Good morning everybody. This is this week's end compass live. The date is January 27th, 2010. My name is Michael Sowers and I will be your host today. Krista is out this morning. And this is the second of our two, or excuse me, the second of our monthly tech talk sessions. As you can see here, we're not in the usual room. I'm in my office, so the background is a little different. And we actually do have a webcam up and running, so you can take a look at my smiling face here. My camera is a little off to the side, so bear with me if it doesn't seem like I'm looking directly at you. A lot of you requested we had the webcam going, so we figured it out. This is a test run. See how it goes, and we'll go from there. So as I mentioned, my name is Michael Sowers. I'm the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Commission. Many of you have met me already. And what we're trying to do is kind of a once a month, let's get a little geeky, let's talk to some people doing some innovative technology things in their libraries, and try to answer some of your questions. And I'll talk about some of the tech news that I think you ought to be aware of, some software, things like that. And continuing as I did last month, I have an interviewee on the line. I have Betty Oliver from Beaver City Public Library. Betty, are you still there? Oops, I have to unmute Betty. Hold on. Okay, Betty, are you there now? Yes, I am. Okay, great. Betty, before I tell everybody kind of why I've got you on the line, you just want to take a minute or two, just tell us a little about yourself, yourself, what library you at, what you do there? I am the Library Director for the Beaver City Public Library. I've been here 20 years, almost 21 actually. And it's just a small library, or from a small town of a population of 640. So as you can guess, I am the librarian. You're in. All right. So I'm going to hold something up here. I, back in, I believe it was maybe December, I got the Valley Talk newsletter, which is the RVLS newsletter there. And they had this wonderful little article that I just titled, something new in Beaver City.  What did you get? We got a photo kiosk. Okay. And so what does that do? Well, people are able to bring in their digital format and print pictures within minutes here in the library now. Oh, wonderful. So, okay, why'd you get one of those? Can't somebody just go to like the Walgreens of the Walmart or something and get their pictures done that way? Well, yes, they can, but not here in town. Like I said, it's a small town, 640 people. So there is no place here in town that offers this service. So we thought it would be a good service that the library could provide. Great. Was this something patrons had suggested, or did you come up with this? Where'd the idea come from? Well, quite by accident actually. The grocery store manager, the good friend of mine, and he had said that one time that he'd been to a food show and that vendors were there trying to, you know, get people that are in the grocery business to put these machines in their grocery stores. And of course, he does not have the room for one. And so he mentioned it to the library when we had received money from a former volunteer. And so we decided that that was a good way to spend the money. Great.  It cost us $6,000. But again, like I said, we had had a volunteer here at the library for years. She worked well into her 80s, and she passed away last year at the age of 99. And she left the library $10,000. Oh, hey, you know, this is why you want to make your patrons happy, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So a patron can come in, bring in their camera, their camera card, I would think. And do this, I don't know how many people on the call have actually used one of these before. But about how long does it take, you know, what's they stick their card in, what do they have to do?   And how much? Okay. And how much do the pictures cost? We are charging $0.29 for a four by six, and we can also print five by sevens. And we haven't printed very many of those. So I think they're $1.49 or something like that. Okay. And does the machine take care of all the payment or do they have to come over pay you? How is that working? They come to the desk to pay me. The screen will come up with a, it'll say ask the store associate for a password. So then I go over and type in the password. But at the bottom of the screen, it'll tell me the price. So I know how much they owe, you know, we don't have to stand there and count pictures and figure all that. Okay, great. And so what's been the patron reaction? How has it been going? We got this machine November 7th, and we are open 20 hours a week, five days a week. And I can honestly say that there have been three days that I have been open that has the machine has not been used. Wow. So, so pretty popular. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. We, I figured that we have, we have printed off over 1400 four by sixes and about probably roughly 75 by sevens. Well, that, that was my next question. That's great. So, so does the machine keeps statistics for you basically? Or, or is this your own count? It does. Well, I've been doing it on my own count, but there is a, you can go in and do the statistics to from the machine. Okay, great. Have there, have there been any specific comments from the patrons that you can remember that would be fun to share about this? Well, of course, everybody's just happy that they don't have to go out of town to do it. And, you know, I have scrapbookers that, you know, Saturday morning, they're here ready to get started for the weekend. And I guess one of the things that I thought would be was, you know, during deer hunting season, I'd have out of state hunters come in and, oh, gotta have a picture of this buck I just got, you know, and so here it is, you know, they're just happy to have the picture to show around and so that's been neat. Great. Have there been any problems or has it been completely smooth sailing since they went? Completely smooth sailing. We have not had one problem. Yes, really. I believe you. I'm just surprised. Yeah. Well, so am I. I'm pleasantly surprised. I said this machine has just been a wonderful addition to the library. Okay. And a little bit more in the technical end, you have, I'm assuming some sort of service contract with the company. So if it's, you know, breaks or something, somebody will come right in after.  And so I gave my daughter a call and she came in and between the two of us, we got it up and we had it running within an hour. So, but as far as technical support, we have 800 phone number to call. We can fax them, anything that we have problems with. I mean, when I talked to this company the first time, I said I would like to have references, of course, and the company is out of Missouri. And so he gave me a couple of different places here in Nebraska that they've sold machines to. So I called both of those places and that was their, their number one thing was that the technical support was exceptional and that if they had to order a new machine that they would go through the same company. So that alone there told me that this was people that stood behind their products. Okay. And one thing I haven't asked you is what, what company is it? What, what brand are we talking about in case other people are interested? It's Mitsubishi and we ordered ours through JR's Ventures out of, let's see, O'Fallon, Missouri. Okay. Great.  You're glad you put it in. What, what, what, how are you handling, you know, you have a little bit of that budget left over, but what about long-term costs, supplies, ink, paper, how are you, how are you covering that? Well, the money that we take in off of the, the prints, it's just put into a separate fund. And so that money just goes back into buying supplies for the machine or like if we needed any upgrades or repairs of any kind, then that would just come out of that money there. Oh, okay. So it's a self-supporting. Right. Great. I do want to throw it out. If anybody in the audience has a question, if you'd like to do it via audio, just go ahead and give a hand raise and I can turn your microphone on or, you know, feel free to put something in the questions area in the GoToWebinar software. But so it took you an hour to set up, you know, only one problem so far. I'd say this is a success story. Yes, I would agree. Okay. Is there anything else you want to tell us about the experience? You know, any answers to questions I didn't ask? What, what, any other library considering something like this might want to know? Well, it's a very small footprint. It's just two by two feet and four inch or four feet high. So it's, you know, a very small area that you would need to set one of these machines up. But of course, you have to have the traffic flow available for people. So we just put ours in the corner of the library and, you know, it's out of the way of incoming. And so I guess, you know, if you're worried about space, it doesn't take up a whole lot of space. Okay. All right. Let's see. I'm just looking at the article here to take somewhat more of a technical question. Do you, can you, and if you can easily answer this, don't worry about it. What, what formats of the cards does it take? Do you know, or will it take a USB drive? Unfortunately, there's about 30 different card formats. So. Right. What it tells us that it will accept is CD, Bluetooth, picture phones, and USB thumb drives. Wow. Bluetooth and CD even. That's nice. I haven't had anybody use those. Yeah. I don't know many cameras that support Bluetooth, but maybe camera phones. I guess if somebody wanted to, you know, take a quick picture on their camera phone and then print it out. Yeah. You know, I didn't really, I'll tell everybody in the audience, I didn't really talk to Betty all that much about this in advance. And I gotta say, I'm, I'm more and more impressed every minute I hear about this machine. I don't think the service has been that good. The few times I've gone down to Walgreens across the street and gotten photos printed out. There's always something going wrong with the darn machine. So. Well, that's another thing that my customers, my customers have said that they feel more comfortable coming in here to use it because there's not a line, of course.  They will come in here and do it for the first time, you know, I mean, I can step in for it and they're comfortable with that. And so it's getting people more used to technical stuff. Have you found most people, is there a skew between needs help the first time versus just able to do it on their own? You know, you can tell when people are comfortable with it. They'll ask when they come in the door if it's their first time. They'll say, is this, you know, like the machines at Walmart? And I'll say yes, basically. And, you know, they'll just go ahead and start doing it. If they have problems, they know that all they need to do is ask and I can step them through anything. But for the most part, most people are familiar with how things work and can do it on their own. Okay. I do have a question from someone in our audience here. Have you, maybe because of the RVLS article or other promotions you may have done, have you gotten any other calls from other libraries say, you know, asking you about this or? No, not as far as phone calls. I have had a lady come over from Oxford, you know, down that she said, when after she'd used the machine, she said that she was going to tell her librarian about it. So I assumed that that meant maybe I'd be getting a phone call. Great. Well, are there any other questions from the audience? Benny's pretty much answered mine. While we give people a chance maybe to type in a question, give you one more chance to add anything you think people might want to know? Well, I think I've covered everything that I had kind of noted, but I just think it's a wonderful service. For a town this size, you know, it's something that wasn't available before and now it is and it brings new people into the library. Oh, you know, this is why I wanted to talk to you and share this story. I think it's wonderful. I had never heard of a library having one of these before. You know, I kind of keep my ear to the ground with what libraries are doing and I was so happy it was in Nebraska. And just the fact that you saw a need for your community and you were able to pull that off and bring this in, you know, luckily the funds were found, that's probably going to be the big hurdle for most libraries these days.  