where did all the stuff in my office come from?

Having been happily ensconced in a series of offices during my 6 years at UVA, I seem to have accumulated way more stuff than I imagined. Even after recycling many years of personal journal subscriptions that the Library didn't need or want, the contents of pretty much every file folder in my file drawers that wasn't important enough to give to someone else, folders and binders full of conference programs and attendee lists, and returning all the books I had checked out except for the one I am reading right now, I still have 4 boxes of stuff. Some books of my own, conference proceedings that I want to keep for now, files for some committees and publications, old backup CDs that I keep out of paranoia, personal desk organizers that work well for me, and way too many gewgaws that I seem to have accumulated. And some framed posters, not all of which are hung on the wall of my current office, but have been in past offices so I've moved them around with me.

Hi, my name is Leslie, and I am a packrat. I thought I was a recovering packrat, but apparently I've been deluding myself.

Open Repositories 08

The timing of my changing jobs this month did not allow me to attend Open Repositories this year. Thankfully, Digital Koans has a great roundup of reports on OR08 sessions.

PREMIS 2.0

The PREMIS Editorial Committee has released PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, version 2.0, a revision of the May 2005 report. A draft XML schema -- still undergoing a month of review before its final release -- is also available.

Audiovisual Research Collections and Their Preservation

TAPE (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe) has published Audiovisual Research Collections and Their Preservation. This report looks at the requirements for access and re-use, focusing on the potential of digitization for creating distributed content-based archives.

1994 again

There is something so charming about the first sites on the web with their white backgrounds, lists of blue underlined links, directories of the internet, and requests to "Click Here."

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the web site for Mosaic Communications Corporation in 1994 is now back online, as is their earlier site at http://mosaic.mcom.com/. And check out the archive of vintage Netscape browsers!

Read about the trials and tribulations required to make this all live again at http://jwz.livejournal.com/856745.html.

convert paper to ipaper

When I first saw this on BoingBoing, I and others were certain it was an April Fool's joke: "Free bulk-scanning, OCR and web-publishing service launched by Scribd."

Then someone from Scribd posted in the comments that this was, indeed, a real offer with a very badly timed annoucement.

Part of me still suspects it's a prank, but this could be a real, limited-time prototype service offer.

My thoughts about iPaper are still as undecided as when I first wrote about it.

preliminary decision to reject Blackboard patent claims

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a lengthy article summarizing last Friday's preliminary decision by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that rejects all 44 claims Blackboard Inc. made regarding a controversial patent it was granted in 2006.

The patent in dispute involves a course-management system in which a single user with a single log-on could have multiple roles in multiple classes. For example, someone who was a student in one course and a teaching assistant in another could log on once and get different levels of access to all the course materials.

Desire2Learn and its supporters have argued that the patent should not have been granted because similar technology existed in 1999, when Blackboard applied for the patent.

The patent office awarded the patent in 2006, and within months, Blackboard sued Desire2Learn for infringement. However, the patent office, in its re-examination, cited several examples of "prior art," or previously available technology, that was similar to what Blackboard claimed to have invented.

two new reports on IP issues

The final report of the Section 108 Study Group is available at http://www.section108.gov/docs/Sec108StudyGroupReport.pdf. The report examines the exceptions available in copyright law and discusses changes that may be needed in light of digital technologies.

The RLG Partner Copyright Investigation Summary Report is now available at http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/2008-01.pdf. This report summarizes interviews conducted with RLG Partner institutions, who shared information about how and why institutions investigate and collect copyright evidence, both for mass digitization projects and for items in special collections.

becoming a digital scholar

Looking for an overview of what it means to be a digital scholar? Read Lisa Spiro's essay "Becoming a 'Digital Scholar,'" the text of a presentation that she gave at the Digital Discovery conference on March 27, 2008.

the law of unintended results

In a recent decision, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta rejected Wal-Mart's claim of trademark infringement again an online critic of the company. The court found that Charles Smith’s parody Web sites (www.walocaust.com and www.walqaeda.com) and related merchandise sold through CafePress were protected speech and that a reasonable person would not confuse their use with Wal-Mart’s legitimate trademarks. The court also rejected Wal-Mart’s claim that it has trademark rights in the “smiley-face” that Smith used in one of his parodies. I wonder what the fall-out will be from that portion of the decision?

Read the history of the case.

a pair of posts on the semantic web

A interesting post on semantic web patterns from ReadWriteWeb, and a just as interesting response to it from Nodalities. Reading both gives a good view of the state of semantic web development.

review of OpenID

My interest in OpenID has recently been piqued, so I am definitely looking forward to the outcome of a JISC OpenID review:

"The primary aim of the project is to produce a report which will allow busy decision-makers to understand OpenID’s security properties well enough, quickly enough, to apply it safely and avoid its potential security pitfalls, based on first establishing by means of a survey a sound understanding of how such decision-makers are likely to proceed in the absence of such guidance. The secondary aims are to develop bridging software that will allow OpenIDs from any source to be used as identities within the production UK (SAML) federation, creating opportunities for early adopters to experiment. We will also demonstrate a library-type service modified to make use of such identities."

document migration

There's a very thoughtful post on the Digital Curation blog about the use of Open Office as a migration tool.

Conversions Plus has personally saved my hide when I needed access to older file formats, but it's not meant as a preservation tool. What tools do people use for conversion? How do they scale?

life on the internet

I was chatting with someone earlier today about identity and privacy, and how I'm thinking a lot about them these days.

In the process of buying the place we are moving to, I was asked for a photocopy of my driver's license. OK, that's not an uncommon request during a financial transaction conducted over email and fax. Then I was asked for a photocopy of my social security card. My what? Why? I couldn't actually find my social security card (note to self -- get a replacement card), so, in lieu of that, I had to sign a release form allowing my lender to confirm my identity with social security. And they needed a photocopy of my passport, too, if I wouldn't mind.

Bruce opened a new business banking account last year, and he was also asked to show his social security card in order to open the account.

Where is the fine line between confirmation of identify (albeit in the face of rampant identity fraud) and privacy?

I saw this posting on ReadWriteWeb about whether hiring officials should look at candidate's social bookmark profiles during the hiring process. That post referenced a Business Week debate on the topic. One of the more interesting things mentioned in passing in the argument against was that identities can be spoofed online, so how does an employer know if they're even looking at a real profile for that person?

Identity and privacy are completely intertwined online.

Circling back to the conversation I was having earlier, we were talking about how much of our lives are archived online -- a dumb message that I posted to a listserv in the mid 1990s is still likely out there in an archive, waiting for someone to wade through hundreds of pages of search results. My personal web page from 1996 is probably in the Wayback Machine. What about now? Is my Facebook profile personal or professional when it includes my movie and music likes but also supports great communication with my close professional colleagues around the world ? My LinkedIn connections include a few close friends from decades past that I have recently reconnected with through that service.

How much do we need to worry about managing our online identities? Either a lot or not at all, and I'm not sure which it is yet.

orphan works

Read the transcription of a statement on orphan works by Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights, to the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary.

Google Books Viewability API

Google has released a new API that supports links to volumes in Google Book Search. Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.

We'd already created our own service for our Virgo catalog for digitized UVA volumes that are available as full-text in GBS. We were thinking about how we'd potentially port that to Blacklight -- now we can look at the API in addition to what we'd done ourselves.

Texas Digital Library Repository

Via DigitalKoans, the Texas Digital Library Repository has launched with content from four of its partner institutions. There's a program that's making some real headway: an IR for ETDs (multi-institutional, even!), journal hosting, and real progress with inter-institutional Shibboleth – on top of what they’re already doing with digitization and online collections.

