Julià Minguillón, a computer science professor who spoke about digital preservation issues, described attempting to deposit an equation into his university library’s OER repository, only to be told that because his equation did not have a title, it could not be included in the collection. He then went on to criticize librarians’ obsession with the “useless” metadata of “author, title, date.” He argued that if we put librarians in charge of OER repositories (exactly the thing I argued for in my paper), we will sacrifice broad, immediate access in favor long-term preservation and proper metadata schemas.

R. John Robertson gave a paper about the role libraries can play in supporting OER initiatives but a significant portion of his presentation was given over to his concerns about librarian participation in this work. His experience with librarians is that they are so risk averse that the merest hint of a copyright issue is likely to send them running for the hills. Like Minguillón, he had anecdotes to back up his worries about librarians as obstacles in the field of open education.

In a word: Blergh! How did this happen? Why, despite biannual New York Times articles about how modern and hip librarians have become, are we still perceived on our own campuses as fearful impediments to progress?

Okay, I know why. Some librarians are fearful impediments to progress. Some librarians allow perfect metadata to be the enemy of good access. Some libraries, as institutions, do not foster innovation and experimentation, and are deeply resistant to change. It’s so disappointing.

It probably says something about the job I’ve had for the last year and a half that I see this primarily as a failure of management. On the plane to Barcelona I read a column by Meredith Farkas in American Libraries called “Nurturing Innovation: Tips for Managers and Administrators.” She offers a number of excellent suggestions for ways to adjust the institutional culture at libraries to support and embrace innovation: Encourage staff to learn and play, give staff time to experiment with potential new initiatives, keep an open mind, develop a risk tolerant culture. These suggestions kept coming back to me at Open Ed as I struggled to defend librarians and libraries against accusations of stodginess. I wanted to hand the article over to the people who complained about their uptight, change resistant libraries and say, “It doesn’t have to be this way. Go talk to your Dean. Make it better.” I also, in that way that sometimes happens, added one more suggestion to the list, thinking it was from Farkas but it’s from somewhere else, part of a theme that developed at Open Ed: Library administrators must make some room in their budgets for failure.

Innovation and progress can’t happen without failure. It’s how we learn, as individuals and as institutions and as species. Yes, library budgets are tight these days. Tighter than we ever thought they could get. With money so tight, and cuts so deep, it’s easy to think that now is not the time to take risks, but of course, now is exactly the time to take risks. How else will we prepared to address the challenges that await us in next year’s budget cycle, and the one after that, and the one 15 years from now?

To use one relevant example: The current commercial scholarly publishing apparatus is choking us. We know this. Knowing this, we have two choices: We can invest in activities that could ease the financial pressure – open repositories, deposit mandates, awareness campaigns – or we can choke. In this case, many libraries are experimenting, and sometimes those experiments even fail. As Farkas points out, when our experiments fail we still learn something valuable from them, something that can set us on a path to succeed the next time.

It’s not enough simply to encourage our staff to experiment. We need to give them money to play with, to set up a repository or buy a license to a promising tool or hire an expert to train staff in something new. It doesn’t have to be a lot of money, but it does have to be relatively free from strings. And then, we need to make sure our experimenting staff share what they’ve learned with colleagues in other libraries, the successes and the failures. It’s how we will all evolve.

So to wrap up this meandering post with a tidy bow: Higher education is changing, and our campuses are full of people (many of whom were at Open Ed and Drumbeat) experimenting with new models, tools, and philosophies related to teaching, learning, and research. The primary responsibility of academic libraries is to support teaching, learning, and research, and so those experiments and the people conducting them are highly relevant to us. We must make sure that we remain relevant to them. If they see us as an obstacle it is only a matter of time before we become obsolete. We want those experimenters and innovators to view the library as both a resource for and a partner in their work, and we can do that by funding innovation among our own staff, expanding our definition of the library’s role on campus, and embracing the possibility of failure. If we neglect to do these things, we don’t just risk becoming obsolete, we guarantee it.

Peter Suber Gavin Baker summarized the issue nicely:

There’s been a dust-up lately over a policy change announced by the Online Computer Library Center for the terms of use for WorldCat, the union catalog of bibliographic records contributed by OCLC member libraries.

