Hey everyone! We're here to tell you all about the Summer Reading Club at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. Yes! Summer Reading Club is still on! We have something for everyone in all grades and at all reading levels. This video is for our reading superstars in grades 2, 3, 4, or 5 as of June 2022. For those of you in grade 6, you have a choice to make. You can either join the Summer Reading Club that you're about to hear about now, or you can join the Teen Reading Club. To find more information about the Teen Reading Club, you can go to wvml.ca.trc. Now, in just a few short minutes, we're going to tell you what Summer Reading Club is, why you should join, how to sign up, and some of our very favorite books that you can find at the library. Summer Reading Club challenges you to read 50 days over the summer for 15 minutes a day. And the best part is, you get to read whatever you want, whenever you want, and however you want. There are lots of reasons to join the Summer Reading Club besides getting to choose what to read. Number one, it's totally free. It doesn't cost you any money and you don't even need a library card to join. Number two, the trophy. The school with the highest number of kids registered will win a trophy. We have three trophies based on school size to keep things fair. Reason number three, prizes and programs. Summer Reading Club members get exclusive chances at prize draws and are the first to hear about upcoming Summer Reading Club programs, such as virtual reality, escape rooms, coding, and much more.  Reason number four, make your brain happy. Did you know that even when you read for fun you are getting smarter and giving yourself a head start for when you start school in September? Reason number five, the medal. Every kid who reads for at least 15 minutes a day for 50 days over the summer will earn their very own medal. It's true. Signing up for Summer Reading Club has never been easier. You don't even need to come into the library to register, though we'd be glad to see you. All you need to do is go to www.vml.ca-src, our Summer Reading Club webpage, and enter your first name, grade, school, email address, or parents' email address, and boom! You are registered. You'll receive a confirmation email with your Summer Reading Club starter kit within 48 hours. And then starting in July, you'll get a weekly email, our Summer Reading Club scoop, with book recommendations, program suggestions, and so much more. Need extra help registering? No problem. Just come on in and see us at the Youth Desk. Once you're signed up for the club, print out your WVMO reading tracker that you get in your SRC starter kit email. For every day that you read for at least 15 minutes, color in one circle. When you've colored in 50 circles at the end of the summer, you have completed Summer Reading Club. Don't have a printer? Pick up the reading tracker next time you're in the library. There's also lots to do at the library this summer. Check in at the Youth Desk each week to get a sticker and earn a chance to win a prize. Can't make it to the library every week? That's okay. Check in when you can and we will get you all caught up. There also might be some SRC goodies available too. I have a question. I don't live in West Vancouver, but I go to school here. Can I still join? Yes, you can. In fact, we want you to join the Summer Reading Club at the West Vancouver Memorial Library so that your school earns points to get that trophy. Hey, I have a question too. I'm going away for the summer and I won't be able to get to the library. Can I still join? That's awesome. I hope you enjoy your trip. Remember, you can always sign up for the Summer Reading Club at wvml.ca-src. You don't have to come into the library if you aren't able to. You can participate wherever you are. Wait! 50 books seems like way too many. I'm worried. Don't be worried. Remember, the Summer Reading Club is about the time you read, not the number of books you read. So some kids will be reading lots of short skinny books, while others will be reading just one thick book. And others will be reading something in between. You can also choose how you read. Get a digital library book on Libby. Libby by Overdrive is the name of the free app with library ebooks and e-audio books. You can use your smartphone, tablet, or computer to read or listen to books. If you haven't tried Libby yet, you have to. It's totally free and has thousands of popular titles. To get started, just search for Libby by Overdrive in any app store and use your library card to set up your account. We can also help you set up or help your parents set you up if they email, call, or visit us at the library. Listen to a playaway! These are self-contained audiobook players you can borrow from the library. We have lots of popular titles for all ages. Listen to a Wonder Book. These are awesome new books with an audiobook player built right into the book's cover. You can check them out like a regular book. Read to someone else or have them read to you. Read in any language or multiple languages. We have books in all these different languages that you can borrow from the library. Now, if I can get a drum roll, please. Here are our top picks for grades 2 to 5 this summer. Now, you don't have to read these books. You don't have to read library books at all. We just can't resist telling you about some of our favorites. Living with Viola by Rosanna Fung. If you enjoyed the movie Turning Red and the graphic novels Sisters, Smile, and Guts, then I would highly recommend this graphic novel for you. Livy is starting out a new school and is having a hard time fitting in. She gets so anxious that her anxiety turns into a life of its own, Viola. Viola makes Livy feel terrible, but when Livy makes new friends, makes dumplings with her family, and asks for help, Viola is slowly pushed away. Opie's Ghost by Justine Ireland. Opie has a special gift. She can see and talk to ghosts, and while this might seem like a pretty cool power to have, it's actually very overwhelming, especially when you have to keep it a secret. After her father's death, Opie and her mom move to Pittsburgh and become maids in this old Daffodil Manor. And you guessed it, Daffodil Manor is haunted because it's crawling with ghosts and they all want to talk to Opie, especially one ghost named Clara, who does not remember how she died. So now it's up to Opie to help Clara and solve the mystery of her death. This is a great pick for historical fiction fans. It thoughtfully explores racism in the 1920s and the legacies it leaves behind. So if you're looking for a good spine-tingling paranormal pick, check this one out. I love Kelly Yegnovels. I love how consistently courageous they are and her latest new from here is no exception. Knox and his two siblings are growing up in Hong Kong when the pandemic strikes. With their mother, they leave for America, but their father and dog have to stay behind in Hong Kong. This big-hearted novel deals with uncertainty and families who are separated, sibling rivalry, ADHD, and anti-Asian hate. But really, most of all, it's a novel about love. Operation Sisterhood by Illume Bemisola, Rudy Day Perkovich. Beau is hesitant towards change and enjoys structure. But when her mother marries into Bill's patchwork family, including a new sister and uncle, twin cousins, and a bunch of animals, she has to move into their brownstone, share a room with her new sister, and adjust to free schooling. This is a beautiful story about finding community and the space within it to be yourself. Calling all Magic Treehouse fans, if you're looking to start a new series that has adventure, mystery, history, and a pinch of magic, look no further than Word Travelers and the Taj Mahal Mystery by Raj Haldar. In this series starter, Eddie and MJ, Molly Jean, are besties, having a regularly scheduled sleepover when they're suddenly whisked away to India to look for a golden key. You can find all of these books in our library catalog. But please make sure to place a whole diet, even if there's a long waiting list, because that means we can order more copies. You can also find these books on our Lucky Day shelf. Lucky Day books are special extra copies of some of our most popular books at the library. You can only find them if you visit the library. Finding one means that you get to skip the wait list. It's like winning the lottery! So that's everything you need to know to join the Summer Reading Club. If you still have questions, visit www.wvml.ca.frc to learn more, or call us, email us, or even come visit us in the second floor of the youth department. We are grateful for your support. And visit us in the second floor of the youth department. We are pumped for an awesome Summer of Reading and can't wait for you to join the club. Remember, no matter what is going on, you always belong at the library, and we can't wait to see you. Happy reading!


Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to Thursday Theorists. Today we are talking about Skeleton and Crew. Yeah, this is Stephen King's second collection of short fiction after Night Shift. I'm going to go through and tell you my favorite stories and then we're going to go through and talk about the stories that tie into the Dark Tower, the King Universe. I'm going to leave a couple open for you, specifically for you to find, so please do that down there in the comments below. I don't really care if you cheat, but if you know the stuff off the top of your head, that'd be cool too. So first up, the Mist. The Mist, there's an element to the story, the creatures, the idea that things coming from another world. I like to think that the creatures in the Mist are the creatures that Roland and everybody comes across while they're on blame, the mono going across the wastelands. You look down, some of the creatures that they describe there seem to be the same type of creatures from the Mist. Also, you have the, what is it, not the show, I always forget these guys, the shop. The shop is mentioned in this, which is also mentioned in Fire Starter, and it's also mentioned in the Dark Tower series. So all that stuff ties together right there. Next up, we have one that I saw, somebody made a very, very loose connect with, but I like it. It's fun, it's fan theories, all this stuff is fan theories, but here there'd be tigers. Somebody, I saw online connected, here they'd be tigers with wind through the keyhole because of the tiger that's in wind through the keyhole. It might be the same tiger, but if you've actually read Wind Through the Keyhole, you know that that tiger is not the thing from that story, but I thought it was a fun little fan theory. Next up, we have Paranoid, a chant comes into play later on, but as far as that one, I mean it's just, it's a poem and Kings never been really good at poetry, I don't think. Let's see here, Nona, Nona happens, a part of Nona happens in Castle Rock, so that again ties all that together because I've attached Castle Rock to the Dark Tower Universe already and other ones that's had, I connected the body and nipple things, all that. And by the way, it's Wendy's button box that connects all of them, it's the hard connect for all of Castle Rock, which is funny because that one didn't come till later. Let's see here, and then we have, let's see, I'm going through this. The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is interesting because there's a lot of similarities between that story and the story N. There's also, there's also fan theories that say that the character in, I forgot the name of the story, in the Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, that's a hard one to remember. I always want to say writing the bullet and I know that's not it, but the Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, the same character from that, I think his name Reginald Reggie, something like that, wrote Paranoid a Chant, so that's interesting. But actually I did this backwards, that's how all the Dark Tower stuff ties in. Now we're going to go into the stories that I like and what I liked about them. I did it backwards this time, y'all fuss at me down there in the comment section. Okay, right off the bat, of course the Mist is great, I love the Mist. It's one of the best Stephen King adaptations, also the one with Thomas Jane. I couldn't get through the television series, I tried to watch it and I couldn't get through the first episode. I was just like, this is whatever. But I do enjoy it, I enjoy the way it starts with the storm and everything just building up and when they go out into the Mist, it's probably my favorite part, when they go to the, I think it's the store next door, I thought that was really cool. The monkey is another favorite of mine, for the same reason that chattering teeth, chattery teeth, can't remember, is a favorite of mine.  It's the reason why I like Joe Hill's collection so much, stories like pop art. I love the weird stuff, especially if it gets too big for the story kind of deal and I think the monkey did that. The jaunt is of course another favorite of mine. The jaunt is one of those rare short stories that actually terrifies me, not because I believe in other worlds or other dimensions or anything like that. It's just one of those existential stories that really makes you think and get you involved and it is a scary concept to be lost for that long, however long those people are lost for when they go on the jaunt. It's a lot of fun, that story doesn't overstay. It's welcome, he gets down and dirty straight to the point and it's one of the few very succinct and tight Stephen King short stories, I love it. Let's see here. The raft is another great one, although as far as experiences are concerned, I prefer to experience in what Creepshow 2, right? I think it's Creepshow 2. I prefer the I guess the film adaptation version of it more than I do the story just for experience wise. I like watching that more than I like reading the story. Y'all fussing me down there in the comments below. Let's see here. Beach World is cool. Every time Stephen King tries to do sci-fi like that, I think he nails it because he doesn't go too far into it, doesn't go full on explanation.  Enjoy it. And Beach World is one of those stories. It's fun. I mean there's nothing wrong with it. It's not that it's one of his greatest stories ever. It's just a fun little story. Survivor Type is another one. Somebody brought this up in the comments asking which one this was. And I think Cowboy, who I don't know, somebody beat me to the answer. So thank you for beating me to the answer. But Survivor Type is of course about a doctor who has to spoilers. I guess I could have said this at the beginning of the video.  It's just a really cool concept. Him being a doctor and him having, was it heroin or cocaine? It's something like that. I think it's heroin because there's a pain reliever. I've never done cocaine, so if it's a pain reliever, let me know down there in the comments below. You know how we did. Anyways, but heroin's definitely, definitely a pain reliever. But he uses that to chop off his foot and he just starts eating himself. It's a great story. Very, very disturbing. Oh, The Reach. Finally, at the end. And I always get this one confused with Castle Reach, Little Tall Island and all that. In fact, in the, I think the Castle Rock, Castle Talk episodes that we did, I discussed how The Reach happened on Little Tall Island. It doesn't happen on Little Tall Island.  It happens on Goat Island, but it's funny because Stephen King later on in his career created Little Tall Island and the passage between Little Tall Island and Castle Rock would freeze over and you'd be able to walk across. So I just always assumed that that was the case with The Reach, but it actually happens on Goat Island. But The Reach, I think, is one of those fantastic stories. And if you remember in the last Thursday Thursday I did, I talked about how the man in the black suit, how he won an award for that story. And I said they were, I felt like they were giving him an award because they had missed out on opportunities earlier in his career. And I think one of those cases is The Reach. It is a personal favorite of Stephen King's. I know that from watching interviews with him even to this day, he says it's still one of his favorite short stories and it's one of mine too. As far as this collection as a whole, hey I really went backwards with this one. I'm ending with what I thought of the whole collection. The collection as a whole is not one of my favorites. There are some terrific, terrific stories in here, but there's really no middle ground. So the stories are either really, really good in my opinion or they're really, really bad. I don't, I don't know what it is, but it just felt like some of these stories were way too forced and it felt like they were stories that were maybe written to maybe make ends meet back in the day that could be wrong, that could be wrong, but that's what they felt like. Stories that you just crank out so that you can get a paycheck. But that's how I feel about Skeleton Crew. How do you feel about Skeleton Crew? Did I mention any of your favorites? Did I not mention them? Do you want to fuss at me? Because the ones I didn't mention, I don't like at all. Leave your rage comments down there in the comments below. But until next time, I have an E, you have an U, this has been another Thursday Theorist Review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!


Let me ask you so so what do you what do you do to to to get people that I'm not just talking about members of any of that I'm talking about how do you get people stirred up in reading the word of God what what is one some of the things you try to do with God and it was a true power behind me so I said and again you can you can talk to people and try and encourage them but they have to come to the to their place in the story where they have to want God and you can't really force people they have to want it and he says you know he's an open door he said if you knock I'll open you know if you call he'll answer and some people they just don't want it they kind of want it but they don't want it better than what they want to sacrifice I didn't grow up in church that's that's that's definitely the way you have to look at it when we're going through this wilderness you have to be able to you know still teach people about God in a way to where they can still be of you know the Holy Spirit it's not bound the word of God is not bound and we know that you know we know that we know that people you just spoke on in the wilderness or wherever they may be even now you know because you know me you know I'm one that you worship God where you stand you know how I am about that I basically know that you know you've been called out that word church means Ecclesia it means to be called out from among them that's what that word means every time we read it in the Bible and I think that we have to you know far as the way the Holy Spirit moves um sorry the way the Holy Spirit moves we have to at at some point uh start helping our people to understand that they're not in a box right right see that's the whole thing for me they're not in a box they're they're they're basically you the Holy Spirit dwells within you leadership goes outside of the church walls and the thing we gotta understand is people that been putting these homes and and been forced a lot of them fear has struck in instead of faith and and so as leaders I don't look I don't put no boundaries but because you're a leader it it needs to be a word sent out to the people at all times that God is still real in the midst of their homes right because a lot of families are hurting right now because there's nobody talking to them they didn't even the kids was going a little bit more something when I was little you know the kids may go and the parents may not go because the parents is causing all kind of hell at home that's the only out the kids got a school in the church yeah or or now they can't go and so they stuck in the house with with parents who don't even understand them so how do we get through those doors the message the message how do we get that message to permeate those those those doors of these places where people are locked in those caves you understand I'm praying for them because this is happening right and that's that's something that God always had me looking at anyway right far as a way to get to people who don't have nothing don't have no way that's that's what I think Jesus meant when he said the harvest is truly plentiful and the labels of few when he was talking about going to Samaria and hanging out that weekend you know over there and and John so that's the part where we have to be creative yes enough to get to those to those people this is a great test that everyone not just us but everyone is going through because a lot of people are losing loved ones a lot of people have lost their jobs people who have faith or had faith a lot of people had faith and has lost it during this pandemic or is struggling tremendously because whether they're so used to going to this church home over here and they're not able there's an affair or whatever to go over there they're not realizing that I can find God even in the midst of where I am right now I need to really sit down and study this word and and have a revelation with him right here right now and not because there's a lot of people who do depend on a preacher a reverent and I realize that and that's the thing that I've always felt sad about you know I was raised in church back home and so forth so I was I've seen people always my pastor this or my preacher this and my so forth and not make you feel like I can get this on my own they don't read the word is what she trying to understand what I mean they don't study they go and they listen to whatever he tells them and then that's it they'll take it and run with it but not study it for themselves and get that revelation