If I ever come through town, I'll try to stop in and use it and contribute to the project. I mean, it's wonderful. It just, I read that article and it just brought this big smile to my face and I'm glad it's working so well for you. So are we and if you're ever in Beaver City, stop by. I will. All right. I'm not seeing any questions in the group. Betty, thank you so much for talking to me. You're welcome to stay on for the rest of the session if you've got the time. Otherwise, hopefully I will run it to you at NLA or come through town when I get a chance. Okay. Thanks for the questions. You're welcome. All right, folks. That was Betty Oliver from Beaver City Public Library here in Nebraska. And I just, I can't say enough about that project. I think it's wonderful. I'm glad they were able to find the funds. I'd love to see more libraries doing that. You know, even if, you know, you've got the Walgreens, the Walmart, the grocery store having something like that in your town, you know, why not offer that one additional service to your patrons? I think it would really be great. And, you know, maybe I don't know. One thing I maybe could have asked her is how much control over the pricing they have. But maybe, you know, if you can even reduce the pricing a little bit just to cover the supplies and, you know, give another reason to your patrons to come on into the library. All right. So it's 10.22 by my clock. I have got some stories I want to share with you. And I actually got some questions that came in. We'd like to try to encourage people to send in some questions. And I got four questions from one person that I think I can answer and see actually if she's Karen. Karen, I did get your questions yesterday and you're on the line. So I'm going to go ahead and do yours first. And Karen, I don't know if you're on a mic or not, but I'm going to go ahead and unmute your mic. If you don't have a mic, you can respond to me in questions. But Karen, are you there? Mike, I'm trying a new microphone. So can you help me? Can you hear me? I can hear you just fine. Great. All right. I'm going to bring up your questions on the screen so everybody can see them here. And I thought they were wonderful questions. I saw them yesterday and I immediately started taking notes after I printed it out and thought I could help out with this. So it sounds like you guys are looking at some upgrades at the library that the city is going to be involved, which I'm sure always adds that wonderful additional level of bureaucracy. And so the first question you had for me here was about a program to completely wipe out hard disks before the city sells off the old machines. Correct. We do have an option. We had an option a few years ago. And I have some PCs that have been set aside and haven't been wiped yet just for backup. But if an option comes up again, I do want to wipe them out first. Yes. Okay. First of all, before I suggest a piece of software to anybody in the audience or listening to the recording, this is important. I've gotten rid of some old computers lately. Generally, in my case, they're so old that I'm recycling them. So I completely yank the hard drive out. I actually have a drawer of spare hard drives. I'm not sure what I'm ever going to do with one gigabyte hard drive considering I have a 16 gigabyte flash drive now. But anyways, but if you are going to donate a computer anywhere, if you are going to even recycle it, if you're going to keep the hard drive in it, you do want to scrub those hard drives completely. You want to make sure none of your financial information is still hiding out there. Just anything you might have ever stored on that machine, because we've all been told just because you deleted it doesn't mean it's actually gone. So on the bookmarks list that we'll link to in the recordings, the URL is up there on the top of the screen right now. It's delicious.com slash traveling librarian slash tech talk plus Jan one zero. The one I've used in the past and the one that always comes highly recommended is called Derek's boot and nuke. This will completely scrub your hard drive so nobody's ever going to get anything off that drive again. Doesn't make it unusable. It just makes it empty. And part of your question was, can I put this program on a flash drive or I'll add a CD around the answer is yes. You download this software, you install it to a CD and then boot from the CD or you can install it to a USB drive. But you do have to make sure that that's a bootable USB drive. And USB drive by default generally are not bootable. So I would just go to Google and search like how to make a bootable flash drive and you'll find some instructions. It's not too difficult. And then you basically you plug in that flash drive or that CD, make sure you can boot from that device. This program comes up, you never even get to Windows. And you basically say, you know what, scrub this drive, give it some time, the bigger the drive, the longer it's going to take. And when it's done, it'll say I'm done.  There's nothing on it. What do you want me to do? So I would highly recommend Derek's boot and nuke. It's pretty bulletproof, pretty very easy to use. So there's your first question. Thank you. You're welcome. Your next question, which I'll bring back up here, is you're currently using Fortress 101. You're not sure you want to stay with that. And you've taken a look at clean slate and deep freeze, also win select. I am not familiar with win select. I am familiar with deep freeze and I am somewhat familiar with clean slate. Basically, it's a toss up. They're all pretty good. I do know that deep freeze only comes as a software product. And I think clean slate, but don't hold me to this, might have a hardware version, which is more of the key style. If anybody had those old gates machines, or in fact, some of you still have those gates machines, where you could physically lock it on the computer if you prefer kind of the hardware version of that. The only thing I might add to this is there is a free alternative called Windows Steady State. It's from Microsoft. We use it here in our computer lab and I've recommended it to many other libraries.  It's completely free. I've had no more difficulty or issues with it than any other software I've used. In other words, it's not perfect, but I think it works just as well and it's free. So you might want to take a look at that. And I did provide a link to it on the bookmarks. Okay, now we get a little more interesting. You're considering upgrading to Windows 7, okay, but so you've pretty much decided you're going to get a Windows 7 or still not sure? I would like to move eventually. It's the timing and then looking at all the details and finding out that things like Outlook Express, which is what we currently use, will no longer be available in any other repercussions. Okay, basically, okay, the larger issues of moving to Windows 7 and then with your fourth question, we'll get a little more detail about versions of Windows 7. But I've been running Windows 7 since about day 3. Well, actually I was running some of the beta versions. I've had pretty much zero problems. Of course, I never had problems with this either and everybody else seemed to. There is some older software that won't run on Windows 7. They are few and far between. I think my father just upgraded and he was running like PrintShop Pro version 12, and they're now on version 25. So he had to upgrade that, but it was 20 bucks and he upgraded it. So the first thing I would check is just make sure that any software that would be mission critical, the stuff you can't live without, says it'll work on Windows 7. And basically, if it works on Windows Vista, it should also work on Windows 7 without too much trouble. Without Look Express going away, you're asking me about the options between Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Hotmail. I've played with both of them. They're perfectly good programs. In fact, some people think that the new Windows Live Mail actually worked better than Outlook Express ever did. There'll be a little bit of a learning curve just because things will look a little different and work a little different, but shouldn't be too much of a trouble there. Your big difference between Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Hotmail is where the mail stored, as I see you've kind of noted on your question here. Windows Live Mail, the mail will be stored on the desktop. So you need to have access to that desktop in order to access your email. Windows Live Hotmail, it's hosted out in the cloud on the web, so you can log in from any machine, get to your email wherever you want. That, I think, really is going to be your choice. Upgrading from Outlook Express to Windows Live Mail, you might be able to kind of transfer those files over. If you go from Outlook Express to Live Hotmail, not sure you might be able to move that. You might be able to export it from one and import it to the other. I can maybe do a little more checking on that if you'd like me to, but it's really going to come down to how do you access your email, whether you want to be on a particular machine or you want to be able to get to it from anywhere. Yeah, I did see something about being able to move the Outlook Express mail to one or the other, and I think you're right. I think there was one that it was capable of doing it and one that wasn't. I can't remember the detail. My guess would be is that the Live Mail, the mail that's on your PC, would be able to convert from one to the other. However, I'm guessing in your situation you're going to be going from like computer A to computer B. You're not upgrading computer A? We will be doing a mix of that. Okay. Some we will be upgrading current PCs. Some will get new PCs. My guess would be is that on the ones you upgrade, the process will be simpler. On the ones you move, you might have to again kind of do an export from the old machine onto like a flash drive and then move it over to the newer machine and plug it in and do an import. Well, actually, we do have an exchange server. So actually our mail should all be on the server. Okay. Sorry, I should have put that in the question. Okay. Then I would probably just move to Windows Live Mail. Can you access the server from another machine? Like if you're at home, can you log in and get your email? We currently through our contract with a computer backup software program helper and stuff, they do provide a web mail alternative. Okay. Then from the sounds of it, I would say just move to the Windows Live Mail. It's just the upgrade to Outlook Express and just go from there. Have you heard anything about people who are using the Windows 7 with its, I believe something like a Windows XP shell. There's a way to still use XP programs. Okay. There is in the ultimate, okay. Boy, you see here's where I get into all the fun stuff of the different versions of Windows 7. There's like a basic version. You don't want that. There's a home version, which I actually run myself and that works just fine for 99% of all people. There's that a professional version and an ultimate version. In most cases, the professional version and the ultimate version besides costing more will add features that most public libraries don't need. One thing they will also add, which is what you're talking about, which is called XP mode, which I think comes with ultimate and can be added to professional if I've got this correct. It is really only something you need if you have a very old piece of software that would only run in XP, would not run in Vista, and therefore will not run in Windows 7. There is no upgrade to that software and you've got to run that old piece of software. There are very few cases for that. I would argue if that's like your OPAC, okay, then maybe this is something you want to consider. If it's a game for kids or something like that, I would honestly say, save the money, buy a new game. That's kind of where I would go with there. Dovetailing into your fourth and last question, 64-bit Windows versus 32-bit Windows. Oh boy. There's a simple answer. There's a hard answer. The simple answer is, honestly, I would go with 64-bit version of Windows at this point. The main benefit to 64-bit Windows versus 32-bit Windows without getting into all the technology issues is you can put more RAM in a 64-bit Windows machine. 