Digital Eccentric

on ebooks and ownership

2011-03-12T13:52:00.006-05:00

Here's a philosophical question - Do I own the ebooks that I have purchased?

This question came to me after performing a mundane task - compiling my annual "What I Read This Year List." I was performing my recordkeeping in a Facebook service. The Facebook service included a datapoint whether the book was owned or borrowed. This was easy, as I bought books or borrowed them from a library. I didn't track this in my LibraryThing account because I felt strongly that LT was where I managed my personal library, and never made any notations about books that I'd borrowed.

Then, in fall 2010, I bought a Nook. I travel a lot, and I an a pretty speedy reader, so my trips often require that 3-6 books accompany me. As I was due to make a trip that would require 10 hour of travel time each way, bracketing a 5-day stay, I was looking at taking 8 books. This would have been at least 1/4 of my suitcase. So I researched and decided on a Nook because I could expand its memory, swap out batteries, load my own pdbs, epubs and pdfs, and use the cool "loan" feature to trade some title with other Nook owners (even though I only knew 1 such person at the time). Its eInk screen is very easy to read. I got to travel with clothes and leave room for souvenirs.

I still buy books. I love books. I still frequent public libraries. I cannot say enough about the quality of the Alexandria Public Library. But I cannot deny that I have bought more ebooks that print books over the past 8 months. At least one a week.

I first considered the concept of ownership when I attended a reading by William Gibson. I loved his most recent book, Zero History. I took a number of my older Gibson paperbacks with me for him to sign, as I hadn't been to one of his signings since 1984.

But not Zero History, because you can't get an ebook inscribed. That saddened me.

I had a related moment when I bought ebooks that the latest n two different series. I owned the others in paperback. This felt wrong, like I really owned the earlier ones but not these. I couldn't see them next to each other on my shelves. No one perusing my shelves would know I had them. But when I was reading the ebook I wanted to refer back to something in an earlier volume, which I did not have on the reader. Might I buy physical copies out of a sense of completeness and the ebook for mobile access and searchability?

Then, when I was updating my year-end reading list in Facebook, I found myself puzzling over the "owned" or "borrowed" column. Did I really own my ebooks?

In one sense I do. I have files on my Nook. I can access them using Adobe Digital Editions or the Nook PC App. I can preserve them to some extent. I have some sense of control over the files.

In the legal sense I do not. I have actually licensed the use of that file for use on one or more devices. The Nook legal notice says that I cannot "copy, transfer, sublicense, assign, rent, lease, lend, resell or in any way transfer any rights to, all or any portion of the Digital Content to any third party, except in connection with the normal use of the lending feature available through the Service, or as expressly permitted by the Terms of Use or applicable third-party license agreement." So, I can only lend using the Lend feature, and I can' resell my ebooks like I could sell my paperbacks.

I don't really own them. How confortable am I with that? Moderately, but not entirely. How much do I miss the physicality? It depends on the time of day. When I'm on the Metro hauling things to and from work, or rushing through an airport, I do not miss books at all. When I'm standing in front of my bookcases, I want to see all my books on those shelves, not on a device charging in my living room.

So, I'm conflicted. I suspect I will sometimes end up buying both.

My year in reading

2011-01-02T15:03:00.005-05:00

I pulled together my list of books read in 2010, which comes to 84 books. It's not actually all the books that I read, but all the new books I read, not the re-reads. There were at least a dozen of those. I have a lot of time on my Metro ride to and from work. Also - no judging, please. As a colleague noted this year, I have "unexpected depths of shallowness" in some of my reading. I read horror and science fiction and mysteries. Live with it.

I need a new way to do this. I was using Visual Bookshelf in Facebook, but its export does not include the data from lists, as in "Read in 2010." I also had a custom filed if I own or borrowed the book -- also lost. I don't do this in LibraryThing because I borrow so many of my books and don't want to include them there. I'm open to suggestions.

Here's the list:

“Yellow Blue Tibia” by Adam Roberts

“Polystom” by Adam Roberts

“Gradisil” by Adam Roberts

“God of Clocks” by Alan Campbell

“Iron Angel” by Alan Campbell

“Scar Night” by Alan Campbell

“Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America” by Barbara Ehrenreich

“Dead in the Family “ by Charlaine Harris

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” by Charles Yu

“Dreadnought” by Cherie Priest

“Boneshaker” by Cherie Priest

“Kraken” by China Mieville

“The Love We Share Without Knowing” by Christopher Barzak

“Bryant & May off the Rails” by Christopher Fowler

“Bryant and May on the Loose” by Christopher Fowler

“Seventy-Seven Clocks” by Christopher Fowler

“Ten Second Staircase” by Christopher Fowler

“Full Dark House” by Christopher Fowler

“White Corridor” by Christopher Fowler

“The Victoria Vanishes” by Christopher Fowler

“Rune” by Christopher Fowler

“Seventy-Seven Clocks” by Christopher Fowler

“The Water Room” by Christopher Fowler

“The Tears of the Furies” by Christopher Golden

“Bite Me: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore

“Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa” by Dambisa Moyo

“The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York” by Deborah Blum

“The Alchemy Of Stone” by Ekaterina Sedia

“The Half-Made World” by Felix Gilman

“Blameless” by Gail Carriger

“Changeless” by Gail Carriger

“Soulless” by Gail Carriger

“Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World” by Gary Indiana

"House of Fallen Trees" by Gina Ranalli

“Basilisk” by Graham Masterton

“The Fall” by Guillermo del Toro

“The Man from Beijing” by Henning Mankell

“Parasite Eve” by Hideaki Sena

“Stone's Fall: A Novel” by Iain Pears

“The Secret of Crickley Hall” by James Herbert

“O Gentle Death” by Janet Neel

“You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto” by Jaron Lanier

“The Bellini Card” by Jason Goodwin

“The Snake Stone: A Novel” by Jason Goodwin

“The Janissary Tree: A Novel” by Jason Goodwin

“Shades of Grey: A Novel” by Jasper Fforde

“Aurorarama” by Jean-Christophe Valtat

“The Burning Wire” by Jeffery Deaver

“Changes: A Novel of the Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher

“Johannes Cabal the Detective” by Jonathan L. Howard

“Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture” by Julian Barnes

“The Passage” by Justin Cronin

“Beautiful Creatures” by Kami Garcia

“The Indian Bride” by Karin Fossum

“He Who Fears the Wolf ” by Karin Fossum

“When the Devil Holds the Candle” by Karin Fossum

“Black Magic Sanction” by Kim Harrison

“Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape” by Kirk Savage

“Paradise” by Koji Suzuki

“The Betrayal of the Blood Lily” by Lauren Willig

“Fever Dream” by Lincoln Child

“Far North: A Novel” by Marcel Theroux

“Bad Monkeys” by Matt Ruff

“Critique of Criminal Reason” by Michael Gregorio

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“In Light of India” by Octavio Paz

“The Windup Girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi

“Skippy Dies” by Paul Murray

“The Mao Case” by Qiu Xiaolong

“Kill the Dead” by Richard Kadrey

“2666: A Novel” by Roberto Bolano

“Whitechapel Gods” by S.M. Peters

“The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements” by Sam Kean

“The Little Stranger” by Sarah Waters

“Daemons Are Forever” by Simon R. Green

“The Kingdom Beyond the Waves” by Stephen Hunt

“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest” by Stieg Larsson

“The Slynx: A Novel” by Tatyana Tolstaya

“The Better Mousetrap” by Tom Holt

“You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps” by Tom Holt

“In Your Dreams” by Tom Holt

“The Portable Door” by Tom Holt

“Earth, Air, Fire and Custard” by Tom Holt

“Big Machine: A Novel” by Victor LaValle

“Zero History” by William Gibson

My favorites:

"Zero History." I love the story arc of the characters through his recent books, and his take on international marketing culture.

"The Kraken." I am a fan of novels where someone discovers a destiny that they were unaware of, and unknown societies just hidden from our own. Of course, I also love everything that China Mieville writes.

"Monument Wars." I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of urban planning, or the history of Washington D.C.

"The Alchemy of Stone." I loved this lyrical novel about what it means to wish to be human.

"Kill the Dead." I cannot recommend the Sandman Slim books enough for their gritty portrayal of Los Angeles, by way of Hell. That said, these books are not for everyone, as there is some extreme violence. Not gratuitous violence in my estimation, but more than some might be able to handle.

"Bad Monkeys." I am still not sure I know what the truth is.

Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century novels. Novels that make the steampunk aesthetic make sense, and feature the south and the pioneer west. I also had the pleasure of meeting her this year, and she's a gracious woman with a fabulous sense of humor.

"The Half-Made World." A steampunk western. I was extremely annoyed when it ended and it seems that there will be another book, because I wanted to find out what happened right away. But hooray, there will be another book.

"The Windup Girl." One of the most lauded SF novels of the year, which was highly deserved.

"The Disappearing Spoon." Fascinating personal stories from the history of science, framed through the discovery of elements.

"Aurorarama." I keep having to add that word to spellcheck dictionaries. An amazing concept where a decadent utopia in the arctic is poised for cultural revolution.

Alan Campbell's Deepgate Codex books. I don't know how I missed these intriguing books about a city chained in the sky over a gateway to Hell, and the wars between the gods when Hell opens up.

"Bright-Sided." I am not a fan of the self-esteem movement, especially in education. This book discusses the positive thinking movement, which I find equally fuzzy-headed.

Some of my surprises:

The Christopher Fowler Bryant and May books. I love quirky, and these English mysteries are full of that. I was particularly amused to read "Rune," one of Fowler's horror novels, to find that an earlier version of the characters were featured.

Tom Holt's J.W. Wells & Co books. I read a Tom Holt book some years ago and just didn't like it, even with its quirkiness. For some reason I picked up one of the Wells, book, and it struck the right note with me. The concept of taking the firm from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Sorcerer" and bringing it into present day with clueless employees is a lot of fun.

Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate books. Supernatural historical romance-y fantasies. Silly, yes, but fun.

"2666." This book seems right up my alley -- academics, missing scholars, serial killers. And yet, I just could not finish it. If my friend Mike -- who is in the same boat -- ever finishes it, I have sworn to try it again.

"You are Not a Gadget." I agreed with some of its positions, but vehemently disagreed with others.

2010 in Review

2010-12-31T22:53:00.009-05:00

I am mortified to find that I only posted three times in 2010. I'd like to be able to say that it was for some glorious reason, but, to be honest, I just haven't made time. I've tweeted (and re-tweeted) quite a bit. I went out on the road and spoke at a number of conferences. I had one article come out that I wrote in 2009. But in 2010, I just didn't make much time to write.

I could make a public resolution, but that's risky...since the proof of failure or success would be right here. So no resolution.

There were a number of topics that caught my attention this year.

Twitter donated their archive to the Library of Congress this year. It has been startling to me just how much public outcry there was. It's not unlike a journal -- a very public journal, aggregated from millions of people. Given the Library's collections of personal papers and man-on-the-street collections, Twitter seems perfectly in keeping with the Library's other analog and digitial collections. And, the Library archives web sites. In one sense, archiving Twitter is archiving another part of the web.

I got more involved in web archiving this year. I've been involved in web archiving before - I started up an initiative to archive course web sites in 2000. It's been gratifying to become involved again, and see how much has been saved and will be saved. Not just at institutions like the Library of Congress or other national libraries or research universities (check out the institutions that are part of the IIPC), but through personal, volunteer efforts. I'm looking at you, Archive Team.

Archives are acquiring increasing numbers of born-digital collections. I've been thrilled to see the increased interest in the use of digital forensics tools in the appraisal and processing and accessing of such collections. But there are challenges. Archives are looking at vintage media, which often requires vintage hardware and software. The collection at the Library's Package Campus is something to behold, but I shudder at what it will take to keep the equipment operational. To understand some of the challenges, a couple of key reports came out this year, on Preserving Virtual Worlds and Digital Forensics in Cultural Heritage.

In that same vein, I've always been interested in computing history. I am going to resolve to return to reading more on that subject.

I've been thinking a lot about documenting computing history in aid of digital preservation. There are multiple initiatives to document and verify file formats. There is at least one initiative to document carrier media. There are archives of manuals and media. I am thinking a lot about what other sorts of documentation are needed - operating systems, application software, hardware of all types... I heard these challenges subtly woven through many presentations and discussions at our storage architecture meeting this year.

I've been thinking a lot about standards this year. That comes from working with an initiative to collect content from the wild, as published. How do we collect things as they are, but minimize the grief required to deal with variety when ingesting them into a managed environment? That I wish I had a great answer for. But that's what 2011 will in part be about.

I almost forgot about personal digital archiving! We started an initiative at the Library in 2010, with Personal Archiving Day and a Personal Digital Archiving booth at the National Book Festival. I loved working at both events. There's a lot more to be done about public awareness and promoting best practices.

writing more very soon

2010-05-24T14:34:00.001-05:00

Since switching jobs on March 1 (I moved from the Repository Development Center at the Library of Congress to the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library) I have had much less time to write. I have a couple of long posts on a couple of topics waiting to come out - more very soon.

Ada Lovelace Day 2010

2010-03-24T19:35:00.010-05:00

I find it incredibly challenging to identify a single individual to write about on Ada Lovelace Day. I have a number of colleagues that I admire more than I can say, and what I really want to do is give a shout out to everyone I can think of (being sure that I am forgetting many women to whom I apologize profusely):

Grace Agnew, Rachel Allen, Ivy Anderson, Martha Anderson, Caroline Arms, Murtha Baca, Carol Bartels, Maria Bernier, Liz Bishoff, Suzanne Bonefas, Sandy Bostian, Cristine Bostick, Kristine Brancolini, Lois Brooks, Colleen Cahill, Laura Campbell, Lisa Chan, Robin Chandler, Patricia Cruse, Robin Dale, Ann Della Porta, Christina Deane, Robin Dowden, Laine Farley, Eleanor Fink, Daisy Flemming, Rachel Frick, Michelle Gallinger, Wendy Gogel, Cathryn Goodwin, Trisha Gordon, Emily Gore, Beth Gould, Laura Graham, Ronda Grizzle, Abbie Grotke, Kat Hagedorn, Susan Hazan, Geneva Henry, Nancy Hoebelheinrich, Gina Jones, Katherine Jones, Anne Kenney, Stacey Kowalczyk, Elisa Lanzi, Cindy Maisannes, Martha Mahard, Maura Marx, Amalyah Keshet, Michelle Kimpton, Katherine Kott, Liz Madden, Jane Mandelbaum, Cathy Marshall, Kathleen McDonnell, Bethany Mendenhall, Marla Misunas, Bethany Nowviskie, Susan Patterson, Sandy Payette, Toni Peterson, Cecilia Preston, Abbey Potter, Merrilee Proffitt, Suzanne Quigley, Michelle Rago, Vicky Reich, Oya Rieger, Jenn Riley, Chris Ruotolo, Bess Sadler, Dorothea Salo, Beth Sandore, Lenore Sarasan, Jodi Schneider, Candy Schwartz, Sarah Shreeves, Katherine Skinner, MacKenzie Smith, Erin Stalberg, Deb Thomas, Jennifer Trant, Jennifer Vinopal, Jewel Ward, Susanne Warren, Amanda Watson, Robin Wendler, Olivia Williamson, Debra Weiss, Holly Witchey, Ann Whiteside, and Diane Zorich.

