Unexpected Christmas

I got home at last, Tuesday December 21. That only left one day to get ready for a trip to London! to attend the marriage celebration of Harold's nephew Joel. We were to leave Thursday before Christmas, but that great storm I fought in Iowa caught up with Cincinnati and dumped 12 inches of snow, topped with an inch of ice. All travel came to a halt. We couldn't even exit our driveway. We learned later that our drive was not plowed out until two days after Christmas. I spent Thursday shoveling two tracks from my parking spot down our long, steep driveway, hoping that gravity would play its part in getting the car down the hill.

Next day, Christmas Eve, my plan was tested. I "drove" the car down the driveway, with Mark and a neighbor pushing on either side. It was a roller coaster out of control, but I managed to hit the street without crashing into any stone walls along the way. We made it safely to our plane, having changed our reservation before the mad rush of stymied passengers.

We arrived in London early Christmas Day. Remember Scrooge awakening in London on Christmas morning? the children, snow, singers, and other jolly-makers? That's not the London we saw. Everything was shut down tight as a drum, even the tube. Special buses took passengers to town and dumped us at a closed station. The best part of Christmas Day was finding our flat in Bloomsbury and meeting up with Eric, who had arrived safely from Los Angeles the day before with nary a problem. He had spent Christmas Eve wandering around London on his own, after being turned away at St. Paul's along with crowds of others.

We spent most of Christmas Day walking, looking for any sign of Christmas or people or food. At last, near the theater district, we found an open restaurant. By then the boys were famished. Generally speaking, London was tomb-like during the entire week following Christmas. Many shops and restaurants were closed, but the museums were thankfully open.

Joel married a young woman named Michelle from SW London, and our family represented the Byers set of relatives. We enjoyed many marriage-related festivities, as well as doing some sight-seeing. See next entry for details.

Dog Trots and Tumble Weeds

Today I set out homeward from Loveland, Colorado for Iowa City. The wind felt good on a clear 48-degree day. But after turning northeast onto I-76, the wind became unfriendly. The sun that shone on the snow-covered peaks behind me faded into a haze that must have been dust. Then I noticed tumble weeds scooting over the highway. And more, and more. Some were as big as little Christmas trees. I tried dodging them after one crashed into the side of the car with a thud. But at high speed, dodge ’em is not possible and I resorted to braking and speeding to let them pass ahead or behind, with some success. In all I was hit violently 3 times on the side and once on the windshield. The trucks were dog-trotting down the highway, with their rear axles into the shoulder while the cabs held the lane. Everyone was buffeted mercilessly. After three hours of enduring the debris, the survivors had tumble-weed trophies stuck underneath or in front, or even on the roof midst leaning bicycles. Mine decorates the license plate.

I looked forward to heading east on I-80, but by then the north wind had brought a nasty cold front with freezing rain and sinking temperatures all across Nebraska. By Des Moines the salt trucks were of no avail, so slick was the glaze that formed on the highway. I gave it up after seeing several cars off the road, and watching two adjacent ones do 360’s in the high speed lanes, honking as they spun to warn nearby cars and trucks. So scoff not at Super 8 where I welcome shelter from the perils of the road. May tomorrow be a better day.

Goodbye LA

The last week in LA went like crazy. Having dinner with friends, getting a chance to hear a concert (Messiah) in the new Disney Hall, holiday lunches, and a good-bye lunch for my with librarians from USC's Leavey Library and the Digital Imaging Management crew. We ate outside at a wonderful Italian restaurant downtown LA on Figueroa called . The perfect send-off.

Saturday December 18 I began the long journey home, my car packed to the gills with my own possessions and those of Sharon Yeh (son's ex-fiancee). I took the risky northern route in order to drop off Sharon's bicycle and other items in Loveland CO where she will be moving to study at Colorado State in Fort Collins.

I introduced Sharon, her sister and her brother-in-law to my niece Katie and her boyfriend Jason, who also studies at CSU and enjoys rock climbing. We had a good dinner in old Ft. Collins Sunday evening.

Cal Tech visit

On December 14 I was able to visit California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in Pasadena. What a different place, Cal Tech in Pasadena. The surrounding neighborhood bespeaks old, comfortable wealth and the campus itself is rich with foliage and calm. Where the students? bicycle hoards? football players? irksome panhandlers? And why does it seem familiar? The library felt like an old shoe, with indexes and reference books as on shelves at home.

I was met by Jim O'Donnell, Head of Collections, Information and Research Services and Head of the Geology & Planetary Science Library. He introduced me to several other people involved in maintaining CODA, their institutional repository. They were George Porter, Technical Reference Librarian in Library Information Technology (LIT), Betsy Coles, Applications Development in LIT, and Jay Walters, System/Network Administration in LIT.

Their approach to digitizing (CODA) couldn’t be more different from the efforts at USC. It has grassroots origins; it grows as needed with scarcely a guideline other than it must be faculty work, and must be academic; it is tended by these four eager persons who share their time willingly; and it runs on whatever servers they can spare for the effort. It is as they say a shoestring operation, and it works. It’s how techy types do it. I felt right at home.