32-bit maxes out at 4 gigabytes of RAM, 64-bit, I think you can put something like up to 32 gigabytes of RAM in a machine, which is insane, but it can technically be done. This, again, however, is you need to check your mission critical software to make sure that you're not running something that you absolutely have to run that won't run in 64-bit. I can name one piece of software that a lot of libraries use, and that is the OCLC connection client. I know this because my wife does cataloging from home, and we got her a new 64-bit machine, and that software won't install. What we ended up doing was we used the web client instead of the desktop client in that situation, but 64-bit is pretty much the standard these days. You get a Best Buy or something, you're going to get a 64-bit computer. The only other consideration is on your upgrade machines. If you have a 32-bit hardware, you cannot upgrade to 64-bit Windows. You have to have hardware that supports 64-bit, so that's one thing you'd want to check. Chances are if you're upgrading, especially if you're upgrading from something like an XP, you probably can't upgrade to 64-bit, but if you buy a new machine, I recommend at this point, unless you really have a reason you can't, I recommend everybody going to 64-bit at this point. Does that help? That does. Can the network support both 64-bit and 32-bit PCs on the same network? Oh yeah, yeah, not a problem. It's purely an issue of hardware and how much, it's called address spaces, it's how much RAM can be used. The networking will be completely transparent.  The Windows looks the same. It's all under the hood stuff. Okay, thanks. Did I answer your questions? That was great. Thanks. Okay, great. You're welcome. Okay, I'm going to put you back on mute there. Did anybody else in the audience have any questions based on those questions and my answers? If you want to drop something in the questions list or give a hand raise if you have a mic. Okay, I'm not seeing any there. I'm going to go ahead and close those up. Let's say that. Okay, the other thing I got was from Claudette at Adams Middle School Library. She's not on the call, but I found this very interesting. She basically sent me an email saying, I saw this new bit of technology. What do you think of it? So I took a look and I've got to say I'm intrigued. This is the Epson Brightlink 450Wi and I will kind of get us past this video here. I'll be fine some pictures. This is a data projector and it does a couple of things that I think are really different. First of all, the projector itself is the smart board. I don't know if any of you have ever used these projectors where you project onto a special board that you've mounted on the wall and then you can touch the board and that acts like your mouse and you can bring up an onscreen keyboard and that way, the instructor at the front of the room can actually be at the front of the room touching the screen without having to kind of step off to the side and access a separate computer. Got to be honest, I've never really been a fan of those. I don't know why maybe because I'm not in a classroom all day. Maybe also because they were never really that big. I would like a huge projection and have me stand off to the side then have a little dinky projection and me standing right next to it. Well, the first thing this does is that you don't require the board anymore. You can only or you just project onto the wall and it allows you to touch what you're projecting onto the wall and that will work like a smart board, which I'm just totally impressed with. Second of all, you can get projections up to 60 inches on the diagonals.  You can project a 60 inch projection right onto the wall and if you look at these images here notice that it has what's called a short throw and this is something I've just learned about in the last couple of days where in order to get a 60 inch projection usually you had to put the projector like in the back of the room you can hang this thing directly above where you're projecting. So it project practically projects straight down onto the wall at just a slight angle so it's only hanging about two feet away from the wall where it's projecting. Again, I was just blown by this as I'm reading through it so basically I got a wall in the front of the room I can mount the projector right in front of the room have it project practically straight down and then interact with that projection right on the wall. I don't know how much this costs. It's one of those contact a reseller if you're interested in purchasing one of these but it's probably not going to be that cheap but I want to play with one. I know we don't have the budget here at the commission to get one of these but it just sounds really interesting and I thought especially those of you who might be at school libraries might be interested in checking this out and I do have like I said a link in my links list. Excuse me for just a moment here. So one problem with being on camera you know you're going to suddenly pay attention to every single move you make. All right any questions on that one? All right let me go through a couple of other stories that I have. Here we have about 15 minutes left and I'm going to go ahead and scroll on down. One of these is a service I don't think I mentioned last month. I want to make sure I mentioned to everybody now and if I did mention it last month I want to mention it again because the offer on this is only good a couple more days. Backupify is a service that backs up content that you're already putting online. So for example I have photos on Flickr, Google Docs, my Gmail, my delicious bookmarks, all my tweets. Now in the case of my Flickr photos I also have them in my hard drive and I burn them to DVD and I back them up somewhere else. My Google Docs I probably have that too but like my tweets, my Facebook stuff, my Gmail I don't necessarily have a backup and what if Twitter blew up tomorrow? What if Facebook blew up tomorrow? What if Facebook decided that they didn't like you anymore and cancel your account? Where did all that stuff go? Well if you sign up with Backupify which I've done I've been using for about a month now they will actually back up that content to another online service called Amazon Web Services and so if you ever lose say all of your Facebook content you can get it all back. You have a backup copy of it and this is going to start costing money come February 1st but if you sign up before the end of January you can actually use the service completely for free. So I'm kind of on a backup kick. My father as I mentioned just bought a new computer that's because his old computer just decided to die.  By the way did I mention you should be backing up all of your content. Okay a few other services some fun stuff just want to throw this in here. Waldo has been found. Does anybody know that? We all know who Waldo is right? Okay well due to the wonderful street view of Google Maps or Google Street View Waldo has been found at 76 Putney High Street in Wadsworth London and there he is see you never know what Google will find for you next. Sorry just had to throw that one in there I thought it was kind of fun. Ah go back to my links list. Firefox browsers for any of you who are Firefox users I don't know if you've noticed but the new version of Firefox version 3.6 came out just end of last week. It's a good browser I like it I use it here at the office. My other computers I'm kind of using Google Chrome which at the moment is kind of still for the super geeky people but if you are somebody who is not using Internet Explorer anymore which is something I will always recommend is not use Internet Explorer. You might want to make sure that using the latest version of Firefox if you've been using it chances are you have already automatically been upgraded. If you're not sure you can just go ahead and click on help and then check for updates as I'm showing you there on this screen and that will check to make sure that you are at the latest version of Firefox. With that what I might also want to point out is that the portable version of Firefox has also been updated to version 3.6. I don't know how many of you have ever played with portable applications but this is software you can download and install on your flash drive and then take it with you. So what I can do is basically go to any computer whether I'm at a public library at home at work I can pop in my flash drive and should I need to let's say they don't have Firefox they only have Internet Explorer and I don't really trust that I can go ahead and run Firefox completely off my flash drive and leave no traces whatsoever behind on the computer that I'm accessing and I don't need traces as in like I'm trying to hide something but it won't actually install anything on that computer it won't actually change anything on that computer's hard drive but I can run my browser have my bookmarks take it with me wherever I want and there's lots of other software available like that not just Firefox if you go to portableapps.com you can find all sorts of software that you can take with you on your flash drive and I'm gonna talk about two more things real quick here one is a new piece of hardware that I'm totally excited about so I just kind of want to share that the other one is something with Google Reader this I love I am amazed by this this I discovered this I think two days ago three days ago January 25th I use Google Reader to follow RSS feeds but not every website I want to pay attention to has an RSS feed so how do I know if that website has been updated or not for a real life example I have a Sony Reader and Sony has a webpage for my unit where they post updates every once in a while you know not regularly but you know maybe every couple of months every couple of weeks and what I'd have to do is I'd have to use some third-party add-on to Firefox that would check once a day to see if that webpage has been updated and then notify me and then I have to go into that webpage to see what the new material was and it worked but it was very klugey well now what you can do if your Google Reader user is you can subscribe to any webpage so all I need to do is I went to the Sony Reader website I found the URL for the updates for my device I copied that URL went back to Google Reader said subscribe to this page and Google said hey you know what there's no RSS feed on this page however would you like us to keep track of it anyway and I said yes please and so now whenever that page is updated Google will notify me in my Google Reader at just as if it had an RSS feed to it and I think that's totally amazing it's wonderful again it's now I can just pull everything into that one location and keep track of all the websites that I need to keep track of so if your Google Reader user check that out um last but not least this is just a device I'm totally excited about it's called the boxy box and tell you a little bit about my home life I don't actually watch much real TV anymore um one or two things a week I pretty much get 98% of my television off the internet Hulu Netflix iTunes all these sorts of resources and generally what's involved however is uh hooking up a computer to my television which is not necessarily difficult if you have a current television but you know who yeah just what you want one more computer in your house so um you know some of us don't want four or five in their house like I have well there are several different devices out there this is the one I'm looking forward to it's going to be out later this spring uh it's called the boxy box that's what it looks like yes it's a little weird looking but you plug this into your TV it supports Wi-Fi or you can plug it directly into your network and then you turn this thing on you turn your TV to that input and it is a complete interface to online video you can get your Hulu you can get your television through YouTube you can subscribe to video and audio podcast feeds you can listen to music through this thing pretty much plays just about everything so kind of looks like this comes with a little remote which also has a keyboard on