but I can understand why in some form because as a child if you don't study and read or even as an adult if you don't study and read for yourself you're not going to gain understanding you're just going to look for what somebody tells you right and that's it so whenever you pick it up to try to understand yourself a lot of times it feels like gibberish because you don't understand it so you tend to look for somebody to tell you what it is instead of trying to get it yourself or learn how to understand it yourself I don't I think I think it takes spending time with God it does I don't I don't think I think the gibberish part come because you're not letting go of things that's pretty much holding you back in the flesh are we read about that the other day yeah I have to really you know I really don't think yeah I don't think I think that that gibberish thing is an excuse I'm being real with you if you can read every other book you can read the word of God but you choose to take interest in what you want to take interest in that's what I feel because you have to let things go in order to grow back to that why I was saying earlier yeah you don't have a strong enough why yeah yeah yeah what let me ask you so so what do you what do you do to to to get people that I'm not just talking about members of any of that I'm talking about how do you get people stirred up in reading the word of God what what is one some of the things you try to do with God and that's a true power behind me so and again you can you can talk to people and try and encourage them but they have to come to the to their place in the story where they have to want God and you can't really force people they have to want it and he says you know he's an open door he said if you knock I'll open you know if you call he'll answer and some people they just don't want it they kind of want it but they don't want it better than what they want to sacrifice I didn't grow up in church you're right I'm gonna flip this a little bit so what about unjust leadership that because they make the ones who try to do right look bad and the bible talks about false prophecies so we can't just talk about this side here and not leave that side open right you know or talk about that the bible says woe going to the man to go say God said and he ain't said nothing yeah in the book of Ezekiel right and it also talks about in a way to where it talks about that in the last days there's going to be false prophets to step up and I believe that we're in those times a lot of times in the way that I see the activity today so in in in in hindsight looking back in your your in your career and you being in this thing have you um ever ran across a place where you had to educate one on what was really real with God yeah versus what what somebody had portrayed God to be when it was falseism daily yeah when it was falseism because you don't hear talk about that right right everybody want to talk about the good parts but they don't want to talk about the the part where where issues come up whether it be Paul and Barnabas decide they're gonna part ways these things happen yes or whether it be human as or whoever Paul talking about because he those names out there he had issues with heresies and all this stuff so we know that they had issues but for some reason in today's society we try to cover ours up in a way to where it's not talked about right and everybody that's going and everybody that's doing and saying that Jesus is Lord is is really following Christ but we know the word says uh said for some of false apostles transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ and no marvel for Satan himself is transforming to an angel of light therefore there's no great thing if his ministers be transformed also so we know this is happening are we addressing it are we we see it do we you know do we react and do the things that it take to to to help the people i'm not talking about them and again it's hard to address uh all issues with all ministers this pandemic itself is addressing so much is addressing and listen even when we talk about uh god and and in in the in the old testament that the priest had to wear a robe e-file yeah and and they had yes but they had bells they had bells that's right on the bottom of the bells and plumb grants that's right they tied a rope around that's right when he was going to hold the hold and he would say i'm good i'm good yeah yeah yeah but we found out if he was good that's right that's right that's right that's right so you okay now i see where you're going because judgment becomes a thing that yes they will have to answer to what they what they do i get it each individual have to answer to god and themselves a lot of times people always say well this person this person we blame everybody else but ourselves yes but at the end of the day when judgment come we have to stand up in front of him or ourselves and account for everything that we've done and at that point you can say well god well i had a good heart i had a distance that we know what we're we're supposed to do from what we shouldn't be doing right because he left the holy ghost to help lead us yes but jesus say many going to come in that day yes see see it's going to be a mini coming in days then we cast out demons in your name then we heal the sick in your name we did some things that looked like we was doing the things that people that was kicking it with you was doing listen even in the he said in the end times there'll be a great a falling away correct that's right that's what we're going through is a great falling away if you don't have a strong enough why it's easy when hard times difficult times times we don't understand times that cause maybe some conflict or yeah uneasiness suggest yeah yeah yeah we on boss talk one-on-one


Hi, I'm Rainier Moser. I am the software development manager for Rackspace's Compute Deploy infrastructure team. It's a new team that we just started up this month after learning some really interesting lessons over the last year. I've been with Rackspace for just over a year. Before that, I spent 10 years as a government contractor. Everybody's got to earn a living. And I'm here to tell you the story of our production deployment of OpenStack. Since we launched in August of 2012, we've learned a lot of things. And one of my favorite quotes is this one by Teddy Roosevelt called The Man in the Arena. If you have a chance to look it up on the internet, I highly recommend it. It basically is at the end, basically, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. Yesterday during the talk that Rick Lopez gave regarding deploying from OpenStack trunk and why we do it and what we gain from it, somebody asked, are you comfortable deploying from trunk? As the director of QE, are you confident? And he said no. And I piped, but we do it anyway. And so that's why, I think, because everybody else in this room, everybody in our community, needs somebody to be the first ones. And we are more than willing to be the first ones. And it's really, really hard. And I'm here to say that while we have big plans and we will get there and we will do it, it is one of the hardest things I have ever seen. And I do believe in magic, because I think that's, sometimes it's the only way we pull things off. So as we go on, let's talk about what at scale means. For rack space, at scale means our global cloud, which is multi-country right now, US and UK, with more coming in the next year, more regions coming in the next year. We have hundreds of thousands, we will have hundreds of thousands of hypervisors at that level. At the regional level, we're going to have tens of thousands of hypervisors, physical infrastructure that we have to manage and all of the virtual appliances and nodes that are on those physical machines. We come down into the cell and we have cells that we use to manage our scaling and to make it easier to roll out new capacity when customers run out. And then each of those cells have hundreds of hypervisors. So it all just kind of rolls up. And for us, that's what at scale means. We're not talking about a hundred or a thousand. We're talking about tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. And that's really the problem that we're trying to solve. We're not at that scale yet, but we know that's what we're getting. And we're trying to make sure we have the infrastructure in place so that we can get there and bring everybody else with us. So our basic release strategy, it sounds so simple when I finally realized, oh my gosh, we take code from OpenStack, we put some of our own modifications to make it work with our internal billing systems and some of the other unique things that we have in our deployment. We package it up, we deploy it to everywhere and execute the code. And then we verify that it works. It sounds so simple. It's not. So here is our first scaling hurdle that we actually conquered this year, happily to say. We started August 2012. Our bar, the bar columns are internal code releases. This is not OpenStack trunk. That's a completely different pattern. We basically, right after we launched, we did a whole bunch of small releases, fine tuning, tweaking configurations. Oh, it always works on my machine, but now there's customers using it. So of course it breaks. We did a lot of those. Then we got into a really good pattern, September through November, where we were releasing about three times a month, almost every week with the week off. And it took about two hours. We were doing it after hours, which is an optimal, but various things in the architecture right now required us to do it to minimize customer impact. And in October, at the last design summit, we started talking about the need to build a better deploy mechanism because we knew our current process was what we were going to outstrip it. We outstripped it in about December, which is where on the diagram here, where our capacity, which is just showing the growth, the growth trend, it got to the point where it took six hours, four to six hours to just push new OpenStack code out. There were various reasons for that and it wasn't necessarily because of the OpenStack code itself, but because of the deploy architecture that we had. We used Debian packages with a master puppet in each region and at some point, there were too many nodes for the puppet master to keep up with and we would have to wait hours for it to drain. The deploy team said, we're not doing this again. We did it twice in December, it took forever. We're not doing this again. In January, we did it one more time. They said they would not do it again and in January, they did it one more time because Rackspace is fanatical and that's how fanaticism works in product. It took more than six hours, it was miserable. I couldn't even stay up for the whole entire night and we had guys having to take shifts, trying to just wait and make sure just to verify that it was working. It wasn't that it was broken, it was just we couldn't verify that it was working. And we finally accepted as a company that we needed to stop doing code releases, focus on the deploy mechanism and be able to tell a better story. So that's what we did. Up until this point, we had been deploying from Trunk every two weeks and so we said, we're just gonna stop. We're gonna stop pulling in new code and stop focusing on making it deployable and work on our internal, the internal process which we're sharing with you today. We switched from Debian packaging to virtual environments. Each project, Nova, Quantum or Networks or whatever they're calling it now has its own virtual environment that then packages together into a tar ball that we distribute to all of the nodes using Torrent. We use the libTorrent library currently. We still use PSSH for fact files for all of the individual passwords and all of the stuff that Puppet needs because Puppet is still our configuration management system and we use mCollective for actions to go tell it to go do this, go do whatever this is. And then our execution, we moved from the Puppet Master centralization to Masterless Puppet running on each of the individual nodes. And it worked great. We learned some things along the way. We may have taken the cloud down for like two minutes at one point, but we fixed it. Just learning as we go, understanding scale and going on. And so are there any questions right now about the deploy mechanism? Back in the back, did you have a question? Okay. Yes, sir. No, and the question is is when it was taking four to six hours, was the cloud down? When we do a deploy right now because of the way OpenStack is architected and specifically the way the services go, there's an API dip whenever the API nodes have to be restarted and that it's gonna depend on how long it takes, but it's usually not more than a few, not more than about 60 seconds that the API will dip down. And then the other really bad, so it's a bad customer experience. The customer gets a 500 error when they try to hit during that restart period. The other issue that a customer might run into and why we do them in the