Menucha

Today and Friday I will be at an Oregon/Washington ACRL joint conference at the Menucha retreat center in Corbett, OR on a bluff above the Columbia River. So far the site is beautiful. I will be adding pictures later. I need to remember to bring along the camera connector. At least I remembered to bring the camera.

Menucha is a Hebrew word meaning rest. The site once belonged to the owner of the Meier and Frank department stores in Oregon. He was the second Jewish governor of Oregon. Now it is owned by a Portland Presbyterian church. Funny how things go around.

Access 2006, Ottawa Ontario Canada

Early this morning, 1:30 am I got home from Ottawa. It was a meeting sponsored by the Canadian Library Association Emerging Technologies section so it was heavy on the technology. It was very exciting to see some really innovative new library applications. These people are really brilliant. I decided to blog it on another blog where I will be writing about library issues. If you want to read about the conference go to http://blogs.library.oregonstate.edu/jpollitz.

I had never been to Ottawa before and found it to be a great city. It is the national capital of Canada and our conference was in a hotel close to Parliment.









This is the Rideau Canal which runs through Ottawa. It was designed to allow freight transport away from the threatening armies of the United States.







On Friday morning I skipped out on a couple of presentations to take advantage of the momentary good weather to sightsee. One of the more interesting things was the Parliment complex. The architecture had a distinct European flavor you don't see much in the US. Parliment is located on a hill overlooking the Rideau River and the provincial boundary between Ontario and Quebec. As I was walking around the buildings I came across this little complex of what looked to be doll houses. As I approached them for a closer look I saw that they were small houses designed for stray cats that inhabit the grounds. There is a "catman of the hill" who takes care of the cats. Now the government gives a small amount to keep the cats healthy and visitors donate money and food for the cats. People also come by and feed the cats.

Friday night we went out to dinner with a group of people from around the US and Canada to a nearby restaurant called the Blackthorne. The food was great and the restaurant was not flustered by our request for separate checks. The two guys in the front are from Vancouver BC and had attended the Code4Lib conference in Corvallis last year. Going down the left are Jane, Jeremy and Anne-Marie from OSU. Then way in the back, at the head of the table, is Dan Chudnov, from Yale, who has been helping Jeremy and Terry on LibraryFind. Next to him is Terry then Roy Tennant from the California Digital Library.

Ottawa and Access 2006

It is interesting to be in Canada and experience the little/big differences with the US. Last night I smelled reefer on the corner of the street. This morning read a newspaper article about how the Canadian government had stopped funding research for the government run medical marijuana growing project in Manitoba. People were complaining that without the research, government marijuana would remain hard to light and not very potent. The smaller difference has to do with about (we all know about that) but also project which is pronounced with a long o. I have been hearing it a lot.

Ottawa

Yesterday I flew to Ottawa for the Access 2006 conference for Canadian librarians. It has been attracting some US librarians also and has a reputation of being a great conference around technological themes.

Ottawa looks pretty cool but I don't know how much of it I will get to see. The weather is cool and rainy. I guess I will be getting a touch of Oregon winter early here.

Hero Street USA

Hero Street in Silvis, IL got its name from the 8 Mexican-American young men who lost their lives in WWII and the Korean War. Someone figured out that this was more lost soldiers per capita for any street in the country. Through the years this small Mexican-American community has sent over 100 sons and daughters to the military. Cely grew up here and two of her three brothers went into the Army. The dead-end street, not even a ¼ mile long wasn’t even paved until the early 1970’s. Around that time the city of Silvis built a park to commemorate the eight soldiers from Hero Street with a commemorative grotto, basketball court, cement slides down the hilly slope, playground and picnic benches. Yesterday they had a rededication of the park commemorating the recent, much needed renovation of the park’s facilities. I walked down the street from my Mother-in-law’s house to hear the speeches and see who showed up. There were the usual American Legion contingents, the parents of people in the military, the Vietnam Vets and neighbors from the street. They also had a contingent of the Patriot Guard Riders. Recently this group has been formed to provide a barrier at the funerals of people killed in Iraq between the mourning families and protesters from the Christian religious group from Kansas who have chosen that venue to spew their anti-gay venom. The rededication was particularly relevant to me since some of the political races in Oregon have taken on a mean spirited, anti-immigrant tone recently. The families on Hero Street came from Mexico looking for work on the Rock Island Lines as a way to make a better life for their children. You can still see a couple of houses that began as boxcars and were moved from the nearby train yards. The commitment that these families on Hero Street made to this country is a great example of how immigration works here. It was a great way to spend a fall Saturday morning in the Quad Cities. The neighborhood is still predominantly Mexican-American but has become much more heterogeneous with a smattering of Anglo and African-American families. You could see it in the faces of the people in the crowd listening to the speeches Saturday.