it it and this thing is going to cost less than 200 dollars I'm looking forward to this um it might actually replace the computer I have connected to my television worst case it's going connecting to the uh TV in the bedroom because that one's not on the network yet so it's just something out there I don't know if any of you you know actually want to go buy one of these things but just to kind of show you the technology that's coming for getting internet based video onto your television this little box is going to cost less than 200 dollars to pretty much anything you could ever want it to do oh and it works with Netflix too so I could pull in my movies television shows whatever straight from Netflix I'm just totally excited about this and maybe a little too excited but I've already got the 200 dollars set aside I want one of these so that's pretty much um my list we had that wonderful uh interview with Betty Betty I want to thank you again for that I see you're still on the call um answered a couple people's questions so just some new hardware some people pointed me to uh talked about a few uh stories and pieces of software I think you need to be paying attention to um we've got about five more minutes uh in our hour are there any questions out there that either were raised because of something I said or not because of something I said and it looks like we've got one floating around in here um um oh yeah okay this is a loaded question how can I learn more about technology in a timely way maybe something guiding me along the way it seems like I never find the time do you have favorite sites you watch okay um wow well okay here's the loaded part of the question um basically if any of you are or uh have in the past are currently but have kind of forgotten about it or hadn't heard about it we do have the Nebraska learns 2.0 project basically we have one service or site uh a month that we go through um we give you a little reading to do sometimes it's a video to watch we actually write a blog post about it you can get CE credit each month for this um just uh you know search Nebraska learns 2.0 and Google that'll come right up because the URL is completely uh blanking on me for a moment um other sites I favorite ones um I follow hundreds of feeds I follow lots of people on Twitter I I just I keep my eyes and ears open constantly so this stuff just kind of comes to me in some cases um but I'll mention two only because I'm thinking about them because I actually linked to them in this uh week this month's session um one is life hacker um this is not just technology although it's a lot of technology for example you can see up here uh use a pressure cooker for fast healthy meals I this is this is so you could argue a pressure cooker is technology um but it also talks about you know google docs you can now upload anything to it so sometimes it's you know totally geeky stuff other times it's just how to get more out of your life how to do things more efficiently I think it's a wonderful site and you'll get a lot of different tips and tricks um for doing these things um the other one which um I don't remember which link I had it to yes um read write web which had this google reader this is more kind of that social web um twitter rss facebook uh web 2.0 the social web that's the kind of the stuff that they pay attention to and I also read this site pretty much daily uh so those were probably off the top of my head my two total favorites uh at the moment so um any other questions or comments uh again if you have a microphone just feel free to to click the little hand raise icon there and bring that up um or feel free to put a question in the questions area I hope I'm still sounding okay I'm a little bit congested and congested excuse me and uh the talking is making it a little bit worse but um uh you know I think I've I've survived the hour and I'm glad the rest of you have too okay I'm not seeing any uh additional questions floating around uh through go to webinar and I'm not seeing any hands raised so I'm going to go ahead and thank you all for attending and give one last thanks to Betty I really appreciate you calling in and let me talk to you about uh your wonderful new service at your library and uh Christa I believe we'll be back next week uh with the next edition of Encompass Live and I will be back next month with another tech talk thanks a lot bye bye


But I think that's the thing about being online. You gotta define what's cool for you. Like I can only pretend to like chokers for so long. And I did. I think that's a really good point about being internet facing. A lot of me is internet facing, but not all of me. No, I don't write about my relationship really because all of that stuff is like not what I want to talk about online. I like want to talk about what happened at the Oscars. I want to talk about Oppenheimer. I want to talk about the Grammys. I want to talk about JLo wearing the same nude lip for 25 years. That's stuff that I actually talk about literally nonstop. The other stuff, it's really just not top of mind to like share because I'm not seeking advice from exchanging ideas. I just like have a big mouth. Your view of Oppenheimer comes from a lens that like I do not have. I also haven't seen it. You would love it. Oppenheimer is about gossips and haters. And I'm full of them. The blogs are buzzing.


What's up guys? We are back for another quick day of eating liver detox diet, basically what I figured out to do after eight years on the carnivore diet. Arguably made my health even worse. So in the morning I usually hydrate a lot and then I'll either do some glandular stuff like usually lamb or goth testicles for testosterone and most other days of the week I'll just have a normal breakfast. Occasionally if I'm like busy and I need to get to work I'll just skip breakfast and just hydrate for the first few hours of the day but I won't do the testicles more than once a week. So usually five or six days out of the week I'm having this meal. So I'll show you guys these pancakes the other week for that recipe. I've really been enjoying them as a nice source of fiber in the oats and just starch in the pancake mix to white flour. Just iberico pork breakfast sauces that we have on Frankie's series meat for you know enough protein it's maybe three or four ounces sometimes I'll have two sometimes I'll have one and a half it depends on how I feel. Supplement wise we're just going to take some selenium I've been doing zinc lately. We've got the honeycrisp apple as usual for dessert a little bit of mastic I'm to keep gut motility high and we're doing water kefir half diluted with water for breakfast I ran out of key for grains I'll have to pick some up at work for the later meals and then of course we have our organic maple syrup for the pancakes pretty much everything here guys you can get on Frankie's syringe me Frankie syringe foods if you guys want to replicate it and the main difficult thing is getting like a high quality breakfast sausage so I'm happy I made the iberico ones but if I didn't have these it certainly would be hard to find like a breakfast adequate high quality protein source and all the stuff guys organ supplements.com we also have the beef powders back so you know instead of doing the testicles and stuff and swallowing down the wrong lens I might be doing the powders in the near future but that's going to be it for breakfast only thing missing that we normally have is is the water key for grains yeah I'll probably do a few swords or video on the beef powders when we have all of them back for the most part we have everything like the brain powder the male virility a few glandulars only thing I'm missing is the third eye and the female fertility so if you guys are waiting on that it might be another week or two so if you guys miss the memo the basis of the diet is everything organic high quality removing inflammation and then just giving my liver exactly what it needs to detox efficiently which is basically a large amount of starch and fiber with the minimal amount of protein that we need for optimal cell function and a big thing that I don't say often enough is if you're drinking probiotics and water key for that's high in B vitamins and it's giving your body you know little gut microbes to digest the carbs that greatly reduces your necessary protein intake so if I was having this meal without the water key for I would need to have two or three sausages you know when you guys see lunch and dinner later you might think the protein looks a little low but when you're drinking you know half a liter of water key for every single meal it's an incredible amount of B vitamins and then those microbes in your stomach are creating more B vitamins from the starch so again you know the actual protein and availability is much higher because of the water key for and we have that on Frankie syringe food as well all right guys we are back from work it is 430 so let me show you guys my lunch all right I guess you call it an early dinner at this point I've been keeping it simple this week really just bread and a protein source so this is our beef stock concentrate from Frankie syringe meat mixed with equal parts of my white bean puree so it's basically a concentration of like protein B vitamins mixed with fiber and some starch and this is just the bulk of the starch caloric density in the meal we have apple left over from breakfast some mastic of course to wash it down and we're doing water key for water key for grains and I dilute the water key for with half water so I'll do maybe half the bottle each meal diluted with water just some key for grains maybe two or three tablespoons per meal just plastic on top to keep the flies away and that's pretty much it really simple lunch but the amount of prep that goes into you know making this stock and the white bean puree plus the bread it's a lot of work but when I do come down and have lunch it's a pretty fast prep wise so this is going to give me basically a perfect meal for liver detox and for energy and just keeping things balanced no supplements with lunch but past week for the most part I was doing zinc pretty much every day but now I'm going to take off the supplements for about a week see how I feel with the exception of the mastic gum all right guys it's about 10 p.m which is quite reasonable compared to the rest of my schedule this week kind of out of the norm for me but I had like a few bad nights where I was going to bed at like two three four a.m because I was so tired when I got home from work I would take a nap at like five or six p.m and then wake up at 10 and have to finish the work so we stayed awake today and we're on a reasonable schedule let me show you guys what's for dinner definitely the most consistent meal that I've been having probably over a year year and a half I don't even know now I got to go watch back my videos but I'm very happy I discovered these udon noodles which are like the only noodles I can eat similar mixture it's what we had for lunch it's the beef collagen beef stock and white bean puree just mixed together on the sauce so we had bread with the same concoction for lunch and now we're having udon noodles with the same concoction for dinner it's just an excellent minimally inflammatory base you know really really basic stuff basically meat beans and starch kind of in different forms throughout the day just for variety we're doing the the rest of the water kefir for dinner diluted with some water a little bit of mass to come at the end of the meal a few tables for the kefir grains and have our apple over here and I like to let the noodles sit for about five minutes because they really absorb all of that collagen broth and white bean puree so I'm really getting kind of complete nutrition just by having a big bowl of pasta which is nice so as you guys could see by like the meal plan throughout the day we're basically giving the body the minimal ideal amount of animal nutrition that we need plenty of B vitamins cholesterol you know any more than like a quarter to half a pound of animal protein per meal is not necessary in the case of this day of eating today we're definitely on the lower side of what I sometimes do I'll be at half a pound to three quarters of a pound per meal sometimes of meat but today we're going a little lighter just to see how