HP BookPrep

Via ReadWriteWeb, I cam across HP BookPrep, a prototype print-on-demand service for, and this is really a quote, "every book ever published." The work from page images and process them through their own process into PDF "eMasters" for printing. It's an interesting prototype.

The pilot collection is Foodsville, a food and cooking community site. Members can read and purchase cookbooks at the site's free library, where books can be discovered by keyword, by author, or by browsing through tags. Of course, they're not actually "free" -- the print-on-demand costs ranged from $7 to $32 when I browsed through the 141 titles currently available. You don't have to buy the books -- you can read them online. I browsed through Lafcadio Hearn's La Cuisine Creole and found it readable. (I love the recipe title "Delicate Rusks for Convalescents" on page 235)

I'm a fan of Lafcadio Hearn, so I checked Amazon, and found that the same POD version is available for $10.26 versus $13.96 on Foodsville, both listed as marked down from $19.95 There is what looks to be a different POD version available from Amazon as well -- also a facsimile of the 1885 edition -- for $21.24. I'm not sure which I'd choose.

It does not say where they're getting the page images from. I'd really like to know that.

anti-counterfeiting course

Via Techdirt, you have to read the article in Inside Higher Ed about a sponsored anti-counterfeiting course at Hunter College where one of the activities was to create a counterfeit blog about events that didn't happen to create a guerrilla marketing message about why counterfeiting is bad.

I can't even begin to describe all the issues I have with this. Let's hope the article and community backlash serve as a cautionary tale for any other organization considering this.

Visible Body

Visible Body launches in beta today, and looks pretty amazing. I could have used this when I took anatomy 25 years ago.

I can't say that I've really been able to experience it, because I waited over 30 minutes for the data to load and gave up. I expect they're getting a LOT of traffic today, so I am cutting them some slack. What is a shame is that it only works on Windows IE because of the choice of plugin.

There's a brief posting on ReadWriteWeb with more discussion.

Warrick

I just came across Warrick, a neat research project that takes advantage of cached web crawls to restore lost web site. Warrick is a utility for reconstructing or recovering a website when a back-up is not available. It searches the Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo for stored pages and images and will save them to your filesystem. It's not guaranteed and it is a research project and not a production service, but it could help when there's no other option. It falls under the general category of research that they call "Lazy Preservation," a phrase that I can see some loving and some hating.

When I followed the link to the about page and I saw that it was a research project at Old Dominion University, I immediately suspected that it was one of Michael Nelson's students, and it was. I briefly blogged Joan Smith's mod-oai work last year. Michael is always working on something interesting, especially his current work on OAI-ORE.

visualization of statistics as art

I am quite wary of art with a pointed agenda. All art has some sort of agenda, of course, but some works seem to be more overtly political than art.

That said, you really need to look at Chris Jordan's "Running the Numbers" series. I don't know where he gets his numbers, but these are astonishing visualizations of statistics, many having to do with consumerism and wastefulness.

I am also an admirer of his Katrina aftermath series.

iPaper

I'm not sure what I make of iPaper, described as a potential "YouTube for Documents." Jeff Young gives a succinct description in his Chronicle of Higher Ed article. TeleRead has a post. TechCrunch briefly touches on the business model. ReadWriteWeb has a longer post.

Basically, documents are uploaded (a number of formats are supported) and streamed to a Flash player for page turning. The iPaper player is also available for integration into other sites.

There is a lot of pointing to an astonishingly bad essay that has been posted for its humor value, and the comments are frequently much obscenity laden. How is this useful? One can see the YouTube comparison here dumb things people do in document form rather than video.

I see uploaded offprints of articles, sheet music, and car manuals, test answers for past medical residency exams, among other things, made publicly accessible. Is copyright status being confirmed in any way?

This could be useful -- a place to upload documents with unlimited storage for public access or sale,that supports review and commenting and social bookmarking. But how do you find what's really useful among tips of reducing your golf slice or "secret White House plans"?

Omeka

I've spent a little time looking at the recently announced online exhibition building tool Omeka from The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

I am very interested. This is a tool meant for cultural heritage organizations that I think could be extended into a tool for personal digital scholarship. We've talked a lot at UVA about the conceptual similarity between born-digital scholarly projects and exhibition building, and have long considered the possibilities for a virtual exhibition tool. Our Collectus tool was a start for us in that direction. Omeka allows you to create an archive, organize it into collections, and create exhibition-like presentations or illustrated essays with a RSS feed. "Items" in an archive can be compound objects and include multiple files. Its API support extension with plugins, such as support for COiNS, geolocation, or tagging. Hooks to applications such as Collex or the SIMILE Timeline would add some interesting functionality.

The biggest limit that I see is that its in-browser automatic delivery is currently limited to images, although you can include any type of media. This seems like an excellent opportunity for an institution to work with GMU to extend Omeka's capabilities and create richer media experiences.

blogging will continue

A number of folks have asked if I will keep blogging after I move to the Library of Congress -- I certainly plan to!

For now, though, blogging will be a bit sparse. I'm working on a transition plan at UVA, my house goes on the market tomorrow (I feel like I'm living through an episode of "Designed to Sell"), I close on a new place mid-March, and I feel overall deluged with paperwork (UVA, LC, Realtors, banks, etc). Yesterday I felt so tired and blah that I just stayed home and slept.

leaving the university of virginia

Now that all the local announcements have been made, I can publicly announce that I'm leaving the University of Virginia Library for a position at the Library of Congress. I'll be joining the Repository Development unit in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. I am sad to leave the people that I work with and the projects that I have been working on, but I'm excited by the possibilities at LC.

The most daunting part of the transition is selling our house and buying something in a much more expensive market (fear not, we have something in the works, but we will be downsizing). The logistics have me briefly quite stressed. You wouldn't think that moving 2 1/2 hours away would be that complicated ...

MODS tools

We're chatting a lot about MODS at UVA, partly about data sharing via OAI and partly about possibly replacing some local metadata standards.

In the great synchronicity of our community, there were two posts on MODS creation tools today, one from the DIL and one from Peter Binkley. Between the tools mentioned in those posts and the DLF Aquifer MODS profile work, it's getting easier to work with MODS every day.

CrossRef Citation plugin

I'm running a WordPress and CommentPress experiment (very low key right now), and now I must look into the CrossRef Citation plugin.

why bind?

I love an effective visualization, and my colleague Holly has a very effective visualization to make the case for her binding budget.

museum data exchange study

Mellon has funded at great project and OCLC/RLG Programs for a project to prototype data exchange between museums. Here's the press release. I spent many years in the museum community dealing with this, so I am beyond thrilled to see movement in this area. I would like to have seen more vendor systems involved in the pilot, but this is still a very welcome project.

copyright infringement to sell salvaged CDs?

Via techdirt -- OK, there's a case to be made that dumpster diving for CDs (even if abandoned) and selling them is illegal, but it's a puzzle why it might also be copyright infringement.

book ripping

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post on the Atiz BookSnap book scanner and "book ripping" that I recommend.

Harvard open access policy

I am thrilled about the Harvard open access mandate. The text is available in this PDF. Robert Dranton made a strong case in a Harvard Crimson article. Here's the article reporting the approval in the Crimson and a brief article in the NY Times. Peter Suber has an excellent post roundup, another roundup, and a post on responses from Library Academic newswire. I especially recommend Dorothea's comments to all.

there will be news next week

I have not had time to blog of late. A series of brief posts will follow. Watch this spot for the news why.

OpenID gets some major press with some major names

Via ReadWriteWeb, the OpenID Foundation announced this morning that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have taken seats as the organization's first corporate board members. Support is growing.