I want them all to know that they have influenced and inspired me again and again over the years and today.

obsolescence

2010-03-17T08:28:00.006-05:00

I think a lot about obsolescence in my work: hardware, software, and file formats. I encounter a lot of obsolescence in my personal life as well: I own a Saturn (I am currently looking for a place to get it repaired since the Saturn and GM dealerships near me both closed -- I haven't needed to drive it since it developed a coolant leak late last year, but I need it again soon); I can't seem to find the dish washing liquid I prefer except at one store; and the body wash I used for years was discontinued, as was the product I choose to replace it soon after. My liking a TV show seems to be the kiss of death, an assurance that it will soon be canceled.

It's the anniversary of my mother's death today, and for some reason I've been experiencing a strange sense memory of a beauty product my mother used, a cosmetics counter lotion that I could not for the life of me remember the name of, but I remembered the black art deco packaging and its scent vividly (and that I used to sometimes buy it for her at Hart's department store in San Jose, California, also defunct). Last night I found some web sites with images of vintage cosmetics ads and, after some extensive browsing, found an ad that jogged my memory (thanks, Found in Mom's Basement). It was a Charles of the Ritz product called Revenescence. Not surprisingly, the product and brand no longer exists.

Circling back to obsolescence, this product was apparently beloved by generations of women who continue to seek it out. I found a 6oz bottle on eBay priced, optimistically one hopes, at $395, and smaller bottles for $150. There are warnings about pirate versions! And someone has attempted to recreate it, emulate it if you will, with some success. In other words someone so valued this that a market re-emerged, and it became worth someone's while to bring back a product that was made obsolete.

How often does that happen with software? I have seen innumerable games and applications brought back through emulation, and translation and transformation tools created for file formats. But how often is a market recreated, and market value reestablished at a higher rate? Should it ever happen, as an incentive to keep a application or format alive?

2009 in review

2009-12-31T10:39:00.007-05:00

As is always the case for me at the end of the year, I find myself waxing nostalgic.

What were my favorite books of the year?

Finch
The City and the City
Sandman Slim
The Chalk Circle Man
Chronic City
The Year of the Flood
The Girl who Played with Fire
The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
Free: The Future of a Radical Price

My favorite movies?

District 9
Food, Inc
Julie and Julia (the Julia parts)
Coraline
Star Trek
Coco Before Chanel
Up (I know, I don't usually like sentimental things, but this was just so darned likable)

There's a longer list of movies I haven't seen but want to:

Avatar
Sherlock Holmes
Up in the Air
A Single Man
A Serious Man
The Young Victoria
Bright Star
Inglorious Basterds
9
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The September Issue
The White Ribbon
Bad Lieutenant
Creation was never released in the U.S., but it looks like I'll get to see it at a screening in January

My favorite conferences?

OR09
DigCCurr 2009
2009 NDIIPP partners' meeting

Accomplishments?

We released our BIL Java library on SourceForge to support the BagIt standard. Kudos to Justin Littman and Brian Vargas.
We moved a number of our tools into supported LoC production, and opened up some of our in-development tools for limited external partner testing. Kudos to Justin Littman, Dan Chudnov, Dan Krech, Paul Petty, Jon Steinbach, Chun Yi, Praveen Bokka, Sohail Aslam, and Brian Vargas.
We launched an expanded internal LoC transfer and workflow service with a greatly improved UI (and more features and improvements to come). Kudos to Justin Littman, Dan Chudnov, Paul Petty, Chun Yi, and Brian Vargas.
The National Digital Newspaper Program hit a million page milestone and updated their entire underlying infrastructure. Congratulations to David Brunton, Deb Thomas, Ray Murray, Ivey Glendon, Henry Carter, Tonijala Penn, Dory Bower, Ed Summers, Dan Krech, Dan Chudnov, Curt Harvey, Justin Littman, and Brian Vargas.
The World Digital Library launched. Congratulations to Dave Hafken, Michelle Rago, Sandy Bostian, Kapil Thangavelu, Risa Ohara, Mike Giarlo, Sohail Aslam, Paul Petty, Chun Yi, and Laura Keen.
Thanks to our QA testing team for all their hard work on all the group's projects during the year: JoKeeta Joyner, La Tonya Freeman, Tasmin McDonald, and Preethi Mothkupally.
Thanks to our Ops team - Scott Phelps, Salim Malik, Ken Stailey, and Kurt Yoder - for all their support on all our group's projects this year.

stories from a maker childhood

2009-12-31T09:22:00.015-05:00

A TV show about vintage toys brought on a discussion in our house of toys we had when we were kids. Not too surprisingly to anyone that knows me, my favorite activities were making things and reading.

My love of all things spooky, supernatural was inborn in me. My earliest comic books at 5 years old were Casper the Friendly Ghost and Wendy the Little Witch. I attended church preschool at The Falls Church, and I was often found wandering the small cemetery that is there. I still have a glow-in-the-dark ghost family that I know we bought one figure at a time on visits to the drug store in Falls Church. It should be no surprise, then, that my absolutely favorite toy from my childhood was the Thingmaker. I have a photo from either Christmas 1968 or my birthday in 1969 where I am joyfully displaying my favorite present - a mold with which to make my own little skeletons.

Don't remember the Thingmaker? It was later re-branded as "Creepy Crawlies." It was basically a hot plate, accompanied by metal molds, into which you poured colored "Goop." The heat set up the goop in the mold, and once the mold was cooled you had soft rubbery things. There were molds for bugs, but there were also molds with which you cast parts to make larger items (skeletons) or 3D objects (so-called "Dragons," which were THE hot trading item when I was in the 2nd grade after clackers, those glassy resin balls on thin rope that you clacked together to make really loud noises and sort of perform tricks). You could mix the colors of goop and create some really startling color combinations. It later years they also had "jewel" molds with jewel powder to cast hard plastic jewels. I am sure the company that manufactured these made quite a bit off the goop and jewel powder consumables. The product disappeared and came back in the 1990s in a safer version but it just didn't look as good to me. OK, I guess it's not acceptable anymore to give 5 year-olds a toy that consisted of an open hot plate, metal molds, and some flimsy tongs with which to extract the hot molds, but I really loved that toy.

I did not have an Easy Bake Oven. Mom would give me a toy that was an open hot plate but not one with an enclosed light bulb? I once enacted the roasting of my talking Bugs Bunny puppet with a neighbor girl with a roasting pan in a dresser drawer. I spent a lot of time at her house because they had a color TV and her mother would let us watch "Dark Shadows" after school.

I was not one for playing much with dolls. I had a large baby doll and baby furniture - I cherished and still have the doll blankets that my mother knitted but can barely remember the doll. I had Barbie dolls (the rotating electric kitchen of the future was my favorite accessory), a Chrissy doll with hair that grew and retracted again (that fascinated me), and Dawn dolls (I loved her dress with the crystal-pleated organza skirt, and her beach house with the inflatable pool). I later transformed some of those dolls into superheroes by making them little costumes. Then there was the one I turned into an Andorian by painting her skin blue with permanent marker and coating her hair with liquid paper. I gave all those dolls away to the daughter of a friend in the late 1980s.

I did have a dollhouse, my most desired gift for Christmas 1969. That was the Imagination dollhouse, an amazing reconfigurable mid-century modern style plastic dollhouse that consisted of three movable transparent colored plastic structures. The figures and furnishings were all sleek and modern. I know they sometimes appear on Ebay. In a future where nostalgia overwhelms me and I am flush with cash and storage space, I may buy one.

I never had Legos, but I did have Lincoln Logs. I have no idea if Mom knew they were developed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright's sons, but she had a Frank Lloyd Wright obsession (she lived in the FLW Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in the 1950s) that she passed along to me.

Mom was a maker at heart. She knit and crocheted, and had a fondness for paper crafts. Somewhere I have a picture from Easter 1970 where you can see on a table an astonishing tableaux of two stylized rabbits, where the clothing/bodies were constructed of a number of different coordinated patterned and plain colored glossy stiff paper (why do I remember that the paper came in folded squares from a Hallmark store?), the heads were decorated blown eggs made to look like bunnies, and they had as Easter hat and an Easter bonnet perched over their ears. I know the templates came from a magazine. Mom kept them for years, but I did not find them when I cleaned out her house after her death.

We crafted a lot together. Some time around 1970 Mom bought The McCalls Giant Golden Make-It Book for us. It was full of templates and instructions to make dozens of projects. Mom was annoyed by my lack of patience in waiting for glue to dry and my insistence in using scotch tape for every paper project instead. She despaired of my seemingly profligate use of tape. Yes, I still have that book.

Mom was an excellent cook but a so-so baker. At Christmas she obsessed about making cookies. Her attempts at bread were disastrous, so she resorted to frozen bread dough. Her Pfeffernusse were like dog kibble. When I was in elementary school I bought The Cookie Book by Eva Moore through one of my Scholastic book orders. It had one recipe for each month of the year, and we made its December sugar cookie recipe with "Peanuts" Christmas cookie cutters which we decorated in glorious detail. (I still have the book, too, and think it has the best Snickerdoodle recipe.) Mom also had a cookie press and made butter cookies that she dyed in batches of red and green. Some years they were very pale tints and some years they were very vivid. Both were unappetizing to look at but yummy. I have that cookie press in its original box with all its dies, and I use it almost every Christmas. I do NOT dye my dough.

I never picked up knitting. I was OK at crocheting. I loved embroidery, needlepoint, and sewing. Mom taught me to sew, I had classes as part of my Girl Scout sewing badge, and I took a summer school needlearts class (we will not speak of my knitting attempts in that class). I still sew but I haven't tried anything else in decades. I am daunted by my expert knitting friends.

Mom had excellent copyist drawing skills. She never created any original works that I remember, but she could copy anything. She was astonishingly skilled with charcoal and pastels. She and I took an oil painting class together when I was a child - the instructor must have been extraodinarily understanding that she let a single mother bring her elementary-aged daughter to class with her. Luckily I was a good painter. My drawing skills were never great. I took lessons in Chinese ink painting in middle school, and I somehow talked my way into a life-drawing class when I was 17 (in post-Proposition 13 California most high school art classes were canceled, so I took adult education and community college classes). My high school classmates just could not deal that I was drawing nude models. I also took a print-making class. I was working with oversize printing plates and had to work with them in the acid with my bare hands. The yellow and black chemical discoloration of my hands freaked out my high school chemistry teacher, who was afraid I'd done it in her class. She was relieved and horrified when I told her what I was doing.

My early childhood room in a number of houses was decorated with little paint-by-numbers paintings. Mom loved the precision of those little kits and pots of paint. I hated the clowns and strange, stylized dogs. I still have the ocean scenes she painted for me. I don't remember doing this myself. I preferred playing with Colorforms when I was 4 and 5. And my Etch-a-Sketch. And my favorite toy before my getting my Thingmaker - a Lite Brite. I always used up the black sheets of construction paper out of the mixed-color pads first as Lite Brite refills. The sensation of pushing the light pin through the paper and through the round mesh and seeing the pin light up was just so cool.

I may have had a couple of tiny Liddle Kiddle dolls, but what I loved was my Liddle Kiddle branded tracing light box. I used that light box - its body was lavender plastic - at least 15 years through the mid-80s when it finally died. I also had a Barbie branded "fashion plate" set that consisted of a series of outline templates that you used to draw Barbie figures that you could color in. There were patterned rubbing plates you could use to create textures. I loved the fashion design aspect of it.

Didn't every kid in the 1970s have a Spirograph? I could create intricate patterns for hours, and I kept a stash of colored ballpoint pens. Actually, I know not every kid had one because I always took it with me to my cousins' house, along with the Barbie fashion plates. My cousin Sandy may have had the Mousetrap and Green Ghost games, but I had those.

metaphors

2009-08-13T11:44:00.011-05:00

My colleague Thorny Staples often uses the metaphor that digital humanities projects are, at their most basic level, online exhibitions. Curated content is presented with key descriptive information not unlike exhibition tombstone labels and contextualized through categorization and by scholarly essays of varying lengths as well as site information architecture (not unlike rooms of an exhibition with wall texts). The end results include the identification and explication of relationships and the presentation of deep readings of objects. That metaphor always resonated with me.

In a recent discussion a small group was trying to work out some generalized models to for the processes we follow from the receipt/creation of digital files through to providing access. We were having a particularly lengthy discussion about description and contextualization -- at what point in a digital file's life cycle is it related to other files and identified as a digital object, and at what point is some sort of intellectual meaning overlaid onto that digital object?

My new colleague Terry Harrison -- a big fan of using metaphors -- commented that when museums acquire objects they cannot know every context in which the object will be exhibited or published in the future, but they acquire it and put effort into description and conservation to prepare for future display/publication when the object will be contextualized many times over.

This sent me down the road to a metaphor that's still developing in my head which may not yet translate to something that anyone beside me thinks is sensible. Or it may not be sensible at all.

First, I'm starting with an assumption that there are four very broad categories of activities that we need to describe (leaving out "preservation" for now). On the museum side, it's these:

Acquisition: Items are proposed, selected, and acquired
Accessioning: Items have accession numbers assigned, are assigned storage locations, relationships between parts are identified (a tea set is made up of individual components), and basic descriptive information is recorded in a registration system
Preparation: Items are cleaned, repaired, mounted, framed, or otherwise stabilized and made ready for research use and public viewing
Exhibition: Items are further described and presented in the context identified by a collection or exhibition curator; an object will be exhibited many times and assigned to multiple contexts

This roughly translates to this in the digital realm:

Creation/Transfer: Selection and digitization or transfer of digital (master?) files to an institution
Inventory: Files are assigned identifiers/names, placed into some sort of meaningful (or not) storage location in a server environment
Processing: QA, manipulation, derivative creation
Access: Making content discoverable and usable, which can include a curator providing context and intellectual overlays for objects (not files)

I'm having one real issue in making this metaphor work for me and for others, and that's around the creation of metadata and recording of file relationships. At what point is the relationship of files to each other recorded? Is the creation of metadata identifying/describing an intellectual object part of inventory, processing, or access? When is the relationship of files to that intellectual object recorded?

I think that inventorying should include a step whereby the relationships between files are recorded so it is recognizable that some set of 300 files go together. There wasn't a lot of push back on this in our discussion. When descriptive metadata for an intellectual object is created and when the relationship of files to an intellectual object are recorded engendered a lot of discussion. I personally think that descriptive metadata for intellectual objects represented by those files is also created during the inventory stage, and that files in hand at that stage should in some way be associated with the intellectual objects at that time.

This is complicated because the recording of all the relationship of files to intellectual objects is not fully possible until objects are prepared and added to an access application. That's where the contextualization happens, so one can argue that that is where intellectual objects are truly defined and the process of associating files to objects takes place. Preparation is driven by access. If access applications are siloed at all, each might use different derivative files, and there has to be some association of those derivatives to the master and to the intellectual objects.

So, we have master files, derivative files (possibly multiple sets over time per access point), intellectual object metadata, relationships of all files to each other and to that intellectual object, and the need to inventory and manage all of the above. Which may be separate from an access application or multiple access points. Where is this recorded, in what order, where, and how do we describe these activities? I'm struggling with that part of the metaphor/model.