I feel and for me sometimes my digestion is better sometimes it's not but the point is that the bulk of the meal is starch and fiber that the body and liver can use to kind of detox and excrete things because you know we've done so many videos on liver detox now but you basically have to consistently consume a low enough amount of nutrients and a high enough amount of starch and carbs and fiber over a very long period of time consistently to uh to these on my brain is right I don't even know if I'm making sense but the point is we're stuck doing this for a little while longer and if you guys want to support me you can go to frankdashforum.com to check out all of my interesting businesses hopefully things go well in the next year or two or three and we can do our our next book because you know there's several people out there doing diets similar to mine but none of them have fixed their health issues so I'm not going to be like in the middle of this and say okay yeah I'm getting better I'm an expert follow my advice advice it's better in my opinion let me wait another year or two three and then be healthy and then I can you know kind of write a book and put things together although most of the information I kind of learned and figured out already there are things here and there that I'll learn every every month or two whether it's something I should be doing or a new food I can incorporate so still learning still progressing hopefully hopefully we can get it done in about two years because any more than that it's kind of like it's really been have been a long time because I've been on this diet for almost three years now but I'll stop rambling guys check frankdashforum.com for all of our interesting and high quality products I got just put some bomb on my lips looks like I'm wearing lip gloss uh but yeah outside of that guys drop like on the video leave a comment down below let me know what videos you guys would like to see I'm trying to not kill myself as much of work and try to get back to YouTube but it's not happening and be sure to subscribe and check that notification I'll do it my brain is so fried today I can't probably the worst probably the worst day I've had in a while see you guys soon


It's T plus two days and Inspiration 4 has completed over 20 orbits already. We haven't received much video, if any, but we have received some information and some photos, so stay tuned as this is your Inspiration 4 update two days into the mission. The general public hasn't really been receiving that many updates from the crew as of yet, with the most popular theory being that the crew have been getting used to microgravity. They have spoken privately to some patients at St Jude Children's Research Hospital and we are expecting a lot more content coming down to earth within the next day or so. For now though, let's have a look at what we have already received. For starters, SpaceX have released some cool photos from the launch of the mission. You can really see the pure power of the Merlin 1D engines here and the brightness of the flame that comes out the bottom of the rocket. We also got this nice long exposure of the ascent out of 39A. The most exciting images we have received are definitely the ones from space by far. Here we have a couple snaps of Jared Isaacman and Haley Arseneau looking out the cupular domed window. We will have a photo of Chris also taking a photo out of the cupular itself and we have a photo of the whole crew posing in front of the hatch. And with those eight photos, we're pretty much wrapped up with everything official. We've got an out of SpaceX and the inspiration for Twitter account but we do have a couple more things to cover. You can actually track the position of the Dragon capsule in real time using SpaceX's new tracker on their website. Just head over to SpaceX.com slash launches scroll down a bit and you can see the position of Dragon resilience as it orbits at 585km above the earth. And finally today, SpaceX has announced that the crew will be doing a live link onto their YouTube channel at around 2100 Coordinated Universal Time, 1700 Eastern Daylight and 2200 British Summertime. Also to speed up your viewing experience, I've linked it down below. Just before today's episode goes to a close, let's thank the citizens of tomorrow. They support financially every month with some cool perks including access to viewing scripts as they are being written and access to the private Escape Velocity channel in our Discord server. You can join the Escape Velocity Orbital suborbital and ground support citizens by heading over to youtube.com forward slash channel number 04 slash join or by clicking the join button that is just underneath this video. Of course remember to do the essentials, subscribe and hit the notification bell. We've got a couple more updates coming out, you definitely don't want to miss them and make sure that you do tune in to the live update from the crew later on today. It's only in a couple hours after the release of this update. I'm very very excited for it because we haven't heard from them yet but for now have a wonderful rest of your day and goodbye.


Alright folks, for the next session, we are going to have a talk on metadata strategy for beautiful NADs. I will play the recording and feel free to ask questions or leave your questions in the chat drop and Anna will be able to respond to them after the session. Okay, let me know if you can see my screen. My name is Anna McHugh and I am a content librarian and curator at Red Hat, which is one of the world's first open source software companies. Today I'm going to talk about content management systems, both for external web users and also internal libraries that you may have at your organization. My role as a librarian and curator at Red Hat is to ensure that our content is relevant, up to date, labeled with meaningful labels and also is housed in software systems where it can be found and where you can emphasize the most important information. I came to Red Hat about five years ago and I am not a formerly trained librarian, although I have always been a huge information nerd. I love hanging out in the stacks of libraries, finding that choice bit of information that's hidden all the way to the back and all the way in the basement. However, as soon as I got to Red Hat, I realized that that kind of inclination was simply not going to serve me. I am responsible for the library on redhat.com and so that's a collection of documents that is valuable to a wide variety of external users. So we have two documentation that is for developers or system administrators. We have documents that are good for people who are just trying to learn about what open source is and how it functions in the world. When I came over, I realized that it was very important for us to build robust and easily access metadata systems and also to use that metadata to ensure that search experiences are easy for users. And I'm going to tell you how all of that went down. And I think that it's really important, however, to note that, you know, in this day and age, it can seem that, you know, our vast amount of information is always an asset. There's definitely also an inclination to hang on to every last white paper, every last case study that you authored. However, I think it's very important to razor in on the important information and to establish context throughout the entirety of one's collection to make sure that you're connecting users, not just with the totality of information, but saying, here, this thing on the top, this is the most relevant, the most trustworthy, because given the rapid amount of, you know, content that we create, and how rapidly also the subject matter of that content tends to evolve is very, very important to be able to do that. Additionally, I think that it's really important in terms of our move toward an all remote workforce. And Red Hat has always been anywhere between 30 and 40% remote, at least in the time that I've been there. And so when, you know, COVID came and we started to work remotely, we already had some really good practices in place. That being said, one of the things that my team took a look at almost immediately in terms of our new, you know, supporting mission is the GitLab remote manifesto. This is sort of an adjunct to the agile manifesto, which essentially establishes a set of principles and ideas where teams that are interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary teams can build products together in a rapid and iterative fashion. Now, this is a very, you know, dynamic way to work, but you also need to have excellent communication between team members. And so, you know, very frequently, a lot of the practices that develop around agile involve a lot of meetings, a lot of regular communication of what is in your way, what kinds of changes the business has given you that changes the software changes the project that you're creating. Now, in order to extend that GitLab has, you know, brought forth a couple of really interesting sort of principles that can help agile teams also adapt to an all remote environment. And before anything else, inclusion and transparency are paramount. And I think that, you know, the work that I do is really important in establishing that because transparency and inclusion really begins with everyone having a certain understanding of where information can be found and what a source of authority is. Additionally, good documentation is very important, you know, you don't have the opportunity to necessarily job shadow somebody if you're in a remote environment. So good documentation, not necessarily comprehensive documentation, but the documentation that will help people get through their jobs every single day is super duper important. And so I think that, you know, this is an area where we can really flourish not only in terms of creating documentation but ensuring that the documentation that is the most important, again, rises to the top. Finally, asynchronous communication. I think this is going to be one of the ongoing challenges that teams grapple with and cope with, kind of regardless of their circumstances. You know, you have teams that are global people working at all hours of day or night as the earth turns, we have people with a variety of differing needs as far as their working styles. And it's very important to foster that flexibility, especially because you know at the core of this manifesto and agile is valuing the humanity and valuing the collaboration that comes out of people who feel like their value feel like they are empowered to create change when it's necessary. So I think that the work that I do is really critical in fostering all of these things. And as a result, of course I take it very seriously. Now I am not suggesting that everybody who is a trained librarian should, you know, drop their books immediately and run off and become a sysadmin because that would both be impractical, and probably not very good for the overall quality of the sysadmins that are available for hire. Now instead, I think it's really important for us to focus on what we're good at which is creating good labels, but also becoming very familiar with our tools. So, you know, one of the things that I think is really instrumental in my job is I serve as a sort of midway point between the business stakeholders. So these are the people who are building the website people who are building technology products that you know that we're trying to bring to market. And the developers and the it operations folks who run our infrastructure who run our websites, who build our content management systems and other systems of record. You can frequently hear from people in the business who have, you know, concrete concerns and considerations, but they don't understand and shouldn't have to understand how the software works to explain what kinds of features they want or what problems they're experiencing. On the other side of the house, the developers don't necessarily know what the business priorities are or, you know, have necessarily the skills to tease that out. Now project managers can help, but also, again, somebody who understands the business context of the content, but also the systems in which it's housed and how those things can be built and modified is a really valuable thing. So, you know, very