Back to the QC

Its 10:20 pm. and Cely and I are in the Portland airport waiting to see if we can get on the 11:15 flight out to Chicago where we will have to wait for two hours and then hope we can catch a flight to Moline. If all works out we will get into the Quad Cities at 8:30 tomorrow morning. The flights seem to have some open seats so I am confident. Usually they are over booked and the wait can be nerve wracking. The elation of getting on the flight almost makes it all worthwhile. Well, I guess flying for free makes it all worthwhile.

The Portland airport is really a great airport. Everyone should go through it at least once. That means that they would be visiting us. The free wifi is terrific. I just spent 45 minutes playing the LA Times crossword. And now I can write on this blog. We are getting close to loading time so its time to close up the computer. More from the Moline airport which also has free wireless access. O'Hare is a bummer because they have wireless but you have to pay 10 bucks to use it.

Gorditas

Its Sunday and that must mean that I am in an airplane or trying to get on an airplane. After the BCR meeting in Denver I flew to Moline in order to pick Cely up and bring her back to Corvallis. My flight was delayed because we were waiting for a plane from Chicago and there were thunderstorms and hints of tornados in the Midwest. I didn’t get into Moline until 12:35 in the morning. Since Alexis is in Milwaukee and no longer in Iowa City she couldn’t come to pick me up. Everyone else that we know in the Quad Cities is like us and 12:30 is way past our bedtime. So I ended up taking a cab and it cost $32.00. It killed me to have to pay those big city rates in the Quad Cities. The nice thing about this trip was that I got to see Tony Cardoso. I hadn’t visited with him in quite a while. He has been busy exploring a new medium for his creative talents lately and has really hit on something. He has been painting gourds. Any description I write does not do justice to how beautiful his pieces are. I hope that he will provide me with some pictures that I can use here. He has a piece in a gallery in Atlanta and three pieces in the Bucktown Galleries in Davenport.

Today Cely and I had a hard time getting out of Moline, which was really stressful but once we got out to Chicago things went really well and we got on the first available flight to Portland. I am writing this on the plane to be loaded later so I don’t know if our luck will hold out in Portland. We have to catch a plane to Eugene because I flew out of there to go to the BCR meeting in Denver. I don’t think I will be doing that again. Its hard enough getting back to Portland let alone adding another leg to our travels.

Denver and BCR

Today I was in Denver for the BCR Board of Trustee orientation meeting. Tomorrow is the full board meeting and promises to be pretty interesting. I don't have much to say about it just that Denver still holds a special place for me. As I was working in my hotel room this afternoon I was able to look out the window and see these spectacular clouds form and dissapate leaving Mt. Evans to appear and disappear in the mists. The Rockies are truly spectacular. They don't have that in your face quality of the Alps and the Cascades have a different, individualism based on their volcanic ancestry but the Rocky Mountains are just so vast and continuing.

In terms of library stuff, it will be interesting to be on the board because I will need to keep in mind how I can use this activity to benefit OSU. First off, I think it will be in finding out what kind of training they can help us with as we move into new areas and need to train staff as their assignments evolve. Serving on the BCR Board now will be interesting because the issue of how OCLC interacts with the networks is still up in the air. Brenda Bailey-Hainer seems to have a smart outlook on the entire issue and knows that they will need to be looking towards developing new revenue sources in case OCLC drastically alters its relationship with the networks. This promises to be a challenge for the future.