It’s disputed whether OCLC provides [Open Access] to the full WorldCat data: Open Library’s Aaron Swartz says it doesn’t; OCLC’s Karen Calhoun says it does.

The new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records supercedes the earlier Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of OCLC-Derived Records, last revised in the pre-Web era. (Karen Coyle points out that the Guidelines were themselves a response to an earlier attempt by OCLC to claim copyright in WorldCat records. The new policy avoids the term copyright, but does make an oblique reference to “the intellectual property rights [in WorldCat or WorldCat Records]“.) The new policy is slated to go into effect in February 2009.

Aside from the name change (from “guidelines” to “policy”, implying enforceability), key points of the new policy include prohibitions on commercial or “unreasonable” use. (An earlier version of the policy also required attribution to OCLC in each record re-used; in the latest version, the attribution requirement has been weakened to a recommendation.)

The dust-up arose because OCLC’s new policy for use of WorldCat records seems to restrict what people can do with OCLC’s records, in ways that the old guidelines hinted at but didn’t actually do. Though it sounds like this was not OCLC’s intention (more on that in a moment) the new policy, if taken literally, prohibits uses that many libraries and organizations are already making of OCLC records, and blocks potential uses that could have been opened up by a more liberal policy.

A couple of people have asked me to write about the brouhaha from a copyright perspective, but this isn’t a copyright issue at all. Like many of the challenges facing libraries in the digital age, the problem isn’t copyright, it’s license agreements; in this case, the agreement between OCLC and the libraries that participate in WorldCat.

Most of the elements that make up a WorldCat record – metadata that includes information on author, title, and year of publication – are not copyrightable. They’re facts. Indeed, much of what makes OCLC’s purported attempt to control WorldCat records so objectionable is that not only are the records uncopyrightable, but even if they were, the copyright would belong to the libraries that created the records. OCLC does not produce the records in WorldCat, it merely ingests them from member libraries. For OCLC to claim copyright or any other kind of ownership over those records offends the sensibilities of the librarians who create the records that make up the catalog and who pay a lot of money to participate in the system, and it worries the librarians and others who depend on the catalog as a shared source of quality metadata. When OCLC took it even further, and used the policy to place extensive license restrictions on the kinds of uses that members can make of the records – limiting acceptable activities not just to non-commercial uses but to “reasonable” non-commercial uses – that was the last straw.

The irony here is that OCLC’s stated goal was to expand sharing and re-use of WorldCat records, and my sense is that this really is what they tried to do. OCLC Vice President Karen Calhoun’s discussion of Creative Commons, and OCLC’s “human readable”-esque summary that is a direct nod to CC licenses, suggest that this policy was created as a good faith effort to clarify the terms of use in a way that would improve members’ ability to use and share WorldCat records. In both public and private statements, people at OCLC have said that the policy isn’t intended to prohibit the kinds of non-profit record sharing that libraries traditionally engage in. In a podcast interview on Talking with Talis, Karen Calhoun said that the old guidelines were terribly out of date and overly restrictive, and that the aim in creating a new policy was to reduce confusion about the many ways that people could use WorldCat records by clarifying and modernizing the language of the policy.

So how did OCLC get it so wrong? How did they end up with a policy that is so very un 2.0, so very unsharing? A policy that has librarians all over the web questioning its motives and its non-profit status? Terry Reese frames it in terms of power hungry monopolies, but I think it comes down to fear. The same fear that has publishers begging for interoperable DRM for e-books, the same fear that has music and movie companies continuing to sue their fans despite growing resistance. It’s the fear that the old business models don’t work anymore, and that the old businesses will die. OCLC likes the idea of Creative Commons licensing, likes the idea of open data, but what OCLC likes even more is survival. OCLC wants to embrace the librarianish ethos of sharing, but only if that sharing does not in any way threaten its revenue stream. This is the policy of an organization that is trying to protect its market share by restricting access to its content, instead of protecting its market share by providing products and services that are better than everyone else’s. Sure, there are overtones of monopoly, but OCLC’s monopoly on catalog data is fragile at best and its leaders know that. Rather, this is about resisting the dramatic changes that a web-based business model would require. One in which OCLC isn’t the only place to access catalog data, it’s the best place.

Additional readings (only includes material not linked in the post itself)

• Stefano’s Linotype: Rule #1 for Surviving Paradigm Shifts: Don’t S**t Where You Eat
• Libology Blog: OCLC WorldCat is the Tiger, not the Lady?
• Code4Lib Wiki: OCLC Policy Change
• Raw Thought: Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab
• blog.ecorrado.us: OCLC’s new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records
• Rob Styles: OCLC Record Usage, Copyright, Contracts, and the Law

Hat tip to Jake Glenn for first telling me about the story and passing on many useful links.

Phil Michel and Michelle Springer from the Library of Congress presented on the LOC’s Flickr Pilot Project. The Library of Congress was the first cultural heritage institution to partner with Flickr to share photographic content and invite user participation and comments. With 15 institutions participating in what is now the Flickr Commons, it is an idea that caught on quickly and has been quite successful. I’ve been very excited about this project since its launch, and so I was motivated to clean up and blog my rather extensive notes on the session. For more information about the project, check out this LOC webcast.

Background

The motivation for the project came from a desire to explore including user generated content (UGC) in LOC descriptive processes. Photos seemed like a good place to start because there is no language barrier, there was already a big collection of photos online, and because they’re fun.

Initial investigations showed that bringing tagging to LOC collections would have had high technical barriers if handled in-house. There was a desire to keep initial expenditures low, and so they started looking around for existing web 2.0 sites that were doing the things they wanted to do.

The project had three goals: Increase awareness of LOC collections; gain better understanding of social tagging; gain experience participating in the kinds of web communities that are interested in LOC materials

There were a number of principles that guided the development of the pilot project: The involved content must already be available on the LOC site; the agreement with the third party site must be non-exclusive; access to the content must must be free; there must be an option to control or exclude advertising on the account; LOC should be clearly identified as the source of the images; must allow LOC to remove and moderate user-supplied content to prevent inappropriate tags and comments; UGC must be clearly distinguishable from Library generated content; must be possible to accurately convey copyright status.

Flickr had a great deal of appeal as a partner: It recently announced the upload of its 3 billionth picture, and has an active user community of over 23 million members. It had a pre-existing, vibrant community built around photography and a conversation that included notes, comments, and tags. From a technical standpoint, it also had APIs that allow for batch uploads and batch downloads of UGC, and a history of dealing with alternative copyright status (Creative Commons licenses).

Getting it off the ground

Flickr programmed the “No Known Restrictions” option especially for the LOC partnership, and it is now used by most of the institutions participating in The Commons. Every institution has its own page in its own webspace the explains exactly what they mean by the statement.

Some time and effort was required on the part of the General Counsel’s office to work with Flickr to create a modified Terms and Conditions agreement that could deal appropriately with the Library’s status as a government institution.

Technical process: Someone (I missed who – Flickr, LOC, or both) built a Java(?) app called Flickrj to push and pull content between the LOC databases and Flickr’s. They chose selected MARC fields whose content would go to Flickr along with the photos: The MARC 856 field was used as unique machine tag value, and so was the DublinCore identifier field.

All together, getting the project off the ground took about 100 hours of work for technical staff.

The photos all went to Flickr in their rough state. LOC folks didn’t do any cropping, color fixing, or clean up of dust or scratches. Part of the curiosity was to see how the public would respond to the images in this rough form.

Startup investments: The Library of Congress purchased a $24.95 Flickr Pro account, which offers members unlimited uploads and stats about traffic to photos. The Pro account is an annual expense that will go on as long as the project does. All Commons member institutions have pro accounts. There was no full time staff assigned to the project, but it required General Counsel involvement, some big conference calls, and eight staffers who contributed about 20 hours each to collaborate with Flickr on development.

Launching and maintaining

This was the first project that LOC ever announced without a press release. There were announcements on the Library of Congress and Flickr blogs, and the organizers considered it a soft launch. Though it involved no mainstream press, there was an enormous initial response, totally out of proportion to what was expected. The result was some near-immediate revisions of plans for maintenance and direct staff involvement; the scale was too big to be as involved as they’d planned.

A number of LOC staff share responsibility for monitoring all new comments, notes, and tags. They use the Flickrj app to pull all the new UGC at once. It takes about 2 hours a week to moderate comments/notes/tags for spam and inappropriateness. Sometimes users call attention to these things before staff find them. There are very few problems with inappropriate tags or comments; the Flickr community is quite well-behaved. LOC staff don’t correct spelling or syntax or remove seemingly useless tags. Staff do accept group invitations from public group administrators, but they only join public, nudity/vulgarity-free groups, so monitoring the group invites also takes time.