frequently when I'm talking with people, I think that there's a lot of real interest in and a lot of very promising developments in the level of sophistication that we have search algorithms and, you know, creating personalized experiences, a wide array of really interesting tools to connect people with the knowledge that they need. However, there is a, I think, significant role, at least at this point for human decision making and the ability of humans to discern the, you know, what is trustworthy what is expert and what is authoritative, far better than machines at this point. I think that the recapture project is a really good example of how, you know, computers and software systems, and also, you know, the human intellect can work together to, you know, basically harvest and create more rich texture information. So, recapture essentially is just digital scans of, you know, books that haven't been digitized, and then they're presented in a sort of distorted fashion and users use them to authenticate and to get into websites demonstrate they're not bots. Now this information is fed back into this massive digitization project, which really feeds, you know, the growth of overall knowledge and, and serves a very important need. So good illustration of one of the things that human beings are very good at that machines aren't necessarily so good at and that is looking at things and interpreting images, especially, you know, distorted images, or for that matter, you know, distorted, or symbolic or metaphorical image. So the human mind is really good at understanding that kind of information and you know you can bake that into the algorithms and the different tools that you use to essentially again, build that context build that understanding that you have a value and what people are trying to learn but also what you're trying to say, because you know, no collection of documents is actually fully objective, you are saying something especially if you're talking about a website for a company. So some people will, you know, occasionally poo poo the role of human beings in the organization of such collections of information. And my counterpoint point to that would be that even Google understands, you know, the value that human beings bring to these sorts of complimentary activities, building knowledge environments that take into account some of the more qualitative factors of the content itself. So, you know, one of the things that I find to be fascinating about Google's work is that they have quality radar guidelines. So basically it's 168 page document that is for human beings. And they sit down and they read a website and they compare it against a rubric of different measures of what quality is and how, you know, again to assess and evaluate how a website behaves and performs and how basically it should rank and search. And there are three main factors that are very important that are also very difficult for machines to discern. And I think these are also really the three critical things that determine whether or not information that we encounter in digital environments is valuable expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So essentially the entire set of activities that a quality radar goes through is to identify the level to which a page represents those things. This becomes increasingly important when you're talking about websites that potentially have a lot of implications of using that information. So medical websites, financial services, etc. So all of the, you know, human feedback is fed into the Google algorithm, so that there is sort of a continual building of a set of understandings of where those fault lines are in terms of what makes something of an authoritative, what makes a voice expertise and more than anything else, what is trustworthy because that's the most important thing that we're trying to parse on the internet or really anywhere. So stepping back from all that crazy stuff I'm going to tell you the story about how my job came to be and how I came to, you know, spend the last five years at Red Hat going from a chaotic document library in a very, very disorganized content system hosted in Drupal to what I would like to think is a more robust, more flexible system that people also have access to data that is meaningful both on the outside and internal users. So this is a quick timeline. We aren't actually dancing bears at Red Hat, although we do occasionally have a reputation as party animals. We were tired in 2014-2015. We were just moving on to Drupal from an earlier content management system. So the new redhat.com had a library that I essentially on my first day inherited.  And I said, well, that should be relatively easy. We just pick a date and we archive things that are older than that date, more or less. And she said, aha, this is the difficulty when we migrated our content into Drupal. It put the same time and date stamp on all of these things. This is a perfect example of the unintended consequences of building cool new stuff. But as a result of that, it also became very clear that our first order of business was going to be going through the content and auditing it, making sure not just that we're getting rid of the things that are no longer relevant. But more importantly, that we were developing a strategic system for managing and labeling that content and future content so that we'd be able to create a system that had a little bit of coherency to it. So, you know, 2014, 2015 was kind of getting my legs under me and, you know, working on some of this auditing 2016. Additionally, we spent a lot of time not just auditing content but also starting to work on our content management system itself. And so developing a far more sophisticated taxonomy, working to, you know, develop onsite search mechanisms and also incorporate some of our organic strategy. 2017 and 2018 were characterized by getting additional access to data outside of the content management system and marrying it up. So, you know, the best example of this is that we were able to create content segments using our inventory and so say for instance we could gather a list of assets or a list of white papers about Linux, which is one of the primary things that red hat is in the business of. And we could marry that up with the data analytics that are used to measure the performance of content. This is really helpful to us because we're able to understand what's working, what's not. And also have an understanding of what users are trying to get to so that we make sure that information is what we focus on in terms of making sure it's up to date. And then in, you know, 2018 and 2019, we started to also branch out into some sort of home group technical solution so we could take these different sources of data and bring them together. We also started to do it, you know, started to do hacks and work around so that we could use our taxonomy to do some personalization and other interesting activities. And additionally, in 2019-2020, we built and launched a digital asset management system as a software as a service. So we were moving off of a far more traditional sort of file management platform onto something that's available in the web browser. And we built the entire search experience around that and around the, you know, specific collection that we're trying to present to people. So I'm just going to give you a quick rundown of the main things that we had to get done before we could make any progress on the cool things like, you know, tying our performance data together with our content metadata. First of all, we had to audit that content and also look at the metadata, not only, you know, what labels were on things and ensuring that, you know, we cleaned up that, you know, all of those records, but also making sure that the taxonomy itself was in good shape. Now, if you're not familiar with the term taxonomy, I'm just going to back out really quick and explain it. More or less taxonomy is just classified information. Dad jokes aside, essentially it is just a, you know, organizational system where you have a hierarchy of information. So you have a parent level, you know, a parent level category and child terms underneath it. So in the case of Red Hat, we have topics is one of our parent level categories. We have Linux, we have cloud computing, we have DevOps and security. So you're basically able to say, okay, this is a dimension of the content. This is a, you know, a label that I want. And here's a controlled list of selections that people have. Now, sometimes people feel, you know, users can say, well, I'd love to be able to use keywords because I can be descriptive and, you know, it'll be easier for people to find the content if it's a very specific bit of information. I find a controlled list of taxonomies that are also developed sort of strategically alongside the business and the collection to be far more effective.  You also have to ensure that that data continues to be accessible and also has high integrity. So, you know, if you have to pass the torch to a different person who is going to become responsible for publishing content, impressing upon them the importance of good labeling and tagging is critical. So when I first started at Red Hat, we had, again, this idea that it's going to be relatively easy to get me up to speed and we're going to, you know, be able to sort of smoothly transition to this new platform where we were hosting our content, so Drupal specifically. And it became very clear that we just had a lot of different problems. Everything from, you know, the records without the time and date stamps on them to, you know, information that was simply out of date and needed to be looked at by people who are technical, you know, owners of the content people who are experts on Red Hat products and open source technology. So over the course of the first year and change that I was working at Red Hat, we eliminated nearly 2500 PDFs that were either out of date, no longer relevant. Basically what you would call content rot, which is the C information that is redundant outdated, and even worse than everything else trivial. So that was the focus. And, you know, on an ongoing basis as a practice we quarterly will audit content. And so our method for doing this essentially is we say anything that's older than a certain amount. So in our case 18 months needs to be audited. If it does not meet certain performance benchmarks. So we need to ensure that the content is, you know, actually of interest to people to again get rid of the trivial things and emphasize the things that are more important to our users. But also to just give us a gut check of like 18 months later is the still relevant in the technology industry very frequently we have to retire things far before 18 months. So we have a window of time basically, you know, three years to 18 months of age we look at the performance of the content itself. Anything that's older than three years, someone has to scream and yell and holler to not have us archive it. And certainly we will have people who are owners who are really good at communicating like no this technology is actually stable enough, or this is a product that some of our users have that we need to keep around. That said, auditing and auditing on an ongoing basis is really, really important to us. I will attempt to use my slides in the correct direction. So not just auditing content, you know, obviously that was one of the first things that I really dug my teeth into. But, you know, in the building and then the maintenance of the Drupal system and then subsequently our internal digital asset manager. We realized that access to data in a very simple CSV format was probably the most valuable feature that our developers delivered for us. We would have all of the wonderful flexibility in, you know, how large your mosaic display is or how people scroll or how they build a collection for themselves. There are lots of wonderful things that can be done with software, but at the end of the day, in order to actually create a system that people can use and to be sure that the information that's stored in it is relevant. You need to be able to pull records out that is inclusive of the metadata that you have. In Drupal, we don't have a very sophisticated list of the metadata that we, you know, include one of the primary use cases