Michigan's millionth digitized book

I love the site that the University of Michigan Library has put up in celebration of the millionth digitized book. I especially love that they credit every one of their 436 staff members with contributing to the project and post some of their pictures on flickr.

West Virginia tax maps

Via Techdirt, it's reported that a company that acquired (via a Freedom of Information Act suit) public tax maps representing the state of West Virginia is being sued to stop them from putting the maps online. The basis of the suit?

"While government documents cannot be covered by copyright, apparently some gov't officials feel that preventing their ability to profit off of that public data is illegal."

the semantics of digital curation

I came across a reference to a blog posting entitled "The Digital Curator in Your Future." Not being familiar with the blog or its context, the first thing I thought was that this would likely be a post on digital curation, the evolving discipline around data curation and preservation. The phrase "digital curation" is all the rage these days.

Nope. This was a posting about online brand success, discussing the need for the intellectual curation, where subject experts "separate junk from art" in the online arena, curating site content to present the most relevant and essential content for their community.

I think this was the last place I expected to encounter the word curator -- describing a vital role in niche market success. That said, I think the posting was absolutely right. Whether you call them editors or curators or guides or whatever, a site aimed at a certain community or representing a brand requires selection/filtering/editing to keep focus, as long as the site also provides some mechanism for community involvement and isn't just a top-down kind of information feed.

The comments were just as enlightening. Some commented that many sites have this sort of human curation. Some commented that they use digg or delicious as an automated curation tool of sorts to locate what others have already identified as being of value (even though the posting explicitly posited that digg is not curation, it's aggregation). Some argued that it has to be expert and human to be effective curation. An interesting discussion.

text-mining project for historical scholarship

Many congratulations to the Center for History and New Media for receiving NEH funding for a two-year study of the potential of text-mining tools for historical scholarship, entitled “Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research With Text-Mining and Analysis Tools.”

I have been in a couple of conversation recently about related topics: What are the differences in practice between literary and historical etext analysis projects? I understand that there's a diverse group having some interesting discussions about that topic to identify needs with an aim to seek funding to support a prototype service project.

What do libraries need to provide in terms of collections and services for scholars working with etext resources for their research? I'm hearing that our service model should be more about helping them learn to create their own resources and tools instead of providing all content and tools for them. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't digitize our rare collections and make them available for use and analysis, but that we need to finally do away with our old service model where we did all the work for the scholars. The "teach them to fish ..." metaphor. Of course it's sensible, but it's a real switch in terms of staff activities, requires some different skills, and requires faculty and folks on their project teams to take on work that they used to rely on us to do. For some in the Library and on the projects that's like shifting course for an oil tanker -- it takes some time and it's not precision steering. Luckily, the overwhelming majority are embracing this.

privacy and Facebook

A UVA undergraduate research team in computer science has shared their findings about privacy issues and Facebook applications. It's so worth reading that the Chronicle of Higher Ed picked up the story.

twine making the news

Back in October I wrote about Twine. I sent in a request to participate in the beta but didn't get selected. The New York Times has an article based on the experience of one of the beta testers -- Sarah Miller, a librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University. Reading the article, I still want to try it.

in other kindle news

A library cannot loan a Kindle without it being a violation of the Terms of Service. It also cannot keep patrons who borrow one from adding their own content.

ereaders

There was an interesting article about the Amazon Kindle in the New York Times -- Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless. The article rightly addresses two of the factors that are key to the success of portable ebook readers -- the quality of the display and usability of the interface, and the physical portability of the unit itself. In those areas, the Kindle doesn't do too badly. Stephen King wrote a column for Entertainment Weekly where he reported on his first use of a Kindle -- he found that he was able to enjoy the book he was reading and the fact that he was using an ebook reader faded into the background.

The article also reports on Steve Jobs' attack on the Kindle not as a device, but as a tool for an untenable market niche because "people don’t read anymore." The article countered the percentage that he presented with some data from a survey conducted in August 2007 by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press.

27 percent of Americans had not read a book in the previous year. Not as bad as Mr. Jobs’s figure, but dismaying to be sure. Happily, however, the same share — 27 percent — read 15 or more books.

In fact, when we exclude Americans who had not read a single book in that year, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8 percent who read 51 books or more. In other words, a sizable minority does not read, but the overall distribution is balanced somewhat by those who read a lot.

Both sides are trying to make a point using statistics: Jobs' figure is high, and the NYT is getting a favorable average by excluding an entire class of respondents. But it's the wrong point. Neither article really dealt with the issues surrounding the content -- availability, formats, interoperability, and DRM. Those are what's really crippling the ebook reader market, not whether people read any more. Make the content as openly available as possible, in as many formats as possible, and transferable between desktops and devices and between people, _and_ do away with the crippling DRM, and then there will be a thriving ebook and ereader market.

already a blacklight 0.2

Bess has posted that 0.2 is out the door.

Within 24 hours of releasing Blacklight 0.1 she received a patch fixing a problem in one of the config files and augmenting the installation README. 0.2 is 0.1 but with the config file fixed, some better installation instructions, and exported from svn (as opposed to checked out).

She's ported the subversion repository over to rubyforge. The source is browseable here: http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/svn/ and you can see all your svn options here: http://rubyforge.org/scm/?group_id=5235

NIH mandate questions

T. Scott Plutchak has a great post on questions that should be addressed at the January ARL meeting on the NIH public access policy. I understand that this is an invitation-only meeting, but I wish I could find some details about this meeting, whoi's going to attend, and what is going to be discussed. If it's on the ARL web site I can't find it. If someone can point me toward more info, I'd appreciate it. Since we don't yet have an IR in place, we have questions about compliance.

texts read into Congressional record

There's an interesting post from Peter Brantley, which contains an opinion (not a legal opinion, but a knowledgeable opinion nonetheless) on the copyright status of texts read into the Congressional record. It's an interesting question -- tracking of rights when copyrighted texts are excerpted in a public document.

Cal Berkeley pilot to subsidize open access fees

Via OA Librarian, the U.C. Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) is launching an 18-month pilot program, to subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication. The pilot will also yield data that can be used to gauge faculty interest in -- as well as the budgetary impacts of -- these new modes of scholarly communication on the Berkeley campus.

TheAtlantic.com

I was initially very excited by the announcement on BoingBoing that The Atlantic had opened its archive. I read the Editor's Note describing the decision. I followed the link to start my exploration.

It's a little misleading. The _site_ is now open to all. They have "Unbound" (web only) content and full issues back to 1995 open. But their other free content seems to be selected material. Some thing that I looked for are there (Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think"). I've seen other people's examples of known article with no results. There is still a "Premium Archive" for the full content going back to 1857.

Still, there's some great content. Try the search at http://www.theatlantic.com/a/search.mhtml

Blacklight 0.1 source is out there

Check out Bess's post for more details -- Blacklight 0.1 source is now available at http://rubyforge.org/projects/blacklight/.

Free Government Information

When I first scanned over this email message in my inbox I thought about those old late night tv ads enjoining us to write NOW! for free government publications that could help YOU get money from the US Government!

This project is actually really intriguing:

Free Government Information is investigating the usefulness of tagging government documents that do not receive traditional cataloging and needs your help! We've posted 32 documents that the Government Printing Office (GPO) harvested from the EPA web site and posted them to the Internet Archive. Over the next three months, we'd like to see as many people as possible tag and describe these documents using the del.icio.us bookmarking service. For a full project description and instructions on how to participate, please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We'd like to thank GPO for posting a sample of their harvested EPA documents that made this project possible.