middle of the night for most of the world is that when you restart a service like Glance or Nova, if a customer's in the middle of doing something, if they're in the middle of a resize or a snapshot, the way those services work, it forgets when it comes back up. And so it goes to error and either they have to start over again or somebody in support operations has to go in and clean it up. Again, it's just a bad experience, but the cloud was not down during that time. Right now, no, I know that's planned in migration and those are talks that are going on in the design sessions, but right now that's just not the reality of the way things are architected as far as I understand. But that is the way we wanna go. We would love to be able to just say, you know what, we're gonna update this compute and we're gonna move everything over here and it'll be great. And then, but right now you can't do that without. Pardon? Yes, they won't be able to make calls to the API potentially and they may have an instance or an action go to error. Those are the impacts. Not for the six hours. It's for whenever that service restarts, for that 30 second service restart. The, we're talking about upgrading with all of this deploy about the infrastructure that runs the cloud, the control plane, the Nova services. The instance is still sitting there happily and as long as there is a small chance that if you're in the middle of resizing that something, you could go to error, you could have a problem. But if you're just, if you've got a customer hitting your web server and your web server is on the public cloud, you're not even gonna know what's, none of this is going to impact you. Yeah, so it's just if you're provisioning new stuff. Yes sir. Right now Swift, I believe we need to use Swift for that and we're not using that, although we have talked about doing that. Swift is looking at implementing some torrenting. Right now this is off of a local server that we call payload or payload server that is our seed node for the bit torrent. All right, so we feel like we have a pretty good handle on our deploy mechanism. We can, we just did a deployment to London last week before coming here and we finished it from seeding out the nodes to verifying through tests and builds in under an hour, which was really great, that was just awesome. And but we had another hurdle and that was actually catching up to trunk. We had gone about two months before we deployed without deploying trunk and there were a lot of changes. So the code we finally pushed out, which we tagged as 152 v152 just to try to keep track of it internally was from February 28th. So it was just past the Grizzly feature freeze and a lot had changed in two months since the beginning of January. The cells code was in. There were some really big migrations on the database in there. So we decided to take it slowly. We were still hoping to catch up to trunk, but we weren't going to rush this. And so we let it bake in our pre-prod environment for a couple of weeks. We got ready for the database migrations and then we deployed the code at the beginning of April and database traffic increased 10 times. And that's what the graph shows you was the increase of the database throughput in one of our data centers, our smallest data center actually. And there was some panic, I have to say. Nobody else had deployed anything from Grizzly really to a production scale environment. So this was not, this hadn't been seen yet. We have some really amazing engineers and software developers in the community from lots of different companies. So we had rackers and IBMers and Red Hatters and HPers looking through the code, figuring out what on earth is going on. And they felt in their gut that it was from the periodic tasks that run periodically to do things like auto-confirm resizes. So if a customer doesn't auto-confirm the resize within 24 hours, it says go ahead and confirm it, get rid of the source VM, keep the destination VM. Same thing with rescue, things like that.  I don't remember what the third one was and I realized I meant to look that up in case somebody asked. And we had the drop that you see at number three. So that was part of it, but not all of it. And so they continued to work, they being all of the community, lots of traffic on the mailing list, lots of stuff in IRC, talking, sharing codes, 20 patches, reviews, patch sets on the code review. And we redeployed 152 with the community fixes and that's where we got down to four, which we knew there was gonna be some database increase, but very minor, like that's what we were expecting to see. And in that particular case, what caused all of this was a change in how the instance type table was being managed. When you say that your instance type is a flavor one and you wanna come down six months later, your product people wanna change and say what a flavor one is. Let's say we're not gonna have a 512 instance, we wanna have just one gigabyte as our smallest one and that's gonna be flavor one. If you were to change that in the instance type table, it would break all of the history of all of your instances. So they decided in the community, it seems like a really great idea to put all of those 10 columns in the instance type table into the metadata table as key value pairs, column name, value, column name, value. So for every instance, it increased the number of rows 10 times. Then on those periodic instance, those periodic tasks, there were some joins that were happening, inner joins against that metadata table that up until now had just been returning one row for every instance. Now suddenly it's returning 10 times as many rows. Those periodic tasks run as frequently as every minute and it was just killing the database traffic between the database and the compute nodes. And then every compute node is querying for that every minute to see who do I have anything to resize. So the code fix was, it sounds, again, it sounds simple. They took out the inner joins. They made it into two queries. They created a path so that you could use it either smaller number of queries or smaller data set is basically from my understanding, the code path. So we deployed that right before we came here and now I'm here telling you the story of where we learned. Last summit we were able to come here and say we're already on Havana. We're already pulling from the next, from the next version of trunk that's been opened. We're already pulling in those blueprints and looking at that code. And this time we're not able to say that. We're not able to say that we're on Grizzly when we're at the last one. Sorry, at Folsom we were on Grizzly. We're not able to say we're on Havana right now. And this is why we had to stop. We had to resolve this. Upside, anybody else that's going to pull down Grizzly Release Candidate, this has all been ported into it. So hopefully you guys will have fewer pain points when you actually go to use this. There's still some big database migrations. Don't get me wrong. But hopefully they're improved and less impactful. So from my final slide here, I'd like to just kind of start the conversation with the community at large of how can we adapt for scale issues? Because we're not the only large-scale deployer. HP has a large-scale deployment. And we've been talking with Monty Taylor from the infrastructure team and Robert Collins who's working on the Nova Bear Metal project about how we can take what they're doing and adapt it to our environment and start to use that. We're figuring out how to contribute to those code bases. We do know we need more testing and more environment options. Just the test coverage in general. Moving more tests upstream into the actual open stack area so people can know, hey, by the way, this code change might break rack space, might break HP, might break a large-scale public cloud deployment. And if you get to that level, then it will break you too, most likely. We're working on internally and we don't have anything to show yet, still conceptually, some personal dev environment options whereby we take some excess hypervisor capacity that's been set aside for development and QA and allow for people to make reservations, reserve for hypervisors, hook it up to networks, hook it up to the auth system, see how it works. Take your code that you've been working in DevStack, that passes the unit tests, passes those things, put it into something that looks like your production environment and make sure it doesn't break anything. So that's something that we're working on and I can't wait to have something where it's about a two-week old project so there's not much to show for it just yet. And then the other one is to simulate compute numbers or node numbers on a limited number of hardware. Right now, we don't have a couple thousand hypervisors sitting around to recreate the compute nodes and all of that stuff. So we're looking for ways to tackle that and simulate that load because this particular issue we didn't find until we had thousands of compute nodes talking to the databases, sending traffic back and forth and pulling every minute. On a couple hundred nodes, it wasn't a problem. And we even tried to look at the data, we tried to look at the traffic and we could not see the traffic. There was just not even enough of an incremental difference. The database and code management, the DB migration pattern I think is one of the biggest conversations started around here and from what I understand, they're gonna start with Glance. Yay! Glance has already got some work done towards that so they're actually gonna start looking at implementing a common DB migration pattern so that it's not all or nothing, we have options. The DB calls with a database the size of six million rows instead of something that's 60 rows would be really nice to think about. I have a database background so I know it's really easy to write something that works great for a few hundred rows and then forget that when you get into production it doesn't scale and then a code optimization path for the large data sets so you can maybe choose between having a smaller number of queries versus smallest data set returned. There are times when you want one over the other depending on the application and it would be awesome to see stuff like that. One thing we learned in the processing community is that we have to do everything we can to stay close to trunk. It's hard but over the last six months getting off of trunk was harder. Not knowing what we were gonna get after two months, after three months, it was just scary but at the same time it would be really, really great to have a continuously deployable trunk to try to introduce the concept of or the mindset of my commit to this blueprint could be consumed immediately so leave it in a state that's usable. May not be completed but just that isn't going to have a dependency, things like feature flags, all those things that people use in the web world that Facebook uses, that Etsy uses, that all those other things to bring some of those patterns in here. So I think I have time for questions if you wanna stay around. I'm just really glad to have the opportunity to share this story with you all and I'll be glad to, I can't wait to come back in a few months and tell you where we are. So any questions? Yes. We cannot do zero down time compute upgrades at this point. There's actually, there was a conversation yesterday about how to do zero down time service upgrades. It's an architectural limitation of open stack right now that is I think will be addressed in this cycle or it will be done to be addressed in this cycle. Yes. There is an actual randomizer that runs and even with the randomizer going, it was still overwhelming the database, the database traffic. That was why we were like, and there was one more migration after that we found later was running every 10 minutes and we're like, what is that? Cause there's randomization. There's randomization down to the minute. Why is this still happening? And it's a power seek, I think. Power status seek. And that's, they're fixing that right now. So in submitting and they're being the community. So I think you had a question, sir. This man right here, he's the operations manager. And we just started having that conversation really. Now that the emergency fires are out and we finally have been able to bring this conversation to the community, that's something that I hope that he's already talking with and that we want it to be a community conversation. We don't wanna just go fix it for ourselves. We wanna fix it with everybody. So yeah, so there was a question over here. Yes, sir. I don't do networks. I don't, I'm sorry.  