that we have is we basically build an inventory. It's a Google Sheet. It's super simple. You know, it has the name and, you know, the type of content that the item is also its publication date, and then all of the taxonomies are usable as filters. They're filtered by topics and by products and by product lines and a variety of other parent terms. Additionally, we took our analytics data out of Adobe analytics and also out of our contact database. So, you know, records of sales and married our inventory of content and our metadata from our CMS up with the, you know, web performance and ultimately the business earnings of each individual piece of content. It's really valuable to us because it gives us a chance to say, okay, it's not just a matter of raw popularity. It is also this, you know, contextual understanding of how our content performs. So for instance, occasionally we'll find something that is a really highly detailed document. And some people say, for instance, in marketing would say there's maybe not so much value to this. However, if we look at it and we say, well, there's only five people who downloaded, however, those five people ended up buying $500,000 worth of Linux, it's probably important to ensure that that document stays up to date and that we continue making documents like it. It's important to be able to get access to, you know, your the data that's within your content management system and again CSV format is really important. I also highly stress that you want to make sure that the values that are separated, you know, comma separated are great, but occasionally, you know, you can end up with a system where all of your terms are in one list and it becomes very ugly. So, you know, looking at what kind of filtering you're going to want to be able to do and what your other use cases are is really important in that case. When you're building these search experiences, you know, be it for in my case red hat calm or, you know, this digital asset manager. One of the few things that I really deeply and fundamentally believe is that a flat taxonomy is very, very important. When I first came on board. I had an internal library and it was basically set up like a traditional sort of file tree, and it got very, very complex and confusing really rapidly, especially because you had things broken up sometimes organizationally but sometimes by different products. It was almost impossible to use and it was very elaborate. Now it was very logical as far as its hierarchies were concerned, but those hierarchies didn't really make sense together, and they're simply way too deep. And most of the time when you talk to people about taxonomy or you talk with them about metadata, you know, their eyes start to glaze over taxonomy to them is reminiscent of, you know, their dorky high school biology teacher. And they think of it also as a deep multi layered thing, you know, a taxonomy as you start at kingdom and phylum and down to genus and species and in between there there's all kinds of stuff that it's almost impossible to memorize. Now the reality is that a flat taxonomy is oftentimes really intuitive and easy for people to use on the subject of taxonomies I think it's important also that, you know, whatever system you're building, being able to modify that taxonomy is very important. So being able to change the parent categories, but most importantly, being able to change the labels on all the records within your system is critical. So for instance, a couple of months ago I had to remove a product from red hat calm, you know, and all of the records associated with it. We have a feature that's a bulk tagger so basically I'm able to go in, delete the term, and the tag essentially falls off all of the records that are associated with that term. So it's a one and done it takes me two seconds, I clear the cash, it, you know, is removed from our content delivery network, and it's a done deal. So if you have another tool however that if you want to get rid of a taxonomy term, you first have to remove that from, you know that specific term from all of the, you know documents and records that have that term. So you can understand where we're getting into a little bit of a problem here. So it's very important to have a flexible flat lightweight taxonomy in my opinion.   I really enjoy hunting for wild mushrooms and messing around with culinary stuff it's just a great hobby. But one of my favorite parts about it is it's a very taxonomy heavy discipline as well. There's already millions of, you know, different species of fungi probably around 1.5 million so and who's counting. And so, you know, there's a very, very rich taxonomy associated with the study. That said, most people, you know, when they're looking for a mushroom or thinking about mushrooms is a really basic template and they have a very specific need. It's a good parallel to, you know, the sort of digital library experience I'm trying to provide to people, even though as the back end user and an administrator, I want to be able to look at all of the seven different names something has had. The front end user wants something very simple. So let's talk about the, the shiitake mushroom probably one of the most popular culinary mushrooms in the world. And because it's so popular it's been studied for a long time. And as a result of that is it actually had seven different classifications seven different linear names. Now if you're super into mushrooms like I am that's great and you can you know dig through taxonomies and the history, you know the changelog, all you want to figure out why people named it that and why they moved it to a different genus etc and so on. So for most people, what they're doing in relation to shiitake mushrooms is walking into a store looking for the produce section looking for the mushrooms, and then looking for the bin that is labeled shiitake.  It's very simple, they should be straightforward. And, you know, as much as you may be an expert and have, you know, really relish developing these complex, but very nuanced ways of getting information, you're usually not actually doing your audience of service. So as a result of auditing our content, also getting access and ensuring that the data in our systems had integrity, and then, you know, working to sort of understand the overall value that our audience finds in the content we're able to do some optimization work. So it read had about two thirds of our revenue comes originally from contacts that we make in organic search. Now, because a lot of the materials that we create are sort of old fashioned, you know, we have a lot of PDFs. We've been making an effort to publish these kinds of documents and HTML. Now, when we do that the traffic for those particular pieces tends to be anywhere between 10 and 15 times the amount that a traditional PDF would get, especially for organic traffic and this allows us also to sort of grow our information ecosystem for specialized topics that come from sort of our technical teams. So in looking at this information of, you know, our metadata we're able to identify okay, what are the things that people are interested in, what are the things that maybe we don't have quite enough on and then we use that to migrate that content and make sure that it is created and published in HTML first. We also have a content analysis program so we're able to, you know, work with different campaigns. We have an editorial board and we have a couple of different, you know, sort of programs that are designed to, you know, project and to articulate red hats position, especially on a particularly interesting, you know, element of open source software.  My team has done somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 of them and we split them up by all kinds of things. So, you know, if you are the owner of a particular product we can give you an analysis of your content. If you are working within of our one of our vertical teams so you know say for instance you work with telecommunications. You can talk to you about the performance of your telecommunications content that is published in French, and you're interested in organic traffic instead of conversion traffic and people buying things. So this level of nuance and detail is really helpful. And, and it allows us to, you know, understand and analyze our content really starts to also wrap our heads around, what are we known for, and are we saying the things that we want to say. And going back to, you know, Google's principles around expertise, authority and trustworthiness, seeing the kind of content that people access will give you a sense of whether or not you are in fact delivering the kind of message that you want. And if not, then you can refocus. Another thing that we have done this really helped, I think the entire business sort of understand metadata and participate in the development of, you know, our content software is our metadata governance committee. So we meet on a monthly basis. It's an open meeting. Anyone can attend and we often do have people from the business or, you know, software developers who are working on our, you know, business applications who attend. And we just basically talk about new terms that we want to add to our taxonomy or terms we need to remove or disambiguation we need to do. So, you know, it's an open forum on a monthly basis where people can bring to the table their need for new metadata or even just a need to be able to find content a little more easily that maybe we should design a label for. So we do that on a monthly basis is very open very collaborative and it's very much the red hat way. It also is an opportunity for us to form relationships with people and to basically demystify the idea of metadata and being sort of a business stakeholder and building, you know, like web applications or search applications, content management systems, etc. And then a couple of days after our, you know, our open collaborative fiesta, the librarians and owners of the different tools get together. We, you know, update the tools that are relevant. We keep a change log and we also maintain a data dictionary, and we do that every single month so every time we change something we have a really clear record of what we did and why we did it. So I also want to talk about, you know, I think the character of the work that I do and the things that I find to be inspiring. You know, I think the very first thing that I discovered is I was not going to be, you know, again, just an organizer of content, but that I was going to be really closely involved with the development of these systems that weren't working very well to ensure that people could find what they want. I'm going to drink some lemonade. All right, that does the trick. So, you know, when I embarked on this journey and I realized, again, that I was going to have some agency to work with the developers work with the business to improve our systems. I realized almost immediately that I had to take on a technologist's mindset I had to, and, you know, fortunately I do have a great deal of enthusiasm for trying new things. And also I simply love a good search experience and so you know this wasn't rocket surgery for me, but what was new was an understanding that in order to get good at my job I had to be really good at bug hunting. And there are a couple of reasons for this. You know, I think that first of all it is the best way to become familiar with the systems that you're using. You know, and I've seen people walk in the door, you know, with a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge, and they come into contact with, you know, a custom content management system, and it's just like, you know, it's like touching a live wire. So I think it's really interesting to delve into a tool as it's been developed for a specific group of users at the same time as you're looking at the content itself and sort of being a librarian about it. But it's really important to also be that bug hunter. So also you can start to understand where the limitations of the system. What do we need to document really well. And also it's a chance to say, hey, you know, this is a thing that's busted. How bad is it. And oftentimes the developers will be like yeah it is busted and it's really difficult to fix. Is it really that big of a headache for your users and oftentimes you can find