They are going to run the project for three months and collate the following data: How many people participated in the project, how many documents were tagged, how many documents were described, and the average number of tags per document. I'm looking forward to seeing the outcome, especially alongside the LC Flickr project.

Peter Brantley on Google Books

There is a very brief interview with Peter Brantley, Director of DLF, in the January 25 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). In this interview he answers a series of questions that identify his concerns about the Google Book project.

He identifies issues about the resources required of the libraries that participate, and that the cost can keep the library from other activities. He hopes that "a court [will] determine once and for all that it is fair use to digitize a copyrighted work and make a snippet of it publicly available." He notes that Google is creating content for its own use that can potentially be made into some sort of commercial service, and that its processes and standards are opaque to the user and the community. He expresses concern that the fuzzy status of orphan works put them into a category where someone will end up making money off them when he thinks that shouldn't be allowed. There's nothing there I'd argue with.

He also points out that the quality of the scans is not consistent. That's followed by this:

Q: Shouldn't Google be commended for helping to preserve library books?

A. The company is not preserving books. It is creating an archive for Google's own purposes.

I'm of two minds when it comes to responding to this. I do not know why so many people assume that this project is preserving the volumes -- Google does not say that; they say that they are creating access copies. The participant institutions know this, and we knew this went we entered into the project. More people need to keep pointing this out.

The other side of this is that IF WE DO WANT "preservation quality" digital objects that represent these books (argue amongst yourselves about how to define what that means or if such objects can actually exist), that's a an additional project with additional costs and time and wear and tear on the volumes to digitize them. And that is unfortunate.

I'm going to end up looking like a major Google apologist because I keep pointing out when folks have things wrong about the project. I just want to set the record straight when I can, so our participation can be judged (pro or con) based on accurate information.

American Literatures

American Literatures is a Mellon Foundation-funded project where five university presses—NYU, Fordham, Rutgers, Temple, and Virginia—have established an initiative designed to create new opportunities for publication in humanistic scholarship. The most innovative aspect of the program will be the establishment of a shared, centralized, external editorial service dedicated solely to managing the production of books in the initiative. This service will handle all copyediting, design, layout, and typesetting costs, and manage each title through to the point where it is ready for printing. The initiative has a web site and has announced on its "about page" (scroll down) in which areas each press is soliciting submissions.

I look forward to watching how this progresses for the UVA Press.

more openID support news

After testing OpenIDs as logins to Blogger in a prototypet program in November 2007, Google has become an OpenID provider. Effective immediately, Blogger users can use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option via the draft.blogger.com admin menu. Read the posting on TechCrunch.

smARThistory

There's an interesting project out of the Fashion Institute of Technology to develop an open access online art history text using interactive technologies -- smARThistory. It's being developed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data

Wired Science has a post on Google's plan to host open-source scientific datasets through a project called Palimpset. The post includes links to a number of documents and other posts.

support for OpenID

Yahoo has thrown some support behind OpenID when used on conjunction with Yahoo IDs. ReadWriteWeb has a thorough analysis.

great headline

From an article in the Times of London on a new genus of Madagascar palm:

"Picnicking family stumbles on a suicidal monster palm tree."

THATcamp

Dan Cohen reports that the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is having an "unconference" called THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp from May 31 to June 1, 2008.

An unconference is a participant-generated collaborative program. I was involved in beCamp last year, and I am a big fan or the model. It's a great fit for digital humanities collaborations.

LC and flickr

One couldn't turn around online today without seeing a post on the Library of Congress flickr experiment today: Read Write Web, Shifted Librarian, eFoundations, Catalogablog, Digital Koans, etc, and of course on the LOC blog.

In case you've been under a rock, LC has put up 3,000 images of photographs from their Prints and Photographs division for which no rights restrictions are known to exist, and are asking folks to tag them to help in enriching the metadata. The pilot project is in a new area of flickr called "The Commons." LC has a GREAT FAQ on participation.

Three things stand out for me:

They have made use of a new rights statement "no known copyright restrictions," which they may or may not make available for other images uploaded to flickr.

They are interested in hearing from other cultural heritage institutions to gauge interest in other projects becoming part of The Commons.

This is a pilot, and they do not know how long they might keep the images on flickr. So, review and tag these while you can. They have other candidate collections in mind.

D-Lib article on CRATE

The January/February 2008 issue of D-Lib includes an article by Joan Smith and Michael Nelson on their proposed CRATE mod-oai utility to produce preservation metadata for web resources. I saw this work presented at Open Repositories 2007 and I thought it was interesting then. It's a good article on an interesting proposal.

Archivists' Toolkit 1.1 released

Archivists' Toolkit -- a tool that has been designed to fill a huge need in the archival EAD community -- has released version 1.1. On the surface it seems to do something so simple, but often those "simple tasks" are deceptively so, and are those that can benefit most from a tool like this that can be shared across the community.

everyone needs continuing ed in copyright

Both Open Access News and the Chronicle of Higher Ed reported on a presentation at ALA Midwinter by Trisha Davis, a librarian at Ohio State University that states that faculty frequently have no idea that they've signed away copyright and/or other rights in their contracts with publishers. This was presented in the context of getting content into the IR at Ohio State.

This is no surprise to many of us. I first really gave this issue some thought after hearing a very good presentation by Karla Hahn that in part covered a study of publishing contracts at the 2004 University of Maryland Center for Intellectual Property conference (part of Panel 2).

Not having attending Midwinter to hear the talk -- so I have no idea if this was mentioned or not -- it's NOT JUST FACULTY that need refreshers in intellectual property. I have heard some librarians from many institutions espouse some really unsound beliefs about copyright and fair use. I also feel quite strongly that "refresher" is neither the right word nor the right idea -- librarians and faculty need continuing education in intellectual property issues. The landscape is constantly changing, laws are changing, and online publishing is by nature international in its distribution.

The UVA Library's Scholars' Lab is holding a series of Copyright 101 presentations that I know are making a difference, because I've attended and heard the questions that faculty have asked and had answered. Some of us now want to introduce a series for library staff as well.

LCSH makes the Washington Post

In 2006 there a decision was made at the Library of Congress to do away with the subject headings for Scottish literature, instead suggesting "English literature" headings. There was more than a small kerfuffle over this when it was belatedly reported in the Times of London and the BBC last December.

Today the Washington Post actually took note of this, publishing an article on the reversal of the decision. The Times has also taken note. In fact, it's all over the news this morning. Interesting that a standards terminology issue has become so political.

Report on LC/SDSC Data Transfer and Storage Tests

The Library of Congress has released the report Data Center for Library of Congress Digital Holdings: A Pilot Project; Final Report. I've only had the chance to glance through it, but it looks to be a very clear and straightforward report on technical, procedural, and cultural issues encountered in this digital image collection data transfer experiment, and how they resolved those issues (or not).

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/pdf/SDSC_LC_data-storage_report_2.pdf

chandler

There was an interesting convergence of posts on Chandler today.

The first post that I read was from Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing, talking about his use of Chandler over the past few months, how he likes it, and how it's improved over time. Then I saw, via TechDirt, that Mitch Kapor has backed out of the project, and there's a press release about the Chandler's future.

I never really looked into Chandler, but I know that folks at some places (UC Berkeley for one) were at one time very engaged with its possibilities. As someone who had been recently required to switch to Outlook and Exchange, I wish this had made more progress and gotten more traction.

print-on-demand from open access books

PublicDomainReprints.org is offering an experimental non-commercial service that allows users to convert digital public domain books in the Internet Archive, Google Book Search, or the Universal Digital Library to print-on-demand using the service Lulu.com. You pay for the service through Lulu.

