Last weekend, I left the city for the first time since I arrived on August 12th. I rented a car and drove myself up to Vermont to visit my friend Melinda. We went to middle and high school together, and I hadn’t seen her since her wedding reception about 15 years ago. Melinda and her husband run an inn located in Warren, VT near the Sugarbush ski area .  It was great to see her again. I was a little nervous that it would be awkward, since we haven’t seen each other for so long, but Melinda and her family made me feel very welcome and comfortable.

Thanks to Melinda’s husband, Michael, who stayed home and took care of the kids (and the inn), Melinda and I spent the day at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT. Actually, Melinda’s four kids are so intelligent, engaging, and well-behaved that I don’t think it would have imposed much of a burden to take them along with us to the museum. It was nice for us to have some time alone together to catch up, though, and it allowed us to explore the museum in an adult-centric way, which was a first for Melinda.  The museum was exactly the sort of attraction I love. It was founded by a wealthy woman in the 1950s who was interested in preserving houses and other historic structures, as well as displaying collections of fine art and Americana. She purchased and moved a whole bunch of structures (including a steamboat) to a large piece of land in NW Vermont.  Some of the buildings are preserved as representative examples of period architecture and interior decoration, and some of the buildings have been converted to gallery space to display collections, which include some works by impressionist masters like Mary Cassatt, Degas, and Monet, and somewhat eclectic collections of American arts and crafts, including quilts and other handmade textiles, dolls, glassware, china and pottery, and hunting decoys. They also have special exhibits, including one right now featuring works by Tiffany & Co., which I loved. We spent most of the day exploring the museum, but on the way back to Warren, we stopped by the Ben and Jerry’s plant in Waterbury, VT for a quick tour and free sample.  That was a lot like going to the Tillamook Cheese Factory, except it was a lot more corporate and “glossy,” but what the heck. It was cheap and fun enough to do once. For dinner, we went out to a very nice wood-fired pizza place close to the Inn where the pizza and salads were very creative and delicious. We stopped on the way home and bought some pints of Ben and Jerry’s for the kids, who had been very generous in sharing their mom’s time with me all day.

Sunday morning, I hung around and enjoyed visiting with Melinda and her family. After lunch, I hopped back in the Prius for a leisurely drive back to Boston, starting out on Vermont Highway 100 South. Some of the leaves on the trees were starting to turn color, but it a  was bit early in the season for the full Vermont foliage experience. Still, it was a gorgeous sunny day and the drive through the valley on the two-lane highway, past rustic farm houses and through quaint small towns was quintessentially rural New England. I stopped for a bit at Quechee Gorge to have a look at the view and to purchase a few Vermont souvenirs, including some delicious aged cheddar and some locally made dog biscuits for Powder.

It took me several hours to drive back to Boston, but the traffic was pretty light and the weather was perfect, so it was an easy drive.  The car wasn’t due back until Monday morning at 8 am, so I found the courage to try driving in the city (only on the Cambridge side of the river, not in Boston proper) in order to do a little grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. I got lost a few times, but I only turned the wrong way down a one-way street once. I managed to make it to Trader Joe’s, back to the house to drop off my groceries and weekend bag, and out to the rental car place in Medford to drop the car off without hitting anything. By 8 pm, I was on the bus, headed back to Cambridge. Overall, it was an excellent weekend.

One of the attractive things about the internship I’m doing was getting the opportunity to work with a tool specifically designed to facilitate the collection and, to a certain extent, curation of metadata. It seems like that’s increasingly what catalogers are being asked to do when we’re asked/expected to take metadata in a wide variety of formats with widely varying levels of completeness into catalogs or other local databases for discovery and/or resource management purposes. Unfortunately, most of our systems were designed with a vastly differnt paradigm in mind. Certainly, ILS systems are designed to ingest bibliographic records in MARC format created elsewhere, but they operate on the principle that a person is going to sit there and manually compare a physical object, such as a book, to each individual bibliographic record and make adjustments manually to suit local needs.

The system I’m working with during my internship is designed specifically to collect data from multiple sources and combine it into a highly sophisticated database where that data can be analyzed, manipulated and output in very flexible ways. It is also specifically intended to allow people with little to no knowledge of databases or programming to do pretty sophisticated stuff without having to learn much about programming. Though the system is still in a fairly early stage of development, I can see that it has real potential. Over the next couple of months, I’m going to experiment with building some library-oriented applications on this platform to test its relevance to solving the challenges that librarians face with regard to data curation.

Figure skating in Boston isn’t as easy as I hoped it would be, but I’m managing to get some time in on the ice. Part of the difficulty is that most of the ice rinks in the Boston area are seasonal, and they don’t open until October or November. Most of the indoor rinks that are open year-round are difficult to access without a car. The Skating Club of Boston is the only rink I’ve been able to find so far that I can get to reasonably well on public transportation (combination of train and bus). Ironically, it takes me nearly as long to get to the rink here as it does for me to get to Sherwood Ice Arena from Monmouth, even though I live within 10 miles of the rink. At least I don’t have to do the driving.

