After I uploaded this morning’s batch of pictures and rested for a bit, I went off back toward Victoria Station and Buckingham palace. On my way there, I stopped off at the Grosvenor Gardens and sat and watched the pigeons and people wander by (and found a cash machine that will actually give me pounds – took me two tries, but I found one!!). I continued on past the royal mews and finally on to the palace.
That was an impressive sight! I got several pictures, both of the palace at different angles and of the monument to Queen Victoria that sits just outside the gates. They are on Flickr, of course!
After that lookaround, I walked back – slowly – to an Indian restaurant I’d passed on my way to the palace and had a lovely dinner there. A short walk back to my hotel followed dinner and now I’m back in my room – uploading, tagging and organizing all of my day’s photos. I’m going to be talking to the folks at home soon, when they get home from work, and then I’ll be more than ready to get some sleep!
I hopped the train to Paddington Station at 2:21pm and ended the portion of my trip that required work. Except for the hauling of 75 pounds of crap that I decided was necessary for my trip to England. I’d call that work, too. Anyway, the trip back to London was lovely – all verdent (and I mean blinding, saturated greens on the hills – dotted with sheep, of course – that we passed) and lovely and relaxing. We got to Paddington, hopped the tube to Victoria Station, got bad directions to the hotel and wandered the streets for a bit – until we finally got good directions – and then made it to the hotel – with all 75 pounds of crap still attached. We were going to get an extra bed and Bobbi was going to crash in my room overnight, before getting on a 7am plane to Italy – but my room is barely big enough for the twin bed that is in it (as in the door won’t fully open because the foot of space between the doorjamb and the bed won’t allow it. Private toilet, lots of tea/coffee makings and all, but NO ROOM. They are moving me to a bigger one tomorrow. After all that, Bobbi decided it would be just as cheap to get a hotel room out at the airport than to get a room here and pay 45 pounds (that’s 90 bucks) for the taxi back – since the tube doesn’t open til 6am. She left, I got settled in my closet and went out for dinner.
I stopped off at a cute little pub on Victoria Street (I think – still getting my bearings) and had bangers and mash with a cider to drink. As I was finishing up, a lady came and sat at my table and asked to bum a light – I gave her one, we chatted amiably, then her friend came out and joined her and she lit into him like a banshee. Apparently he (or someone) had been telling people that she will “drain your bank account” and she wanted him to stop. He insisted that he wasn’t saying it. I was fascinated, but had to leave in the middle – it was getting a bit weird for me! They paused in their argument, wished me a lovely evening and continued on as I walked away.
I got back to the hotel at about 9:30 and the “emergency engineering issue” that they had warned me about when I checked in kicked in. No electricity for the rest of the night. I’m typing this up on battery power and will post it tomorrow (Thursday) after the power comes back on to our street.
Sweet dreams, y’all – I’m going to sleep!
Wednesday, the final day of the UKSG conference was fabulous. We started the day with a discussion of Web 3.0 that I am totally going to crib for my Web 3.0 session in September. The speaker, Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef , discussed the emergence of metadata and the move from “reading” the web to “computing” the web. He also talked about RDF and turning the web into a database. It was all fascinating stuff and I will definitely be using it. We snuck out after that to get ready for our session at 11am, the final breakout session of the conference. It went pretty well – not as many questions during the session itself, but lots of folks stopped by and chatted afterward. I took about 50 moo cards and left with 6. I was pleased! After that was a discussion of the similar issues plaguing the music industry and libraries – that of content distribution that both supports content creators and allows democratic access to culture by the public. Jim Griffin, a music industry exec, was funny and thought-provoking. After that was a final lunch – with goodbyes and thank yous to all the nice people I met and to those who invited me to the conference as well.
Last night’s final dinner was a “red” themed dinner – everyone was supposed to show up in whatever they felt interpreted the red theme best. I wore a red sweater. The guy who won the contest wore copies of the Sun and the Mirror (“redtop” papers) plastered to his entirely red outfit as well as a little hat made of more pages from those papers. I recieved enough advice about where to go in London that I’m probably going to have to extend my vacation for another week (we can consider this my official request for time off, right Bill?) and had a lovely time eating myself silly. I, along with the rest of my table, received advice on how to taste wine in the snobbiest French way by a truly charming French man and we discovered that there were more midwesterners at this conference than we had ever guessed. I sat across from a lovely woman who lived in Kansas City, MO for years before she relocated to Glasgow, Scotland.