For example, you paste in a URL for a public domain volume from Google Book Search, and the process takes advantage of the existing PDF for production. Apparently the Internet Archive PDFs can't be used, so the process takes advantage of the dejavu files instead.

There's a blog post mini-interview with the founder, who has his own blog.

Nature archive online

The full text of all Nature articles back to the first issue in 1869 are now online. I wish it weren't by subscription only, but we have access at UVA and it is remarkably cool. That first issue includes a book review for M. Madsen's Antiquités préhistoriques du Danemarck on Danish Iron Age sites that makes me want to look for a copy so I can see the beautifully described illustrations.

Final Version of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control Report Released

The final version of the highly anticipated report from the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control was released today -- "On the Record: Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control." I don't know when I'll have a chance to look at it, but I understand that changes were incorporated from comments received during the review period.

copyright and images online

There was an interesting article today in the Washington Post about folks who have posted images on flickr and in blogs, only to discover their images co-opted for commercial use. (I don't know how long the article will be publicly available)

Cases included a woman who found an image of her pub in a Santa suit used on a Fox NFL broadcast, and a Dallas teenager who found an image of herself used in a commercial ad campaign for Virgin Mobile in Australia. There have apparently been a number of cases involving the online parenting magazine Babble, which they repeatedly blame on inexperienced staff. In one case, a man who asked a Microsoft blog to remove a link to his image and got no response then replaced the image with a famous pornographic image, which got immediate action.

The article briefly describes fair use, and rightly mentions that a rights holder can give away or assign rights use. But there's this quote from the article: "Clearly, the only way to really make sure your photos on the Internet don't get splashed around is not to put them up there to begin with." (their emphasis.) And there's this description of creative Commons: "... Creative Commons, a nonprofit that licenses photos for Flickr."

Given that they spoke with Larry Lessig and quoted him in the article, could they have done the five minutes of research needed to correctly characterize CC? Could they have bothered to describe how best to declare one's rights? Advising folks to be vigilant about their rights is a good thing, but let's not advise withholding content for fear of misuse.

public domain day

John Mark Ockerbloom blogged a list of authors whose works in theory went into the public domain yesterday., at least in some countries. With the “life plus 70 years” and "life plus 50 years" term rules, authors who died in 1937 or in 1957 should have their works pass into the public domain in many countries. John goes on to decry that nothing like that will happen in the U.S. until 2019.

CopyrightWarch.ca also has a greet entry with an extensive list. It's a list full of fabulous names.

virtual 1815 Jefferson library

Working at the University of Virginia, one is never far removed from Mr. Jefferson's legacy, be it architectural or intellectual or in manuscript form.

LibraryThing announced today that the project to catalog Jefferson's 1815 library (the volumes sold to the Library of Congress to replace its burned collection) is complete, the first collection processed by the volunteer "I See Dead People['s Books]" group. Not only did they catalog them using the Gilreath/Wilson list, they used his classification scheme for tagging AND they excerpted book reviews from his letters, using the online page image versions from LC. And you can take advantage of LibraryThing social tools, like checking what books you have in common, view tag clouds, stats, etc. This is a work of digital scholarship, providing access and interaction and analysis, built using a tool that many do not take yet seriously.

I notice that one of the other projects is Tupac. I wonder where that authoritative list is from?

adding metadata to the list of what we learned

A couple of folks wrote and asked me why I didn't specify metadata standards in my post on what we learned from our repository project. I mentioned the impact of interface design on metadata needs, but some additional reinforcement can't hurt.

So ...

5. It shouldn't even need to be said that you should have your metadata standards identified before you start your development. We did. What we learned is that activities related to categories 2-4 will mean that you will have to make changes to what metadata you create and how you use it. For example, when changes were made to our interface design and functionality, we needed metadata formatted in a certain way for search results and some displays. We thought that we'd generate the metadata on-the-fly, but that turned out to be a lot of overhead so we decided to pre-generate the metadata needed: display name, sort name, display title, sort title, display date, and sort date. It isn't metadata we necessarily create during cataloging processes, but it's something we can generate during the conversion from its original form to UVA DescMeta XML. Another example is faceted browsing. To have the most sensible facets in our next interface, we need to break up post-coordinated subject strings or we'll have a facets for every variation. We thought about pre-generating this, but it turns out that Lucene can do this as part of the index building.

copyright the pyramids?

From BoingBoing and Techdirt -- Egypt plans to pass a law that enacts copyright protection for the pyramids and the Sphinx and any object in any museum in Egypt in order to levy fines against creators of full-scale replicas that infringe on this so-called copyright. Apparently the Luxor hotel is safe because it's not an exact replica ...

I understand looking for income streams to care for their cultural heritage and I am extremely sympathetic, but this is such a wrongheaded interpretation of the concept of copyright. That said, Egypt can set their own copyright laws, and if they want to declare this part of their copyright code, they can. I wonder how they plan to enforce this?

NIH Open Access mandate is law

Via Peter Suber, President Bush signed the omnibus spending bill that includes the requirement that publications based on NIH-funded research be submitted to PubMed Central and made publicly available, with a no more than 12-month embargo.

That said, there is no reason to wait to start depositing, articles should be deposited upon publication with restricted access for one year rather than waiting for deposit (Who keeps track of embargoes? -- "Today it's been a year and I should deposit that article"), and the same articles should additionally be self-archived in each researcher's university's own Institutional Repository. If their institution does not have an IR, they should ask "Why Not?"

EDIT at 6:27 PM: Here's the press release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.

Google responds to privacy questions

Via Stephen's Lighthouse, a posting at search engine land on Google's response to 24 questions about privacy issues submitted by US Representative Joe Barton. A PDF of Google's response is provided.

Fedora 3.0b1 is released

The first beta version of Fedora 3.0 is now available. I am thrilled about this (even though we're going to wait until after the release of final 3.0 to upgrade) because this includes a change that I have wanted for a long time -- the Content Model Architecture (CMA). When the Fedora architecture was first designed, the tight bindings between objects and their disseminators seemed to be a good thing. As repository services were developed using Fedora, though, some of us discovered that we needed to make changes to disseminator mechanisms after we developed them. In the previous (current) architecture, because the objects were tightly bound to the disseminators we could not make changes to the disseminators unless NO objects were bound to them. In other words, we had to purge disseminators that were bound to objects (the easiest way was to actually purge the objects), then update the disseminators, and then re-ingest the objects and re-establish bindings. CMA adds the ability to formally instantiate content models in relation to objects, also making it easier to update disseminators without the purging of objects. This also supports a new ability to validate objects against content models, a very desirable QA feature.

what we learned from our repository project

Earlier this week someone asked me what we had learned from our repository development project over the years. This is the first time that anyone has asked that so directly, as opposed to general discussions about assessment and process review and software optimization.

So, what did we learn? This is what I've come up with so far.

1. Have your media file standards in mind before you start. Of course standards will change (especially if you're talking about video objects) during a multi-year implementation project. But if you have standards identified before you start (and minimize the number of file standards that you'll be working with), you at least have some chance of making it easier to migrate and manage and preserve what you've got and to design a simpler architecture. We did this (in conjunction with an inventory of our existing digital assets) and it was key for us in developing our architecture and content models.

2. Know what the functional requirements of your interface will be before you start. We had developed functional spec documents and use cases, but two different stakeholders came back to us during the process with new requests that we couldn't ignore. In those two cases the newly identified functional requirements for our interface required that we change our deliverable files and our metadata standard. We had to go back and re-process tens of thousands and then over 100,000 objects to meet the functional need and have consistency across our objects.