I learned about how they manage their repository, which uses EPrints, an open access software. They started before D-Space at MIT was developed. Each person plays a role in operating CODA, with no one working at it full time. They even call upon the document delivery staff to assist with scanning, as they have the staff and equipment to handle the task. I liked their style of collaboration and experimentation, with their modest beginning leading to a fuller product as faculty became aware of the opportunity to participate and the team learned to handle a variety of materials.

They use CODA for theses, lab reports, technical reports, articles, report series, born-digital conference proceedings created using CODA, and complex geographical presentations. Right now CODA consists of separate groups of materials, with no cross-collection searching. Adding federated searching is a current goal.

At the end of the afternoon I met Kim Douglas and had a chance to brainstorm a bit about the direction of digital repositories, federated searching and other challenges. I was enticed to want to return and work with the CODA team in the spring, though working with OhioLINK's selected repository software would probably be the wiser thing to do.

Dante's View and Venice Beach and LACMA

Saturday December 11 was glorious. Totally.
I arranged to take a rigorous walk to Dante's View in Griffith Park with Joel Flashman, former teacher of son Mark. Of all days, he was trapped in the elevator of his apartment building for two hours and missed the hike. I hoofed it up alone, at a brisk pace. It was tank-top sunny with clear blue skies offering a complete panorama of Los Angeles, Palos Verdes, Santa Monica, and the ocean beyond. Happily, the gardens on top offered a hose for filling water bottles and dog dishes. Perfect refreshment for the reluctant trip back down.

Late in the afternoon, Saschka Haberl and her mother (from Berlin) joined Eric and me for a trip to Venice Beach. We drove over the canals, lined with houses lighted for Christmas, waded in the ocean, heard the drummers beating incessantly, watched roller skaters, browsed in Small World Books bookstore, and then ate next door at the Sidewalk Café. It was a perfect evening to see the sunset and say good-bye to the ocean.

Sunday the Calders played at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was a free concert that was broadcast live. Special audience guests were Wayne Smith (Eric's cello teacher from Cincinnati) and his wife Eva and son Daniel. All were visiting from their home in Berlin!

ISD party

On Friday, December 10 everyone working in the Information Services Division at USC (all library and information technology personnel) were invited to a party hosted by Jerry Campbell, Chief Information Officer and Dean of the University Libraries. It was held at the Empress Pavilion in Chinatown. Attendance was limited to 350 persons! Guests were welcome. Son Eric was my escort.

It was a remarkable party, with delicious food served in countless courses, live music, dancing, prizes, and table favors (a tiny squishy USC football of course). Jerry Campbell delivered an emotional speech, counting the blessings of being among friends and co-workers after dealing with serious illness, and knowing this would be his last year. He visited every table, giving me the opportunity to meet him and thank him for approving my sabbatical time there. It was a memorable occasion.

Playing hookie

The Calders were very busy last week, with a concert Thursday at Colburn, a Friday Colburn Orchestra concert, and a quartet concert on the UCLA Live! series on Saturday night. (The same night USC played UCLA in football and won.) It poured rain all Sunday, so Eric and I took Monday as a day off. We explored hiking trails in the nearby area, as the mountain roads had snow. We also drove through residential areas in the hills just below the Hollywood sign and in Silver Lake. Amazing constructions! Architects and builders must have nightmares trying to build there. If you look at any LA map, you will find these streets by their curly lines, as opposed to the grid-like lines in the flat areas.

In our search for a trail head on the west side of Griffith Park we discovered the Sunset Ranch, offering horse-back riding in the park. So we went for it - an hour trip with the half-way point a look-out south across all LA to the ocean. The sun came out just as we reached the look-out. Eric had never been on a horse before; he found it a fun new experience.

Other highlights of our day off included finding the Dodger Stadium and nearby hillock where we sat and watched the sun setting over the ocean beyond Santa Monica.

LACASIS/SLA-SCC

Tuesday December 7 I attended the Joint LACASIS/SLA-SCC Holiday Program featuring the speaker Dr. Kevin Starr, a historian who writes about California. He was also formerly California State Librarian. He spoke somewhat autobiographically about his experience at Harvard with the California collection in Widener, and about his experience as State Librarian. Throughout he emphasized the importance of librarians as knowing content, not just data facilitators, as can happen in the digital age.

LACASIS/SLA-SCC stands for: Los Angeles Chapter ASIS / SLA Southern California Chapter. They have joint meetings once in a while. This was held at a hotel in Long Beach. I was surprised at the number in attendance, and at the diversity. Among the attendees was Doris Helfer, Department Chair Technical Services at CSUN Northridge. She is running for President of SLA. Her Dean Susan Curzon was also there. She invited me to see their robotic retrieval system and also their digital archive, running on CONTENTdm Multimedia Software . (Wayne at USC tells me they looked at this software when Documentum was selected for USC. The proprietary metadata structure limited the ability to create or label your own fields.) The CSUN Northridge archives can be viewed at http://library.csun.edu/spcoll/digi_coll.html .

Other librarians represented law firms, Aerospace Corporation, bank archives, the California African American Museum just south of the USC campus, hospital librarians, 20th Century Fox librarians, representatives from Ebsco, Lexis Nexis, and of course many academic librarians.