Download iCal file

The JPEG2000 in Archives and Libraries Interest Group of the LITA division of ALA is pleased to present a program on Archiving in Practice with JPEG2000 on Sunday, June 29th from 8am to 10am in Ballroom E, Anaheim Convention Center.

The lead presentation will be given by Justin Dávila, Digital Media Workflow, Business and Technology consultant. The formal presentation will be followed an invitation to the audience to present five-minute lightning talks on the topic of JPEG2000 for cultural heritage archiving and access. More details can be found in the announcement on the j2kArcLib.info website.

Update

20080717T1338 : Slides from the presentation are posted on the ALA Presentations website.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://j2karclib.info/node/120 on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/jpeg2000/jk2kig.cfm on June 9th, 2011.

The American Library Association annual conference is getting more social each year, and as a long-time member of ALA and often a critic of the, well, un-togetherness of ALA’s electronic capabilities, it is nice to see the trend continuing this year. Take, for instance, the Blogger’s Room. Initially just a LITA thing, it is now being promoted as an association-wide service. As I write this, that page has about two dozen entries for individual and group blogs that say they will be covering conference events.

Or take Brian Eisley‘s unofficial Twitter reflector. (Brian calls it a group; I’m calling it a reflector; it is something different than a Twitter Hashtag.) He has put up some instructions on how to get signed up to receive and how to sent messages to the reflector. There is also the Twitter hashtag #ala08. I’m a Twitter newb, so I don’t know the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of each. But I’m interested to learn…

Speaking of tags, the ALA Annual Wiki defines ala2008 as the official conference tag. That’s not such a stretch to assume — it is a logical choice — but the establishment of an “official tag” (as much as anything is official in the social tagging space) does help collocate meeting content in the blogosphere, in Flickr, and in del.icio.us. (What?!? …you say? That’s the function of subject analysis and description? Here in the unwashed folksonomy space? Blasphemy!)

Did I mention the Official ALA Annual Wiki? It is now getting prominent placement in the navigation area of the primary conference pages. The fifth link down — pretty impressive. And it is easy to see why. The Official Wiki holds a host of information not previously found in the American Libraries insert or even on-site. Links to policies and procedures, a Google map of area restaurants and hotels, an “Unofficial Events” page, and a Conference Presentation Materials site to put all of the PowerPoints and handouts from meetings.

It is nice to see ALA providing this space where grassroots organization and promotional efforts can be shepherded in on co-located space. There was a time that this was spread out over various hand-coded web pages, blogs and other web services. Way to go, ALA; and way to go ALA members!

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.brianeisley.com/TwitterALA2008/ on January 28th, 2011.

First, kudos to the vendor that runs the ALA Meeting Planner website. They listened to suggestions and now include a way to download your event planner information to your desktop/handheld device using the iCalendar standard. It is available from the “Downloads and Printing” page of your meeting planner homepage. (You’ll need to sign in using the e-mail address listed on your ALA Annual Registration form plus the password “ala”.) Jump down to the end and select the “iCAL” button next to “Personal Itinerary” to download the iCalendar file.

Now comes the unfortunate part — it doesn’t import into Mac iCal. Because of a structural error in the file, it may not import into other applications, either. The problem stems from the fact that the unique identifier (“UID”) for each event is not in fact unique — it is the same for all events. The fix is pretty simple, though: open the .ics iCalendar file in a text editor (“TextEdit” on the Mac, “Notepad” on the PC) and make each UID unique. In my case, the UID line for each event was:

