52,000 frames of Hitchcock

Back in January, I set myself the task of reducing every one of the available major Hitchcock films down to 1000 frames of film.
Today, nearly 7 months later, I’ve finally finished 🙂

I’m guessing this is probably the largest online collection of images from Hitchcock’s films, with a total of 52,000 images covering a creative period of over 50 years, and taking up 3.76GB of disk space.
However, there’s still more work to be done! With the help of some fellow fans, I’m starting to catalogue the images — in particular, which actors are in each frame and what’s happening or what objects appear. It’s still early days, but here are some examples from the films that have been catalogued so far:

The images are also starting to be integrated into the actor/actress pages in the site (e.g. Tippi Hedren).
Also, inspired by a comment in Charles Barr’s “English Hitchcock“, I’ve begun documenting film credits as well intertitles from the silent films (e.g. Champagne).
The final thing I’ve been adding in the last week or so is content from YouTube. The aim is to have videos for each of Hitchcock’s cameo appearances (e.g. Vertigo), interviews (e.g. Picture Parade), and film trailers (e.g. Frenzy).
So, now you know why I’ve not been blogging much recently 😉

Congratulations Casey!

Contrary to any speculation you might see on snopes.com, I haven’t been abducted by aliens, joined a monastery, or fallen down an open manhole cover — the last couple of months have been fairly hectic and although I’ve kept saying to myself “I must remember to blog about XYZ”, life just keeps throwing stuff in my way.
Anyway, this morning I found out that Casey Durfee has left the Seattle Public Library to become the latest employee of LibraryThing — specifically he’s going to be working on the LibraryThing for Libraries product.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve added something to our OPAC or written a bit of code that I thought was new & cool only to find out that Mr Durfee had already done it.
I think I’m already on record as saying that if I lived in the USA, I’d camp outside Tim Spalding’s house with a large sign saying “Please let me work for LibraryThing! Will write code for coffee and peanuts!”. Come the day that LibraryThingGlobalHyperMegaCorpLtd opens its first UK office, I’ll be there with my sign.
So, with a huge amount of envy, I’d like to wish Casey all the best in his new job. I’d also like to thank him for the hundreds of helpful emails he’s sent to the IPAC and Horizon mailing lists over the last 6 years — there were many times when I seriously wondered if Casey knew more about how HIP worked than the developers at Dynix (and then SirsiDynix) did!

yikes – I live in a blacklisted country

I don’t think I’ve ever come across this before, but I responded to an email sent to me from a public library in the US and was surprised to receive the following delivery failure message…

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host csplspam.xxxxxxxx.lib.ia.us [xxx.xxx.160.30]:
557 Your IP address is from a blacklisted country. Disconnecting.

…I know spam’s a serious problem, but isn’t blocking all email from a whole European country kind of excessive?
:-S

Go Danbury, Go!

Congratulations to Danbury Library in Connecticut for being the first to add LibraryThing for Libraries to their live OPAC!
For anyone wondering if it works with the Dynix/Horizon HIP OPAC, let me tell you that it works a treat 🙂
In completely unrelated news, one of my work colleagues visited Grimsby today. A quick look at Wikipedia and I was able to amaze her with the fact that Grimsby produces more pizzas than anywhere else. Not only that, it looks like Grimsby has been making pizzas since the Dark Ages:

Hmmmmmmm… Medieval Margarita with 6 slices of Mozzarella!

Was I really in Barcelona last week?

We only got back from Barcelona 3 days ago and already it seems more like it was 3 weeks ago. There’s nothing like 400 unread emails in your inbox to make you forget about what you were doing the week before!!!
For those of you who enjoy looking at holiday photographs, there’s nearly 400 of mine on Flickr, or you can find all the conference photos here. Tim from Birkbeck has also been adding Barcelona photos to Flickr. Tim’s head also appears in this serendipity photograph taken late on the Wednesday evening in a random bar — someone’s (maybe Chris from Lincoln?) hand got in the way and I can almost here a voice saying “I will crush you!” in the background 😀
day5_205
The 4 presentations I took part in are available at: https://library.hud.ac.uk/barcelona
The list of Library 2.0 examples used in the Web 2.0 session is:

…phew — hopefully there was something of interest in that little lot! I’m sure were at least a hundred more examples I could have included and, if you’ve got a good one, please post a comment with the details 🙂
The plan is to gather together all of the presentations from the conference and add them to the wiki. It’s currently branded the “Dynix User Group UK” wiki but, once the various European User Groups start to come together, I’m sure it will get a more generic title — I quite like SLUG (SirsiDynix Libraries User Group), although that’s quite similar to SMUG (SFX & MetaLib User Group).
Don’t forget, if you’re a SirsiDynix library in the north of England (Unicorn, Dynix, or Horizon), there’s a meeting at the University of Bradford on May 17th. A trip to the (in)famous Kashmir Restaurant for a curry is on the cards for those who attend 🙂

Barcelona – DUG/EUUG 2007

Bryony and I have been in Barcelona now for just over 24 hours and my feet are already knackered from all the walking we’ve done!
The joint DUG/EUUG SirsiDynix Conference starts on Wednesday, but we decided to fly out for a few days of sightseeing in advance.
A few of the photos from today and yesterday are on Flickr, although I haven’t finished tagging and adding descriptions yet…
day2_013 day2_023 day2_030 day2_043 day2_034 day2_004 day2_008 day2_022 day1_013 day2_016 day1_009

Oh God, I feel so old!

