Fuzhou Report 1999/10/22

I was getting a second look at their computer room today. It's going to
take a few times for me to get the whole picture. Translating is hard
enough without having to deal with the technical jargon. The Library has
about the same size computer room we do, also with a raised floor. They
don't have as much of the floor space used as we do, as they don't have
the large servers we have nor as many of the others. And because they
don't have branches, or at least any wide area network to any other site,
they don't have much in the way of communications gear; just one Cisco
2501 out to their ISP over a modem.

They have a huge set of batteries to support a small uninterrupable power
supply giving them 8 hours of backup power, maybe. They don't have any
alarms installed as far as I could tell. Their cabling system doesn't use
patch panels. Instead they have 110 blocks where the incoming and outgoing
cat 5 cables are punched down and jumped across to the other side's set of
blocks. This was apparently installed by Northern Telecom. I guess it is
probably working at 10 megabits, after all, old cat 3 will support 10
megabits, but I can't imagine it will be that great at higher speeds.  
But that was about the only thing I saw that seemed to me out of line.

They've got 3com superstack 3300 10/100 switches waiting to go into
"closets", which are actually cabinets mounted on the walls where signal
closets would normally be. All the cabling was installed in the building
long after it was built, so the cables are running on top of the walls in
some cases, but they look ok. They mentioned that they didn't have enough
drops in the computer room and I said they just needed to drill some holes
in some of the floor tiles and pull more cables, but they have to run all
the cables in steel conduit to protect them from the mice, even under the
computer room floor. Chairman mouse I asked? They laughed at the joke. The
Chinese are not all that uptight about their government, would be my
observation. The 3com equipment is waiting for the fiber to be installed
and the ATM modules to get here and be installed. In the meantime, they've
got 10 (100?) megabit as backup.

I stuck my head in one room full of pc's and people where a class was in
session. The assistant director was teaching a class to other librarians
of the area on the management of library automation. They pay the library
for taking this class.

The room next to that has about 10 pc's where patrons can use multimedia,
which is mostly cdroms, I believe. They've got a couple of towers of
cdroms in the Automation workroom. I'm recommending they write those off
to hard disk, as we do.

They have plans to put about 10 PC's in the lobby soon to provide the
catalog and other services to the patrons. Right now there are only a few
pc's in the reading rooms to search for material, but they still haven't
finished the retroconversion of the records in their main stacks card
catalog. (Cards are filed according to the number of strokes in the
characters.) They are interested in what they might do to "protect" the
pc's from abuse from patrons. In their case they probably will be using
windows 98, for which there is software for locking down machines that a
lot of libraries use.

I gave an earthshaking talk this morning on reference, which was really
just a review of what US libraries usually provide as reference services,
which is a lot like what Chinese libraries do, and what we do at MCL,
including Youth Services. I have copies of our web sites with me on Cdrom
which gives me a fighting chance to be able to represent our services. I
found the Web camp stuff on the cd's I have with me by dent of
perseverance and enjoyed showing those stories by kids. I'm hitting the
web pretty hard, even though their connection right now needs a big boast.
I also gave them my opinion of what should be on every library's web site.
I might as well try to influence the Chinese, I can't get anyone at MCL to
listen to me. They were really interested in our community database. "Did
we have the price of vegetables?" Well, not exactly, but that is an
interesting idea. After the lecture, the group of questioners and I were
treated to the rocking and rolling of a 6.5 earthquake at about 11 AM in
Taiwan. In Fuzhou , there was no real effect but the swaying in the
building was quite evident and lasted for what seemed like several
minutes, and reoccurred several times for a short period. Lots of fun.
They claim they are really rare, as a rule. The large earthquake in Sept
knocked books off the shelves of several libraries on Fuzhou, but that was
about it. I've seen lots of stacks that needed earthquake bracing, in my
opinion. Some of the 8 floors of stacks at the FPL have some bracing, but
I bet an engineer or architect would say they need more bracing and to be
anchored to the floor better. I can probably get an architect's opinion on
that in about a week.

The reference department here has a staff of 8 people. They use the
internet, but have been disappointed in the use of it for answering
questions. They staff one reading room of their reference books, where all
the reference material is gathered together. and not decentralize as ours
is. They also do much work on the databases they are building such as: a
subject index for Macao and Hong Kong, local products, and enterprise
reform.

Mrs Wu, the head of reference, invited me over to her house on Saturday
for a party. Many of the library staff were there cooking up a sumptuous
lunch; all the great Fuzhou dishes. They insisted I try to make dumplings,
which wasn't that hard, so I got to do a little bit of the work. She lives
in an apartment that is in a building that is owned by her husband's
employer, the Bank of China. Employers who can afford it, buy buildings
and their employees can live there. The 2 bedroom apartment was redone
about 3 years ago when they moved in with totally modern fixtures. They
have included elements of both Chinese and Japanese styles into the living
and dining areas. We took off our shoes as we entered to not scratch the
attractive cherry wood floors. They live there with their son, who is off
at college in the south studing business administration. His room had maps
of Europe on the walls. These apartments have sun porches where many
people have plants creeping out and over the building; lots of
Bougainvillea.

From Fuzhou, rocking it up,

Brian