Updates to the images themselves take 15-20 hours a week. These involve corrections to descriptive information, fixes in the LOC catalog, and occasionally image fixes. Sometimes the orientation of images is wrong. First they fix it on the LOC server, then they generate new derivatives, and then send corrected versions to Flickr. In general, they limit edits to very basic changes and real errors. Sometimes they’ll point people from the LOC catalog back to Flickr when large amounts of conversation, updating, and information-sharing are taking place for a particular photo.

During the Q&A, someone asked about how have time pressures changed over the course of the project. Turns out, they haven’t exactly gone down, though they have shifted. When the project first launched, staff was checking the new comments and tags every 24 hours, and it was totally overwhelming. Efficiencies have come from the technical solutions, like the ability to batch download all new comments, notes, and tags. However, as the number of photos keeps going up, time demands on moderators continue to go up. Part of time demand comes from level of participation in the community, which is a steady stream; activity doesn’t stop on the older photos, so the rising total number of images leads to a rising total amount of new user generated content.

Outcomes

One of the main goals of the project was to drive more traffic to the LOC photo collections website, and it worked. People visit the LOC pages for higher resolution images, to get additional information, and to browse related collections. The organizers feel that the pilot has definitely achieved goal of raising awareness of LOC photo collections.

An unexpected outcome: Major search engines are finding, exposing, and weighting LOC’s Flickr images in search results. Many of the photos rank very high in images searches. It’s an unforseen way to further expose the content to the world.

Many of LOC photos are also being embedded in blogs all over the web (including this one). When it happens via “Blog this” function in Flickr, it’s easy for LOC to track it (and I imagine it’s trackable even when it happens in other ways).

The user involvement has been very interesting as a source of further study. There is a core group of about 20 commenters who provide historical research, fixes, comments, notes, etc. They’ll often support the information with citations, links to NYTimes archives and other external sites and archives. There are also 10 “power taggers” who have applied more than 3,000 tags each. One person was responsible for over 5,000 tags. The people at LOC did some work examining the different types of tags that people apply, and identified nine different categories: LC description based, new descriptive words, new subject words, emotional/aesthetic responses, personal knowledge/research, machine tags, variant forms, foreign language, and miscellaneous.

Users frequently post modern photos in the comments to show what the featured locations look like now. Sometimes people will go to the featured location and reenact the photos. There is quite a bit of playfulness and humor in much of the user involvement. Notes are a useful way to identify people in crowd shots and to transcribe text that appears in the photos. Some people also use notes to make jokes or silly comments, and while some people in the Flickr community have objected to the proliferation of notes, LOC has decided that for now the value of the function outweighs the irritation.

Conclusion: There has been a great response to the pilot, and great user participation, learned a lot. It stimulated conversation both between users & librarians and also between librarians. The project tapped into expertise in that resides in communities of interest. It brought up issues related to presentation and engagement that can inform decisions about how materials are presented on the Library’s own web site. While there are some risks associated with jumping into the web 2.0 world, and you have to be willing to cede some control, the benefits and rewards have been terrific.

From the press release:

The University of Michigan Library is adopting Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial licenses for all works created by the Library for which the Regents of the University of Michigan hold the copyrights. These works include bibliographies, research guides, lesson plans, and technology tutorials. The Library believes that the adoption of Creative Commons licenses is perfectly aligned with our mission, “to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.”

Commented University Librarian Paul Courant, “Using Creative Commons licenses is another way the University Library can act on its commitment to the public good. By marking our copyrighted content as available for reuse, we offer the University community and the public a rich set of educational resources free from traditional permissions barriers.”

It is a proud week to be a Michigan librarian (see also this announcement about the new Hathi Trust shared digital repository, and this one about our shiny new Espresso Book Machine). It’s amazing to work in a library that has strongly committed to innovation without losing sight of a core value system centered around public service. I feel very lucky. Go blue!

The University of Michigan Library was just awarded a grant for over half a million dollars from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to develop a copyright review management system which will improve the reliability of copyright status determinations.