SCoB is an old, historic rink (Dick Button and Tenley Albright trained there in the 1940 and 1950s), so it is an interesting place to skate. It seems like the glory days are past, but plenty of people, including many aspiring competitive skaters, skate there, and a couple of the most successful coaches in the country right now (Mark Mitchell and Peter Johansson) are on the coaching staff. Ice time is pretty tightly scheduled, even though the rink is devoted almost exclusively to figure skating, rather than hockey.

Partly because it’s a private club with a long history, the rink at SCoB is run a bit differently than rinks in Oregon. There are many rules about who has priority to skate, what kind of skating you can do on what sessions, and the order in which skaters’ music will be played. Members have access to more sessions at lower prices than non-members. A 50-minute public dance session costs me $16.50, nearly double what I pay for an hour of freestyle ice at Sherwood. Members who have contracted for ice time for the entire “club season” (September through June) pay the lowest rates of all, though they don’t get a refund if they miss a session and the rules prohibit resale and most exchanges of contracted ice time. Members also have priority over everybody else if many people want to skate a particular session. They have limits on the number of skaters on sessions, which is nice, but as a walk-on non-member, I have lowest priority, so if it gets crowded (hasn’t happened to me yet), I might not get on the session at all. Most of the sessions are freestyle sessions, and they are restricted to skaters who have passed certain US Figure Skating tests. This means that there are only about 10 sessions (at 50 minutes each) a week on which I’m even eligible to skate.

The first type of session I tried was a Public Session. The rules state that you can’t do dance patterns or moves in the field (the two main types of skills I like to practice) on public sessions, but I figured I’d give it a try to see how strict they were about enforcing the rules. Well, I discovered quickly that the public sessions weren’t going to meet my needs. I kid you not, they had a guy there playing the Wurlitzer live for the entire 2 hour session. They also had a skate guard there to enforce the rules, including asking singles to leave the ice every time the organ player called a “couples” skate (about every 15 minutes). It was somewhat surprising that they didn’t require women to wear skirts … As a one-time, novelty/retro experience, it was fun, but I won’t be going back for that type of session again.

Public dance sessions seem to suit me much better, except for the price. According to the rules, you’re only allowed to do ice dance patterns or dance programs on public dance sessions, but that suits me pretty well since that’s mostly what I do anyway. The fact that that everybody there is working on the same type of thing actually makes it a bit easier to practice, since the other people skating know the patterns and are working on similar things themselves. It makes it easier to share the ice when everybody is working on similar skills. I’ve been able to sneak in some moves in the field work, especially moves that are good warm-ups for dance and/or incorporate dance moves. It seems to be mostly adults and older teenage girls on the public dance sessions, so I fit right into the crowd. I can also have lessons on public dance sessions. I had my first lesson yesterday for about 45 minutes. My coach took a look at my Bronze dances and gave me some refinements to work on. She thinks I might be able to test while I’m here, which would be really great. The ice is warmer/softer here than it is at home. This makes edges and turns feel more comfortable, and I seem to get more speed/power with the same amount of effort.

If winter comes early, I might get to skate on the Frog Pond on Boston Common, which would be really neat.

Nearly done with week 3 of my internship. I’ve gotten more familiar with the application, and I’m now able to work more independently, though I’m not yet doing every step in the process or using every aspect of the system. I think I’m more or less proficient with the entry-level stuff now, though. If you want to check out the end result of some of the work I’ve been doing, take a look at: http://matrix2.itasoftware.com/

Just do a search for flights between the US cities of your choice, then direct your attention to the Events calendar display at the bottom of the screen (you may need to scroll to see it). One of the main things I’ve been working on is using a special back-end application to harvest events data off of various websites to populate this events calendar display. We’re still identifying sites to harvest data from and building up data in the database, so some cities have much better coverage than others at the moment, but you can get the general idea. Given that ITA is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, Boston has better coverage than many cities right now, so that’s one of the best cities to search. Currently, the data gets refreshed about once per week, usually on Friday evening or Monday morning.  Give it a try, especially if you’re planning a trip somewhere and want to check out airfares and activities at the same time. If you have suggestions, feel free to submit them via one of the links on the site. Comments are directed to my team, and I assure you that they will be considered carefully.

As I was warned, the web page tagging and harvested data review process is kind of tedious, but no more so than a lot of the work I do with data in the library catalog or spreadsheets, and the back-end application provides support that is far more sophisticated and vastly superior to that offered by any library system I’ve ever seen. There are significant bugs and usability issues right now, since the application is still in the alpha development stage, but I’m enjoying working with it, and I feel like I will be able to make some meaningful contributions toward its development, which is pretty satisfying.