Page Page
Susan M. Johns
11th Annual CODA Conference
University of South Australia
Adelaide, Australia
September 30-October 2, 1998
Report of CODI President Susan Johns
I departed on Wednesday, September 23, 1998 to make the 15-hour journey from Pittsburg KS by car to Kansas City International Airport, and then by successive flights to Denver, CO and Los Angeles, CA. From LA, the flight to Sydney, Australia was an additional 14.5 hours, arriving on September 25, 1998. From Sydney an additional flight to Adelaide, with layover time, took another 4 hours, making my total travel time close to 34 hours. It was with great joy that I met Margareta Nicholas at the Adelaide airport and willingly turned over the driving and transportation to her from that point.
Wednesday Conference began at 9 a.m. Apologies for Lana's absence were noted, a few organizational notes were spoken, and the morning generally was turned over to Amlibs AUS personnel, including Ross Welch, ALS General Manager. Ross, a tried and true American, gave helpful hints of what he had learned in Australia since the acquisition of the Australian office ("vegemite goes on thin", "liberal equals conservative in Australian politics", and "the alphabet goes from A to Zed, I learned it all wrong when I was growing up as a child").
Ross covered some of perhaps what Lana would have (Ameritech has $25 billion US in assets; 69,000 total employees, 1 million shareholders, specializes in local, long distance, cellular, paging, security monitoring, cable TV, internet services, library services, EDI and communication technologies); including aspects of Ameritech Library Services (7000 libraries worldwide in Mexico, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Saudi Arabia, France, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and New Zealand).
Ross explained briefly how Ameritech fit into the baby-bells and AT&T breakup of some time ago, and indicated that Ameritech had now purchased the Amlibs AUS office to achieve several goals: 1) acquiring a significant customer base (Pacific Rim holds 2/3 of the world's current population); 2) development expertise in CJK and Unicode programming already in place in the Amlibs AUS office; and, humorously, 3) he referred to the Amlibs AUS office as the "Apollo 13 Mission Control Centre" where when requests come in saying "Dynix-L says", the Australian office attempts to get the answers from Provo to solve the log or customer inquiry.
Bob Claxton, Manager, Customer Service and Operations, explained where the office was with regard to installs, upgrades, and customer support. He gave good information on the upcoming implementation of Vantive and Log Express; addition of voice mail for all staff; staff training on new products (including the recent visit of Glen Schneider from Provo Development to assist with bringing them up to speed with WebPAC); and the beginnings of Telecirc II in Australia. Bob also briefly addressed issues concerning ISO 9000 certification, and gave a thorough demonstration of some of the Vantive functionality from both the support person's screens as well as the customer's screens. While helpdesk software had been in place at Amlibs AUS prior to introduction of Vantive, the staff was looking forward to the various benefits of Vantive, including being able to search global log resolutions, tap the knowledge databases, bug release tracking, statistical tracking, etc.
A noticeably positive feature at CODA was a very strong and healthy relationship between the CODA members and the Amlibs AUS staff. As an aside, in addition to the tote bags, Amlibs picked up the total cost of the Thursday dinner, along with various other supports throughout the conference. (There were no external vendors or exhibits at all.) With this relationship, over the course of the three days, various contests and activities arose, the first of which was an excellent handout in the packets testing the "international IQ" of the participants by identifying flags, languages, phrases, and other aspects of various countries.
Amlibs presentations continued after tea, including the following from Ross and members of the Amlibs AUS staff:
Chris Taylor, Amlibs AUS developer, next demonstrated Ed Riding's automated Technical Service Workstation designs, similar to what the CODI Board saw at ALA this summer. Chris further explained Project Sunrise, which he described as the Technical Service Workstation development, and Project Gryphon, the PAC/WebPAC staff searching and search engine project.
After lunch, Amlibs AUS staff had been asked by the conference committee to address some specific issues of interest to the membership: SQL, Java, Z39.50, "cfm" files; EDIFACT/X12/BISAC; system administration training/ accreditation/ services; and Year 2000 compliance.