3. Some aspect of your implementation technologies will change during the project. New technologies will become available for implementation during your project that are a better fit than what you planned to use. For example, we never initially identified Cocoon as part of our implementation, but it became a core part of our text disseminators.

4. Your project will never be "done." OK, we've got a production repository with three format types in full production and three in prototype. We've still got to figure out production workflows for those media types and there are more media types to consider. And, as a corollary to point 3, there are new technologies that we want to substitute for what we used. We're obviously going to switch to Lucene and Solr for our indexing. New indexing capabilities will absolutely bring about an interface change. There are also more open source web services applications available now than when we started in 2003. We can potentially employ XTF in place of some very complex TEI and EAD transformation and display disseminators that we developed locally. This is bringing about a discussion about simplifying our architecture -- fewer complex delivery disseminators to manage and develop and more handing off of datastreams to outside web services. Not that there aren't complexities there and a lot of re-development work, but it's a discussion worth having. We're talking a lot these days about simplifying what it takes for us to put new content models into production. The development of Fedora 3.0 will also have a huge effect.

EDIT 28 December 2007:

A couple of folks wrote and asked me why I didn't specify metadata standards. I mentioned the impact of interface design on metadata needs, but some additional reinforcement can't hurt. So ...

5. It shouldn't even need to be said that you should have your metadata standards identified before you start your development. We did. What we learned is that activities related to categories 2-4 will mean that you will have to make changes to what metadata you create and how you use it. For example, when changes were made to our interface design and functionality, we needed metadata formatted in a certain way for search results and some displays. We thought that we'd generate the metadata on-the-fly, but that turned out to be a lot of overhead so we decided to pre-generate the metadata needed: display name, sort name, display title, sort title, display date, and sort date. It isn't metadata we necessarily create during cataloging processes, but it's something we can generate during the conversion from its original form to UVA DescMeta XML. Another example is faceted browsing. To have the most sensible facets in our next interface, we need to break up post-coordinated subject strings or we'll have a facets for every variation. We thought about pre-generating this, but it turns out that Lucene can do this as part of the index building.

(http://digitaleccentric.blogspot.com/2007/12/adding-metadata-to-list-of-what-we.html)

Open Journal Systems 2.2 released

OJS 2.2 has been released. We have an earlier version up that we've been testing with a student journal. I see some additions that I know folks will find attractive. Strangely, one of the potentially most desirable features is the integration of Google Analytics. I have watched the editors of the journals that we host implement them because (sometimes struggling to do so) we're just not in the business anymore of supplying web stats for every site on our servers. I want to upgrade our test instance to the new version to see how it compares with other solutions that we are considering for the hosting of journals and the submission/review/editing process.

petition for open bibliographic records

Peter Suber reports on one of the responses to the draft report from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control -- a petition to LC to make its bibliographic records openly available.

open data commons

There is a lot of hidden data out there -- data used for and created through research -- and a lot of confusion as to what rights it carries and how it can be used. Talis has announced a partnership with Creative Commons to launch a new type of personal data licensing: a Science Commons protocol and the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License. Notes on the project are available at the panlibus and Nodalities blogs.

now it's a trend

I shouldn't port my data without someone to watch over my shoulder. Today, supposed power-user that I am, I decided to port my own data in our conversion to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange.

I went to the web page that I was pointed to by many helpful email messages. I backed up my calendar and created the right format file for importing. I didn't need to convert an IMAP mailbox because I had been using POP and would retain my old local Eudora archive. I determined that I had an active account by logging into the web version. But somehow, while setting up the desktop Outllook client I messed up not only my authentication method (it kept asking me for my certificate and wouldn't authenticate using it), but in trying to fix it I set up an offline email box that became my default.

I feel for the poor IT guy (thanks, Rob!) who got called in to help me after I commented to my colleague across the hall that I had messed things up. We had to delete my certificate to get my authentication to reset to asking for a password. Then we were able to get into the application and declare my server email box as my default, not the offline "personal" email box.

We kept trying to check my email, but then I was told that I'd missed a step -- I needed to register Exchange as my new default email server. I think I can blame the documentation -- That was NOT listed as a step on the page "Getting Started with Exchange," I swear. I had four tech support guys in my office (I was the object of much good-tempered group teasing for messing up), and the only reason that one of them could tell me the URL I needed to go to so I could change my default email is that he had printed the page. None of them could find a link to that page anywhere on the site.

I set up Exchange as my default, imported my "old" calendar (through January 14 when we change), and even got my Eudora address book imported with only a little weirdness. I still have no clue how to set up thematic email folders and filters like I had in Eudora. I guess I have to give in to the teasing and sit through some training, or at least read the help docs ...

sharing personal libraries

I am very excited by the news about the joint project between the Zotero group at the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive.

Zotero is a very easy-to-use tool for developing personal citation repositories for distributed resources. The creation of a "Zotero Commons" registry of sorts where materials used by researchers can be shared is a powerful idea. It's an institutional repository without institutional boundaries. The idea of tying this in to the Internet Archive's archive of the web so that materials citied but not directly deposited are also not lost is even more intriguing. That there will be the capacity for both individual and group work is as it should be.

Here's the core of the project to me: "The combined digital collections present opportunities for scholars to find primary research materials, to discover one another’s work, to identify materials that are already available in digital form and therefore do not need to be located and scanned, to find other scholars with similar interests and to share their own insights broadly."

I wonder how this will fit into the landscape with other digital registries and collections. The DLF/OCLC Registry? OAIster? Aquifer? American Memory? What is the relationship between what institutions digitize, what their research communities have deposited in IRs, what is harvested into larger aggregations, and what scholars personally create? This is a problem space that bears a lot more discussion.

personal libraries

There is a great post on Hackito Ergo Sum about how they set up their personal library system, from barcode readers to cataloging to shelving. They went with Readerware, a reasonably well-known desktop program.

It's a shame they never encountered LibraryThing in their research. I knew about LibraryThing but didn't do anything with it until the time came to pack up our books to more to our new house in 2006. In late December 2005 I signed up and by mid-February 2006 I had all of our over 2,000 books cataloged, tagged, and packed without the use of a barcode reader (although I do have an original cuecat that Wired shipped out as a subscriber benefit sometime in the 90s, still in its original box). Like them, I have older books without ISBNs and foreign imprints. Many of the foreign imprints I found through non-US library catalogs. I had to manually enter some items, but that was not a challenge.

I guess I'm just a shill for LibraryThing.

print and digital at the New York Times

One of the most insightful blogs on media culture is written by David Byrne. He recently blogged about the new New York Times building, and, in response to his posting, he was invited to meet with various NY Times staff about print and digital journalism. His post on those meetings is one to read.

photography in museums

Please check out Perian's post on photography in museums over at Musematic. It presents both sides, and quotes from a BoinBoing comment of hers to rebut some comments made by Cory Doctorow and others.

xISBN everywhere

The FRBR blog posted on Eric Hellman's annoucement that wikipedia is now available as a lookup option in xISBN.

xISBN seems to be everywhere now. It's used by LibX. It's available to resolvers. It's obviously part of WorldCat. But through what tools can you take advantage of the option to choose which, or maybe multiple, lookup options you want?

I went to the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland wikipedia article. I wondered which icon would appear next to the ISBNs -- LibX or Find@UVA. It was the latter. For a paperback edition of Alice in Amazon, it's the former.

With LibX and Amazon I got a great application of xISBN against our catalog. With Find@UVA I got no matches because it's not using xISBN (note to self -- make sure that we request support for xISBN and the newly announced xISSN as features, if we haven't already). In both cases the lookup target was our catalog, because that's the default (or only option).