In response to Margaret’s concerns for my health, I am walking a lot – we are about 1/2 mile or better from the conference center, so I get it at least a couple of miles a day walking back and forth – but there is no way on earth I could walk off all of the amazing food they are providing!
I’m off to a discussion on Web 3.0 and then a repeat of our session! Have a lovely day!!
Great, now I’m going to have that song in my head today. Oh well, it will be a change from Madonna’s Material Girl, which has been running through my head for a week!
Anyway, Tuesday, after our first class, I went back to the hotel and headed to the bar area for High Tea. I had little finger sandwiches (of ham & mustard, smoked salmon & cream cheese, roast beef (withhout the tomato) and I passed on the cucumber sandwich), fruit cake (real, live fruit cake!!) with my scones, devon clotted cream, strawberry jam and tea. It was a perfect snack – a bit heavy, perhaps, but lovely to eat & experience. Now I’m getting ready to head to the evening reception & dinner. I’ve still got a couple of hours before dinner, so I’m sure I’ll be ready for it – despite the big tea – when it is served!
I attended a session this morning on the Changing Face of Library Automation and Open Source by Ken Chad. He is a consultant who, among other things, helps library systems during the change-over to a new ILS vendor. He started with an overview of the state of the library market (with a UK bias) and actually began by talking about Google. A frequent message I’ve heard in the conference, and he reiterated, was that Google is a library company – their mission statement makes them definitely “one of us”. Ken stated that they got into the library world in the reverse, though, by starting with search and moving on to collections (via Google book digitization, Google Scholar, etc), rather than starting with a collection and branching out to searching that collection, as libraries do. He reviewed the UK based vendor landscape and showed that change of ownership and/or consolidation is happening everywhere. He then listed the influences of vendor strategies:
- Web 2.0
- New User Behavior
- W3C standards (web services, etc.)
- Need for increased productivity at reduced cost of ownership
Ken then brought up the “Amazon-like” recommendations engines and how libraries and vendors aren’t offering anything like it – yet. Next was a look at the fact that the market is failing (he mentioned the “Opac Sucks” conversations in the US from a while back) and said that this will open the way for open source.
He mentioned, during the second half of the program, social production (people giving their time w/others to produce goods – such as Linux – for free), passionate amateurs (LibraryThing’s Tim Spaulding, for one) and that “most creativity is collaborative”. He advocates for the library to be a platform for collaboration and creativity. The audience then chimed in on the concept of a sense of value – Radiohead’s recent release of an album without a price, the users could just pay what they thought it was worth. One lady said that 80% of the downloads were paid for. She also brought up the concept of restaurants that don’t have fixed prices and the fact that people are paying enough for the food that they are making a profit.
Finally, the discussion centered on open source alternatives to traditional ILS offerings and how they are used in libraries. Several people are using solutions such as Koha or Evergreen. One gentleman said that he had used a commercial VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) that was so bad, they ended up recreating one in Facebook!
All in all it was a good presentation and an interesting discussion!
The class went quite well – it was a packed room of attentive and interested folks! Nothing better than that! The presentation is published via Google Docs, so if you want to see the updated version of our dog & pony show, take a look!
So last night, about 11pm, I went out for my last smoke of the night. While I was out there, I was approached by a middle-aged English woman, asking me if she could buy a fag off of me. While I thought I was prepared for that question, I apparently wasn’t. I giggled. I then told her that there was no need for money, I believe in smoker’s karma – I donate one to you, there will be one for me when I need one. She insisted, and gave me 25p (about 55 cents) for one cigarette. What this taught me? I’m still juvenile enough to get a giggle out of selling a fag (for under a dollar, even!) on the streets of England and that cigs here must be rather expensive and I’m glad I brought my own!
We ate 
, we walked around Torquay’s harbor and did all manner of window shopping before we stopped off at the Living Coasts (with my pics on Flickr) and wandered through that “coastal zoo”. We have been busy! I also stopped off at a bar and had a “Devon cream tea”, consisting of 2 scones, jam, devon clotted cream and a pot of tea. It was AMAZING. I may be hooked!! After all that, I took a nap and then Bobbi and I went down to dinner at the conference. It was an international buffet, which was good (not as good as last night, but what can you do?). We discussed library differences between UK and US libraries (not so many?) and had a good time. Now it is almost 11pm and I’m ready for bed!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/webgoddess/tags/traveling/ – my pics of my journey from Missouri to Torquay, Devon, UK. Long and arduous – but totally worth it! I’m off to the 2nd conference reception and dinner – the first (last night) was freakin’ awesome, so I’m looking forward to tonight. More later!