Colbert on Oregon

One of the librarians here sent everyone a link to the Colbert Report on Wikipedia. Another of his reports was an interview with Darlene Hooley of Oregon's 5th legislative district. She's not from my district but once again Colbert digs deep and provides a concise picture of what it is like here in Oregon. So if you know about where we live and our representatives in D.C. are up to, watch Colbert.

Guilty Pleasure

I didn't think I was capable of it. I didn't think it could happen but it did. I'm a little embarassed to admit it but I found a middle aged man running around in his underpants funny. What's worse I thought it was just as funny the second time he did it. Yes, this weekend Cely and I went to see Taladaga Nights: the ballad of Ricky Bobby and we liked it. I want to share some of the shame with my sister Linda. We went to it on her advice. She told us she would pay for the tickets if we walked out but I guess she is off the hook. This is definitely a guilty pleasure, its a funny movie with a lot of laugh out lot moments. I think the reason it was so funny was that Will Ferrell shared the screen with a capable cast.

The Museum of Glass

Last weekend Cely and I took a drive up to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. It was a great day for day for a drive. The museum was smaller than we expected to see more glass. They had one great show Absence Adorned there by a glass artist named Karen La Monte. Her life sized glass dresses were really incredible. These pieces were worth the price of admission. The cone shown in the picture here forms the heat vent for the hot shop in the museum where the work gets done. We watched while the artisans worked on goblets for some new La Monte pieces; nothing as spectacular as her dresses. The museum was set up by the city of Tacoma and Dale Chihuly. The picture also show his Bridge of Glass which has a lot of his pieces in large shadow box wall designed so that the light can come through the pieces. As you walk across the bridge you also pass under a ceiling of glass pieces that look like sea shells. Here is another photo of the bridge that shows the passage with the sea shell ceiling and two other very large installations.

The High Cost of Textbooks

The article on textbook prices and academic libraries that Anne Christie and I wrote has just come out in E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship.

Trip to DC and Milwaukee

WashingtonDCMilwaukee 017
Originally uploaded by jpollitz.

I'm behind the times again. A couple of weeks ago Adrienne had some days off so we went out to visit her and do some touristy stuff. Fortunately Lin could get some time off on Wednesday and she took us in her boat on the Severn river all the way up to Annapolis. The next day we went to the Mall in DC and went to the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian and the National Gallery. When we left the gallery we saw this car that the local pigeons must have thought made a great toilet. They chose this car and none of the others around it.


I didn't realize how fantastic the National Gallery is. We kept running into paintings that we recognized. They had a wonderful traveling exhibit of Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting. It was very impressive. On Friday we went to visit Mount Vernon, ate at Zed's Ethopian restaurant. They had pictures on the wall of Hilary Clinton, Clint Eastwood, and others. This is the only place where I have eaten Ethopian food but would recommend it to anyone visiting DC.

On Saturday we flew to Chicago on the plane Adrienne was working. It was so much fun to see her in action. Then we took a short trip to Milwaukee to visit Lex for the day. It happened that the Mexican Fiesta was going on that weekend so we went downtown to get some food, hear some music and listen to the grito contest. In the evening we went to see Little Miss Sunshine at the Oriental Theater. The movie was very charming and the theater, a renovated 1927 old building was fantastic, complete with six huge buddhas with lighted jewels in their navels and set into the walls around the main seating area. Here is a picture of Lex at the grito contest.

Google Book Search

There was an interesting article in the Sunday August 13 Washington Post, Search Me? about the Google Book Search project and copyright issues. There is a little on how the book scanning project first came to be, which I had not read before. The discussion of the suit between publishers and Google captures some of the issues but does not address the truly significant problem of "orphaned" works. Those books, out of print, possibly in the public domain, possibly not, represent a huge obstacle to all digitization projects. These books represent around 70% of the books which could be scanned but finding who might control the copyright for any of these books is often quite impossible.

Jill and Izzy get Married

A couple of weeks ago, Friday July 28, my niece Jill married Ismael Hernandez. It was really great fun. They had a really talented mariachi band that played all of the old classics while we were eating. Then they had a DJ that played everything from Ranchero music to hip hop to Frank Sinatra. What a "multicultural" musical experience! Cely and I even got out on the floor for a norteño polka medley. It went so long that we couldn't even make it through the entire thing. It was really fun though. I kept it up and tried a cumbia with my younger sister, Nancy. I learned that I really don't know how to cumbia. But here is a picture of me with Jill during the dollar dance. That's their cute little son Ritchie. He was the ring bearer.