UID:EC9439B1-FF65-11D6-9973-003065F99D04

The text file is somewhat confusing to read (it was meant for a machine to read, after all, not you), but you just have to look for each line that starts with UID. I changed the last number of each entry to a sequential number, so in the end my file looked something like this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:ALA Personal Itinerary
[...]
BEGIN:VEVENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
CREATED:20080514T021306Z
PRIORITY:5
SEQUENCE:5
DTSTART;TZID=US/Pacific:20080628T103000
DTEND;TZID=US/Pacific:20080628T120000
SUMMARY:Building and Supporting Koha , an open-source ILS
DESCRIPTION: Unit: LITA, Location: Hyatt Regency Orange County, Room: Grand A
UID:EC9439B1-FF65-11D6-9973-003065F99D01
TRANSP:OPAQUE
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:BUSY
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
CREATED:20080514T021306Z
PRIORITY:5
SEQUENCE:5
DTSTART;TZID=US/Pacific:20080628T133000
DTEND;TZID=US/Pacific:20080628T153000
SUMMARY:There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog: The Ultimate Debate on the future of the Library Catalog
DESCRIPTION: Unit: LITA, Location: Hyatt Regency Orange County, Room: Grand A
UID:EC9439B1-FF65-11D6-9973-003065F99D02
TRANSP:OPAQUE
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:BUSY
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1
END:VEVENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
CREATED:20080514T021306Z
PRIORITY:5
SEQUENCE:5
DTSTART;TZID=US/Pacific:20080629T080000
DTEND;TZID=US/Pacific:20080629T100000
SUMMARY:Archiving in Practice with JPEG2000
DESCRIPTION: Unit: LITA, Location: Anaheim Convention Center, Room: Ballroom E
UID:EC9439B1-FF65-11D6-9973-003065F99D03
TRANSP:OPAQUE
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-BUSYSTATUS:BUSY
X-MICROSOFT-CDO-IMPORTANCE:1
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

See the differences in the bolded lines? The changes are done; save the file and import it into the Mac iCal program. All of your entries will show up. When you do this, also take note of this advice in the site’s documentation:

Dates are relative to the event’s location, not the device’s.
A meeting at 10am to 11am Pacific Standard Time (PST) will show up in the calendar of an attendee in Washington DC as 1pm to 2pm. When the device’s clock is changed from Eastern Standard Time (EST) to PST, the calendar will automatically shift the appointment to the correct local time of 10am to 11am.

Hope to see you in Anaheim!

Here is my planned schedule for ALA Annual in Anaheim. Reality, of course, may be different. If anyone is interested in talking about electronic textbooks, discovery interfaces and their underlying indexing structures, and service-oriented architecture for library services, please get in touch with me and let’s see if we can find a time to get together.

Friday, June 27

• 11:30 AM — Private meeting
• 1:30 PM to 4:30 PM — OCLC Symposium: The Mashed-Up Library (Marriot; Platinum Ballroom)
• 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM — LITA Happy Hour (Mist Pool Bar at Hotel Menage)

Saturday, June 28

• 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM — LITA Joint Chairs (Crowne Plaza; Cabo San Lucas B)
• 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM — LITA IG Chairs (Marriot; Room 315)
• 12:00 PM — Private meeting
• 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM — There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog: The Ultimate Debate on the future of the Library Catalog (Hyatt Regency; Grand A room)
• 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM — LITA Standards Interest Group (Convention center; Room 304D)

Sunday, June 29

• 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM — Archiving in Practice with JPEG2000 (Convention Center; Ballroom E)
• 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM — The Open Library: Promise and Peril (Disneyland Hotel; Adventure room)
• 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM — LITA Camp planning meeting (Hilton; Carmel room)
• 1:30 PM — Private meeting
• 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM — OCLC Developer’s Network Shibboleth project (Hilton; Avilia room)
• 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM — OCLC Blogger’s Salon (Hilton; Palisades room)
• 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM — OCLC Developer’s Network Meet and Greet (Hilton; Avila room)
• 7:00 PM — vendor reception

Monday, June 30

• 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM — Legal Issues in Developing Open Source Systems for Libraries (Hyatt Regency; Grand A)
• 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM — Next Steps in Next Generation Catalogs (Convention center, Room 213C)
• 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM — ExLibris: Towards a Next-Generation Framework for Library Services (Convention center; Room 201 A/B)
• 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM — “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions” ACRL President’s Program (Hilton; California Pavilion D)

The text was modified to remove a link to http://j2karclib.info/node/120 on January 19th, 2011.