a way to jigger the system so that that need is met without having to create these, you know, elaborate technical solutions that can be very simply dealt with in another way. I love the fact that in my job, if something is broken or someone can't find something. It is always my turn. So if they can't find something because of a server time out. It's my turn. If someone can't find something because it's labeled wrong. It's my turn. If you know content hasn't been audited appropriately so old content is rising to the top because it's been popular forever and the thing that's new and shiny is is you know sitting in the bottom of the drawer. It's my turn to figure out how to fix that problem. And that may sound daunting but it's actually wonderful and it gives you an opportunity to build really rich rich relationships. You know there's nothing more satisfying to me than talking to a user who's having a problem but can articulate what the issue is, because they don't spend time in the software and being able to walk over to the technical team and saying okay this is the issue that they have. It involves these different components these are, you know I've tested it five ways from Sunday so I've verified that it is actually broken. This is something we need to fix. And if so how I think it's also really helpful when you're, you know, building these road maps and trying to develop additional features, because there's oftentimes a temptation to, you know, adopt. And this is from the business side in my experience pretty elaborate search experiences and you know they're like we're going to have this very very specific set of filters that people are going to use and will have, you know, comprehensive documentation and a user guide. And I love to bring people back to the reality of the paradox of the active user. People are going to jump into your software right away and start using it. And one of the first things that almost everybody is going to start doing almost immediately no matter what the software is, is try to find things. Now of course in an information environment that's really all you are doing is uniting people with the knowledge that they need. But I think it's really fun to put yourself in the position of a user and say okay, I am going to behave the way that I ought to, in a digital space which is if I cannot get the information that I need that kind of denigrates the quality of the experience and that makes me want to find another source of information. In addition to the inconvenience of not being able to navigate the system, clearly. So I think that, you know, articulating this is oftentimes very helpful for business use, you know, your business stakeholders to hear. I think one of the most valuable sources of information and input that you could have when you're trying to build information systems and environments is the projects and the problems and the pains of your passionate amateurs. We're talking about the people who will hack together a solution to a crummy problem that they have in the content management system, because they need to get their work done and they're always looking for new and exciting ways to get around, you know, the hurdles that they encounter. I think that also it gives you a sense of where people are willing to put their efforts. That gives you an additional sense of what is very valuable to them and what you need to be able to provide in terms of the user experience. In my team, that person is Brian. When Brian first came to us, he was really excited to bring together the analytics information and the information from our content management system to build these inventories and provide people with greater access to our content greater insight into what was working. But he wanted to take it further. He wanted to make it easy for people to submit requests for content to be published and to, you know, label their content appropriately and have it, you know, go into our project management system and then subsequently into publishing in a smooth and automated fashion. So he built a Google form that we can basically use to take in that information and put it into the software where we basically manage, you know, all of our tasks. He also used, you know, similarly, that data to send automated notifications to people who own content after three and after six months of that content being published, because it's super important to be able to say okay what's working what isn't.  And what I would propose to you is you want to find the people who are running the Raspberry Pi, unplug it, tip it over and shake it and you will find some really good future features. Because again the people who are willing to work hard and come up with creative solutions to certain problems are also the people who understand what the biggest problems are. And this is really important because you're going to be, you know, more than likely involved with a project where you have to build software that has been purchased by someone who doesn't necessarily know how software is designed. At this point in time 40% of the software and technology business, you know, technology buying power resides with the business units in different organizations. Now, that has its value because of course those are the organizations that know exactly what the need is and what their associates are struggling with. However, a lot of times, you know, there are software systems and software as a service in particular is kind of becoming ubiquitous for these, you know, knowledge management systems of all kinds. They need to be built in a way that was that is very thoughtful and very straightforward but also with a full understanding of what's going on under the hood. So if you, you know, sort of look at the totality of features that are available occasionally people who are purchasing software as a service will focus on, you know, the user interface or some of the different tools and configurations. But ultimately, you want to make sure that you can build a collection that has relationships that ties things together that basically each individual piece of content that you have functions as a star in a larger constellation. That superimposes additional meaning that basically helps tell your story and helps articulate to your users what you need to convey to them. So this is an example from our digital asset management system that we built in 2019 and have been, you know, adopted business wide at this point. And one of the biggest challenges that we had was establishing relationships between different pieces of content that were related. It was people would be looking for a white paper but they also wanted a digital banner ad or they wanted, you know, email template copy something similar. So we built the system to, you know, reflect those relationships and to build a very simple publishing mechanisms into the system. So it's easy to build those relationships and essentially again, curate the content in a way that's meaningful and a way that's flexible and can be reconfigured if necessary. All of that said, one of the great things about software as a service is that you can do all kinds of really interesting things with it. You know, you don't have to worry about hosting it. The vendor takes care of a lot of things people just go into their browsers and use the tool and that's all they need. A lot of these different solutions do employ, you know, machine learning, some AI sometimes natural language processing in order to sort of execute some of the search and recommendation engines. I will say that those are really cool features. I would not make a single decision based upon them. However, I think it's important to bear in mind that those things are relevant in the future. But more often than not when I'm looking at a knowledge management system or a CMS, what I'm looking at is something that is difficult to get the information out of it's difficult to change the labeling system and organizational structure. And ultimately, the teams are just not ready to use the amount of information that comes out of machine learning and AI algorithms. So I think it's important to, you know, consider that but I also think it's important to when you're working with people say we need to focus on the foundational basics. How do we ensure that, you know, when a new version of our software releases that everyone finds the most recent version of documentation and not something that was published two years ago. So in conclusion, I want to talk to you very briefly about the four things that I consider to be the deliverables of my job and how I get the information that I need to, you know, execute on those deliverables. So first, I have user interfaces for my, you know, content management software. I also have to deliver governance and flexibility. So essentially, building search experiences that have the tools, and also the informational flexibility to to accommodate new forms of knowledge into my collection. So, you know, talking with users and understanding the jobs that they have to get done is absolutely critical. Also talking with people about taxonomy and metadata is important. And it's something that, you know, again, maybe intimidating to people at first but usually when you explain it as a good labeling system, you will get people interested in it because people love to go from the vague to the specific, especially if it means that the things they put effort into writing or creating get used. Now, when you start to get more advanced and things are, you know, more sophisticated, working on application integration, bringing data from different applications together, and also managing and analyzing organization data becomes instrumental. So a lot of that work comes in understanding how different software systems connect. And so, you know, in our case, we're building a virtual data infrastructure that sort of collects all the information that's coming out of our systems and also makes it easily accessible. So little API connections can be built. You have loosely coupled applications throughout our environment. And then ultimately at the base layer, you can pull all of our enterprise data out and, you know, slice it, dice it, analyze it using some very sophisticated techniques. But again, that data access and integrity making sure that things are, you know, tidy and prioritize for truth is, I think, one of the primary things that I bring to the table and that my team works to achieve. Now this is, Truth Happens is one of the watch words at Red Hat, our CEO Paul Cormier, you know, is really fond of saying that we simply don't understand what the truth is going to be in the future. We only understand the truth that is now, but it is constantly happening. It's constantly evolving. This is why we participate in open source. We like things to go rapidly. We love innovation. We love learning where we're wrong and improving. And I think what, of course, one of my favorite quotes about the understanding of change and how truth and how, you know, authority and expertise can shift over time is the statement that Bill Gates made in the 80s about how 640K is about as much computing power as anyone could ever possibly want. We all know, especially Bill Gates knows that that is not the case. I appreciate your time very much at the very end of the day. I think that my job is rewarding, because I have an opportunity to work with software, work with people who work with software, and work on search experiences with an eye toward ensuring that, you know, we're communicating, not just in a comprehensive way, but in a meaningful, trustworthy way. I appreciate your time. I welcome you to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions. And I hope you have a magnificent day. Wow, that was a really well delivered talk. Thanks, Anna. Folks, if you have any questions, I think we just have about four minutes or so. To take questions. So if you do have questions, feel free to drop them in the chat. And Anna will be able to respond. And I, there's any questions and you'd like to, you'd like to come on video. You can just request to share your AV and then you can, you can talk with the participants. But if we don't have enough time, I guess we can move over to the breakout room. I will put a link as soon as I find it in the chat. And we can head over there to continue with this discussion.