Tonight Cely and I went to see Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack. It was surprisingly good. Jeremy and Erika Frumkin invited us to go. Gehry is the architect who designed the laser building at the University of Iowa. Alexis took this picture of that building. He also designed the bandstand at Millenium Park in Chicago.




The documentary was better than many of the mainstream movies we have been to lately. Both Cely and I give it thumbs up.

Now it is back to the Tour de France. Floyd Landis had an amazing day today winning stage 17 and bringing himself back from an 8 minute deficit.

ALA Saturday morning

It is Saturday morning at ALA in New Orleans. There was a great crowd at this presentation. Ruth Vondracek and Maureen Kelly from the OSU Libraries are talking about our program to put library resources into the classroom.

This one is mostly for Alexis and Adrienne. Last night Cupcake discovered the television for the first time. We were watching a PBS show, The Birds of Oregon during another of the many pledge drives they have out here. Cely and I had never seen Cupcake react to the television but the sounds of the birds chirping really changed that. Old cats do learn new tricks.

Seattle

Yesterday Cely and I drove up to the Ikea just outside of Seattle. It was a great day. Cely has been missing the quiches that we used to get at Ikea in Schaumburg and missing the cool and cheap home stuff. So we hopped into the car for a drive. Not very smart with how the price of gas has been lately but being smart has not stopped us ever in the past. We got up there at about 3pm after stopping at the IHOP in Salem for breakfast and a 3 and a half hour drive from there. When we got up there we discovered that they weren't making the quiches in Seattle. Maybe they have changed there menu all over. It has been awhile since we made an Ikea visit. Of course we ended up buying some Swedish sweets and cheese, a couple of cheap throw rugs and a table top grill. You cannot go into that place without spending some money. This Ikea was really different from the one in Schuamburg. I think what they did was just take over a couple of existing warehouses. That made it less attractive to shop in. I wonder if this was one of the first Ikea's in the US or if it is just a temporary store. It is even placed in an area zoned for light industry and warehousing rather than shopping.

I didn't take any pictures on this trip so here is a picture of some the beautiful rhododendrons that grow around here. They are starting to fade but when they are in their full glory they are spectacular.

Alexis' Commencement

I haven't written in this for almost two months. That does not make for a very interesting blog. But then, I don't think much about this blog will be very interesting. I just need to keep writing.

On Mother's day weekend Cely and I went back to the Quad Cities for Alexis' graduation. It was a perfect weekend because Adrienne's birthday was on the 12th, Alexis graduated on May 13, and Mother's day was May 14. Adrienne flew in on Friday night so the whole family was there and we were all at June's house.

So, Cely and I took the red eye on Wednesday night and got into the QC on Thursday morning. That night we went to Iowa City for an awards banquet at the University. Alexis got the College of Arts and Science Dean's Academic Achievement award. It was very cool.

A funny thing happened at the banquet. I ran into a guy I knew from Arlington High School, John Keller. He is the Dean of the Graduate School and was there to give the award to one of his students. It was fun, John and I caught up on what had happened to us since high school. Alexis had a great night. Cely and I were really proud.

On Saturday Adrienne, Cely, and I picked up Alexis for commencement. It was fun to see Lex cross the stage but it was a really long ceremony. Afterwards we went out for dinner at Biaggi's in Davenport. Afterward June had the family over for dessert. Vincent, Jutta and Jordan were there. So was John with his kids Jake and Kate. Ernie and Debbie were there too. It was really fun. Vincent entertained everyone with his tales of his new job as a letter carrier. He could be a stand up comedian.

Here is a picture of the girls. We had a birthday cake for Adrienne and a graduation cake for Alexis. Cely and I stayed until Tuesday but the girls had to go back on Sunday. Lex went back to start moving to a new apartment and Adrienne flew back home so she would be ready to be on call. Cely and I were able to spend some time with June.