I had a very interesting couple of weeks. On Friday, Feb 1, I had to present to the Board of Trustees a brief outline of the technology planning. The hard part of this is that you have a short time to communicate effectively what you are planning to do. With help from a few colleagues who helped massage my presentation, I got that done. Then I gave a talk on “Milking Google for All it is Worth” to faculty and staff on the following Monday. It was well attended and I will write about it in my next blog post. The most satisfying thing about the talk was a couple of followup emails from the attendees on how they already applied some of what they learned. This was followed by Academic Council on Wed. where I had to answer a question regarding what we are doing about the Library Collections Safety (which I will write about also), but the council voted to support the Open Access Legislation – a HUGE step for us as a College.

Then of course, the Blizzard struck. It was not bad at all because we did not lose power. Then, who cares? Really… We have a person who promptly clears our driveway and our roads were cleaned reasonably well. I watched a total of 5 Tamil movies while it was snowing. Life was good.

I heard a speaker during my recent visit to Google mention the Procrustes bed (which I explain below) and I thought “This is perfect for what I have been talking about” – how the technologists always produce technologies that they want us to fit in!

So, what is a Procrustes bed? Wikipedia says “A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.” There area few variations on the theme and story, but, the one I like the most is from the Myths Encyclopedia. It is so cool and I can see someone making an engaging Tamil movie about the story. I always add some spice to the myth and say that Procrustes ran a motel to which he invited the guests to stay. He had a bed and almost no guest fitted the bed exactly. Either the person was taller than the bed, in which case he chopped the person’s legs off to fit the bed or if the person was shorter, he stretched the person to fit. Invariably in both cases, the guest died.

Another twist to this story is that he had a bunch of beds and he always pulled the one that the guest would not fit in. Either way, this is a perfect analogy to the way technologies, especially software are written. Here it is – one is sweet talked into how the software (the bed) is a perfect fit for what you need and then after you buy it, it hardly fits and you are required to fit in it! And with every upgrade, it is almost as though the vendor is conspiring to change the fit that you just made!

Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you that the myth also has a good end to the story – Theseus, a Greek hero, plays the same game on Procrustes by providing him a bed where he doesn’t fit and kills him. I love it. I am adding this to the list of movies I plan to direct after I retire!

Upon further reading, I discovered a statistical method for similarity comparison called Procrustes Transformation – “A Procrustes transformation is a geometric transformation that involves only translation, rotation, uniform scaling, or a combination of these transformations. Hence, it may change the size, but not the shape of a geometric object.”

This is perfect way to describe what our strategy is. We do not want to be subjected to the torture of the Procrustes bed. Instead, we transform the bed into a reasonable number of combinations that helps us support our users. The extensions that we are boldly engaging in – such as the Web Applications that rely on Banner and other data, extensions to Google related tools, or 25Live are all examples of this idea.

So, the transformation we are talking about can be picturized as follows: