Yesterday, I tendered my resignation at the Ann Arbor District Library. My last day of employment will be this Friday, the 23rd of February.

To say that working at AADL was a honor would be an understatement. It is a fine, fine institution, filled with bright, intelligent, hardworking, and committed individuals. They have allowed me to grow tremendously, and I feel that I’ve been able to make a significant contribution to AADL in return. So I extend my deepest thanks and gratitude to every last person at AADL.

I am leaving Ann Arbor because I have accepted a position at the Darien Public Library in Darien, Connecticut. My official title will be Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives. I have to say that my pulse quickens when I think about what the Darien Library has in store for the future, and to be part of it is a dream come true. I will be working for Alan Gray, who is currently Associate Director. DPL’s director is Louise Berry.

I will continue to blog here at blyberg.net. I also have no plans to discontinue work on such projects as PatREST, or SOPAC. In fact, they will be crucial components of my future work. Darien Public Library is, like AADL, an Innovative Interfaces customer and I plan to join Darien in their effort to forge a srong and close relationship with III. Though I may have been critical of them in the past, and very well may be in the future, that does not mean that I don’t value a meaningful development partnership with them. I tend to think in terms of “how can what I’m doing now benefit not just my institution, but all institutions?” So you can be sure that I will continue to share our successes, and perhaps more importantly, our failures.

If you currently use my AADL email address to contact me, I suggest you use my posted contact information to get hold of me instead. My personal email address is john@blyberg.net.

Roy Tennant has written a very cheeky, open letter to ILS vendors over at tech essence warning them that, in the face of growing competition from the open source sector, they ought to be abandoning their business-as-usual tact.

I’ll tell you, I sure as heck wouldn’t want to be a vendor right now.

But then again, what if libraries received an open letter warning against the same complacency that plagues our ILS vendors? Remember this open letter in the Lawrence Journal World?

What if our users decided that the $80-$100 allocated to the library from their property taxes would personally serve them better if it were spent on a Netflix subscription? After all, DVDs constitute the largest percentage of circulated items at our library. Yet, compared to Netflix, our selection is lousy, availability is a joke, and distribution methods? Ha. That’s just one example of many instances where our users are not getting the ROI they may be looking for.

The reality is that public libraries are not in a position to compete with power houses like Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. We’re even getting our hat handed to us by the pirate movie and MP3 scene. So when I read Roy’s letter, I thought, yes he’s dead-on, but that pendulum swings right back at us. Roy sums up some of the advice given by a Business Week article about the Eastman Kodak company:

• Watch for treacherous shifts
• Get your best people behind the program
• Give your new initiatives room to breathe
• Make painful breaks with the past
• Don’t confuse what your company does with how it does it

Sage advice. We ought to take it. I’m personally much less concerned about the fate of our vendors. They’ve made their bed, and we no longer have to sleep in it with them.

I casually mentioned the semantic web the other day at the OLA Superconference in Toronto while speaking on a panel wth Michael Stephens and Amanda Etches-Johnson. I was trying to drive home the point that, as libraries, we ought to be much more clued in to such inevitabilities than we are (and if the semantic web doesn’t unfurl like Tim Berners-Lee envisions, it will be something equally as potent).

Late October, I also spoke about the “Semantic Library” at a Connecticut Library Consortium symposium.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon this gem:

(link)

via Seth Godin (and Alan Gray).

I just got back from Rochester, New York, where it’s cold and snowy. But that fact didn’t do anything to put a chill on the impeccably hosted eXtensible Catalog partners meeting. The eXtensible Catalog (XC) is to be, potentially, an open-source product that arises from a grant given to the University of Rochester by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant itself is up for renewal in April 2007.

From the XC blog:

The principal investigator for the project is Ronald F. Dow, the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries, with co-principal investigators David Lindahl, director of digital initiatives; Jennifer Bowen, head of cataloging; and Nancy Fried Foster, lead anthropologist for the libraries.

This first year of grant funding represents “Phase I” of the XC project, and one of the goals of that phase is to secure a number of partnerships for going forward. That’s where the partners meeting came in. In addition to getting a lot of valuable feedback from a group of about 30 people from a wide range of institutions, the XC project hopes to get a number of people to sign on to help the project itself with anything from consultation to actual development.

As a library geek, I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the scope and structure of the project until David Lindahl gave a technical overview of how the development process might work. XC is to be a highly modular project centered around a common framework. This will, hopefully, allow XC to be a ubiquitous product that works with any ILS. It would be up to the XC partners (and perhaps, ultimately its users) to create the “plug-ins” necessary to make it work with a previously unsupported system.

I have to say that I really like the proposed structure that Dave talked about, and as I mentioned at the meeting, there are a number of projects that are currently striving to do similar things, but none of them have really thought to harness the potential of the open source “community” like XC does. So I believe XC has a higher potential for success than some of the other projects like it.

That said, a number of very good issues were raised at the meeting. Foremost among them was the issue of governance. Who will ultimately be responsible or the project? Will it stay in Rochester? I think this issue, more than all others, is what made many of the other potential partners nervous. That, and the fact that the XC project is still very early on in the design phase. Justifying a commitment to the project is not easy for a lot of libraries. That, of course, makes my blood pressure rise. When I think about the fact that the prospect of working together with other libraries on a long-term project is a hard sell to library administrators, I get mightily frustrated. Librarians seem to always want the “sure thing” even if it means settling for mediocre. I’d much rather take a risk and go for the holy grail. After all, it’s just time and money, right?

Not that I’m saying that XC is the holy grail. Not at all, but, like I also mentioned at the meeting, XC is a lofty, idealistic vision for library catalogs. I like idealism. If we, as libraries, can get past our sanctimonious insistence that lofty goals are for careless upstarts, we might actually wind up with something we want, for a change.

So, who knows what the future has in store for XC. It’s one of those projects that will succeed beyond all our wildest dreams if it gets the support it needs. Or it could die on the vine due to lack of attention and care. Kind of like the rest of us.

Totally non-library related, but…

I’m no longer the only Blyberg blogging (yes I know that alliterates). My sister, who quietly and modestly applies her genius at the National Galery of Art, has started a blog.

Go sis!