Three buses loaded us across the River Torrens to the site of the Adelaide Gaol, a stern place which was still in use for actual prisoners up until sometime in the early 1980s. The caterers had a great time marching us in by pairs, shaking us down, and generally trying to get us segregated into orderly tour groups to view the facilities. Systems librarians with wine glasses in tow after eight hours of vendor presentations are a very hard group to get to march in a straight line! The food was excellent, the flavor of the surroundings are best noted by the photos Mike Shearer took on the web page, and many of us retired by 8 p.m. to go back downtown for additional coffee, ice cream, and other desserts after the excellently catered goodies at the Adelaide Gaol. For coffee, Mike Shearer, Anne Beaumont, and Chris Hannan and I found a sidewalk cafe and tried not to talk about WebPAC for about two hours!
Day 2 began with an introduction of Lana Porter, Ameritech Library Services CEO, and her general introduction into what Ameritech is and can do for the customers. As most of the product direction was covered on Wednesday Morning, her talk was brief, centering mainly on the SW Bell issues, the strength Ameritech corporate brings to the Library Services Division, and the other corporate details we needed to hear.
Next came my presentation, followed closely by the MADU presentation. MADU, the Malaysian Dynix User group, made their presentation next, spearheaded by Esther Ong, MADU Chair. It was fascinating to see the outreach and concerns of the Malaysian group, and brought home to me that the product is far-reaching and complex in terms of CJK support; and I think assured the MADU group, based on the crowd reaction, that while their concerns seemed basic and obvious, we were pretty much all in agreement with their difficulties, frustrations, and successes with the product.
After tea, the group broke up into parallel streams for Dynix, Horizon, and School issues. Scholar/School issues concerned mainly the diminishing numbers of CODA members and sites which can no longer afford the Dynix product. I briefly ducked into the Horizon agenda to pass on to both customers and Amlibs AUS staff the list of Horizon Enhancements that had recently been voted and submitted on in July by the US Horizon group (hand carried by Alta Linthicum to the UK, and then hand-carried back to the US and on to Australia by me!). By the time I returned from this I had missed Steve Thomas's report on University of Adelaide user authentication efforts prior to RSS, but did make it back in time for the Bisac/X12 report and Java WebPAC. Time flew, however, and Java WebPAC was cut somewhat short due to time and buses departing, so the Reserve, 856 tags, and Year 2000 report (from previous day) can be found at the conference web site.
Site Visits were scheduled throughout the day rotating among four sites: ALS Headquarters (for cake and coffee), Mercedes College, a Scholar site making the transition to Horizon (Mercedes being a K-12 private Catholic school); Luther Seminary Campus, a Windows NT Dynix site; and the Underdale Campus, University of South Australia, where the RSS module, recently installed, was demonstrated. In addition, those not wanting to travel far by bus could have a tour of the City West Campus Library, University of South Australia, where the conference venue was being held, where ALS products were also being demonstrated in the computer labs. The bus trips to the various campuses were quite enjoyable, not only because we were on our feet a lot, but because it allowed many of us to see areas of suburban Adelaide.
The evening was not diminished by rain showers and brollies, as we made our way to Gekko's, a fine restaurant along the riverfront (see web pictures). The dinner was exquisite, generously sponsored by Amlibs AUS. After dinner, Bob Claxton introduced all Amlibs AUS staff present, and after trying to analyze what they did and for whom when they were introduced, they all joined in singing well-vocalized lyrics to the tune of the Adelaide Crows' Football Song. Developers did a bit of juggling, and Max Bancroft ended the evening telling a great joke, and then we all went home, stuffed, happy, and a little damp from the rain.
Kinetica Services and Products were discussed on Friday morning. These included Networked Service Project (which replaced ABN as the primary source of their MARC records); Data Migration to the new database product; Data elements and cleanup; Searching Kinetica, etc. The session was critical to all attending but was less about Dynix than about the problems with ABN not succeeding as the national supplier, and the hope that Kinetica could salvage the national database and make it more accessible to all levels of cataloging and sites needing it. During this discussion I made a mad dash to a local bookstore for some local author fiction and ended up getting drenched in a short rainstorm (that'll teach me!). I was, happily, back in time for tea and the presentation of the fine South Australian wine to the winner of the flag contest (a Scholar client); boxes of chocolates for the runner up, and a big chocolate frog for the consolation winner.