Yes, sir. That's what we do right now. We do go first. We go with our smallest. So that if there is something like this that happens. That's how, even when we had this 10 times increase. We went to London first so we can do it in their middle of the night, which is our daytime. Customers didn't know what was going on. It wasn't impacting them. Their requests were still going through. Their traffic was still going through. So that's one of the, we do do that. We do, we generally try to do one region at a time when we're doing a big upgrade like that. Any more? Yes, sir. Right now we don't have an explicit effort going on. So if you have ideas, you know, put it out on the dev mailing list. Go out. I mean, we have really hard problems to solve and we need as many brains as we can solving them. So if you do have ideas, that would be great. There was another one back in that corner. Another hand. Yes, sir. Yes. You're welcome. You're welcome. I wish we could have done it sooner. I wish we could have done it closer to the actual closer, but found it sooner. So, and we'll keep doing it. Right now we're planning on keeping on, keeping on doing that. You can also remember when we come up with blood and dust on our face to say, yeah, that was hard, now get back in there. That's always helpful. So, all right, are there any more questions? Yes, sir. What's he talking about, Brian? I would assume something like, talk about. So, that could be like a whole other 40 minute conversation where we talk about our INOVA implementation where we use a cloud to run our public cloud, which essentially makes our cloud a cloud application.  So, even when we're telling our customers, think about it like the cloud. Think about it like the cloud. We're also going through that learning curve as well in our operations and our infrastructure team. We're like, oh, wait, we're a cloud. Our control plane is on a cloud. So, and yeah, that's a whole other conversation. Alrighty, any more? Yes. Pardon? All of our regions have over six cells. So, a cell is between 200 and 600 nodes. So, I mean, that's a small scale deployment. And we anticipate by the end of the year or very quickly to bring on capacity for all of our regions to have more than a dozen cells. So, even our small data center is well over 1,000 individual hypervisors with several thousand nodes, individual nodes. Yes. Instac doesn't believe in rolling back. It makes our release managers really, really nervous. So, our strategy is to bully on through until we figure it out. Yeah, and that is, and cry a lot and tell support, we're really sorry, because they are the ones that are gonna get all the angry phone calls. That has never happened, just in case you're wondering. We've had six hour nights bleary eyed with not enough alcohol, but we've never actually had to do that. Yeah, no, when you're expecting it to take two, and you don't start until 11 p.m. because you're on the East Coast, yeah, you cry. And there is no way to roll back really easily, and you know you have to keep going forward. Yeah, so those are the problems that my team is working on because right now we're the ones that are up in, up at the middle of the night, why didn't the deploy work, along with his team, the operations team. So, I call them operations plus because they're way more than what you would normally say, what you normally think of. Any more, I've got 10 minutes left. Or y'all can go grab more coffee, see if there's candy left. All right, thank you all so much, y'all have a great rest of your trip.


I am Tim Cole from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and my job this morning is to briefly introduce and provide context for the findings that Katrina and Harriet will present. They'll be briefing you on the user research outcomes from two projects involving digitized special collections hosted at the University of Illinois Library. This is early research, a first step in investigating among other questions, the question posed in our session title, but it's just a first step. We will not offer a definitive answer today to the question we pose, more research we feel is needed, but our findings should be taken in context and alongside similar research from elsewhere. First things first, before diving into what we did, let me begin by acknowledging the generous support of those who sponsored our research, especially the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Unities, and the DFG, the German National Research Foundation. My way of context, let me begin by summarizing our assumptions and some of the limitations of our work. Given the early state of our research, the community's research, into these questions of the benefits of linked data for end users, we took our initial stab, a small-scale case study approach, looking specifically at the initial reactions of domain scholars and graduate students to LOD-based enhancements of three established web-accessible digitized special collections hosted at Illinois. While this limited our ability to generalize our findings, the approach gives us access to advanced users, involved content, especially rich in links, provided a scope in keeping with our resources, and yielded data points that we feel can be used in combination with results from similar studies, both larger and smaller, to begin getting a clearer understanding of the potential near-term benefits for end users of LOD. More about these three collections that we used in just a moment. Those of you who may remember seeing the Gartner New Technology Hype Cycle, shown here from about 15 years ago, are aware that it's not really a cycle, nor is it all that represented in detail of how technologies in general are received. Rather, it's an exaggeration, a caricature, if you will, of what happens when the next new technology comes along. But like most caricatures, there is an underlying grant of truth. It's very easy by turns to both overestimate and then underestimate the potential impact of linked open data in libraries. To avoid this, the key we felt in grounding our assessment and initial evaluation was to ground our initial evaluation in practical experience. As we begin the introducing LOD-based features and functions and services into certain of our digitized special collections, we chose to focus on assessing the potential benefits of connectedness. There are many aspects of linked open data. These are the ones that we thought to focus on. For example, how could we use linked open data models and services to link to context about our resources, and importantly, to the person, place, and event entities associated with our resources in order to get more information about those entities. We also wanted to explore the ways LOD services might facilitate the use of distributed authorities and analysis of simple patterns of connection surfaced by media from these collections. Our mental model of user experience also needs to be explained to provide important context for understanding our findings. User research, as we are discussing today, is about more than just interface design. It's about more than just helping the naive user navigate a library online catalog. Not that it's unimportant, but in this case we wanted to look at more advanced uses and users, especially when it comes to digitized special collections, which are focused on that kind of audience. We must understand the information, seeking experiences and needs of domain scholars and students. We must understand how linked open data can change the value proposition of these resources. To do this, we need to consider the totality of the user experience as illustrated in the Peter Marvel's user experience, Honeycomb, shown here. You can build a clean, easy to understand interface, but the resources and functionalities behind an interface are not useful, valuable, or of interest to the researcher. It won't matter for that audience. So our goal is to understand how to make our collections more useful to scholars, helps scholars engage with our collections, helps scholars connect our collections to other content of interest to them. Intuitively, LOD seems well suited to do this, but is it? Do we know how to use LOD effectively to do this? So how do we go about investigating this? Do we know how to research? What kind of methods do we use? As those of you who don't use the research know, it's typically not enough to simply ask scholars what LOD-based features and functions they want in the abstract. You need to give them concrete. You need to be concrete, give them something to react to, something to build from. Harry and Katrina will go into more detail, but we rely in general in these studies, primarily on semi-structured interviews and wire frames, and usability testing, one-on-one usability testing to gather feedback from scholars. Briefly, a couple of words about the collections, and again, Katrina and Harry will flesh it out a little more. The Molley Collection, which is the theater throwing arts collection, includes more than 4,000 digitized set in costume designs created by the Molley Group that was active in New York and England during the middle of the last century. We identified person, theater, and play that is mentioned in the descriptions of these set designs and costumes. And then we tied these to other services such as VIAF, Wikipedia, and other web-related resources. Activating these links in real time as we build search result displays allows us to generate sidebars and knowledge cards for context and include links that users can use to get even more context about the actors, directors, plays, and so on. The Colbe Proust Archive is a very different kind of collection. It's comprised of the research notes of the late Philip Colbe, the faculty member of Illinois, who edited the 20-some volumes of Proust's correspondence, and spent about 40 years researching the life and times of Marcel Proust. This data was particularly rich in person and bibliographicalities. Many of the people were not authors, so VIAF was a little bit less useful, but there were other sources in the web that were very useful. And these personalities co-locate individuals from the most prominent families of Paris during Proust's lifetime. So we experimented as an initial stab at this with civil visualizations as these social networks in order to gauge whether our researchers thought such visualizations might be of interest or might suggest ideas for more sophisticated analyses and visualizations. And then finally, Harry will talk about Elmeticon Ly, which is essentially a virtual library of digitized album books from six major rarebook collections in the U.S. and Europe. Elmeticon provides integrated search, discovery, and access to 1400 digitized books and includes descriptions of more than 33,000 individual emblems from within those books. Here again, we mind VIAF in real time to provide information about personalities the emblem authors, for example, associate with digitized books. But also because emblem studies community agreed more than 20 years ago on subject indexing using the icon class Tharis, we were able to use icon class LLD services to offer icon class search engine browsing and any of the four languages supported by that service. To be clear, we do not maintain a copy of icon class locally. All searching and browsing of icon class is done against copy of icon class maintained in the Netherlands and then applied against our database, which simply has the numeric codes for the emblems that we have in our collection, that we index our collection. So that concludes my introduction. I'll now turn it over to Katrina, who will describe research findings and possible next steps based on her work. And let's find the right presentation. And you want to find the one for Katrina? It should be opened down the bottom there somewhere. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. I'm Katrina Fenland. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Maryland iSchool. But I'm a recent transplant from the University of Illinois where I worked with Tim and Harriet on these kinds of projects. So I'm going to dive into an Andrew W. Mellon funded project. That was about adding linked data to a couple of special collections and then evaluating potential benefits for users of the features that are based on linked data in those collections. So I'll start. I'll give you an overview of how we did the study. And then I'll talk about the three features we added. And then I'll go into our outcomes. So both their reactions to specific features and also some of the more general takeaways about potential benefits of linked data. Tim went over our test collections, the Motley Collection of Theater and Costume Design, and the Cole-Pruist Archive. We did this study in two phases. So the first phase was about conducting a series of interviews to set a benchmark for a second phase evaluation. So the first phase done before we had added any linked data to the collections, just a benchmark evaluation of our two test collections. Then we spent some time adding linked data, features based on linked data to the collections. And in phase two, conducted more interviews to get a sense of their reactions to the enhancements that we'd made. So 10 interviews in the first phase with humanities researchers, most of them grad students, in an array of fields, theater, history, art history, medieval studies, literature, languages, and then implementing linked data and features based on it. And in phase two, 10 more interviews with researchers to get a sense of their reactions to the features. But we also made an emphasis in the second phase on trying to draw out their practices, their research processes, especially those that might benefit from linked data. So asking them about how they make connections among primary sources and external sources, secondary sources, how they navigate among distributed collections. So really trying to draw out their processes in addition to their reactions to the features that we had added. So I'll talk about what we found out. I'm going to start by walking through the three features we added and the scholars' reactions to those features. And then I'll come back to more abstract claims about potential benefits of linked data for collections. But the overarching theme here that's kind of casting its shadow on everything that I'm going to talk about as an outcome is that our participants were really enthusiastic about the features based on linked data. But their enthusiasm was qualified in really different ways by contextual factors that really need more investigation. So the three features that we added. We enhanced item level metadata records with contextual information about entities that we found in the records. We enhanced search results with a knowledge panel that we generated based on linked data in response to users' queries. And we added an interactive visualization of relationships in the Cold Pruised Archive. So I'll walk through each of these. Here we have the item record enhanced with information about contextual entities found in the item record. And so that context is added in two places, both in links within the record itself and also in the sort of sidebar that takes snippets of information drawn from external resources through linked data about entities that are found in the record. Here's a zoomed in view of one of those snippets. So drawing on external resources like Wikipedia and authority files and IMDB to sort of flesh out the record with contextual information. What did scholars think about this feature? So in terms of cons, they found the information we added, the links that we added, the contextual information we added to be underspecialized for their research needs. So they want less general, more particular kinds of connection and information. But they want it specific to their needs as researchers and where they are in their research process. However, they liked this kind of thin layer of context, especially if they were early in a research process still kind of doing the exploratory work of figuring out what's even out there that can support their inquiry. So they liked this for early phase research. They also like it for getting information about entities or concepts that they consider peripheral to their immediate information need. Of course, that's a really subjective thing. So figuring out which things should be contextualized is kind of a challenge. Okay, second feature we added. So this was added to the presentation of search results in response to queries. This is a dynamically generated knowledge panel. Might be familiar to you from your Google searching. So they've done a search for a term, Thomas Ducker. They get the results related to Thomas Ducker at a list as usual. But they also see this knowledge panel that offers more contextual information about entities related to Thomas Ducker that have been derived from or inferred from linked data. Okay, what did they think about this? So in terms of contextualizing terms they were searching, they found this kind of knowledge panel a little less useful because most of the time when scholars are doing a search for an entity, for primary sources about a given entity, they know a fair amount about the entity already. So the sort of, again, the sort of shallow contextual information about this entity and related entities was less useful to them. But what they liked it for was for instant disambiguation of their search terms so they knew that what they were finding was what they were searching for. The person they were finding was the person whose name they had searched. They also really liked it. This was interesting to me. They liked this. They expected this to give them an overview not of sort of general state of knowledge about Thomas Ducker on the web and people connected to Thomas Ducker. They wanted that to be an indicator of what our collection held about Thomas Ducker. So the knowledge panel as a way of orienting them to the scope and contents of the collection relative to their specific information need. This is interesting because we know from decades of user research that historians and other scholars always start their search process by doing exploratory searches to feel out what's in a collection. And this offers an effective way to kind of tailor the presentation of the scope of the collection to them based on link data. Okay, third feature that we added. This one a little more analytic and interpretive. So this is an interactive visualization of relationships among entities in the Cold Proust archive. So interactive in the sense that scholars can adjust this timeline to see the relationships at different periods of time. They can pull out individual relationships, click on notes to learn about the families and the people that are connected to each other. They can also annotate this graph so they can add notes, two nodes into relationships about their interpretation of what's happening in this graph. So what did scholars think of this? This was the feature they were most enthusiastic about. They thought it was useful for a number of things. First as an entry point into the collection. So an alternative to searching directly for primary sources. They wanted the nodes to link back to the primary sources that they had been derived from. So they could use this as the entry point. They were also interested in using it as a hub for collaborating with each other. So having sort of a limited audience for this work but their peers so they could communicate through the annotation process with one another. And we found that they liked this because it offered new opportunities for analysis. This kind of graph allows them to pursue lines of inquiry that otherwise would be impossible given the current representation of the collection. Now this is interesting to me because we've often thought so traditional conception of collections is as sort of raw information for them. The responsibility, the duty of interpretation analysis is squarely on the shoulders of the user. But here we found that they were very happily sort of asking us to do some level of analysis that they could get a better start on their works. They wanted us to do some interpretation for them. So overall we find our participants were hungry for new modes of access to collections. Even collections that they were very familiar with are new well. They wanted more connections across collections to be accomplished through, that's what they expected the links in the link data to lead to more related collections elsewhere on the web. More contextual information for primary sources, for search results, also for collections as a whole, and more links and analytic features. So the takeaways from this study, more contextual information is better about different levels here. So primary sources, entities within primary sources, the collection as a whole, especially if that contextual information is linked and actionable for the scholars. But it's qualified. There's a great deal of variation among exactly what kinds of context people wanna see. And we've known for years that there's variation among disciplines. But this study really highlighted for us how much variation there is based on more subtle things. The phase of research that a scholar is at, so whether they are just starting out or whether they are deep into a book project, the immediate context of the current search, so what they're actually doing on a given day matters too for what kinds of contextual information they wanna see presented to them along with the primary sources. So in an ideal world, the presentation of contextual information would be really responsive to where they are, who they are and their prior knowledge and their progression through their own research. So what they see surrounding the sources they're searching for on one day might differ as they progress through their own understanding of what's happening in a collection. This study confronted some really familiar limitations for user studies in these kinds of cultural collections. The scale necessarily small and local because of the methods we used and the scale for the project. It's always hard to identify a research community that's using a collection so that they don't have to sort of imaginatively put themselves in other shoes as they're responding to the collection, right? So trying to identify a community when the collection itself is a niche collection that really caters to a very specialized, highly distributed international audience. So hard to get reactions from those users. And of course these studies tend to be when you're looking at sort of developing new features the studies tend to be speculative. So you're asking them to respond to potential features in a collection and how they might use them in their research processes. Our future work is really about trying to fight back against some of these limitations. So there's the basic work of identifying and implementing really meaningful connections among collections and external resources through entities in the metadata. The things that scholars care about in the metadata. But as far as sort of getting back at these user studies and limitations we want to find ways to identify the most useful kinds of context for scholars at different phases of work, doing different kinds of work, trying to answer different kinds of questions not just based on discipline. And that kind of rich user study is gonna depend on longitudinal study, lots of iteration, the triangulation of results from multiple methods. So both perspective methods forward looking, asking them to speculate, but also retrospective ones really looking at what they have actually done with primary sources in their publication or in their own reflection. So someday with this blue sky, ambitious goal of being able to present collections to them, aligning the context we provide with and the connections that we provide through linked data with their specific use context in real time. So that's our goal. Okay, and I'll pass it over to Harriet to talk about emblematic, okay. Thank you. Sorry. Great, thank you. So today I'm gonna give a brief talk on an older project called emblematic online. And so this is more of a kind of a general research study and talking a bit more about the discovery, things we learned about discovery for that project. So first set of context though as we've heard from Katrina and Tim that digital archives today provide unprecedented access to these were archival materials but also enhanced exploration as we've seen with data mining, image analysis and other approaches for data analytics. But again, when I embarked on this study in 2014 there were still large gaps in knowledge on how the digital resources were used and research and teaching and the efficacy for the digital collections for scholars. So today I'll briefly describe, first really describe the background rationale at the time of my work in investigating user requirements for digital collections and then how I investigate key issues of usability via the case study or emblematic online. And then talk a little bit about how my analysis of how humanity scholars specifically how they used emblematic online and research and teaching I gained insights on a diverse array of user needs for digital collection. And today I'll highlight what we learned about user's needs in particular for discovering access and using the enriched metadata and icon class and the role of discovery functionalities in their work practices for digital collections. So again, it's brief background context. There's a rich corpus of research on the use of digital collections by scholars. So the papers that Tim and Katrina linked to have a number of the studies cited on humanity cyber infrastructure studies of disciplinary research practices that Ithaca has done that highlight how scholars use digital contact and complex and multifaceted ways. But in the creation and curation of digital collections we're learning that it's not enough to simply have that static scan content and expect users to flock to it. And so this Ithaca, this older Ithaca report a test user engagement and attestment are key to making our digital resources maximally useful. So with the strategic assessment we can build digital collections to promote use of the content by students, faculty and public. We can also improve our existing collections in ways that facilitate the integration of our digital resources into their scholarly practices and also ensure a reasonable return on investment of all the grant and institutional funds that we're investing in our collections. So thus we ultimately want to know how can we connect the structure and content of our digital collections to actual scholarly practices? And that was the question that motivated my study of emblematic online, which provided a rich case study of how users engage with digital archives from a variety of disciplines. So emblematic online was built as a multi-institutional international project that received multiple NEH grant awards and aims provide comprehensive access to digitized copies of emblem books from leading rare book collections around the world. And so very over the years many emblem books have been digitized to varying extents and emblematic online brought these multiple collections from the institutions listed on the right and what we call the open emblem book portal. So it's had a couple of phases of digitization. The first one was digitization with the NEH DFJ grant and then the most recent development of the emblematic online project and expanded to include the multiple digital collections and also looked to enhance the metadata further with more extensive application of icon classes as Tim mentioned and improving the search interface. And just really quickly, here's what we're talking about when this is what the scholars that I work with were looking at and this is what they use in their scholarship. So this is an emblem and it's a genre of early modern printed works emerging between the 16th and 18th century and it comes primarily in this tripartite form with the motto which is pretty self-explanatory, the pictora in the middle and the subscriptio which is a longer tax or company annotation. And the pictora as you can see is a heavily symbolic image with multiple elements. And when you just oppose the symbolic picture with the motto and with the subscriptio, you get a fairly cryptic and complex image and this is what scholars are studying. And scholars from across disciplines use these emblem books for rich integration of visual culture and textual culture and what they reveal about intellectual thought in the period. So these emblems are in emblem books and these emblem books are in special collections around the world. And for a long time the emblems were primarily found through seminal but incomplete print bibliographies. And what emblematica sought to do was, as Tim described, adding metadata and making these searchables so that scholars can find these richly textual and visual digital content. And so emblematica was also, I would like to highlight an in-depth collaboration between Mara Wade, Professor of Demandic Studies, Tim, MJ Han, Tom Kilton and then later me joining on the last phase of the project. And early modern scholars such as Peter Daley argue for the importance of librarian scholar collaborations for digitizing special collections such as this one. And the key reason is to enable this user input on top of, to begin with and then augmenting that with the usability study that we embarked on. So by examining the needs and practices of emblematica online users, I started to examine how emblematica online's functionalities match the scholarly practices of humanity scholars as they use these digital facsimiles of these rare book materials. And so just briefly, these are the goals where to understand the research practices of humanity scholars working in early modern studies in particular, understand their behaviors and then also gather input to assess the new functionalities and services that were added to emblematica online in the newest iteration of the portal and determine future functionalities to further enhance the portal. And so the methodologies was two phases. I conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with researchers, students, graduate students in teaching faculty from Illinois, Wolfland Biddle and at the Emblem Studies meeting in Germany. And then they were from the disciplines of literature, linguistics, music and art and their experiences range from minimal use of emblem books to extensive use. And then I did five observational usability testing sessions with faculty and students from the University of Illinois and the testing protocol was based on the interviews and the participants conducted a series of tasks across the whole emblematica online website and open emblem portal. And the analysis of our scholars interviews revealed key insights into how humanity scholars integrated the collections to the research workflows and how the collection could be iteratively designed to meet their needs. So I'll start with talking about the interview findings and then wrap up with what usability testing highlighted. So of the interviews in particular, collection enhancement was one of the most prominent benefits cited by respondents. Because the digital collections from the single institutions were now magnified into this aggregation, respondents noted that granular search functionalities in particular with icon class could enable scholars from multiple disciplines and other research areas to discover the works for their own research and expand the use of emblem books as a scholarly source. And with the breadth across disciplinary research that could draw upon this emblem collection, previously under read scholarship and emblem studies could be brought further in dialogue with scholars. So that's collections with these robust discovery mechanisms in particular, facilitated, they saw both discovery and scholarship with these collections. Along these lines, a key area that respondents identified was with emblematic online was a critical role in discovery. So emblems are notably unique type of research because they're heavily dependent on the visual content as much as the textual content in the multiple languages, as Tim mentioned with icon class. And so having the search functionality enabled new methods for searching this archival content, enabled the scholars to look at specific emblems and again expanding interdisciplinary research via new sources of content such as the emblems. So as the first quote from the interview mentions, scholars who see that the digital collection could encourage new approaches to search and the searchable functionality with the linked data could enable scholars to surmount linguistic barriers as well as using the visual elements of the content as search terms. And the metadata is also key to supporting the research behaviors with this type of unique digital content as it allowed scholars to encounter the emblem books that they previously may not have known of as a primary source for their scholarship. And then thirdly, we saw that the linked data and the searchability of the content also went to humanities data curation. So as the scholar noted, data management for the humanities could possibly be even more possible with the power of rich metadata as the scholars could build corpora of digital content and what they could consider as data sets and allow them to share with other scholars and prove their hypotheses behind their own close readings. So now briefly discuss the usability testing. So we did five user testing on the observational user testing sessions with humanities scholars on the functionality of emblematic online. And this is the old interface of emblematic online that we use for the user testing. And so just a couple of things that I thought particularly highlighted the usability in terms of discovery and using the metadata. So one of the most frequent challenges that the users encountered with the old interface was how to start searching for emblems from the homepage of the website. So from the opening page, some participants could identify the search bar but it was not as intuitive in terms of how to begin their search. So the overall structure of emblematic online was a mixed experience for users in terms of the navigation of the tabs and the ways that we originally used the metadata to filter their search results. So this revealed that he concerned for emblematic as we transitioned into a broader tool is how do we make the digital collections as searchable and as readable as possible so that the researchers can navigate intuitively to the digital content they wanted. Another issue was discovery of the content and the mechanisms provided. So participants immediately began with simple keyword searches to find emblems that match authors, topic and iconography. But participants noted that even though the search interface was customized to search specifically for emblems, they still might use features, use in other databases such as early English books online, including a need for a legend to explain the portal's search limiters for transcriptions and also the icon class terms as a way of searching that they weren't quite familiar with. And thinking of icon class, how specifically did they react to the use of icon class as a discovery tool? So icon class as convention is a multilingual classification system specifically used for art and iconography. And so over 23,000 of the emblems have been assigned and applied icon class heading terms. And most noted that icon class had immense added value for browsing the content as the quote, a test from one of the usability testing participants in terms of being able to drill down and find the topics they need. But we also learned there's a tension in implementing a new system such as icon class as respondents requested more of a context on how to use it. So we learned that when building digital projects, the complexity of the tool really must be balanced with kind of the navigability and helping people learn how to use metadata such as icon class. And as the scholar quote also hints, humanist's desire to search content in multiple ways, not only in direct of searching, but in serendipitous browsing, which icon class started to lend them being able to do by able to find emblems that were linked with the different terms. So this is the new interface that resulted from our finding along with work by a UX design firm. And there's a further emphasis on searchability functionality as key to this revamp. Because we founded our testing that the expectations of users when exploring digital collections is complex, ranging from a basic need of high quality reproductions to being able to distinguish the types of archival content they're perusing. And both the testers and the interviewees frequently express the need for context, annotated context and unannotated content and other functionalities that allow them to fully engage with M1 books as archival scores and scholarly area. And we also consider the needs of interdisciplinary scholarship as they take advantage of easy access to these vast digital collections of content and how to address the needs for this broad scholarly knowledge base that allows all types of scholars to interact with this digital collection. So these are the summary of what we found as user needs. These are also highlighted in the portal article that we published a couple of years ago. So the core user needs, especially in terms of discoverability, is enhanced discoverability and accessibility, interoperability to facilitate interaction across multiple digital collections. And then also interactive center digital curation so that users seek to interact with the digital collections to do comparative analyses, export content and work with content across multiple collections. And this speaks for needed, for greater capability interactivity with collections. So just to really quickly wrap up, these are just some of the future impacts of digital collections and what link open data may have on scholarship. And in particular, I wanted to highlight how could digital collections with rich metadata and linked open data lead to an expansion in scholarly communication as scholars engage with other scholarship and scholarly outputs through exposure of primary sources like M1 books. And just to reiterate what Katrina was saying, further user research is needed to reveal the fuller range of ways that different levels of users are able to interact with our collections. Okay. So we have about five minutes, roughly seven minutes for questions. Hopefully you guys can relate to your experiences and what you found useful. There has been a fair amount of publish on this work. Magwork is the first three items there. Those links to be in the slides which we've posted, include conference papers, a book chapter, article, a project white paper, that Katrina and I co-authored, as well as the poster I presented at ASST a few weeks ago was available. These websites, not all the features we showed are available in the websites that are up right now. The American one is probably the one that has the most features incorporated into production. The image search test one is just that, a test way to get into the modeling collection. Code proofs is up, but the visualization in particular is not available. And if you have questions about anything today, our email addresses are there. So, comments, questions? We are two minutes, three minutes over time. So I want to thank everybody, and I hope this was useful. Please join me in thanking the panel. And we're delighted to spend a couple minutes here.


