finalized the order in which we would present Endeca facet refinements in our new catalog interface. We're still debating them.

Dec 12, 2006
Finalized schedule for a second round of interviews for Associate Head of IT. I am pleased that the job went to Emory's Maurice York. I am doubly pleased that he has been named interim department head.

Dec 12, 2007

Andrew's going away cake.

Now, forward. Ever forward.

Everything's up-to-date in Kansas City. At least that's what I had always been told. In fact KC has gone about as far as they can go by offering free wireless in the airport. I was there this week speaking at the Military Libraries Workshop.

As I sat in the airport Thursday evening watching the snow come down and my estimated departure time get farther away, I managed to find a stray power plug and sat down to catch up on email and maybe submit a blog post. The former took no time at all (with only a week left of work at NCSU, my correspondence has dwindled...the end-times get lonely). When I tried to do the latter, I was confronted with a serious message from KC's free wireless provider:

My blog. Not "inappropriate," not "restricted," not even "suspicious"... pornography! In fact, blogs.ala.org is categorized as such since I could not get to others either. Had the area around the terminal's only power source not been so crowded, I might have tried a few real porn sites to see if I could get through, but who could guess what kind of scrutiny I might have been under at that point. After several tries, I became somewhat embarrassed and even felt it necessary to explain the repeatedly appearing screen to the gentleman with whom I shared an armrest lest my failed attempts at work become as suspicious as real porn.

The only alternative was to sit there and laugh about it. Was this Karmic revenge for ALA's stance on filtering? Was it some sort of mid-western editorial about the quality of my blog? How ironic that I had to wait until I got home to blog about it.

I've had a few e-mails from folks asking me why I have not reported on the Amazon Kindle yet. As one who was once labeled the "E-Book Evangelist," certainly I would have an opinion on this one. Frankly, I almost don't know what to say, and the usual 3-day fermentation period that is my writing style, which usually results in a zippy 250-word blog post, just was not coming.

One of the phrases that I used to use about e-books is "the second mouse always gets the cheese." I thought that for sure early failures in e-book devices would lead to the perfect handheld device, software that made digital reading a pleasure, and a DRM acceptable to most libraries—or at least their patrons. I sincerely thought that by now we would have a device that smelled like a paperback, and we still don't have anything that even feels like one. Since the early days of digital books, many a rodent has died upon the altar of the e-book mousetrap. The cheese itself (digitized content, in this painful metaphor) has aged gracefully and gotten bigger. But the perfect device, the perfect software, still eludes us.

That said, I don't want to dwell on the Kindle itself. There are plenty (plenty, plenty) of blogs, reviews, and even videos mostly deriding Kindle's ability to not be more like an iPod. I'm not going to criticize its look and feel because $400 is above my technical curiosity threshold. Really, Amazon, did you think that making me choose between this oddly colored (is that 1993 PC beige?) e-book device and a Sony Blu-Ray was giving me any choice at all? Though I don't have one in hand, my biggest disappointment is that the pictures I have seen make it look a bit too much like the grainy snapshot that was available when I did blog about Kindle over a year ago.

I do not find disparity between belief in the power of the printed word and the power of the word digitized. I have said all along that an e-book is not a device, it is not a piece of software—it is the work in electronic form. How a publisher chooses to distribute that work, and how a person chooses to consume it is where the disparity begins. —Your's truly, Computers in Libraries, May 2005

So we're still down to distribution and consumption being the biggest barriers. These are the topics being debated in the circles of Google Books and the OCA. And now Amazon has distracted us with their new little device. I really only want to see one for the supposed wonder that is the e-ink display. As I have been cleaning out my office, I came across my old RocketBook and SoftBook. I still like them both as devices, but due to technological and content restrictions (and some financial mismanagement), they were doomed to failure.

So maybe we need to take another step back. The Kindle is just another device, like the iPod, and the Palm, like the RocketBook. Tastes for consumption are hard to predict, but content providers can put themselves in the stream regardless. I grow increasingly pessimistic about a publisher's ability to put itself in that stream without hyperbolic DRM paranoia.

The e-book scene is so different than it was when I first got involved, yet the arguments for and against seem to be getting circular in nature. What exactly will get us out of this circle, out of this e-book malaise, I do not know.