How did this conversation arise? Well, we're trying to scope out some future directions and activities, and a shared understanding of the model for the activities we support is vital. Mine is not the only model proposed and it just may not be right. I'm sharing this as much for my own process as anything else.

LoC on iTunes

2009-06-30T14:35:00.003-05:00

The Library of Congress now has content on iTunes U. iTunes U is the area of the iTunes Store which offers open educational audio and video content from universities and other educational institutions. The Library’s initial iTunes U content includes historical videos such as original Edison films and a series of 1904 films from the Westinghouse Works, as well as event videos such as author talks from the National Book Festival, the "Books and Beyond" series, discussions with curators, and lectures from the Kluge Center. The audio content includes Library podcast series such as "Music and the Brain," slave narratives from the American Folklife Center, and interviews with authors from the National Book Festival. The collection also includes Library-produced classroom and educational materials, such as courses from the Catalogers’ Learning Workshop.

You must be running iTunes to be able to view the LoC content.

new BIL on SourceForge and update to BagIt spec

2009-06-27T15:56:00.004-05:00

This week saw a couple of events around the BagIt specification and tools.

A revision of the BagIt specification went out this week. You will note that it is still 0.96 -- the revisions were only in language to clarify some questions that had been received. There are some discussions going on about 0.97 - join the Digital Curation Google group. I'd like to see some more activity there!

Version 3.0 of BIL, the BagIt Library for Java, was released on SourceForge this week. It's available as binary and source code.

Plus, there was the BagIt video ...

BagIt video

2009-06-27T15:45:00.004-05:00

The first in a planned series of digital preservation videos is available on the digitalpreservation.gov site -- an introduction to BagIt! Brian Vargas did a great job as "the talent" -- e.g., the narrator -- but folks should know that Brian was not selected just for his acting experience: he wrote many of our transfer tools (like the transfer scripts on SourceForge) and is a co-author of the BagIt specification.

The video premiered this week at the annual NDIIPP Partner's Meeting to great acclaim. It's aimed at a general audience.

EDIT: The NDIIPP site has added a great new page on the Transfer Tools with a link to the video.

Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive

2009-06-26T13:04:00.004-05:00

I came across a very interesting resource today -- the Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive -- and the just-released results of a study they did on archiving legal resources on the web:

The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has released a comprehensive report evaluating its digital preservation efforts during the project's two-year pilot phase.
The project evaluation reveals that nearly 14 percent — or approximately one in seven — of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2009 have already disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project's efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs. A similar analysis in 2008 showed that slightly more than 8 percent of archived titles had disappeared from their original URLs, demonstrating a dramatic increase in "link rot," or inactive URLs, among archived content over the past year.
During the two-year pilot phase, the libraries participating in the project archived more than 4,300 digital objects and tracked more than 177,000 visits to www.legalinfoarchive.org, the home of The Chesapeake Project's digital archive collections. Users of the project's Web site visited from educational, government, and military institutions in the United States, as well as from countries abroad throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.

Not too surprisingly, the second highest class of domain to where resource loss is found is .edu, after .info. Academic institutions are not always very conscientious about preserving access to their content, and with their academic term structure and the movement of faculty between institutions, web content on .edu sites is highly variable in its longevity. I don't see a characterization of how old the resources are that they harvested -- that can be very difficult to identify -- but it is a high percentage of bitrot, and there was quite an increase from the end of the first year to the end of the second year.

Download the PDF of their report.

milestones for the National Digital Newspaper Program

2009-06-16T19:55:00.007-05:00

Today there was an exciting press event at the Newseum for the National Digital Newspaper Program, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There was a great live demo, a video on digital production for the project from the University of Kentucky, and some nice speechmaking. The event promoted the milestone where the project surpassed 1,000,000 pages available at the Chronicling America site, the addition of seven new state partners, and the addition of images of illustrated newspaper supplements to the LoC Flickr Commons set (with more to come every month).

So far the AP has an article available, and there were representatives of other news outlets at the event. Check out the press release. Roy Tennant has a post that includes some of the technical specs supplied by my colleague Ed Summers. Ed and Dan Krech have done some great work to update the underlying application, improving the ingest and search functionality, adding the functionality that allows the site to be crawled, and exposing the data as RDF for a multitude of possibilities.

Edit: Here's the Washington Post article, and the official LoC blog posting.

something odd happened today

2009-06-13T15:48:00.003-05:00

Last weekend I went to my local public library (which I love), where I spotted a book that was on my to-be-read list. I keep a list of books I want to read, and periodically search the library's catalog to see if they have it at any of their branches. I had this book noted on my list as being held in the collection of my local branch. Depending upon how much I want to read the book, I'll put a hold onto the book if they have it in the collection but it isn't checked in. This is a book that held a middling position on my list for a while, a 2007 sequel to a science fiction novel by a newish but award-winning author which I liked but didn't love, but thought might be interesting. I grabbed the book off the shelf, but, in the process of wandering around and gathering up other books, I must have set it down and it didn't make it to the self-checkout with me, something I didn't discover until I got home. Ah well, I knew I'd be back this weekend, and maybe it would still be available.

I returned today and wandered over to the shelf. It wasn't there. I decided to look the book up and see when it was due and put a hold on it this time.

It wasn't there any more. It wasn't in the catalog, and the author wasn't in the catalog either.

I left with the books I found and one that was on hold for me. I considered asking about the missing book/author, but there was quite a line and I didn't want to hold people up while I asked my crazy-conspiracy-sounding questions -- how did this author and his books disappear in the last week? And why?

how did a month go by?

2009-05-26T20:55:00.003-05:00

In re-writing the opening sentence to this post about seventeen times, I have alternated between apologizing, rationalizing, making excuses for, and outright ignoring that I haven't posted here in a month.

I've been attending conferences and traveling a lot. Four meetings/trips in three weeks, and four states (yes, one state was Virginia, but I was off site for three days, followed the next day by a trip over two hours away and overnight for two nights, so that counts). That doesn't stop most folks from continuing to reach out and share, but I find travel very draining. I can happily spend my days chatting with colleagues, taking notes and tweeting, and talking about what excites me about my job. By the time I collapse in my room at the end of the day, I sometimes feel like I hope to never discuss the BagIt specification again (But I will, you know I will, and with great enthusiasm). And when I get home, I hole up and do not feel social for a good 24 hours. Yes, I might be the most outgoing Myers-Briggs "I" out there, but I'm still an I who just wants to sit quietly and think for a while.

And, if I also want to make some semi-valid excuses, my work PC died again and it was out of my possession for 3 weeks, one of my projects had a major deadline that was almost fully met on time and required some last minute scrambling on my part so I didn't blow the deadline too badly, and we had to pack up and move out of our office suite so some duct repairs could take place. I should not even admit how far behind I am in studying for my Japanese class.

I hope to resume normal blogging this week. The coming attractions: the IS&T Arching 2009 conference, Open Repositories 2009, and a visit to Scola, the Library's international newscast preservation partner.

Digital Karnak

2009-04-27T15:09:00.004-05:00

I am a huge fan of 3-D visualizations of archaeological sites, and there's a new one developed by a team under Diane Favro and Willeke Wendrich at UCLA. Digital Karnak provides a Google Earth visualization of the site of Karnak, a massive temple complex in Egypt that was in use for some 1,500 years. There's a nice interactive timeline through which you can view the development of the site over time. Start with the overview if you're unfamiliar with Karnak.

The web site includes an amazing archive consisting of stills from the 3-D model and photographs from the archaeological site. I'd like to see that expanded some day to include any smaller objects from Karnak that are in various cultural heritage collections. Historical renderings (there are known drawings from the early 18th century onwards) would also be a nice addition.

There's a nice article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

World Digital Library Launch

2009-04-21T04:00:00.005-05:00

The World Digital Library is now available.

The site is launching with 1,170 objects from 26 partner institutions. WDL focuses on significant primary materials reflecting the cultural heritage of all UNESCO member countries, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other types of primary sources from varying time periods. The project will continue to add content to the site, and will enlist new partners from the widest possible range of institutions and countries.

The site is available in seven different languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The content is not translated -- the items appear in their original language. The metadata and all the site navigation is translated to make it possible to search and browse the site in any of the languages. The metadata came from partner institutions or was created by catalogers at the Library of Congress, and much of the translation was provided by Lingotek.

The site was built using the Django Python framework, nginx, Lucene/Solr, and a mySQL database. The zooming in the imageviewer and pageturner is Seadragon Ajax. There is heavy use of Javascript, jquery, JSON and underlying XML. Check out the image carousels and timeline tool! The project also developed a cataloging tool to manage the metadata and cataloging process and interact with the Lingotek translation system via their API.

museum data exchange software

2009-04-12T07:48:00.006-05:00

OCLC, funded by the Mellon Foundation and working with the software company Cognitive Applications, Inc, has released COBOAT and OAICat Museum to support data interchange between museums. This work is happening under the auspices of their Museum Data Exchange Project.

So what, many people will say? It should already be easy to share museums data, right?

Not so much.

The museum collection management system arena has some major vendors (Gallery Systems, Willoughby, Minisis, Cuadra, etc) and some smaller vendors (Re:discovery, PastPerfect, etc.), and countless (and I really mean countless) home-grown systems running on FileMaker, Access, and MS-SQL. I know, because I spent many years working for museums and I was on the board of the Museum Computer Network, a group that dilligently worked on many interchange initiatives. I worked with software from 3 vendors and managed a FileMaker-based system. Getting data in was easy. Getting data out was often hard. Participation in data aggregation projects took a lot of effort. And most small- or medium-sized museums (and there are many, many more of them than large museums) have little or no technology staff to enable data sharing. And there is no common data schema in the community.

The museum community itself has sometimes slowed progress. When discussion of relevant library community standards were mentioned, some said "We're nothing like libaries! Our collections are unique! Their standards are not for us!" That attitude seems to have adapted in the last 10 years.

I am glad to see something like this going forward. A fee-free tool that can help museums extract data from black-box vendor systems and enable sharing? Bring it on.

open repositories 2009

2009-04-10T09:34:00.003-05:00

The abstracts are now available for the presentation and poster sessions at OR09. This is one of my favorite conferences to attend and present at.

DigCCurr 2009

2009-04-05T10:03:00.006-05:00

I was in Chapel Hill the first week of April for the DigCCurr 2009 conference and to attend a meeting to brainstorm about personal digital collection preservation. I thought the conference was very good, better than the first one in 2007. I saw many excellent presentations, had some great conversations, and got a good response to my presentation on LC's work with file transfer and inventory tools. As with the last conference, I walked out thinking that I should have been an archivist.

I strongly recommend the proceeding form DigCCurr 2009. They're available as a free download from Lulu, or you can buy a POD version. You can also look up the very active twittering history at #digccurr.

I found it strangely hard to write up my notes from this meeting. I think it's because I'm still struggling with some aspects of the digital preservation problem space.

I absolutely agree that the activities of traditional archival practice have a place in the preservation of digital records. Where I found myself disagreeing with some presenters is in the balance between collecting and saving what we can versus an appraisal process to select what we will collect/save. In collection development practices for general collections, there is the often-held discussion about never knowing what might prove useful in the future, so it is a disservice to be too selective now. I guess that I have taken that point of view to heart, and I want to see our institutions cast as open a net as possible for digital collections. If we don't grab it when we can, there will be nothing to select.

I also found myself bristling occasionally over the implied scope of the term "digital collections" as I most often heard that phrase used at the meeting. There was very much a focus on electronic records and the digital realm of personal papers. Of course there were some great discussions around multimedia, web sites, audio/video, and image collections, but what I pretty much never heard anybody mention was born-digital scholarship and teaching and learning materials.

My first web site preservation project was at the Harvard Design School in the late 1990s, where, while developing courseware software, I realized that we were losing the history of what we taught and the products of the courses as we overwrote sites every term. Part of an institution's records are its lists of course offerings, course syllabi and reading lists, and, for some courses, the projects that the students created and put online in the course site. This was particularly true at at graduate school with programs in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning where the studio courses produced important site-specific work and case studies that was often lost after every term. I felt so strongly about this that I launched a course site preservation project that would have involved retrieving sites off server archives. We were looking at using METS (in its early days) to map the sites. But, as often happens, I ended up leaving before the project got very far along and no one felt nearly as devoted to the project as I did and it didn't go very far.

At UVA we launched a project called "Sustaining Digital Scholarship" to preserve born-digital scholarship, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. We instituted a technical assessment process and were working on documenting and migrating some major digital scholarly resources with varying strategies. That project is still going on in a limited way. It can take a lot of resources to assess and document a large digital archive.

That said, I was excited by some of the tools that I saw. ACE from the University of Maryland. MOPSEUS from Greece. The PARSE.Insight draft preservation roadmap. CASPAR for representation information. PLATO and Hoppla from Austria. LANL's ReMember Framework for OAI-ORE. CDL's Pairtree directory structure. Prometheus and MediaPedia from Australia. All very much worth looking into.

There was also a thread in this meeting on the use of digital forensics, transitioning some tools and practices from legal digital forensics into archival digital forensics. This interested me very much and I intend to read up in this area.

new flip book beta

2009-04-02T06:43:00.001-05:00

From Peter Brantley on the OCA blog -- A new beta version of the Flipbook bookreader has been released open source under GNU license. The source code is available from the Open Library site.

LC/CLIR report on pre-1972 sound recording copyright

2009-04-01T21:40:00.002-05:00

Excerpted from the press release:

Sound recordings were not protected by federal copyright law until 1972. A Library of Congress report indicates that the miscellany of state laws protecting pre-1972 sound recordings will extend copyright protection until 2067, creating a situation where some recordings dating to the 19th century are not available in public domain.

The Library announced today the completion of a commissioned report that examines copyright issues associated with unpublished sound recordings. This new report from the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources addresses the question of what libraries and archives are legally empowered to do, under current laws, to preserve and make accessible for research their holdings of unpublished sound recordings made before 1972.

The report, "Copyright and Related Issues Relevant to Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Unpublished Pre-1972 Sound Recordings by Libraries and Archives’ is one of a series of studies undertaken by the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB), under the auspices of the Library of Congress. It was written by June Besek, executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia University. The report is available free of charge at www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub144abst.html.

New LC multimedia collection sharing initiatives

2009-03-27T10:37:00.004-05:00

This is news ... The Library of Congress will begin sharing content from its vast video and audio collections on the YouTube and Apple iTunes web services as part of a continuing initiative to make its incomparable treasures more widely accessible to a broad audience. The new Library of Congress channels on each of the popular services will launch within the next few weeks.

...

The General Services Administration today also announced agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that will allow other federal agencies to participate in new media while meeting legal requirements and the unique needs of government. GSA plans to negotiate agreements with other providers, and the Library will explore these new media services when they are appropriate to its mission and as resources permit.

Read the Press Release.

Jenny Holzer

2009-03-24T18:39:00.006-05:00

Even though I have already posted for Ada Lovelace Day, an exchange I had with a colleague earlier today led me to want to post about someone else. I accidentally printed the entirety of a lengthy PowerPoint presentation. After the pages I actually needed printed, I canceled the print job and went to my meeting. When I got back there was a stack of messed up printouts from the failure of the print job to, well, fail gracefully. There were pages of random letters in random length rows. A colleague saw me staring at one of the pages and exclaimed "text art!" I immediately thought of Jenny Holzer.