I'm Zeke and welcome to the dream green show. There's nothing better than me going to sleep and then waking up the next day and I made money. That is called passive income. The easiest form of passive income is by earning money through the form of dividends. Now I says easy because I earn money by doing absolutely nothing. Dividends is when you own a company that pays out dividends and they pay out their investors in a form of dividends just for owning shares of that company. And there are many different types of dividends and how they get paid out. Dividends could be paid out monthly, they could be paid out every quarter or they could be paid out semi-annually or annually. And then there are also different tiers of dividend companies. There are just companies that pays out dividends. There are dividend or risk cuts. These are companies that have increased their dividend payouts for the last 25 years. That means every single year for the last 25 years they have been increasing their dividend yield. The higher dividend yield, the more money they pay out to their investors and then the highest tier of them all are called dividend kings. These are companies that have been increasing their dividend payouts for the last 50 years.  That means they are not going to cut their dividends anytime soon and compared to some other companies that have only been increasing their dividends for the last five years. That means they have cut their dividends five years ago and in that form you are losing passive income by them cutting their dividends and when the company cut their dividends that price their stock price usually fall too. So you want to invest into safe dividend companies. So in this video I'm going to bring you guys all of my dividend kings. All of these companies have been increasing their dividends over the last 50 years. They're also doing pretty dog on good inside of my portfolio. So I'm going to give you all the dividend kings that are performing very well inside of my portfolio and their dividend structures. But before we dive into this video this video is brought to you by Weeble. Sign up now by clicking the link down in the description to deposit any amount of money. You can deposit just one dollar if you want to and you'll receive two free stocks valid up to $2,300. With those two free stocks you could keep them inside the platform and decide to use it or you could sell those two free stocks and withdraw all of your money. It's literally free money. And also if you trade any amount of cryptocurrency on Weeble you'll receive an extra free $5 worth of ship. And I'm also leaving a link in the description to Coinbase. Coinbase is by far the easiest way to buy and sell cryptocurrency. If you use the link down in the description you could get a free $5 worth of bitcoin deposited into your Coinbase account today. But enough talking let's go ahead and dive straight into this video. Welcome back dreamers. Here we are on the first dividend King which is J&J, Johnson & Johnson over the last year. They're up 6.4 percent. If they did been doing pretty doggone good inside my portfolio paying me out a sweet dividend. I own one share and I'm up around 8.62 percent just from the the value of the company going up but I'm also getting dividends from them every single quarter. If you guys want to know how to look at how long a dividend company has been paying out try using SeekingAlpha.com. Now according to SeekingAlpha.com Johnson & Johnson they have been increasing their dividend yield every single year for the last 59 years. Over the last five years their growth rate is 5.87 percent and they pay out 2.2 and they have a 2.66 dividend yield paying out every single quarter. So for every share that you own of Johnson & Johnson you're receiving around four dollars and 24 cents. The next one is Coca-Cola ticker symbol K.O. Over the last year they're up 1.63 percent. Over the last five years as you guys can see they've almost recovered from the pandemic after the big drop. They're 53 dollars and 64 cents. Over the last five years they're up 32.97 percent. According to SeekingAlpha they have also been increasing their dividend yield for the last 59 years. They are also a quarterly paying dividend stock. They have a dividend yield of 3.14 percent and they pay out around $1.68 per share of Coca-Cola that you own. The next one has probably been increasing their dividend yield for the longest which is Procter & Gamble ticker symbol PG. Over the last year they're up 9.32 percent. Over the last five years they're up 81 percent. Procter & Gamble own pretty much everything inside of the grocery store. They've scrolled down on seven shares. I'm up 10 percent and they have also been paying me out dividends every single quarter. If we take a look at SeekingAlpha they have been increasing that dividend yield for the last 65 years. They also pay out their dividends every single quarter and they have a dividend yield of 2.32 percent paying out $3.48 for every share that you own of Procter & Gamble. Now dividend kings they're not going to have super high dividend yields but they're safe and you know that you're going to get your passive income every single year and that a share increase every single year because they have been increasing theirs for the last 65 years. If they can increase their dividend yields through a pandemic and a whole recession then they can increase their dividend yields throughout anything so they've been doing it for the last 65 years. They have a very safe form of passive income through the form of their dividends. Guys if you want access to any time that I buy and sell different stocks inside of my portfolio make sure that you click the link down in the comment section. That'll take you to my Patreon the Patreon to take you to my Discord over there we have a great community of traders I post technical analysis at any time that I buy and sell different stocks and right now we've been going hard on some option players. So if you want the opportunity to join that community click that link down in the comment section. Another very safe one to invest in tool is tick assemble MMM 3M. So 3M makes everything from duct tape to sticky notes to the N95 masks that we wore during the pandemic. Right now they're up on the year just a little over 0.27%. According to Seeking Alpha they've been increasing their dividend yield for the last 63 years. They pay out their dividends every single quarter and they have a dividend yield of 3.43% with an annual payout of $5.92. Now this next one is a bonus stock they're very very close to being dividend kings. Right now they're dividend aristocrats which is PepsiCo. They're $164.80. They've been outperforming Coca-Cola for a while now. They're up 14% over the last year in the last five years. They're up 63%. I'm up around 13% on Coca-Cola and they also pay me out their dividends every single quarter. Now the reason I added PepsiCo to this list is because they have a dividend growth of 49 years. It's December when January hits they have been officially crowned dividend kings. So in just a couple of days they would be dividend kings. That's why I added them to this list. They also pay out their dividends every single quarter. They have a 2.61 dividend year with an annual payout of $4.30. So that's PepsiCo. I'm going to give you guys one more bonus stock and that's going to be a Walmart ticket symbol WMT over the last year. They're down a little bit 7.93% but over the last five years we all know Walmart is going to absolutely crush us. I added Walmart to this list because they've been increasing their dividends over the last 48 years. So they're very close to becoming dividend kings. Okay so Walmart been increasing their dividends for the last 48 years. They pay out every single quarter and they have a dividend yield of 1.6% paying out $2.20 per share. Over on Walmart I'm up 10% on Walmart and I receive dividends from them every single quarter. And there we go guys. If you've been looking for a safe way to earn some passive income dividends might be the way for you. If you're scared to invest into risky companies that have high dividends to where they could cut their dividends at any moment and you lose all of your growth from the loss of that company then you might want to be looking into dividend aristocrats or dividend kings. Dividend kings are very very safe and a lot of companies inside of the S&P 500 strive to reach that plateau of becoming dividend kings. So make sure that you don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Make sure that you build that strong foundation by at least adding some dividend kings inside of your portfolio. But these have been performing amazingly well inside of my portfolio. If you guys have any other dividend kings that have been performing well inside of your portfolio drop that down. I'd love to check out what you guys have been successful on. So if you made it to the end of this video make sure that you guys like this video. Subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell because that helps out this channel more than you can even imagine. Also don't forget to pick up your two free stocks over on Weeble. It's free money guys. Please take full advantage of that opportunity. But other than that I'm Zeke. Bring you to Dream Green Show and I'm out. Peace.


Created to have dominion, Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden. They were permitted to eat the fruit from any of the trees in the Garden, except for from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Challenging God's directives, the serpent asked, did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the Garden? Eve replied, it's only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the Garden that we are not allowed to eat. God said, you must not eat it or even touch it.   Both Adam and Eve gave in to the cravings of the flesh and entered a fallen state. I want to point something out here. Notice the strategy used by the serpent. First he asked, did God really say?  Before someone will contradict God's word, they will first question his word. Be careful to not do as the serpent did. Be careful to not question God's word.