The AGM followed immediately before lunch. Included in the AGM were presentations concerning
In 1997 226 CODA members had paid dues. In 1998, 180 members had paid dues. 21 members were lost (no longer customers), 25 have not renewed. According to ALS customer lists, there are approximately 400 sites that could be potential members. Much of the lost and non-renewing members were Scholar sites. (An interesting aside, in that many of the conference committee and Board members last year were Scholar clients, as the school librarians felt they had more free time to commit to the organization than municipal or governmental agency librarians. They found themselves planning and organizing this conference with very few Scholar or school attendees due to the dramatic shifts in ALS products and support of Scholar and school sites, in many cases pricing the sites right out of the product).
Townsend, Australia will be the site of the 1999 Conference, with Canberra chosen as the site for 2000. Similar to issues in Salt Lake, venues in Sydney were considered too expensive and unavailable for the next several years due entirely to the Olympics. Townsend will be beautiful, but airfares in the interior (for instance, for US rep to fly from Sydney to Townsend) may be well over $500 to $700 alone (AUS), and the trip will be significantly longer than the 1.5 hours from Sydney to Adelaide.
The internationalisation proposal from Brian Hackett was discussed. There were questions, the primary one being that since CODA is structured such that both Dynix and Horizon clients are members of CODA, they felt they needed to consult a bit with the other Horizon groups before entering into a federation commitment, bringing with them a significant number of Dynix clients. They were eager to support more internationalized efforts, but also raised significant questions concerning the product direction (more a carryover of questions that were not fully answered in the Wednesday Q&A) before committing the group to one direction or another.
At lunch, and immediately after it (the Kinetica breakout sessions), I was hoping for a little less intensity. When I gathered my sandwich and tea at lunch and sat down, Ross Welch immediately approached and asked if I could meet with Amlibs AUS staff in one corner, so I did. The first question they posed to me was, "Please tell us all you can about JAD, we've very little information and need to understand what's involved in it." Well, I can tell you that sandwich didn't get eaten very quickly. The Amlibs AUS staff were keen to participate, but had little info from Provo, thus, this was apparently who not much mention of JAD occurred throughout the conference with the exception of my presentation. The Amlibs AUS staff are a personable and very knowledgeable group, highly motivated toward service.
Final tea was held with farewells around 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon. I helped the conference committee take down signs and tidy up, prepared to go back to the hotel, and on my arrival met the MADU contingent who hastily beckoned me to a taxi for a whirlwind trip to a shopping center. Later, we went into the city centre for dinner in Chinatown, and I had a most enjoyable time with them, learning and discovering what a vast area the Far East is, only to discover that two colleagues from the University of Illinois (who worked on their MLS degrees in 1987 with me) were both known to them at the library schools in Singapore :_) Small world, Singapore!
While the travel is exhausting, the trip to Australia is absolutely worth it. The support of yet another isolated and remote group of robust Dynix users, I believe, is central to the goals and mission of CODI. It was very helpful to have the perspective of the UK conference in the previous week, the continuity was informative and very necessary, actually, as some of the same continuity does not appear to be among the international offices and their staff. It was also very helpful to see the Amlibs presentations develop over time, i.e., from Ed's presentation at ALA, to his excellent presentation in September at York, to watching Ross give it effectively in Australia. Particularly if Amlibs is not going to have the same reps at each conference, the CODI rep can provide considerable information and continuity in the state of the state, so to speak. The rapport, friendship, and intelligence of our Pacific Rim colleagues is something I will cherish for many years to come.
Send comments to: suzyq@pittstate.edu
Susan M. Johns-Smith
Axe Library
Pittsburg State University
1605 South Joplin Street
Pittsburg, KS 66762
Phone: 620-235-4115
This page last updated Monday, 28-Oct-2002 15:58:26 CST