Jenny Holzer is famous for her text-based art featuring short statements, or "truisms." Some are well known cliches while others are random phrases or slogans or exerpted phrases from larger texts or documents. Her work explores the use of words and ideas in public spaces. She works in a variety of media, including large scale xenon projections, LED signs, the Internet, plaques, benches, stickers, T-shirts, and street posters. I cannot begin to describe how mesmerizing her work is, whether a large-scale projection or an immersive gallery space. For over thirty years she has joined ideology with space through text using technology. I just found out that she is on twitter.

I cannot remember where I first encountered her work. It may have been at SFMoMA. It may have been at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts (one of my absolute favorite museums that not enough people know about). Or it might have been at Mass MoCA. I very much want to see the exhibition of her work at the Whitney, on display through May 31, 2009. There's a detailed review in the New York Times.

Ada Lovelace Day

2009-03-24T05:47:00.007-05:00

I have had the pleasure in my life of working with a number of strong (and strong-willed) women who have seen me through various stages of my career. On the occasion of Ada Lovelace Day, I'd like to write about a colleague who I have known for many years, although we only had the opportunity to work in the same place for 4 weeks: Caroline Arms.

Caroline joined the Library of Congress in 1995 to work on the American Memory project. While the initial focus of the project was digitization and access, she saw the underlying issue that was created by such an effort: preservation. There was a profound lack of awareness in the library world about digital preservation at the time.

Caroline thought long and hard about the life cycle of digital objects, focusing in particular on one of the most vital areas that have consequences for all preservation efforts: standards for metadata and file formats. Preservation is always easier if good choices are made about digital formats. Curators should make collection decisions knowing which formats will and won’t be easily sustainable. For an object to be useful long into the future, its formats should be carefully selected and the specifications and characteristics of its formats must be documented.

Caroline and LC colleague Carl Fleischhauer’s exhaustive format research led to their creation of the Digital Formats web site, the first definitive inventory of information about current and emerging digital formats. The site is an essential resource for the international digital preservation community. Caroline also made a concerted effort to promote the use of formats with open standards, and to shepherd file formats through the standards review process.

She was also involved with the development of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. I first met Caroline working on a collaborative OAI harvesting project, and I owe much of my expertise to her mentoring.

It was a great loss to LC that Caroline retired in June 2008. She did not retire from the community, however, and is participating in a LC group looking at metadata even now.

Thank you, Caroline.

ennui

2009-03-20T22:00:00.003-05:00

I have been suffering through a state of ennui of late. Low energy, not feeling like cooking, a short attention span for reading, lack of interest in TV shows I usually enjoy, and a strong desire to work at home, curled up on the sofa with cats. Not even getting a great deal on some fabulous shoes to wear once sandal season returns, or going to a farmer's market we'd never visited before and finding -- wonder of wonders -- bacon sage ravioli, has cheered me up much. Tasks that usually give me a strange sense of accomplishment, like a successful presentation for a group at work or being caught up on the laundry or finally depositing a stack of checks for small denominations that I kept accumulating to take to the bank all at once, have done little to enhance my mood for long.

It's partly the cold, March, why-isn't-it-really-spring-yet doldrums. It's just past the one year anniversary of putting our house in Charlottesville on the market. I have also spent the lion's share of my time doing almost nothing but writing. In the past few weeks I have written a chapter for a book, revised a conference paper, written two conference proposals, and written 3 lengthy technical documents for one project alone, not to mention sending countless emails. All that writing and spreading myself across Twitter, Facebook, and this blog has had the effect of cutting down on posting overall.

Successfully (I hope) completing my first Japanese course next week will help. And two projects I've been working on have launches next month -- getting those out the door and having the chance to talk about them them will almost certainly improve my outlook.

copyright registries

2009-03-01T20:43:00.003-05:00

I attended a great presentation by Siva Vaidhyanathan and James Grimmelmann at Georgetown University last Friday on the Google Book Search settlement. The question that I most wanted to raise during the discussion period (why did the facilitator never call on me?) was about their opinions on the proposed registry. This seems to me to be one of the topics most in need of clarification in the settlement.

I chatted with both of them afterwards. I worry about a potential lack of transparency of the registry's contents and its mode of operation. I have heard Dan Clancy from Google say that it will not be made fully publicly available.

While there a student from the University of Michigan School of Information mentioned Michigan's IMLS grant supported effort to create a Copyright Review Management System to increase the reliability of copyright status determinations of books published in the United States from 1923 to 1963. Last week Lorcan Dempsey was blogging about the OCLC Copyright Registry Evidence Initiative. Stanford has a Copyright Renewal Database. John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania researched periodicals renewals in addition to posting scans from many volunteer institutions (including Carnegie Mellon's and Project Gutenberg's extensive work) in his Catalog of Copyright Entries. The U.S. Copyright Office has records from 1978 onward online.

So, where does a Library (or anyone, for that matter?) go to research the copyright status of a published work? One of these places? All of these places? And where might the ownership status of orphan works someday be researched and recorded and made public? What will be the most authoritative source? Will there be open resources and less open resources? This looks like an area where there might be too much competition, almost a splintering of attention that calls out for a sense of coordination in the community.

recent reading

2009-03-01T20:24:00.004-05:00

Some reports and posts that caught my attention recently:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation released a progress report from the DuraSpace project, a joint project of the DSpace Foundation and the Fedora Commons.

"MetaTools - Investigating Metadata Generation Tools" from JISC.

Merrilee Proffitt from RLG/OCLC posted on the "Legal and Ethical Implications of Large-Scale Digitization of Manuscript Collections" symposium at UNC-Chapel Hill. Posting Part 1 and Posting Part 2.

Andrew Richard Albanese published an article for Library Journal called "Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box." It's a very balanced presentation of a number of points of view on the failure and success of IRs.

eReading

2009-03-01T19:44:00.006-05:00

Via TeleRead, I found an essay about eReading devices by Jennifer Chapelle on treocentral. The piece, "Centro, iPhone, and that Other Reading Device (Kindle 2)," briefly describes her experiences with a Centro and an iPhone, focusing on the new Kindle 2.

Overall, she liked it. But she's not throwing away her other devices.

If you've ever been interested in getting an eReader type of device, I can definitely recommend the Kindle 2. It's not the cheapest gadget, but it does have a lot of features, and don't forget that 3G Sprint radio inside. If you want an eReader that is thin, lightweight, fast, looks great, has a built-in dictionary and a battery saving sleep-mode with some cool portraits, the Kindle 2 from Amazon is a great choice.

And if you don't care about those eReaders like the Kindle and the Sony device, just stick with your Treo or Centro. Those are great little eBook readers! And we know all the other great stuff you can do on them like talking on the phone, texting, writing documents, listening to music, taking photos, surfing the internet on decent looking web browsers, playing games, etc. My Centro and Treo Pro will be staying right by my side, Kindle or no Kindle.

I saw an interview with Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose last week, which was primarily a discussion of the Kindle 2. My take-away is that the killer feature for the Kindle is the wireless purchasing of books that does not require a PC. Bezos is also a huge fan of the ability to bookmark your location in a text on your Kindle, and when you pick up another of your Kindles, the devices will sync up and you will find the same bookmark. Interesting, but I'm not sure I understand yet why you would have more than one. One at home and one at work? One downstairs and one upstairs? It's already portable. The functionality that they are working on where you can sync between your Kindle and a reader app on a cell phone and back interests me more. His example was reading on a cell phone while waiting in line at the grocery store, and having your Kindle aware of your new bookmark once you get home. That use case works better for me.

His statement that he wants to deliver "Every book ever in print in any language" gives me pause. That feels potentially monopolistic for the eBook distribution sector. Well, at least for their proprietery AZW ebooks. But if theirs becomes the most successful pipeline for eBooks, will other creators and distributors of other formats be able to compete? I can only assume the open access eBook realm will not fade away.

I found myself looking at the Sony eReader a week ago. The touchscreen and non-touchscreen versions boths have some different usability issues. The touchscreen is the better of the two, and supports annotation. It supports more files formats that the Kindle. It requires a PC has no wireless features. And it runs on MonteVista Linux, which a member of my family worked on a couple of years ago.

For now at least I plan to continue to read books on my Centro. I have about 3 dozen books, some recent, some classics. And I haven't divested myself of my nearly 3,000 dead tree books. Or my library cards.

Caldwell collection

2009-02-22T14:45:00.003-05:00

The Cooper-Hewitt Library is celebrating the release of Shedding Light on New York: Edward F. Caldwell Collection. The collection contains more than 50,000 images consisting of approximately 37,000 black & white photographs and 13,000 original design drawings of lighting fixtures and other fine metal objects that they produced from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries.

Caldwell & Co. was America’s premier producer of lighting and other metal objects during the turn of the 20th century through the 1940s, and the archives are currently stored in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Library in New York City. Notable clients of Caldwell lighting fixtures included the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and the Roosevelts, and the company was also commissioned for famous landmarks such as the Grand Central Terminal, Radio City Music Hall, and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Caldwell & Co. manufactured unique and intricate lighting fixtures in their Manhattan factory, such as chandeliers, electrified lamps and wall scones, which were then shipped to prominent residences all over the United States.

New York Public Library also has Caldwell & Co records.

Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts

2009-02-21T18:09:00.002-05:00

A team at UCLA has launched the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts, a centralized online archive of holdings worldwide.

The Catalogue first began to take form in Christopher Baswell's talk at the MLA conference in December, 2005. Generous support by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, has enabled Professors Matthew Fisher and Christopher Baswell to develop this site, and make it publicly available in its current form through the CMRS web site. An additional grant from the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute) made possible additional data entry, and substantive refinements to the back-end technologies in place.
...
Eventually, the site will have a collaborative layer of some sort, so that scholars can share their expertise with other researchers and with libraries, which do not always have the most accurate information for each manuscript, according to Mr. Fisher. He’d like the catalog to provide a general set of digital tools, too, so that similar databases can be built in other fields.

To date the project has located over 5,000 digitized manuscripts, and over 1,o00 have been cataloged for inclusion. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed provides background on the project.

FDsys federal content management system

2009-02-20T22:05:00.002-05:00

Via Open Access News, the FDsys (Federal Digital System) of the US Government Printing Office (GPO) has entered its public beta. FDsys is an advanced digital system that will enable GPO to manage Government information in a digital form, and enable GPO to manage information from all three branches of the U.S. Government.

For more detail, see Joab Jackson's article about it in Government Computer News, February 5, 2009. There are five major releases planned over the next three years.

Duke Library's Trident Metadata Tool

2009-02-20T21:44:00.003-05:00

The Duke University Library is blogging about its Trident Metadata Tool development. Their February 13 post is the first on their architecture.

good week for open source releases

2009-02-20T16:07:00.003-05:00

The Indiana University Library has released open source software to create a digital music library system.

Indiana University today announces the release of open source software to create a digital music library system. The software, called Variations, provides online access to streaming audio and scanned score images in support of teaching, learning, and research.

Variations enables institutions such as college and university libraries and music schools to digitize audio and score materials from their own collections, provide those materials to their students and faculty in an interactive online environment, and respect intellectual property rights.

A key feature of the system for faculty and students is the ability to create bookmarks and playlists for use in studying or in preparing classroom presentations, allowing easy access later on to specific audio time points or segments. A key feature for libraries is a flexible access control and authentication system, which allows libraries to set up access rules based on their own local institutional policies.

This software is the culmination of nearly fifteen years of development and use of digital music library systems at Indiana University. Creation of the current Variations software platform was originally funded by the National Science Foundation. In 2005, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded Indiana University a National Leadership Grant to extend this highly successful system to the nationwide library community. Beyond IU, the software is currently being used at the Ohio State University, University of Maryland, New England Conservatory of Music, and the Philadelphia area Tri-College Consortium (Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr).

This open source release of Variations complements IU’s earlier release of the open source Variations Audio Timeliner, which lets users identify relationships in passages of music, annotate their findings, and play back the results with simple point-and-click navigation. This tool is also included as a feature of the complete Variations system.

Indiana University plans to offer a free one-hour Variations webinar at 4:00 PM EST on March 4, 2009 for institutions and individuals interested in learning more about the system. To register, e-mail mnotess@indiana.edu.

The Indiana University Digital Library Program created Variations in collaboration with faculty and students in IU’s Jacobs School of Music. The IU Digital Library Program is a collaborative effort of the Indiana University Libraries and the Indiana University Office of the Vice President for Information Technology.

For more information on the Variations open source release, see: http://variations.sourceforge.net/

The Washington Times released some Django open source tools (has a newspaper even released open source software before?):

The Washington Times has always focused on content. After careful review, we determined that the best way to have the top tools to produce and publish that content is to release the source code of our in-house tools and encourage collaboration.

The source code is released under the permissive Apache License, version 2.0. The initial tools released are:

django-projectmgr, a source code repository manager and issue tracking application. It allows threaded discussion of bugs and features, separation of bugs, features and tasks and easy creation of source code repositories for either public or private consumption.

django-supertagging, an interface to the Open Calais service for semantic markup.

django-massmedia, a multi-media management application. It can create galleries with multiple media types within, allows mass uploads with an archive file, and has a plugin for fckeditor for embedding the objects from a rich text editor.

django-clickpass, an interface to the clickpass.com OpenID service that allows users to create an account with a Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Hotmail or AIM account.

The opensource.washingtontimes.com web site will be hosting the code and issue tracking software, using django-projectmgr.

Yiddish books online

2009-02-08T10:42:00.003-05:00

In October 2008 at an Open Content Alliance meeting, I saw a presentation about the National Yiddish Book Center. It has just been announced that over ten thousand Yiddish texts -- estimated as over half of all the published works in Yiddish currently in existence -- are now available online through a joint venture with the Internet Archive. From the press release:

The National Yiddish Book Center is proud to offer online access to the full texts of nearly 11,000 out-of-print Yiddish titles. You can browse, read, download or print any or all of these books, free of charge. These titles were scanned under the auspices of our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, and have been made available online through the Internet Archive.
…
Original, used copies and new, print-on-demand hardcover reprints of most titles in our collection are available at nominal cost.

Some of rights issues are apparently unclear, but it seems so important to make this collection available -- works written in an at-risk language that were at one point systematically destroyed -- that any potential legal risk is worthwhile in my mind.

A brief announcement appeared in the New York Times.

wikipedia loves art

2009-02-05T16:10:00.005-05:00

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has announced its participation is a really interesting initiative -- help illustrate Wikipedia articles with your images of art from their collection. Photograph items from the collection, following some guidelines, upload your images to flickr, and your images will likely be used to illustrate a Wikipedia article.

Over the next month we are participating in Wikipedia Loves Art, a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among 15 museums and cultural institutions worldwide. The project, in conjunction with Flickr, is aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009.

We're inviting you to come into the museum and shoot photos of our artworks based on various themes. You can shoot on your own or form a small team (10 people, tops). The photogs or teams with the most points will win prizes.

The details about participation are available at Wikipedia.

This is part of the larger Wikipedia Loves Art project where a number of museums are participating in a scavenger hunt. The only thing that is not clear to me is what the Wikipedia articles that these images will illustrate are about. Scholarly topics? Topics related to art and art history? Articles about the museums or the specific works of art? I am curious.

DCC paper on interoperability

2009-02-05T15:58:00.002-05:00

The Digital Curation Centre has released a short briefing paper on interoperability. Its a good, brief primer on the basic issues.