LibX can search other lookups -- WorldCat and GoogleScholar. Depending on the requests they get (Wikipedia has a bad rep as a search resource among many academic librarians and faculty), they could add Wikipedia.

But what if I want to check in more than one location for links or citations or holdings? Is there a tool that can do that?

how did I miss this?

Apparently today was "Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day."

The Wired geek dad blog had some great suggestions.

I love this one: "Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say 'In thirty years dial this number. You'll know what to do after that.'"

UpLib personal digital library tool

From Bill Janssen of PARC, via TeleRead:

"We’re planning to release our UpLib digital library system as open source software in a couple of months, and I’m still looking for beta testers, people who’d like to receive early a raw codebase tar file which may require some hacking skills to compile and install (though, I like to think, not too much). If you know about ‘configure’ and ‘make,’ you’re a candidate. I’m particularly interested in finding beta testers who use Windows, as that platform is still somewhat of a mystery to me. We use MSYS and MINGW to create the installer for Windows. For those of you who are wondering, the core of UpLib is a document repository server which serves as a base for a number of document analysis functions."

“The system consists of a full-text indexed repository accessed through an active agent via a Web interface. It is suitable for personal collections comprising tens of thousands of documents (including papers, books, photos, receipts, email, etc.), and provides for ease of document entry and access as well as high levels of security and privacy. Unlike many other systems of the sort, user access to the document collection is assured even if the UpLib system is unavailable.”

There are a couple of PARC white paper PDFs available, from 2003 and 2005, and one ACM article from 2005 that I found.

I have no idea what the status of this is -- there appears to have been some conversation on the ebook community list that this has been vaporware for some time -- but I'm intrigued that another tool is entering the personal digital collection problem space.

supporting data in PQDT

Today we received a downtime notice from ProQuest. This is not unusual, especially during the holidays when services make time to update and upgrade. What cheered my little heart was this notice:

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Multimedia Support release—ProQuest has seen an increase in dissertations and theses that include supplementary digital materials - audio, video, spreadsheets, etc. To properly support scholarly access to these materials, ProQuest is now making them available online in the Full Text version of the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database.

Yes, ProQuest is going to include at least some supporting media and data for the theses and dissertations that it makes available. PQDT already has an Open PQDT that includes Open Access ETDs. I cannot find any details about this on the ProQuest site, but it's a promising step.

digital whomever

Siva has a great post about the labeling of "Digital" whomevers -- natives, immigrants, generation, millennials -- etc.

He doesn't buy it. I have a slightly different spin and some different reasons, but I don't buy it either.

I often take part in discussions about services for faculty and students, and sometimes hear ageist comments about how older faculty are completely non-digital and all students are automatically all digital. Hah! Just like some folks have an interest or skill in languages or math or art and some folks don't, it's the same with whatever "digital" is. I have worked with faculty in their 60s who saw something in being digital decades ago and have worked in that realm for years. I have worked with colleagues -- librarians and faculty -- in my own age group (I'm 44) who hate all technology with a passion and others who embrace it in all ways. I have worked with students at three different research universities who could not care less about being digital.

Being digital is not generational. At the core of what Jeff Gomez calls "Generation Download" and "Generation Upload" in his book Print is Dead, there is truly an ubiquitousness of digital media use that is changing media consumption and production paradigms and changing the media market. There is absolutely an increased level of acceptance that this is standard operating procedure. I'm still not willing to agree that an entire generation is digital and that the entirety of other generations are not. There's still predilection and interest and skill and, yes, issues of availability and affordability of technology that crosses all generations.

There are degrees of digital-ness. Different comfort levels. Different skill levels. Different levels of access. Why do we have to apply such absolute labels?

developing a service vision for a repository

Dorothea rightly challenged me for not including a service vision in my post on repository goals and vision. I do have something like a vision, but I wouldn't say that it's quite where it needs to be yet. That said, I said I would post it, so I am.

What are the services needed around a repository?

• Identification and acquisition of valuable content
• You can't wait for content to come to you – research what’s going on in the departments and at the University, and initiate a dialog.
• Digital collections must also come from the Library and other University units – University Archives, Museums, etc.
• Consulting Services
• Advise on intellectual property and contract/licensing issues for scholarly output.
• Assistance in preparing files for deposit, creating or converting metadata, and in the actual deposit process.
• Access
• Easy-to-use discovery interface with full-text searching and browse.
• Instruction for community on how to find and use and cite content.
• Make the content shareable via Open Archives Initiative (OAI).
• Promotion and Marketing
• Build awareness of the high cost of scholarly journals, and that we are buying back our own institutional scholarship.
• Promote the value of building sustainable digital collections – preservation is more than just backing up files.
• Promote the goals of the Open Access movement, including managed, free online access and a focus on improved visibility and impact.
• Show faculty that they can build personal and community archives.
• Market repository building services that will enable the institution to build a body of digital content.
• Market the repository as a content resource and a venue that increases the visibility of the institution.

Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control available for comment

The Library of Congress has released a draft of the Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control for comment. Comments should be received by December 15, 2007, so pull together all your autocat, ngc4lib, and web4lib postings on the issues and get your comments in.

Alliance for Permanent Access

I haven't been able to track down much on the new Alliance for Permanent Access. There's this press release. Did anyone attend the Second International Conference on Permanent Access to the Records of Science held in Brussels on November 15, 2007 where the Alliance was launched?

MARCThing

There's nothing that I can say about the MARCThing Z39.50 implementation for LibraryThing that isn't in the Thingology post. But this statement caught my eye:

I do have a recommendation for anybody involved in implementing a standard or protocol in the library world. Go down to your local bookstore and grab 3 random people browsing the programming books. If you can't explain the basic idea in 10 minutes, or they can't sit down and write some basic code to use it in an hour or two, you've failed. It doesn't matter how perfect it is on paper -- it's not going to get used by anybody outside the library world, and even in the library world, it will only be implemented poorly.

Amen.

goals and vision for a repository

Last week I had the opportunity to have a lengthy conversation with some folks about our Repository. In doing so I was able to get at some really simplified statements about our activities.

Why a Repository?

• A growing body of the scholarly communications and research produced in our institutions exists solely in digital form.
• Valuable assets -- secondary or gray scholarship such as proceedings, white papers, presentations, working papers, and datasets -- are being lost or not reproduced.
• Numerous online digital collections and databases produced through research activity are not formally managed and are at risk.
• An institutional repository is needed as a trusted system to permanently archive, steward, and manage access to the intellectual work – both research and teaching – of a university.
• Open Access, Open Access, Open Access and Preservation, Preservation, Preservation.

What's the vision for a Repository?

• A new scholarly publishing paradigm: an outlet for the open distribution of scholarly output as part of the open access movement.
• A trusted digital repository for collections.
• A cumulative and perpetual archive for an institution.

What does success look like?

• Improved open access and visibility of digital scholarship and collections.
• Participation from a variety of units, departments, and disciplines at the institution.
• Usable process and standards for adding content.
• Content is actively added.
• Content is used: searched and cited and downloaded.
• There is a wide variety of content types.
• Simple counts are NOT a metric.

I really appreciate having the chance to formulate ideas like these that have nothing to do with the technology but everything to do with why we're doing what we do. I want to work this up into something more formal to share broadly.

boxes, the outcome of online shopping

In our household we shop online a lot. Boxes often arrive at home that one or the other of us didn't expect.

