Digital Karnak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.