JHOVE2 requirements available

2009-02-05T15:53:00.002-05:00

The latest version of the JHOVE2 Functional Requirements have been posted. I'm still interested in what isn't documented yet, e.g., the final list of formats that will be supported.

National Film Board of Canada puts archives online

2009-01-25T21:50:00.002-05:00

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has opened up its archives - more than 500 films, clips and trailers are now available on their new Screening Room web site. They're freely available for online viewing (there are costs for public broadcast and educational use), with more to be added regularly.

the burden of twitter

2009-01-25T20:59:00.005-05:00

Steven Levy has written an essay for Wired about the guilt that one can feel for not participating enough in ones social network. Following tweets but not twittering, not blogging often enough, or not updating ones Facebook status. It's a brief but interesting read on privacy and a weird sense of duty to keep those public lines of communication open.

Nicholas Carr has posted a very interesting reaction to Levy's essay.

There's an arrogance to sharing the details of one's life in public with strangers - it's the arrogance of power, the assumption that such details somehow deserve to be broadly aired. And as for the people, those strangers, on the receiving end of the disclosures, they suffer, through their desire to hear the details, to hungrily listen in, a kind of debasement. At the risk of going too far, I'd argue that there's a certain sadomasochistic quality to the exchange (it's a variation on the exchange that takes place between celebrity and fan). And I'm pretty sure that Levy's remorse comes from his realization, conscious or not, that he is, in a very subtle but nonetheless real way, displaying an undeserved and unappetizing arrogance while also contributing to the debasement of others.

This seems a bit strong to me, but not entirely off base. Arrogance of power? Debasement? Sadomasochistic? OK, that may be true for some who participate in social networking, just the same as for some participants in a real life communities. There is something a bit egotistical in assuming that others will follow your tweets/blog/delicious tags/flickr set/facebook. There is something a bit creepy that, if you don't require approval, complete strangers read your tweets where you might be discussing where you are at any given time. I like to think that most use social networking to actually keep in touch, not to obsessively stalk one another.

There's that public sharing expectations thing again. I know, I think about this a lot. People I do not know read my blog, see many (but not all) of my flickr images, and join my delicious network to see most (but again, not all) of my bookmarks. I have made a conscious decision to share these things. I had to struggle with getting over the creepiness factor. It was well over a decade ago that a woman from China, upon being introduced to me at a conference reception, exclaimed "Oh! I know who you are -- you have an interest in folk art and you like armadillos!" She had come across my personal web page (remember those?) while researching the conference speakers.

There's no turning back. There's only self-selecting your level of exposure.

Folger Library launches online image collections

2009-01-25T20:34:00.003-05:00

The Folger Shakespeare Library just expanded access to its Digital Image Collection by offering over 20,000 images online. The collection includes books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, art, and 218 of the Folger’s pre-1640 quarto editions of the works of William Shakespeare.

Online use is through the Luna Insight Browser -- you have to add an exception to your popup blocker or the software will not function properly. To access their Shakespeare Quartos collection and to get full functionality (saving searches, exporting html pages) you have to install the free Insight Java client.

They have a "how-to" page and search tips available.

Library of Congress SourceForge release

2009-01-25T20:03:00.004-05:00

Last month the Library of Congress had a soft launch of an open source software release. We officially announced the release in the January 2009 issue of the Library of Congress Digital Preservation
Newsletter. This is the first software that the Library has formally released as open source.

The tools are available through SourceForge under the “Library of Congress Transfer Tools” project. The project includes tools for use with BagIt specification, a hierarchical file packaging format for the exchange of digital content jointly developed by the Library of Congress and the California Digital Library.

Three tools developed by the Library's Repository Development Group are available now. Parallel Retriever implements a simple Python-based wrapper around wget and rsync to optimize the transfer of content between locations through parallelization. It supports rsync, HTTP, and FTP transfers. Bag Validator is a Python script that validates a Bag, checking for missing files, extra files, and duplicate files. VerifyIt is a shell script that verifies file checksums within a Bag manifest using parallel processes.

The Library plans to release additional tools as part of a suite of solutions and software development resources as they are completed over time. There are already more tools in the pipeline.

mobile is the new black

2009-01-23T22:55:00.002-05:00

There's a new WorldCat Mobile pilot service.

NYPL has announced its NYPL Mobile beta.

The DC Public Library launched an iPhone app.

Stanford has a new version of an iStanford iPhone app that ties into its student services system.

The International Children's Digital Library launched an iPhone app last November.

technology transition at the white house

2009-01-23T22:26:00.007-05:00

There was a great Washington Post article yesterday about how White House technology is "in the Dark Ages." I laughed bemusedly over my toast and read the article aloud at the breakfast table.

The White House is not being singled out. I work for a Federal Agency. I know folks who work at numerous other Federal Agencies, some of whom have worked at said agencies for decades. Federal agencies have many, many rules about hardware and software security, and every agency has to interpret and enforce those rules themselves. Security levels of content muddy the waters. This can cause a certain amount of confusion as to what is and isn't allowed. Someone told me that their agency (not the White House) hasn't yet approved Firefox. News that the White House counsel's office approved use of Gmail accounts for some press office activities has been forwarded to many Federal IT units, I'm sure.

Edit, 25 January: Wired has posted a Wired/Tired overview of White House tech, and a list of recent technology projects from various agencies. Nice to see the shout out for the LoC Flickr project.

oclc summary of proposed google book settlement

2009-01-15T15:28:00.003-05:00

Ricky Erway from OCLC has distilled the proposed Google Book Settlement, its appendices, and the three library registry agreements from 320 pages to a 4 1/2 page summary. It's an excellent overview of the proposal.

d-lib article on some LC tool development

2009-01-15T15:09:00.004-05:00

My colleague Justin Littman has just published an excellent article in the January/February 2009 issue of D-Lib Magazine: "A Set of Transfer-Related Services."

"The Office of Strategic Initiative's (OSI) Repository Development Team (RDT) is developing a portfolio of services and components to address the challenges posed by scaling transfer processes. While the portfolio is expanding, the focus of this article will be on two core services, the Inventory Service and the Workflow Service. Before proceeding to examine these services, it will be useful to further delineate the transfer problem space. After examining these services, their role in mitigating preservation risks will be considered."

presidential records and donation reform

2009-01-12T15:09:00.003-05:00

On January 7, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives approved H.R. 35, the "Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2009," and H.R. 36, the "Presidential Library Donation Reform Act of 2009." These were chosen by the House leadership as the first pieces of substantive legislation passed in 2009 as a symbol of government transparency.

The Presidential Records Act Amendments restores meaningful public access to presidential records by nullifying a 2001 Bush executive order, and the Presidential Library Donation Reform Act requires the disclosure of big donors to presidential libraries. The Senate still has to pass its versions of the bills before they can go to soon-to-be-President Obama to be signed, which he has apparently indicated that he would.

The National Coalition for History provides a good overview of the Records Reform Act. The House Speaker's site provides an overview of both.

I want a Palm Pre

2009-01-11T11:40:00.003-05:00

Pretty much everyone who knows me knows my loyalty to Palm. I've had one since 1997. I've been syncing it with enterprise calendar systems so I have my personal and work calendars going back to February 1996. I currently have a Centro, and even though I have to manually key in all my work events because we use such an old version of Groupwise that I can't seem to find a sync that works, I am still devoted to my Palm.

I cannot count the number of friends and colleagues who have iPhones and have done their best to convert me. The Urbanspoon app and its clever use of the accelerometer to randomize recommendations by shaking the phone almost had me. My answer is always that if they can promise me that I can port over everything I have on my Centro -- 13 years of calendar, hundreds of contacts, notes, to-do lists, and ebooks -- then I'll consider it.

I am now waiting with baited breath for the Palm Pre. It's such a step forward in the interface (a card stack metaphor) and operating system (its WebOS is Linux) and browser (based on WebKit). It doesn't use the Palm desktop anymore, which while be a paradigm switch for me, but they have promised data migration tools for Centro users.

I know that some apps I use won't work anymore, and Raymond's concern about no backwards compatibility of the OS is a real one. But they need to move on and I need to move on, and I'm glad it looks like it will be to another Palm. You can't always be fully backwards compatible. Hey, I only complained a little when I discovered I couldn't run FileMake Mobile on my Centro, didn't I?

Reviews at Gizmodo, ars technica, PC World, and a PC World FAQ.

on electronic texts

2009-01-03T18:25:00.008-05:00

I just read an article at Information Today by Nicholas Tomaiuolo, an instruction librarian at Central Connecticut State University, entitled "U-Content: Project Gutenberg, Me, and You." He outlines the requirements and steps for preparing an etext for Project Gutenberg.

At one point in the article, there is a discussion about the requirements for full text, not just a PDF created from page images. The author wrote this from the point of one unfamiliar with PG's requirements, illustrating the process one might follow to create an acceptable PG submission -- images to PDF, and images to OCR to corrected plain text -- I found myself thinking quite a bit about the often heard statement (not in this article, mind you) that PDF is the ultimate format for texts.

I'm in no way denigrating PDF. PDFs is an absolutely required format for texts. PDF is highly portable and shareable and readable, and, if the source files are good enough, clearly printable. But it's not innately analyzable or easily repurposed. That requires full text.

I am not unfamiliar with what it takes to create an accurate plain text transcription of a text. When Gutenberg was in its early days, we were really talking about transcriptions, as in people typing in text. OCR has greatly streamlined that process, but the proofreading required is non-trivial. Want to work with a highly formatted text, or one with tables or formulae or figures? Challenging. Adding layers of structural and semantic markup to plain text, as with TEI, is time consuming. Rich markup, including identifying dates or names or geographical places, or providing normalized versions of said dates and names is a large undertaking. A full text with structural and sematic markup can be repurposed into many formats, including ebooks and PDF.

And you do want ebooks. Some months ago I had the great opportunity to demonstrate the prototype World Digital Library site at the National Book Festival. There is no greater focus group than thousands of people who love to read! The two top requests were that the books should be downloadable as ebooks and that all the text content be available as full text in all seven project languages. These were not academics or librarians (although there were some of the former and many of the latter who stopped by), but parents and commuters and researchers and genealogists.

Both are daunting requests when you do not have full text available to work from. There will be PDFs. The others are goals to strive for.

flickr commons developments

2009-01-02T11:49:00.004-05:00

I am not part of the Library of Congress Flickr project team, and I in no way speak for them.

There is a lengthy discussion on Wired and at Found History about The Commons on Flickr, given that Yahoo laid off key staff member George Oates who shepherded the project. It doesn't seem that the project is in any imminent danger, but a dedicated group has stepped forward to evangelize, innovate, and curate thematic sets from the across the collection. I'm thrilled to see a community of use developing around The Commons, but it's sad that this is what precipitated its full coalescence.

DCC obsolescent data and files challenge

2009-01-02T11:27:00.006-05:00

There's still time to send a message to Chris Rusbridge at the Digital Curation Center to enter his personal data recovery challenge:

I will do my best to recover the first half dozen interesting files that I’m told about… of course, what I really mean is that I’ll try and get the community to help recover the data. That’s you!

OK, I define interesting, and it won’t necessarily be clear in advance. The first one of a kind might be interesting, the second one would not. Data from some application common of its time may be more interesting than something hand-coded by you, for you. Data might be more interesting (to me) than text. Something quite simple locked onto strange obsolete media might be interesting, but then again it might be so intractable it stops being interesting. We may even pay someone to extract files from your media, if it’s sufficiently interesting (and if we can find someone equipped to do it).

The only reference for this sort of activity that I know of is (Ross & Gow, 1999, see below), commissioned by the Digital Archiving Working Group.

What about the small print? Well, this is a bit of fun with a learning outcome, but I can’t accept liability for what happens. You have to send me your data, of course, and you are going to have to accept the risk that it might all go wrong. If it’s your only copy, and you don’t (or can’t) take a copy, it might get lost or destroyed in the process. You’ll need to accept that risk; if you don't like it, don't send it. I might not be able to recover anything at all, for many reasons. I’ll send you back any data I can recover, but can’t guarantee to send back any media.

The point of this is to tell the stories of recovering data, so don’t send me anything if you don’t want the story told. I don’t mind keeping your identity private (in fact good practice says that’s the default, although I will ask you if you mind being identified). You can ask for your data to be kept private, but if possible I’d like the right to publish extracts of the data, to illustrate the story.

His deadline is Twelfth Night, January 5, 2009. Read his post for the rest of the details.

I've been thinking a lot lately about data migration and recovery, and I think this is a great way to illustrate the challenges and solutions -- with real data and the stories behind its creation, loss, and potential recovery.

make

2009-01-02T11:18:00.002-05:00

I am definitely a proponent of the self-made. Cooking, clothing, jewelry, assisted forays into small electronic projects, etc. At various times I have designed and made costumes, painted, made paper, etched prints, made lampwork glass beads, and learned the basics of Chinese brush painting. I haven't had as much time for that in the last couple of years, but that doesn't mean that I don't still strive to make.

I'm a big fan of Make, and so are a lot of others. In that vein, William Turkel has posted his list of books for humanist makers.

interview with Vint Cerf

2009-01-02T10:54:00.001-05:00

Siva Vaidhyanathan has posted his interview with Vint Cerf about developments in search technology and Google.

resolutions

2009-01-01T14:21:00.005-05:00

I don't know if these are resolutions or goals ...

I have been getting back to writing in the past few weeks, but I will write more about what we're working on and getting the word out.

I will be a more hard-nosed project manager vis-a-vis deadlines. I am too often too understanding of delays.

I will explore Washington D.C. more. I lived in metro D.C. for part of my childhood and have been in Virginia for 7 years, but still have a disconnected sense of the city. Perhaps that's in part an artifact of traveling by Metro and not having a real sense of the city's topography.

I will meet more people in other divisions at LoC. This is harder than it sounds.

I will eat lunch at my desk less often. I will make more of an active effort to organize social opportunities. (Why don't I remember this every time I think about switching jobs -- it gets harder and harder to build a new social network every time.)

I have faith that our house in Charlottesville will finally sell.

EDIT: There is another long term goal that I'm already working on: I've signed up for a Japanese class through the Federal employee graduate school. This is the year to begin transforming my ragtag knowledge of Japanese into usable language skills.

archiving the bush administration

2008-12-30T11:00:00.007-05:00

There is a great article on ars technica today about the major processing effort that will be required at the National Archives when the Bush administration leaves office. The ars technica piece references a New York Times article on the topic from this past weekend.

This section really strikes home:

The contingency plan will entail "ingesting" the Bush White House's data into a separate system before integrating it with the ordinary archive. As the plan explains, "the current PERL [Presidential Electronic Records Library] system architecture was not scalable to actually support the volume of records that are expected from the current Presidential administration."
It's not just size that matters, though: the Archives will also need to process reams of information locked in some quaint proprietary formats. The RMS index, for example, "consists of an implementation of a customized older version of Documentum running on Oracle, with image files (including copies of scanned records) incorporated as objects in the database." The photos are stored in a "proprietary photo management software called MerlinOne, running on Microsoft SQL as the database engine," and it has apparently taken several months to extract the images and metadata for relinkage outside the Merlin format.

First, the use of quotation marks should remind us all that "ingest" means absolutely nothing to someone who is not a repository manager.

I have participated in some discussions about a potential data migration project at work. I recently saw an inventory of media formats -- not file formats, but media formats -- that the project would need to encompass, and it is lengthy. The only source I can think of for hardware to read some of the formats is EBay. That doesn't even take into account the files themselves. It's interesting how quickly a format becomes obsolete, and how many customized systems federal agencies use.

blogging has fallen by the wayside

2008-12-29T14:42:00.004-05:00

Between a month almost solely dedicated to a single high-stress project and a lot of other writing commitments -- revising a paper for a conference, drafting a conference proposal and a co-authored conference proposal, and a writing chapter for a book -- I find that I haven't made time to blog. I promise to make time soon.

best metrics for comparing hardware?

2008-12-29T12:12:00.004-05:00

Recently I spent 4 weeks on a project where we were considering hardware options for a large amount of storage for a data migration project. We ended up with 4 different proposals -- three from vendors and one to be built in-house. One of the tasks that I worked on was a matrix to compare the 4 potential solutions.

There were the easy metrics -- the amount of raw and usable storage, number of racks/tiles required, electrical and cooling requirements, cost, etc. Comparing supportability was trickier but doable, with 24*7 versus 12*5 phone support, availability of on-site technicians, warranty terms, support contract costs, etc. Where it became more difficult was identifying metrics to compare performance. Ratio of processors to storage? Location of processing nodes in the architecture? I/O rates? Time to read all data? And how do you best calculate those last two with four quite architecturally different proposals? We ended up with metrics that not everyone agreed upon, in part because there was a requirement that not everyone agreed upon.

I'm curious how other folks have gone about doing this. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who is willing to share their strategies.

ICDL adding European collections

2008-12-17T21:45:00.003-05:00

From an article on Forbes.com, the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) announced a partnership with the Taliaferro Family Fund to increase the number of European children's titles in the collection. The Elias Project will target three collections in Europe: the Norwegian Children's Book Institute in Oslo, Norway, the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany , and the National Center for Children's Books in Paris, France.

After reading the article, I check in at the ICDL site, which I hadn't visited in a few months, and noticed two other news announcements: ICDL and the Google Book project will be sharing public domain children's book titles; and ICDL has launched an iPhone app with full access to the collection, a new titles features, and an offline mode and an airplane mode. It's great to see such a worthwhile project making such advances in collection building and in adding new services.

(I didn't see a press release about the European project on the ICDL site. I saw the press release on some other sites, so I assume it's meant to be out there.)

letter to santa

2008-12-16T15:29:00.002-05:00

Nik Honeysett has posted a great letter to Santa on the Musematic blog.

If enough of us ask for that image format, will Santa grant our wish?

interview with Paul LeClerc in New York Times

2008-12-12T14:26:00.004-05:00

Paul LeClerc, director of the New York Public Library, answered questions online at the New York Times that have been made available in three parts: part one, part two, part three. Topics include budgets, branch closures and renovations, ebooks, and preservation efforts.

In part two, he briefly mentioned their participation in the Library of Congress National Digital Newspaper Project and its public access content web site Chronicling America. It was nice to see this project mentioned get a media mention in the context of preserving and providing access to often ephemeral newspapers.

Library of Congress releases report on flickr pilot

2008-12-12T11:16:00.004-05:00

The Library of Congress has released its report on its Flickr Commons pilot, where approximately 5,000 images were uploaded for a crowdsourcing metadata experiment. A full report and a summary report are available, both PDFs.

The photos have drawn more than 10 million views, 7,166 comments and more than 67,000 tags. When Flickr commenters provide updated place and personal names, dates, and event identification, staff from the Library's Prints and Photographs Division verify the information and have so far updated more than 500 records in their catalog -- with many more in the queue -- citing the Flickr Commons Project as the source of the new information.

creative commons wants feedback on licenses

2008-12-11T17:16:00.002-05:00

Creative Commons is conducting a study to collect feedback on the term “noncommercial” and how it should be covered in its licenses. The hope is that what’s learned from the survey can improve the licenses that allow or restrict noncommercial uses. The questionnaire has to be completed by this Sunday, December 14, 2008. Everyone who has taken advantage of CC licenses as a creator or a user should take some time to answer the questions.

world war II collection at the national archive and footnote

2008-12-11T15:29:00.004-05:00

The US National Archives and the historical document website Footnote.com have collaborated on the digitization of a large collection of documents from the US involvement in World War II, which are now available on the footnote.com web site. There is an ars technica article on the collection and interface.

Like the ars technica writer, I had a lot of difficulty finding anything that I hoped to find. My grandfather, father, and uncle all served in WWII. My grandfather died in a friendly fire incident where allied planes accidentally sunk a ship carrying prisoners of war to be returned. I found nothing. There was nothing in the documents nor in the photos. Although I did find out that a man with almost the same name as my uncle (same middle initial but different middle name) was listed as missing when his plane was shot down in 1943. Still, it's a lot of useful content that I'm glad to see digitized and OCR'ed.

I was disappointed I wasn't surprised. I found the navigation to be a bit puzzling. I found I had to have multiple tabs open to easily go back to search. Not just the image but the entire image viewer screen had to come into focus when I selected something to view.

The ars technica writer said that his view of the site included the disclaimer "All Free (for a limited time)," and commented that "... it would be nice to think that a service based on government records of a significant American experience would be free indefinitely." The original press release describing the collaboration is worth reviewing, because it addresses that point in the ars technica article. The agreement allows Footnote.com non-exclusive access, and "After an interval of five years, all images digitized through this agreement will be available at no charge through the National Archives web site." So, Footnote can charge for it for now, but it will all revert to the National Archives for free and open access.

I don't see that disclaimer when using my Library of Congress computer because we have full access -- I wonder how long it will be fully accessible for those without subscriptions?

laine farley named cdl director

2008-12-07T20:32:00.003-05:00

I just saw the press release naming Laine Farley as the new Director of the California Digital Library. I am thrilled for Laine, who's been serving as the interim Director for over 2 years. I have worked with her on Aquifer and at least one other collaborative community project, and I know what an experienced and capable person she is.

costs of operating a data center

2008-11-30T10:10:00.003-05:00

In recent weeks I've been in a number of meetings about storage architecture. In comparing potential solutions for a particular project's needs, there has been a lot of discussion about requirements for space, cooling, power, etc., which are some of the metrics for comparison of the proposals. Today I came across a posting by James Hamilton from Microsoft's Data Center Futures Team, on misconceptions about the cost of power in large-scale data centers.

There is an error in the table for the two amortization entries: the 180-month amortization of the facility says 3 years in the notes column when it should say 15, and the 36-month amortization of the servers says 15 years when it should say 3. The right numbers are used in the calculation -- it's just the explanatory notes that are switched.

There are some very interesting calculations that I plan to forward to other folks. One commenter points out that the figures and graph don't take staffing into account, which, according to Hamilton, is because that cost is a very small percentage of the cost. At Microsoft's scale that's probably true. I guess we're a relatively small- to medium-scale data center, because we are definitely taking that into consideration. And, while the cost of power may be a lower percentage of overall cost than previously considered, power capacity is still definitely a factor when you're considering adding a number of servers and switches.

Jamie Boyle on public domain

2008-11-29T10:27:00.004-05:00

Jamie Boyle's book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind has been published by Yale University Press, and is also available for free download under a Creative Commons license.

I've seen Jamie Boyle speak two or three times, and I consider him a very important voice in the discussions on the public domain, intellectual property, patents, the economics of same, and their place in technology and culture.

Read this book.

LuSql - Lucene indexing of DBMS records

2008-11-26T13:13:00.002-05:00

The release of LuSql has been announced on a few email lists:

LuSql is a high-performance, simple tool for indexing data held in a DBMS into a Lucene index. It can use any JDBC-aware SQL database.

It includes a tutorial with a series of increasingly complex use cases, showing how article metadata held in a series of MySql tables can be indexed and how file system files containing full-text can also be indexed.

It has been tested extensively, including using 6.4 million metadata and full-text records to produce a 86GB index in 13.5 hours.

It is licensed with the Apache 2.0 license.

release: http://lab.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cistilabswiki/index.php/LuSql
tutorial: http://cuvier.cisti.nrc.ca/~gnewton/lusql/v0.9/lusqlManual.pdf.html

commentary on why google must die

2008-11-25T14:45:00.005-05:00

John Dvorak write an essay in PC Magazine entitled "Why Google Must Die." It's a pithy article on search engine optimization (SEO) and the SEO tricks that are in play to work best with Google or get around a Google feature. This is an an essay that I never would have noticed had it not been referenced in a posting by Stephen Abram that I very much took notice of, also entitled "Why Google Must Die."

His post is a response to the often-heard suggestion that OPACs, federated search, and web site search engines should be "just like Google." He asks what should be implemented first:

1. Should I start manipulating the search results of library users based on the needs of advertisers who pay for position?
2. Should I track your users' searches and offer different search results or ads based on their private searches?
3. Should I open library OPACs and searches to 'search engine optimization' (SEO) techniques that allow special interest groups, commercial interests, politicians (as we've certainly seen with the geotagged searches in the US election this year), racist organizations (as in the classic MLK example), or whatever to change results?
4. Should I geotag all searches, using Google Maps, coming from colleges, universities or high schools because I can ultimately charge more for clicks coming from younger searchers? Should I build services like Google Scholar to attract young ad viewers and train or accredit librarians and educators in the use of same?
5. Should I allow the algoritim to override the end-user's Boolean search if it meets an advertiser's goal?
6. "Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil." (Wired). Is that who you want making your personal and institutional values decisions?

There's more to the post. I admire a forthright post like this that pushes back on the assertion that doing things the Google way is automatically better.

I used to have lengthy discussions with a library administrator in a past job who wanted image searching to be just like Google images, because searches on a single word like "horse" would always produce images of horses at the top of the results. It was a lot of effort to explain that this was somewhat artificial, due to the sheer number of images and, that, in the absence of descriptive metadata, that having the string "horse" in the file name would ensure that they would be near the top of the list and that Google didn't actually recognize that it was an image of a horse. Sorry, we really did need to expend effort on descriptive metadata.

SearchCampDC

2008-11-25T10:34:00.002-05:00

The Library of Congress is hosting the SearchCampDC barcamp on Tuesday, December 2. From the wiki:

The goal of SearchCampDC is to bring together people working on and using search releated technologies in and around Washington DC. We all rely on tools like Google in our daily lives, but as IT professionals we often need to build or integrate search technologies into applications, and the enterprise.

Search technologies typically rely on a wide variety of techniques such as fulltext indexing, geocoding, named entity recognition, data mining, natural language parsing, machine learning, distributed processing. Perhaps you've used a piece of technology, and care share how well it worked? Or perhaps you help develop a search-related tool that you'd like to get feedback on? Or maybe you've got a search-itch to scratch, and want to learn more about how to scratch it? If so, please join us for SearchCampDC.

The idea for this event came about from a happy coincidence that several Lucene, Solr, OpenLayers and TileCache developers were going to be in the DC area at the same time. The idea is to provide them (and hopefully others like you) a space for short & sweet presentations about stuff they are working on, and also to provide a collaborative space for people to try things out, share challenges, ideas etc.

europeana a victim of its own success

2008-11-24T16:52:00.003-05:00

There are a number of article documenting the wild success and consequent server failure of the Europeana digital library: Times Online, PublicTechnology.net, and Yahoo Tech. The development site that documents the project is still available.

This is a cautionary tale for those of us who are working on the World Digital Library project, which is set to launch in April 2009. We know that there is a potentially high level of interest in a multi-lingual international digital collection site -- albeit one with a much initial smaller collection -- and seeing this confirms for us that making plans for mirroring is a necessity.

Europeana

2008-11-20T07:26:00.003-05:00

The prototype site for Europeana, the European digital library funded by the EC, is set to launch today, November 20, 2008.

The initial collection of 2 million items comes from museums, libraries, archives, and audio-visual collections, and includes paintings, maps, videos and newspapers. The interface is in French, English, and German, with more languages planned. Highlights include the Magna Carta from Britain, the Vermeer painting “Girl With a Pearl Earring” from the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy'" and newsreel footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Content is free of copyright restrictions.

New York Times and EU Business articles provide more details. The goal is to add 10 million items into the digital library by 2010, at a price of 350 million to 400 million euros.

LIFE photo archive in google images

2008-11-19T15:28:00.002-05:00

Google has launched a hosted collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE Magazine.

Apparently only a small percentage of these images have been published; the remainder come from their photo archive. Google is digitizing them: 20 percent of the collection is online, and hey are working toward he goal of having all 10 million photos online.

There are some great Civil War, WWI, WWII and Vietnam war images, portraits of Queen Victoria and Czar Nicholas, civil rights-era documentation, and early images of Disneyland. There are photographs by Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Carl Mydans, and Larry Burrows, among others.

cataloging flash mob

2008-11-18T10:13:00.000-05:00

I love the idea of a flash mob volunteer effort to catalog the book and videotape collection at St. John's Church in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. There's more from one of the volunteers.

I'd like to see this effort replicated at small historical societies, house museums, and other organizations that are often supported only by a small cadre of volunteers.

facebook repository deposit app using sword

2008-11-17T17:49:00.000-05:00

From Stuart Lewis' blog comes word of a Facebook app -- SWORDAPP -- for depositing content into SWORD-enabled repositories. It's meant to encourage social deposit: notice of your deposits goes out in your Facebook newsfeed, and you can receive news of your friend's deposits. You have to already be eligible to authenticate and deposit into a repository somewhere.

This is an interesting use of SWORD in an application that lives in a really different context. He's looking for testers and feedback.

arl guide to the google book search settlement

2008-11-16T22:58:00.003-05:00

The Association of Research Libraries has created "A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries & the Google Library Project Settlement," a 23-page document intended to help libraries understand the impact of the proposed Google Book Search settlement.

oxford university preserv2 project session at dlf

2008-11-16T13:44:00.002-05:00

My brief, unstructured notes from a presentation by Sally Rumsey from Oxford University on the Preserv2 project, at the DLF Fall 2008 Forum.

Effort focused primarily on IRs with research data, but applies to all types of repositories.
“Boxed up -- but innovative at the time – repository environment.” 6 different repositories at Oxford, multiple Fedora & Eprints, some sharing the same storage.
A desire for decoupled services -- distributed storage and transportable data. Scalability issue.
Implemented British National Archives seamless flow approach to preservation. There are three categories of activities: Characterization (inventory and format identification). Preservation planning and technology watch (using the PRONOM technology watch service). Preservation Actions (file migration, rendering tools, etc, based on repository policy).
Smart Storage. Ability to address objects in open storage through a repository layer or directly in the storage system. DROID was used as the tool to verify new items as they are stored, and continually check files in storage. They are implementing a scheduler.
Oxford looking at Sun Honeycomb server architecture.

exposing harvard digital collections to web crawlers session at dlf

2008-11-16T13:35:00.002-05:00

My somewhat unstructured notes from a presentation by Roberta Fox from Harvard, at at the DLF Fall 2008 Forum.

Barriers in exposing their collections from their legacy applications : session-based, frames, form-driven , non-compliant coding, URLs with lots of parameters.
Crawlers couldn’t get past first page of any of their services (VIA, OASIS, PDS, TED, etc)
Concerns: Server load an issue, dynamic database-driven sites.
But, exposure to crawler declared a priority.
Added robots links on every page to identify how it should be handled -- index, no, follow links, etc, to control server use.
Slow down crawl using Google webmaster tools to avoid major server hits.
Added alt and title tags to provide context for pages/items found through external search (originally assumed because access would be through the Harvard University Library portal context). They added links on all pages to provide additional context, e.g. the full preferred, presentation, to assist udders when they land on a page through Google and not through the HUL context, so users can find their way around.
Crawler friendly – generated a static site map for key dynamic pages, update the site map weekly.
Updated, simplified URL structure for deep pages.
Access to Page Delivery Service the most challenging for OCR’ed text. Generated a crawler-friendly page for each text in addition to original unfriendly frames version (there is no priority to rewrite the app to remove frames).
It is somewhat burdensome to create index pages that point to all the items in a database (such as all the images in VIA) on a weekly basis, but it’s better than no access – it’s an automated creation process and doesn’t take up that much room on the server.

ncsu course views session at dlf

2008-11-16T13:26:00.004-05:00

My somewhat unstructured notes from a presentation by Tito Sierra and Jason Casden from NCSU on the Course Views tools, at at the DLF Fall 2008 Forum.

Their goal is to create a web page for every single course at NCSU.
Blackboard Vista (hard to work with), Moodle (easy to work with), WolfWare (internal tool, easy to integrate), Library web site.
Implemented using object-oriented PHP, and the front-end design makes use of YUI, jQuery and CSS. RESTful requests to the Widget System, and Restful URIs.
They screen scrape the course directory to build the database of course titles.
There is an issue with the course reserves system so they are not currently embedding reserves, just linking.
Built their own mini-metasearch which searches one vendor database set for each general discipline (created by subject librarians, who identify one vendor and a set of their databases to be searched).
The subject librarians create a “recommended” resource list for each course.
Real issues with customization, especially for sections of large courses.
Balance of fully custom, hand-made versus fully automated. Librarians given a number of widgets to select from, some of which are canned and some of which can be customized.
Reserves used the most by far, then search, then the “recommended” widget.
Customized widgets used most (the 3 listed above).

djatoka jpeg 2000 image server session at dlf

2008-11-16T13:21:00.001-05:00

My brief, unstructured notes from a presentation by Ryan Chute from Los Alamos National Labs on the Djatoka JPEG 2000 Image Server, at at the DLF Fall 2008 Forum.

APIs and libraries: Kakadu SDK, Sun Java advanced images, NIH ImageJ, OCLC OpenURL OOM. Could work with other than Kakadu, including Aware.
Viewer adapted from a British Library implementation.
Features: resolution and region extraction, rotation, support for rich set of input/output formats, extensible interfaces for image transformations, including watermarking. Persistent URLs for images and for individual regions.
URI-addressability for specified regions needed, and OpenURL provided a standardized service framework foundation for requesting regions. This extends the OpenURL use cases.
Service example: Ajax-based client requests, obtains metadata and regions from image server using image identifier, client iterates through tiles and metadata to display.

university of texas repo atom use session at dlf

2008-11-16T13:12:00.009-05:00

My somewhat unstructured notes from a presentation by Peter Keane from UT Austin on the use of Atom and Atom/Pub in their DASe repository, at at the DLF Fall 2008 Forum.

DASe project: lightweight repository, 100+ collections, 1.2 million files, 3 million metadata records.
DASe has replaced their image reserves system. Home grown (“built instead of borrowed”), originaly prototyped 2004/2005.
They didn’t originally plan to build a repository, they were building an image slideshow and ended up with a repository, too.
It’s a data first application. Data comes from spreadsheets, FM, Flickr, iPhoto, file headers, etc. System includes a variety of different collection-based data models. Needed to map to/from standard schemas. Accepted as is, no normalization or enrichment at all.
SynOA: Syndicated Oriented Architecture. Importance recognized in being RESTful. DASe is a Rest framework.
Use the Atom publishing protocol to represent collections and items and searches. Used internally between services, including upload and ingest (uses http get, post, etc). Everything is Atom with a UI (Smarty PHP templates) on top of it.
Working on a Blackboard integration.
Interesting use of Google spreadsheets – create Google spreadsheet for whatever they have a name/value pairs, automatically outputs atom, can ingest from feed.
No fielded search across collections, only within a single collection. They could map across data models to a common standard, but haven’t. (corrected as per comment below)
Repositories were considered a door to libraries, all trying to create a better door. This is not the right concept, instead should be exposing in a standard way to any and all services.
Loves REST; used the term “RESTafarian.”

creative commons non-commercial use session at dlf

2008-11-16T12:43:00.004-05:00

My somewhat unstructured notes from a presentation by Virginia Rutledge, an attorney from Creative Commons, at the DLF Fall 2008 Forum.

Copyright is a bundle of rights. She went over this in some detail for those who are less familiar.
Creative Commons exists to support the ability to share, remix, and reuse, legally.
Example of recent Library use: the entire UCLA Library web site is under a CC license to clarify its content re-use status.
The Creative Commons definition of non-commercial is tied to the intent of the user -- no intent towards commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. BUT, there is no single definition of non-commercial.
There are undertaking a research project in many phases. 1st (done) – focus groups. Identified 4 communities: Arts, education, web, and science communities. This proved to be a VERY bad idea, as the boundaries are actually way too fuzzy and interdisciplinary. The work invalidated the assumption that they could do this on a community-based basis.
A number of issues of importance to rights holders in allowing non-commercial use were identified in the discussions: Is there a perceived economic value? Who is the user-- an individual or an organization? Non profit or not? Is any money generated? Is access supported by advertising or not? Is the use for the “public good” -- for charity/education? What is the amount of distribution? Will the work be used in part or in whole? Is this use by a “competitor?”
There are also subjective issues: Is it an objectionable use? Is it perceived as fair use?
Personal creator and personal use versus institutional ownership and use is a distinction that really makes a difference to people, but has no meaning in US law.
Some of the confusion over how to define "non-commercial" is not understanding what activities the prohibition of non-commercial use actually prohibits. Most rights holders don’t really want to prohibit all commercial uses, just some, and it varies wildly by person/organization.
Based on the research so far, there is no checklist they can come up with.
As of November 17, a poll will be available online, and they are encouraging librarians to participate.

google book search session at dlf

2008-11-16T12:24:00.004-05:00

I was going to spend some time transforming my notes from Dan Clancy's session on Google Book Search from the DLF Fall 2008 Forum into more coherent prose, but for the sake of timeliness, I'm going to post them as is.

20% of the content in Google Book Search is in the public domain, 5% is in print, and the rest is in an unknown “twilight zone” -- unknown status and/or out-of-print.
7 million books scanned, over 1 million are public domain, 4-5 million are in snippet view.
Early scanning was not performed at an impressive rate, and it took way longer than expected to set up.
Priorities are working search quality, and exposure to google.com.
Search is definitely not solved and “done,” and is harder given the big distribution of relatively successful hits.
They are working to improve the quality of scanning and the algorithm to process the books and improve usability. They admit that they still have work to do, especially with the re-processing of older scans.
Data to support Long Tail model is right.
Creating open APIs, including one to determine the status of a book, and a syndicated viewer that can be embedded.
Trying to identify the status of orphans, and release a database of determinations. But institutions need to use determinations to guide their decisions, not just follow them because “Google said so.”
On the proposed settlement agreement: Google thought they would benefit users more to settle than to litigate.
The class is defined as anyone in the U.S. with a copyright interest in a book, in U.S. use. (no journals or music)
For all books in copyright, Google is allowed to scan, index, and provide varying access models dependent upon the status of the book -- if in print or out-of-print. Rights holders can opt out.
4 access models: consumer digital purchase (in the cloud, not downloads – downloads are not specifically included in agreement); free preview of up to 20% of book; institutional subscription for the entire database (site license with authentication, can be linked into course reserves and course management systems); public access terminals for public libraries or higher ed that do not want to subscribe (1 access point in each public library building, some # by FTE for high ed institutions) which allows printing (for 5 years or $3 million underwriting of payments to rights holders).
Books Rights Registry to record rights, handle payments to rights holders. It can operate on behalf of other content providers, not just Google.
Plan to open up government documents, because they feel that the rights registry organization will deal with the issue of possible in-copyright content included in gov docs, which kept them from opening gov docs before.
Admits that publishers and authors do not always agree if publishers have the rights for digital distribution of books. Some authors are adamant that they did not assign rights, some publishers are adamant that even if not explicit, it's allowed. The settlement supposedly allows sharing between authors and publishers to cover this.
What is “Non-consumptive research”? OCR application research. Image processing research. Textual analysis research. Search development research. Use of the corpus as a test corpus for technology research, not research using the content. 2 institutions will run data centers for access to the research corpus, with financial support from Google to set up the centers.
What about their selling books back to the libraries that contributed them via subscriptions? They will take the partnership and amount of scanning into account and provide a subsidy toward a subscription. Stanford and Michigan will likely be getting theirs free. Institutions can get a free limited set of their own books for the length of the copyright of the books. They can already do whatever they want with their public domain books.
They will not necessarily be collecting rights information/determinations from other projects for the registry. In building the registry, they are including licensed metadata (from libraries, OCLC, publishers, etc), so they cannot publicly share all the data that will make up the registry. But they will make public the status of book that are identified/claimed as in copyright.
If Google goes away or becomes “evil Google,” there is lots of language in contracts and settlement for an out.
The settlement is U.S. only because the class in the suit was U.S. only. Non-U.S. terms are really challenging because many countries have no concept of class-action, and there is a wide variation of laws.
A notice period begins January 5. Mid 2009 is the earliest time this could be approved by the court.

omeka 0.10

2008-11-14T16:04:00.001-05:00

Omeka v 0.10 has been released. Omeka 0.10b incorporates many requested changes: an unqualified Dublin Core metadata schema and fully extensible element sets to accommodate interoperability with digital repository software and collections management systems; elegant reworkings of the theme and plugin APIs to make add-on development more intuitive and more powerful; a new, even more user friendly look for the administrative interface; and a new and improved Exhibit Builder.

scholastic books flickr set

2008-11-14T15:33:00.003-05:00

I came across a link to a flickr set that someone has created with covers and illustrations from Scholastic Book Services books from the 1960s and 1970s. I _loved_ it when the Scholastic book order forms were distributed, and I always ordered something like a dozen books every time. This set includes a number of books that I know I owned, and even a very few that I _still_ own. This person has a great collection.

EDIT: Here's another flickr set.

Greenstone release

2008-11-14T14:56:00.001-05:00

Greenstone v2.81 has been released. Improvements include handling filenames that include non-ASCII characters, accent folding switched on by default for Lucene, and character based segmentation for CJK languages. There are many other significant additions, including the Fedora Librarian Interface (analogous to GLI, but working with a Fedora repository).

Rome Reborn and Google Earth

2008-11-14T14:47:00.002-05:00

BBC News reported on a release of a collaboration between Google Earth and the Rome Reborn project. Ancient Rome is the first historical city to be added to Google Earth. The model contains more than 6,700 buildings, with more than 250 place marks linking to key sites in a variety of languages.

roman de la rose digital library

2008-11-14T07:15:00.003-05:00

Johns Hopkins University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France have announced that the Roman de la Rose Digital Library available at http://romandelarose.org/. The goal is to bring together digital surrogates of all the approximately 270 extant manuscript copies of the Roman de la Rose. By the end of 2009 they expect to have 150 versions included in the resource. There is an associated blog available at http://romandelarose.blogspot.com/.

I am particularly interested in the pageturner and image browser that they used -- the FSI Viewer, a Flash-based tool. It seems to work with TIF, JPG, FPX, and PDF (but not JPEG2000?), and converts files to multi-resolution TIFs. It's a very intuitive interface.

photoshop ui rendered in real-world objects

2008-11-10T11:27:00.000-05:00

Via BoingBoing, the UI for Photoshop recreated with real objects, created by the agency Bates 141 in Jakarta for Software Asli. Follow the links to the image and to the "making of" flickr set.

court rules that hash analysis is a fourth amendment search

2008-10-31T13:49:00.000-05:00

The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania has issued an opinion in the case United States v. Crist that a hash value analysis in a criminal investigation counts as a Fourth Amendment "search." Read a synopsis at ars technica.

JISC Digital Preservation Policies Study

2008-10-31T13:43:00.000-05:00

JISC has released a two-part study of digital preservation policies: Digital Preservation Policies Study and Digital Preservation Policies Study, Part 2: Appendices—Mappings of Core University Strategies and Analysis of Their Links to Digital Preservation. The study aims to provide an outline model for digital preservation policies and to analyse the role that digital preservation can play in supporting and delivering key strategies for higher ed institutions.

cloud computing

2008-10-31T13:35:00.000-05:00

An interesting new book -- The Tower and The Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing -- has been published by Educause. The term "cloud computing" is usually used to refer to applications that run on remote systems in "the cloud" rather than on desktop computers or to the storage of files remotely rather than locally, but the book defines the term more broadly, including open-source software and social-networking tools. The full book is available online as a free PDF.

twitter war of the worlds

2008-10-31T13:04:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Amanda for pointing this out -- I am addictively following the twitter production of War of the Worlds, an homage to the Orson Welles radio production. How this came about is described at the Ask a Wizard blog.

google book search settlement agreement announced

2008-10-28T09:40:00.005-05:00

Today it was announced that Google has reached a settlement in the lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publisher, and a group of individual authors.

Some of the details are available at Google. The changes that I am the most interested in are these:

"Until now, we've only been able to show a few snippets of text for most of the in-copyright books we've scanned through our Library Project. Since the vast majority of these books are out of print, to actually read them you'd have to hunt them down at a library or a used bookstore. This agreement will allow us to make many of these out-of-print books available for preview, reading and purchase in the U.S.. Helping to ensure the ongoing accessibility of out-of-print books is one of the primary reasons we began this project in the first place, and we couldn't be happier that we and our author, library and publishing partners will now be able to protect mankind's cultural history in this manner."

...

"The agreement will also create an independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry to represent authors, publishers and other rightsholders. In essence, the Registry will help locate rightsholders and ensure that they receive the money their works earn under this agreement. You can visit the settlement administration site, the Authors Guild or the AAP to learn more about this important initiative."

I'm all for more access to these books and for rightsholders to get their due, but what does it mean to assign a value to them?

They also plan to offer subscriptions: "We'll also be offering libraries, universities and other organizations the ability to purchase institutional subscriptions, which will give users access to the complete text of millions of titles while compensating authors and publishers for the service." I have mixed feelings -- the subscription model is not an unusual one, and libraries have certainly provided digitized materials from their collections for paid subscription services before, i.e., with ProQuest. I wonder if the partners will get any share in the compensation for providing the content for the service?

I'm currently at an Open Content Alliance meeting and I'm looking forward to what I am sure will be many discussions among the attendees today.

EDIT: There's now a joint press release from the University of Michigan, the University of California, and Stanford University, a FAQ from the American Association of Publishers, a Google rightsholders site, a Google blog post, in addition to the site above and the press release.

search engine cache isn't copyright infringement

2008-10-24T10:25:00.002-05:00

Some argue that search engines such are copyright violators because they scrawl, index and keep an archive of web sites. That copied archive -- or cache -- is, according to this argument, an unauthorized copy. Found via TechDirt, the Pennsylvania Eastern District Court held that a Web site operator's failure to deploy a robots.txt file containing instructions not to copy and cache Web site content gave rise to an implied license to index that site.