What happens when thousands of students living at a University are shopping online every day for whatever they might need, from shoes to car tires? In a very entertaining article, The New York Times reports on what's happening at mail rooms at Universities.

ars technica on Google Book Project

ars technica has a very fair blog posting outlining the ongoing online discussion between Paul Courant at Michigan and Siva Vaidhyanathan at UVA about the Google Book project. It nicely presents both sides of the discussion.

unplanned hiatus

Between a 3-day planning retreat, updating technology and the threat of data loss, a cat that went missing 7 days ago who has not returned, and the Thanksgiving holiday, blogging hasn't been top of the list. I'm back now.

the not-so-nameless fear of personal data loss

Ten days ago I upgraded my smartphone.

For over three years I hung onto my Treo 600. Yes, a 600. Even when its antenna broke while I was at JCDL 2006, I drove to Durham and got a replacement unit rather than upgrade. I just didn't see a reason, as none of the new Treos were better. So what if my contract expired a year and a half ago and I could have upgraded at any time?

Then I saw the Centro, and something about it changed my mind. Maybe it was the much smaller size, or the brighter, clearer screen. Maybe the much more usable buttons and keyboard (I know, they're smaller keys, but their gel surface is great for my small hands and fingernails). Maybe that it had Bluetooth. Or that it was available in slightly sparkly black. I came to covet it online, and then I gave in and bought it.

Then I had to transfer my data.

Now, I've had a Palm device for 10 years. I have my calendar going back to early 1996 because I've been synching up my calendar with an enterprise system at three universities during those eleven years. I have databases like all my books (downloaded from LibraryThing) and DVDs in FileMaker Mobile. I have the electronic Zagat. I have ebooks. I have memos and to-do lists and a large address book.

None of them moved over when I updated the Palm desktop and initiated my first sync. Not a darned thing. Not only did they not move to the Centro, they disappeared from my Palm Desktop.

Hysteria ensued.

Once I was talked down off the proverbial ledge, things improved. I was able to beam over all my memos, my to-do list, and my address book from the Treo (although they all lost their categories). I had a calendar backup on my laptop that had 1996 to late 2005 (apparently the last time I backed up my full calender. Memo to self -- never forget to do that again). I discovered that my Zagat had expired the week before, which is why it didn't move. Fixed. I got my ebooks reinstalled (after discovering that I somehow had 2 Palm users set up and that I was using the wrong one in the installer). I deleted the extraneous Palm user, causing a bit more temporary hysteria because I re-lost and and to retrieve some data again.

My Oracle Calendar Sync completely failed. I couldn't even see the conduit. I thought, hey, there's a newer version than the one I have, upgrading will reinitialize the conduit. A fine plan if the installer hadn't failed, corrupting the old install so that I not only couldn't install a new one, I couldn't remove the old one because a file was missing. Our IT help desk didn't have the old installer available anymore (Memo to self -- keep all installers AND keep up on new versions) but a nameless university elsewhere in the world had it on their web site and all was repaired. The first sync took over 130 minutes, but that was a small price to pay to have my past and future calendar back.

All of the above took 2 1/2 days. What never came back, though, was FileMaker Mobile. UVA never moved past FM 6, so that's what I've continued to use as a client with FM Mobile 2. Given that FM is on to version 9 and FM Mobile 8, and the company has announced that it's discontinuing FM Mobile, I do seem to be be in a jam there. Yes, that I have that installer, and I have my databases, and I can see the conduit, but no joy in synching.

Change is good. I just need to decide what to change to, and then I will have all my data back. Until the next time I have to upgrade ...

highlights from the Fall 2007 DLF Forum

There were a number of highlights for me from the fall 2007 DLF forum.

Dan Gillmor gave a great opening plenary on journalism in a world of ubiquitous media access. He talked quite a bit about participatory media and collaboration, and how the average person with a cell phone can participate in "random acts of journalism," such as recording the shooting at Virginia Tech or the 2005 tsunami in Sri Lanka. It is more likely that on-the-spot photojournalism will come from anyone, not journalists . He also talked about what he termed "advocacy journalism," where a community is formed, whether around a location or a topic, and that community reports often more quickly and more deeply on issues of interest to their community. What's the role of professional journalism? "Do what you do best and point to the rest." Follow well-established journalistic practices in reporting, and point to those communities and compedia that are doing a good job rather than trying to also do what they do. In a world with so much access, there is more transparency; conversely, it is also much more difficult to keep secrets. But what do you trust? What's accurate? Trust cannot be based solely on popularity, but on reputation, which is exceptionally difficult to qualify and quantify.

Rick Prelinger gave a talk on moving image archiving and digitization. I loved this phrase: "Wonderful and unpredictable things happen when ordinary people get access to original materials." In a world where there is now more individual production that institutional production, we should be crawling and preserving what's out there on YouTube and elsewhere, starting in early on what will be the hardest to preserve. He also pointed out that YouTube raised popular expectations about video findability while simultaneously lowering quality expectations and making the segmenting of content out of its raw or original context the norm. Rick also referenced the SAA Greene-Meissner report which urged archivists to consider new ways to deal with hidden collections, in making his point that workflows should not be sacred. Our social contract with users is to provide access. Digitization provides visibility and access, which can drive preservation.

Ricky Erway led an interesting overview of the agreements that various institutions have entered into with their third-party digitizing partners. The one that I knew the least about was the NARA arrangement with Footnote.com, where the materials will be available only on Footnote by subscription for five years, after which NARA can make them available, although NARA admits that it isn't clear exactly what they can and cannot do. For some reason James Hastings made sure to make the point that Footnote is not a LDS Church unit, although the parties involved definitely have ties to the church and are strongly interested in the materials for use in genealogy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

There was a session on mass digitization "under the hood." I was particularly floored with the work at the National Archive of Recorded Sound and Images in Sweden. Their automated (in some cases robotic) processes for digitization are truly astonishing, as is the scale of their digitization. If I am reading my notes right, they create between 1.5 and 2.5 TB every day.

Herbert Van de Sompel gave a very effective presentation on ORE. I see a lot more folks getting what he and Carl Lagoze have been saying about compound objects. I love their elegant use of ATOM.

Denise Troll Covey gave a report on a the preliminary results of an in-progress study at Carnegie-Mellon on faculty self-archiving. I look forward to reading the final results and being able to share them, especially given the mis-information that faculty believe about their rights and their lack of archiving.

Steve Toub and Heather Christenson gave a great talk on a survey on book discovery interfaces. Microsoft Live Search Books seemed to fare the worst, while LibraryThing seemed to be at the top. They promise to make a ppt with many more slides than they presented available.

Tito Sierra, Markus Wust, and Emily Lynema from NC State presented their "CatalogWS" a RESTful Web API, which they take advantage of for their very cool MobiLib mobile catalog app, as well as a staff book cover visualization tool for large screen displays, and an advanced faceted search interface for generating custom catalog item lists for blogs and webpages. They also gave a nice shout-out to Blacklight, which we appreciated.

Mike Furlough and Patrick Alexander from Penn State led a good discussion on publishing and libraries. Activities represented in the room ranged from journal hosting to publishing of library collections online to collaborating on born-digital scholarship to working with university presses on electronic editions of works.

Read Peter Brantley's post on Mimi Calter's talk on the examination of the Copyright Registration Database that Peter and Carl Malamud worked to hard to set free. Make sure to also read the comments.

I was happy with the responses that Bess Sadler and I received from our presentation on Project Blacklight. Bess went way above the call of duty and completed some UI update tasks (translating language codes and setcodes into human-readable terms and adding browse centuries) and figured out how to combine the Virgo and Repo indexes in Lucene while sitting in our hotel room. We were able to show REALLY up-to-date screen shots in our presentation, including one we added while setting up the laptop at the podium.