Transitioning from paper to digital

<p>Roy Tennant has been transitioning the paper words of yesteryear online for decades. The Boyes Hot Springs resident started working in libraries at age 17, and attained his masters in library and information science from UC Berkeley. He has worked both for the Berkeley library, the whole UC library system, and now the largest library cooperative in the world. He is a frequent speaker on the digitization of library systems.</p><p>DailyGeek: What OS do you primarily use?</p><p>Tennant: I've been a die-hard Mac user for many years. In fact, when taking my last two jobs it was non-negotiable, despite the fact that the organizations were all-PC shops at the time. In both cases it was the beginning of the end for Windows OS dominance for those organizations. I feel strongly that workers should have whatever OS in which they can be most productive. With the Intel Mac, I now run all three major operating systems: Windows (XP at the moment), Unix (OS X) and Mac (OS X). There is no software program I can't run, so what's not to like about that? And what organization would not want you to be as productive as you can be?</p><p>DailyGeek: What search engine do you use?</p><p>Tennant: Google. Everything else continues to be an "also-ran," although only time will tell how long Google's dominance will last. I still remember when AltaVista was the search engine to beat.</p><p>DailyGeek: Your preferred Internet browser?</p><p>Tennant: I prefer Firefox, mostly because of the plug-in architecture, although I've noticed that photographs display better in Safari -- the colors are more vibrant. Internet Explorer is not an option on the Mac, although the very few times I must boot into Windows on my Mac it's mostly due to Web sites that require Internet Explorer. My opinion of any company that requires such a travesty immediately plummets. Have they not heard of standards?</p><p>DailyGeek: Do you have an e-book reader?</p><p>Tennant: You would think as a "techie librarian" I would have several e-book readers, but I've never owned one. For me they still don't pencil out economically. I've even predicted in print (my blog) that the Kindle would "go down in flames" -- partly as an antidote to the amazing hype it gets despite the lack of evidence that it is a runaway success. Call me old-fashioned, but I still like my books on paper, at least with the current state of technology and the expense of the alternative. This is from someone who was a pioneer in putting books on the Web.</p><p>Also, since my laptop is basically now an appendage of my body, I can't imagine not using it to read books rather than paying $300 to $400 for a specialized device that only reads books.</p><p>DailyGeek: What do you think is the future of the written word?</p><p>Tennant: The written word has an incredible future ahead of it -- look at how many people are not only writing but having their writing distributed much more easily and widely than ever before! It is the publishing and distribution infrastructure that has changed. I've published several books through traditional publishers, but my last one was self-published through Lulu.com. I doubt I'll ever go back, unless I'm desperate for the marketing assistance. Print on demand publishing is here, and it's straightforward, inexpensive and easy. Whether it will survive economically is anyone's guess, but while it's available it's a great thing for authors. I also think it's interesting how self-published books that begin to look successful can (and often are) picked up by traditional publishers and mass marketed.</p><p>DailyGeek: What program do you prefer using for Twitter?</p><p>Tennant: My favorite Twitter program is TweetDeck (available for all platforms via Adobe AIR), which enables you to keep several panels open at a time. Panels can be allocated to updates from your friends, or direct messages, or replies, or even a search. Naturally, I have a vanity search so I can see what people are saying about me. Since I have Growl installed on my Mac, I get automatic, unobtrusive updates as things roll in and I can either choose to look or not.</p><p>DailyGeek: What other social networking applications do you use?</p><p>Tennant: I use Facebook, although I have to admit I'm not spending a lot of time hanging out on it. I use chat quite a bit and we use Yammer at work (basically a Twitter for an organizational audience). I also hang out in a chatroom for library software developers on a regular basis. Chatrooms are probably the single most under-rated social networking applications out there, mostly because it is under the radar of everyone except the most technical audience. From that chatroom we have developed a very successful annual conference, a journal, regional groups, and a very rich community -- see http://code4lib.org.</p><p>DailyGeek: Favorite Web sites?</p><p>Tennant: My Web site is http://roytennant.com and from there I link to my personal "Web empire." Some sites, such as the Online Medieval and Classical Library (http://omacl.org) I have rescued from a former job where the organization I worked for was no longer going to support it. I wanted to keep it around, so I took it on personally. Another such site I arranged to move to Sonoma State University, which you can now see at http://london.sonoma.edu. Other sites I have created from scratch, such as http://FreeLargePhotos.com, which hosts both my photos as well as those of several other photographers.</p><p>I also can't avoid mentioning the absolute best Web site for finding books you don't have to pay for -- http://WorldCat.org. The outfit that I work for (the largest nonprofit library cooperative in the world, http://oclc.org) knows where you can find nearly 1.5 billion books in libraries all over the world. We have over 130 million item records, which is larger than any other bibliographic database on the planet, including Amazon.</p><p>DailyGeek: Favorite way to get news?</p><p>Tennant: I admit that I still like to get much of my news on plain old newsprint delivered to my door, via the Sonoma Index-Tribune, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and the Sun. The other main way I get my news is on KQED, NPR, the California Report and IPR.</p><p>DailyGeek: Favorite productivity tech tool?</p><p>Tennant: After many years I'd have to say there really isn't anything I can't do with Perl and my favorite indexing tool, Swish-e (http://swish-e.org). With this combination I helped create the Librarians Index to the Internet, http://lii.org, my photos Web site, http://FreeLargePhotos.com, and many other sites. Swish-e is both an HTML and XML aware indexing tool that makes it very easy to turn a bunch of text, HTML, or XML files into a virtual database.</p><p>DailyGeek: Favorite piece of technology that is not mainstream?</p><p>Tennant: My Swiss Army knife. When I travel, and I'm forced to leave it at home, I feel naked. I've had a Swiss Army knife in my pocket for well over 30 years and it has gotten me out of more scrapes than any other technology I can name. And yet the vast majority of humanity live without it. How can they survive? I'm utterly clueless.</p><p>Bonus Question from last week's participant, Jeff Baudin, founder of Micromat, which develops software for iPhones and Apple.</p><p>Baudin: Do you ever see a time in the near future when books will go the way of the parchment and scrolls?</p><p>Tennant: I firmly believe we will never be an all-digital society. Rather, we will enter a golden age of format choice where you will be able to get the written word as digital, print, or audio. We will pay not only for the content itself, but for the format. Perhaps digital will be cheaper than either print or audio, since the latter two formats incur additional costs in either printing or vocal talent. But the point is that soon we will be able to choose whatever format we want. And I think that can only be seen as a good thing.</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Nathan Halverson at 521-5494 or nathan.halverson@pressdemocrat.com. Check out his blog at DailyGeek.Pressdemocrat.com or on twitter.com/eWords</p>