Quite a few things have happened this year that have reminded me I’m in my mid 30s.
The latest is this article on the BBC News website: How the Spectrum began a revolution

…yep, it’s 25 years ago today since Sir Clive Sinclair unleashed the follow up to the ZX81!
I can clearly remember the day I first saw a ZX Spectrum — it was at Alex Mitchell’s house and he’d got “Escape” from New Generation Software:

At the time I still had a ZX81, but somewhere around the end of 1982 I’d sold that and had enough money to buy a 48K ZX Spectrum. I think it took me nearly 30 minutes to decide which game I should buy first — eventually I chose the fantastic “Atic Atac” from Ultimate 🙂

Pretty soon I’d taught myself Sinclair BASIC, and then Z80A assembly language (now that’s hardcore!). I’m sure all of those hours staring at a black & white portable TV didn’t do my eyes any good, but my love of coding and programming can definitely be traced back to those many evenings spent prodding away at the “dead flesh” keyboard.
I think I’ve still got my Spectrum somewhere, but these days it’s much easier just to fire up an emulator.

William Morris Gallery

Just spotted that the Waltham Forest Council is cutting back funding to the William Morris Gallery in London. I’m sure many of you will already be familiar with his work but, if not, check out the Wikipedia article.
If you are an aficionado of Morris’ work, then you might want to head over to the Save William Morris Gallery & Vestry House Museum website, where there’s a link to an online petition.
The architectural critic and writer Jonathan Glancey wrote an article in The Guardian this week:

The London borough of Waltham Forest says it needs to cut costs. …The aim, say many local people together with defenders of the gallery – including Tony Benn, and Morris’s biographer, Fiona McCarthy – is to prepare the way for complete closure.

Fans of Alfred Hitchcock might be interested to know that his birthplace of Leytonstone is part of the Waltham Forest borough, and is only about 3 miles from the museum.

100,000 ideas!

I totally failed to spot that the Library 2.0 Idea Generator has now created over 100,000 ideas!
I’ve no idea what the 100,000th idea actually was, but I hope it was “Build an Idea Generator and sell it to Google for $1,000,000”.
Around about 1% of the ideas were of high enough quality that the viewer added it to the whiteboard. I gave up counting how many of them reference Michael Gorman, but here’s a few that caught my eye…
– investigate Michael Gorman and use him to replace all of your librarians
– closely scrutinize Michael Gorman and then paint him purple
– create Stephen Abram just to annoy Michael Gorman
– write a song about Michael Gorman just to confuse Michael Gorman
– enhance Michael Gorman for the Millennials
– repurpose Michael Gorman and then replace him with a robot
– replace Michael Gorman using Firefox
– add the Netflix model just to annoy Michael Gorman
…poor Mr Gorman — what did he ever do to you?
I must admit, most of my favourite ideas involve the Library 2.0 World movers and shakers…
– vigorously shake Lorcan Dempsey and upload the result to YouTube
– invert Lorcan Dempsey and then paint him purple
– closely scrutinize Leslie Burger and then visualise her as a tag cloud
– digitize Meredith Farkas and observe her from a suitable distance (see here for the result)
– write a song about Walt Crawford and publicise it on your plasma screen
– fall in love with Stephen Abram and embed him into a portal
– impress Michael Stephens and upload the result to YouTube
– podcast about your podcasts and then blame Michael Stephens when it doesn’t work
– unlock the latent forces within Jenny Levine and then run through your library screaming ”it’s all too much!”
If you’ve got a favourite idea from the whiteboard, or if you’ve actually been inspired by one of the ideas, please let me know!

OPAC Survey results – part 8

Library and Information Show 2007
I’ve just about recovered from LiS 2007 and hopefully I didn’t cram too much into the 30 minutes I had for my session!
There’s a few photos from the event on Flickr…
lis07_015 lis07_002 lis07_014 lis07_010 lis07_009 lis07_006
OPAC Survey
I think the previous post will be the last batch of graphs unless I uncover something new in the data. Instead, many thanks to my colleague Lisa (Senior Assistant Librarian for Applied Sciences and Computing & Engineering) for sifting through the respondent comments for the common themes.  The full figures will be in the report, but here’s a snifter of the “feature comments”…
The most common wanted feature was federated searching (both electronic resources and other libraries’ holdings), with over 30 responses.
Next up, being able to customise the OPAC (look & feel and adding new features), with over 15 comments.
Relevancy ranking was specifically mentioned by at least 10 respondents, with 9 wanting personal borrowing histories, Amazon style wish lists, and saved session results.
1 respondent wanted to be able to search by colour of cover and another wanted wiki style functionality adding to the OPAC.
For the “final comments” section, here’s a sample…
10 respondents felt that “2.0” style features could be a distraction and that the OPAC should be kept simple. Another 10 said that lack of staff expertise or money was stopping them from being able to make the changes they would like to their OPACs.
However, the most common theme was laying the blame squarely at the feet of the vendors — broken promises, slowness of feature delivery, etc.
Lisa also picked out a handful of the comments that she felt stood out and here’s just 3 of them…

It seems that OPACs are too busy trying to please every customer. They spend too much time developing and not nearly enough time releasing software. The ability of the library to customize the OPAC should be the primary feature. Developing extensive APIs and building in flexibility should be at the top of the list for development. Let librarians develop the specific tools they want or need. Allow librarians to create add-ons and templates and distribute them to other libraries. OPAC vendors need to concentrate on search technology and not the next great feature.

I think we should always keep in mind the key aim of the OPAC is so users can locate/access resources. These new web 2.0 type enhancements can be fantastic, but there is a danger in using them just because we think we should.

We took a risk in 2002 and extensively customized our OPAC outside the confines of vendor support. Our efforts have been extremely successful and it has essentially become our new model for the direction we’re heading in the future. We’ll be doing MORE customization and application development in the future, rather than less. We’re much more likely now to move away from traditional library automation vendors as we consider what comes next.
(Phil Feilmeyer, Hennepin County Library)