Here are the details:

The University of Michigan Library will create a Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) to increase the reliability of copyright status determinations of books published in the United States from 1923 to 1963, and to help create a point of collaboration for other institutions. The system will aid in the process of making vast numbers of these books available online to the general public. Nearly half a million books were published in the United States between 1923 and 1963, and although many of these are likely to be in the public domain, individuals must manually check their copyright status. If a work is not in the public domain, it cannot be made accessible online. The CRMS will allow users to verify if the copyright status has been determined.

The project was inspired by the work that the Michigan Library is already doing to determine the copyright status of the thousands of books published between 1923 and 1963 that Google has digitized from our collections. Books published during that period are in the public domain if their copyrights were not renewed or if proper copyright notice was not included in the publication. Most digitization projects, including Google’s, block access to all books published after 1922 because their copyright status is unknown and difficult to determine. Michigan has a workflow in place that uses copyright renewal records and page images from the books to research the copyright status of those works, and to open up access to the ones that turn out to be in the public domain.

The Copyright Review Management System will build on this work, and support efficient collaboration among institutions. It joins OCLC’s new Copyright Evidence Registry in the growing field of collaborative library copyright determination projects. My understanding is that Michigan is already sharing data with OCLC, and presumably our collaborators will as well. It’s nice when collaborative projects collaborate with each other.

Michigan’s project will raise the impact and usefulness of mass digitization projects by drastically increasing the number of digitized works that libraries can safely share with the public. In the absence of a reasonable orphan works bill, or even, dare I say it, some much-needed improvements in copyright law, it’s great to see libraries working to expand the known public domain and squeeze every last usable work from their massively digitized stacks.

From the press release:

The WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry is a community working together to build a union catalog of copyright evidence based on WorldCat, which contains more than 100 million bibliographic records describing items held in thousands of libraries worldwide. In addition to the WorldCat metadata, the Copyright Evidence Registry uses other data contributed by libraries and other organizations…

“Having a practical registry of copyright evidence is vital to our objective of providing our scholars and students with more digital content, one goal of Stanford’s mass digitization projects,” said Catherine Tierney, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services, Stanford University. “By leveraging the value of its massive database, OCLC is in a unique position to champion cooperative efforts to collect evidence crucial to determining copyright status.”

It’s good that OCLC is creating a copyright status registry. A well-populated registry, by and for librarians, with good and useful metadata, could eventually save users real time and money. Currently, we have a handful of institutions doing major digitization projects that are separately investigating copyright status on a large scale. It’s inefficient, with lots duplicated effort. Copyright evidence is exactly the kind of thing on which libraries can and should be collaborating, and OCLC seems like a logical organization to take the lead.

I do have a couple of questions/concerns.

1. OCLC claims and enforces copyrights in its bibliographic records. While it grants member libraries permission to make broad use of those records, my understanding is that the same is not true for non-members. If OCLC extends that policy to the Copyright Evidence Registry, it risks becoming just another walled garden that is useful only to a select (and paying) group of members, and less useful even to that group than it would be if it were truly open.
2. Right now the registry is sparsely populated. It will take a critical mass of records and contributors to become a trustworthy source of copyright evidence. Where will that critical mass come from? What is OCLC doing to build it quickly? How will users know when the registry has reached it?

Via Digital Koans.

If you’re a librarian, and you’re working with lots of information — and I mean, lots, like information overload lots — you need to be equipped with a way to handle this information without resorting to mind-numbing data entry methods. No, really. Every time someone says, “I guess I have to do this exhaustingly repetitive task by hand, I cry a little. It doesn’t matter if you’re one thousand miles away; I know, and I weep.

The tutorials are funny, easy to understand, and created especially for librarians (the examples use the LC Classification Outline!). I’ve been having a great time working my way through them, discovering some of the ways that command line can make my life easier, and it’s just too terrific a resource not to share. If you ever wanted to learn how to use the command line but weren’t sure where to start, look no further.

Paul Krugman says it better In a column titled Bits, Bands, and Books: Paying for Creativity in a Digital World, Paul Krugman describes the impact of the digital revolution on the market for creative content. I think he gets it exactly right. He also calls the Grateful Dead “business pioneers.” Who knew?

Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Cory Doctorow and Creative Commons are bestsellers Like all his other books, Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother, was released online using a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA). Unlike his other books, and unlike any other CC-licensed anything, Little Brother has now spent four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s the first CC-licensed novel to make the list, and excellent news for people like me who argue that giving stuff away for free online doesn’t mean you can’t sell it for profit, too. Also fun to think about in the context of Paul Krugman’s column on e-books.

Science proves the MPAA and the RIAA are jerks A recent piece in the NYTimes Bits Blog points out a study from the University of Washington which showed that the technologies Big Media uses to investigate illegal file sharing regularly produce false positives.

From the Bits blog:

In two separate studies in August 2007 and May of this year, the researchers set out to examine who was participating in BitTorrent file-sharing networks and what they were sharing. The researchers introduced software agents into these networks to monitor their traffic. Even though those software agents did not download any files, the researchers say they received more than 400 take-down requests accusing them of participating in the downloads.

The researchers concluded that enforcement agencies are looking only at I.P. addresses of participants on these peer-to-peer networks, and not what files are actually downloaded or uploaded — a more resource-intensive process that would nevertheless yield more conclusive information.

In their report, the researchers also demonstrate a way to manipulate I.P. addresses so that another user appears responsible for the file-sharing.

This is not the first time flaws in the RIAA/MPAAs’ strategy have been revealed, and librarians and other concerned parties have been calling for more transparency in their tactics for quite some time. Now opponents of file-sharing lawsuits – not to mention the defendants in those lawsuits – have scientific evidence that these tactics implicate innocent people.

Pictures of Libraries When I travel, instead of collecting souvenirs I like to visit and take pictures of libraries. I saw a few very cool libraries on my recent vacation, including the brand new Openbare Amsterdam Bibliotheek, the Amsterdam public library. I was incredibly impressed with the design of the Amsterdam library. It has a lot of good signage, open spaces and tables for people to hang out and collaborate, tons and tons of computers (both Mac and Windows), good light, inviting stacks that weren’t too tall, and seemingly intuitive organization (from what I could understand of the Dutch).

If you’re interested, have a peek at my Libraries set on Flickr. Also check out the page about the new library at the Openbare Amsterdam Bibliotheek website.

1. Build first, explain later: People found that it was very hard to sell anyone on a 2.0 experiment when all they could do was try and describe it. “Well, Twitter is like microblogging… Well microblogging is like blogging, but smaller… Well, blogging is like when people post about different stuff, like news and stuff, and it shows up chronologically on the webpage…” etc. If they actually created a few Flickr sets, or set up a blog, it was much easier to demonstrate the utility of such a thing, and they were able to generate buy-in from the administration and the users.
2. Talk about the ends, not the means: In trying to explain Web 2.0 technologies to upper level administration, Dave Carter of the University of Michigan focused on their ability to help us better connect with our users, rather than on the details of how they work or what they are. By explaining the end goal – building a relationship with users, encouraging interaction, and improving services – he was able to sell the principle of 2.0 without getting bogged down by the minutiae of various sites and and technologies. U of M ended up offering a whole summer series on Library 2.0, and blogs, wikis, and Facebook have been adopted by librarians all over campus.

After the breakout sessions we had a show and tell, where several people got up and demonstrated a cool new thing they’re doing in their library. They included

• A video about gaming tournaments for teens at the AADL
• All sorts of awesome embedded media in the catalog at DALNET
• A library toolbar for Firefox and IE, from Columbus Metropolitan Libraries
• A blog run by teens at the Detroit Public Library
• A new tagging application, MTagger, from the University of Michigan.

We also saw a library book blog, but apparently I didn’t write down the URL or the name. I was especially impressed by all the different embedded media options from DALNET (that’s Detroit Area Library Network, I think). They’re doing stuff like embedding movie previews from YouTube in the catalog, so that if a patron is looking at a record for Spiderman 2, she could actually watch the preview right there on the page. And they’re doing it all with MARC! Very cool.

It was nice to meet librarians from all over the Midwest, and also to be reminded of some of the stuff I’ve been meaning to experiment with but just haven’t gotten around to. When I learned that there was no Wikipedia entry for the AADL, I went home and created one, my first ever new Wikipedia article (it’s still a stub – go edit it!). I also decided to take my Twittering to the next level, to see if I can finally understand what the fuss is about. If you’re interested, follow me at http://twitter.com/mollyali.