In Parker v. Yahoo!, Inc., 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 74512 (E.D. Pa. Sep. 26, 2008), the court found that the plaintiff's acknowledgment that he deliberately chose not to deploy a robots.txt file on the site containing his work was conclusive on the issue of implied license. In so ruling the court followed Field v. Google, a similar copyright infringement action brought by an author who failed to deploy a robots.txt file and whose works were copied and cached by the Google search engine.

The court further ruled, though, that a nonexclusive implied license may be terminated. Parker may have terminated the implied license by the institution of the litigation, and he alleged that the search engines failed to remove copies of his works from their cache even after the litigation was instituted. If proved, "the continued use over Parker's objection might constitute direct infringement." That issue will likely be resolved at a later date.

For an analysis, see the New Media and Technology Law Blog.

The same plaintiff's earlier Parker v. Google, Inc., No. 06-3074 (3d Cir. July 10, 2007) is also a search engine copyright infringement case.

tiny faces

2008-10-22T16:17:00.003-05:00

This struck me as hilarious -- Someone noted that a box of Cascadian Farms frozen broccoli had teeny, tiny faces worked into the image on the label:

http://bread-and-honey.blogspot.com/2008/10/wtf-broccoli.html

A comment in another blog said this (unsubstantiated):

"They've been putting tiny faces of employees, family and friends on the labels since at least 1995, which was when someone first showed me this on the labels of Cascadian Farms jams when I was first working at Fresh Fields (later bought by Whole Foods). CF has since been bought by General Mills, but it seems the tiny faces continue."

A bulletin board thread from 2007 claimed that the creamed corn packaging had a little hidden baby's face. Strange. That thread described it as a version of an "easter egg" in a video game or DVD ... an undocumented feature that you have to really try to find. That's pretty apt.

los angeles food nostalgia

2008-10-19T17:54:00.025-05:00

On a long drive recently, my partner Bruce and I were reminiscing about places we used to eat at in Los Angeles. He grew up there and has a longer list than I (maybe for another post). So many places we used to patronize as recently as the early 1990s are now gone, or, as the L.A. Time Machines site puts it, "extinct." I decided that I would try to write down the places I remember frequenting that are no longer open. Then I started semi-obsessively researching them.

A Chinese restaurant on Sunset Blvd or Antioch in Pacific Palisades. I don't remember the name or the food, but I do remember the old school Cantonese-American black, red, and gold dragon-decorated bar that served cocktails in tiki glasses with umbrellas. I used to order Fog Cutters or Mai Tais.
Blum’s in the Plaza Building at the Disneyland Hotel complex. Mom and I used to visit Disneyland every summer when we went down to L.A. to visit grandmother Johnston in Beverly Hills. Mom loved to stay in the old "Garden Rooms" section of the Disneyland Hotel (she called them the Lanai rooms). Every day we ate at least one meal at Blum's before or after a monorail trip. And on every trip we watched the "Dancing Waters" at the hotel complex.
Cafe Casino with locations on Gayley Ave in Westwood and on Ocean Blvd in Santa Monica. I ate a lot at the Westwood location (there was a great vintage poster store next door), and Bruce ate at the Santa Monica location.
Café Katsu on Sawtelle Blvd in West L.A. One of the first places Bruce and I went on a date. It was very small but the food was extraordinary. It was down the street from a Japanese restaurant that I cannot remember the name of that had fabulous grilled squid, and nearby the take-away hole-in-the-wall Tempura House that you had to visit early or they'd be out of the shrimp and sweet potatoes.
D.B. Levy’s sandwiches on Lindbrook Drive in Westwood. Located above what I seem to remember was a Burger King and near the now-demolished National movie theater, this place had a massive menu of sandwiches named after celebrities.
English Tea Room on Glendon Ave in Westwood. You walked off the street into a brick courtyard to enter this very quaint tea room. I almost always had the Welsh Rarebit and the bread and butter pudding.
Gianfranco restaurant and deli on Santa Monica Blvd in West L.A. This was the place a group of us ate on a very regular basis when undergraduates. I had a weakness for the gnocchi with pesto. My friend Cynthia remembers nothing but their delicate hazelnut cake.
Gorky’s Café at 536 East 8th Street in the downtown Garment District. Saturday mornings when I was in need of fabric or trim or beads, I'd drive to downtown L.A. to the garment district before any place was open, because the shopping day had to start with blintzes at Gorky's.
India's Oven on Pico Blvd in Culver City(?). The original location, with the disposable plates and cutlery.
Kelbo’s on Pico Blvd in west L.A. Polynesian tiki tacky like you cannot believe. Friends went there for the cheap, huge communal well drinks with lots of long straws. I went for the tiki tacky. They also sold painted faux stained glass for some reason.
Knoll's Black Forest Inn on Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica. An unchanging decor and menu for decades.
Merlin McFly's on Main St. in Santa Monica. I remember it being near a great vintage clothing store. The draw was the amazing stained glass windows that featured historic magicians. The restaurant is long gone, but the windows were saved and are now at a venue called Magicopolis.
Mie and Mie Falafal in Westwood. I never had falafal before my freshman year of college. Our dorm was being renovated for the 1984 Olympics and had no dining hall, so I often found myself there.
Moise’s Mexican on Santa Monica Blvd near Federal in West L.A. I lived four blocks away and always ordered the same thing -- carne en serape, a burrito filled with beef in a sour cream sauce, covered in cheese and quickly broiled.
Panda Inn on Pico Blvd in West L.A. An elegant 80s room, the 2nd or 3rd location after Pasadena, before it went national. It was at the Westside Pavilion mall, an upscale mall designed by Jon Jerde.
The Penguin Coffee Shop at 1670 Lincoln Blvd in Santa Monica. My friend Cynthia and I loved it for its Penguin logo. The sign is partly still there (as is the Googie-style building), even though it became an orthodontic office.
Polly's Pies at 501 Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica. Bruce loved this place.
R.J.s for Ribs at 252 N. Beverly Blvd in Beverly Hills. The ribs were good, but the real joy was trying to stump your waiter when he asked what animal he should fashion your foil package for leftover food into. Armadillos, bats, ...
Robata on Santa Monica Blvd in West L.A. near the Nuart theater. I was a very frequent attendee when the Nuart (and the Fox on Lincoln in Venice) were full-time revival houses. Robata was, as you'd expect, Japanese robata, or grilled, skewered food.
The Sculpture Gardens restaurant on Abbott Kinney in Venice. Bruce and I ate brunch there very frequently, but no one else seems to remember it, with its multiple little buildings surrounding a funky courtyard with sculptures. They had the best breakfast bread basket and baked apple pancakes.
Ship’s coffee shop at 10877 Wilshire Blvd in Westwood. A classic Googie-style coffee shop with toasters at every table. My friend Kevin ate there a lot.
Tampico Tilly's on Wilshire in Santa Monica. Cheap, decent Mexican in a huge faux rancho house. I think El Cholo took over the building.
Trader Vic’s at 9876 Wilshire Blvd in Beverly Hills. I remember eating there every summer with my grandmother Johnston. I was always allowed to order a Shirley Temple, which feels pretty daring when you're 10 years old. Sometimes we also ate at The Velvet Turtle on Sepulveda Blvd.
Wildflour pizza on Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica. There is still one location open, but this is the one I remember best. They had to-die for spinach salad with marinated artichoke hearts.
Zucky’s Deli at 431 Wilshire Blvd at 5th St in Santa Monica. I had a roommate in college who was from New York via Florida. He took me to Zucky's for my first egg cream, and introduced me to Fox's Ubet syrup. When I worked at the Getty Research Institute when it was at 4th and Wilshire, I often stopped in for the fabulous corn muffins from their bakery. Izzy's was across the street -- they had good pie but I remember really disliking their tuna melts. What an odd thing to remember.

Of course there were lots of other places that are still there ... Angeli Caffe on Melrose Ave in West Hollywood, Anna Maria's Trattoria on Wilshire in Santa Monica, The Apple Pan on Pico, the Border Grill on 4th Street in Santa Monica, the Broadway Deli on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Campanile on La Brea Ave in North Hollywood, Chaya Venice on Navy Street in Venice, Chin Chin on San Vicente Blvd in Brentwood, i Cugini on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, Dhaba Indian on Main in Santa Monica, Empress Pavilion on Hill St in Chinatown, Father's Office on Montana in Santa Monica, Marix Playa on Entrada in Pacific Palisades, Noma Sushi on Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica, Stan's Donuts on Weyburn in Westwood (the best apple fritters), Robin Rose ice cream on Rose Ave. in Venice, The Rose Cafe on Rose Ave. in Venice, Snug Harbor on Wilshire in Santa Monica, Thai Dishes on Wilshire in West L.A., Versailles Cuban on Venice Blvd in Culver City, Woo Lae Oak Korean on Western at Wilshire (the best place to eat before shows at the Wiltern theater), Ye Olde King's Head on Santa Monica Blvd in Santa Monica (why do I think it was somewhere else before?) ... and likely dozens that I don't remember right now.

digital book access at John Hopkins

2008-10-17T11:12:00.003-05:00

Jonathan Rochkind has posted a great description of digital book access features that he's put into production in the link resolver and OPAC at Johns Hopkins. They're remarkable in the sense that he's taken advantage of so many different service APIs (Google Books, IA, OCLC, Amazon, HathiTrust) to provide functionality with conditional options to provide as much collection coverage as possible.

obstacles to universal access

2008-10-17T09:35:00.003-05:00

I've just read an interesting paper from a presentation at the recent CIDOC meeting: Nicholas Crofts, “Digital Assets and Digital Burdens: Obstacles to the Dream of Universal Access,” 2008 Annual Conference of CIDOC (Athens, September 15-18, 2008).

The premise is that technology is not the issue keeping our institutions from reaching a goal of universal access -- it's a number of post-technical issues, including varied intellectual property barriers, institutions' desires to protect their digital assets, and collection documentation that is not well-suited to sharing.

From the section on "Suitability of Documentation":

... but while this technical revolution has taken place, there has not been a corresponding revolution in documentation practice. The way that documentation is prepared and maintained and the sort of documentation that is produced are still heavily influenced by pre-Internet assumptions. The documentation found in museums – the raw material for diffusion – is often ill-suited for publication.

From the conclusion:

While making cultural material freely available is part of their mission, and therefore a goal that they are obliged to support, it may still come into conflict with other factors, notably commercial interests: the need to maintain a high-profile and to protect an effective brand image. If museums are to cooperate successfully and make digital resources widely available on collaborative platforms, they will either need to find ways of avoiding institutional anonymity, or agree to put aside their institutional identity to one side.

It's a frank and interesting paper. I think there has been progress in documentation practice -- look at the CCO and the Aquifer Shareable Metadata efforts, and the earlier Categories for the Description of Works of Art -- but it's true that this hasn't yet taken hold in a widespread way.

First Monday article on Google Books and OCA

2008-10-15T12:36:00.008-05:00

The newest issue of First Monday (volume 13, number 10, 6 October 2008) has an interesting article by KalevLeetaru -- "Mass book digitization: The deeper story of Google Books and the Open Content Alliance."
The article compares what is publicly known about the Google Book and OCA projects.

From the conclusions:

While on their surface, the Google Books and Open Content Alliance projects may appear very different, they in fact share many similarities:

Both operate as a black box outsourcing agent. The participating library transports books to the facility to be scanned and fetches them when they are done. The library provides or assists with housing for the facility, but its personnel are not permitted to operate the scanning units, which must be staffed by personnel from either Google or OCA.
Neither publishes official technical reports. Google engineers have published in the literature on specific components of their project, which offer crucial insights into the processes they use, while talks from senior leadership have yielded additional information. OCA has largely been absent from the literature and few speeches have unveiled substantial technical details. Both projects have chosen not to issue exhaustive technical reports outlining their infrastructure: Google due to trade secret concerns and OCA due to a lack of available time.
Both digitize in–copyright works. Google Books scans both out–of–copyright books and those for which copyright protection is still in force. OCA scans out–of–copyright books and only scans in–copyright books when permission has been secured to do so. Both initiatives maintain partnerships with publishers to acquire substantial in–copyright digital content.
Both use manual page turning and digital camera capture. Large teams of humans are used to manually turn pages in front of a pair of digital cameras that snap color photographs of the pages.
Both permit libraries to redistribute materials digitized from their collections. While redistribution rights vary for other entities, both the Google Books and OCA initiatives permit the library providing a work for digitization to host its own copy of that digitized work for selected personal use distribution.
Both permit unlimited personal use of out–of–copyright works. While redistribution rights vary for other entities, both the Google Books and OCA initiatives permit the library providing a work for digitization to host its own copy of that digitized work for selected personal use distribution.
Both enforce some restrictions on redistribution or commercial use. Google Books enforces a blanket prohibition on the commercial use of its materials, while at least one of OCA’s scanning partners does the same. Google requires users to contact it about redistribution or bulk downloading requests, while OCA permits any of its member institutions to restrict the redistribution of their material.

From the section on "Transparency"

A common comparison of the Google Books and Open Content Alliance projects revolves around the shroud of secrecy that underlies the Google Books operation. However, one may argue that such secrecy does not necessarily diminish the usefulness of access digitization projects, since the underlying technology and processes do not matter, only the final result. This is in contrast to preservation scanning, in which it may be argued that transparency is an essential attribute, since it is important to understand the technologies being used so as to understand the faithfulness of the resulting product. When it comes down to it, does it necessarily matter what particular piece of software or algorithm was used to perform bitonal thresholding on a page scan? When the intent of a project is simply to generate useable digital surrogates of printed works, the project may be considered a success if the files it offers provide digital access to those materials.

To me, that paragraph gets at the key issue in discussing and comparing the projects -- are books being scanned in a consistent way and being made accessible through at least one portal, enforcing current rights restrictions? Yes? Then both these projects are, at a basic level, successful and provide a useful service.

Yes, there are issues to quibble with for both projects. More technical transparency is desirable for both projects. Both have controlled workflows that limit what can be contributed to the projects in different ways. There are aspects of the Google workflow that Google contractually requires its partners to keep secret. That's their right to include in their contracts, and a potential partner's decision to make if they find it objectionable and therefore choose not to participate. Each documents and enforces rights in different ways and to different extents -- we should be looking to standards in that area. Each sets different requirements for allowing reuse. If only there could be agreement.

One note on preservation. Neither projects are preservation projects -- they're access projects. Even if there were something we could point to and say "that's a preservation-quality digital surrogate" -- if such a concept as "preservation-quality" exists -- neither project aims for that. Both projects do, however, allow the participating libraries to preserve the files created through the projects. These files should and must be preserved because they can be used to provide digital modes of access, and, in some cases, they may be the only surrogates ever made if the condition of a book has deteriorated. Look at the HathiTrust for more on the topic of preserving the output of mass digitization projects.

And one note about the Google project providing "free" digitization for its participants. Yes, Google is underwriting the cost of digitization. But each partner library is bearing the cost of staffing and supplies for project management, checkout/checkin, shelving, barcoding, cataloging, and conservation activities, not to mention storage and management of the files. The overall cost is definitely reduced, but not free.