killer digital libraries and archives

Yesterday the Online Education Database released a great list of "250+ Killer Digital Libraries and Archives." It lists sites by state, by type, has a focus on etexts, and is a remarkable compendium of digital resources.

Of course, the first thing I did was look for our digital collections on the list. The UVA Library hosts the wonderful Virginia Heritage resource, which brings together thousands of EAD finding aids for two dozen institutions across the state of Virginia. We have our Digital Collections, with more than 20,000 images, 10,000 texts, and almost 4,000 finding aids.

Nope. Not on the list.

Not surprisingly, our former Etext Center was on the list under etexts (the Center no longer exists as a unit and its texts are gradually being migrated). The Virginia Center for Digital History was there, as it should be with its groundbreaking projects and its great blog. IATH was there with its many innovative born-digital scholarly projects.

I sulked about this for a few minutes while thinking about the likely reason we weren't on the list -- for the past few years we've been talking nonstop about our Repository and Fedora and not about our collections. Now, we wanted and needed to talk about Fedora and our Repository because we we really trying new things and solving interesting problems with our development and participating in building a community around Fedora. But users don't care about how cool our Repository development is. They care about the collections in the Repository.

We've spent the last few months working at raising awareness about what we have. Our new Library home page now has a number of links to the digital collections. We have pages on how to find what you're looking for in our digital collections. We have feature pages for all of our collections in the Repository. We're making progress in migrating collections and making the Digital Collections site a central location where they're visible. We have an RSS Feed for additions to the collections. We now have a librarian and a unit dedicated to shepherding collection digitization through the process and working more closely with faculty. I hope the next time someone creates a list like this we'll be visible enough to be on it.

two interesting IP decisions

Just in time for World Series fever -- The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has upheld (PDF) a lower court's ruling that stats are not copyrightable in a case between CBC Distribution (a fantasy sports operation) against Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association.

MLB argued that its player names and stats were copyrightable and that CBC—or any other fantasy league—couldn't operate a fantasy baseball league without a multimillion-dollar licensing agreement with MLB. CBC countered that the data was in the public domain and as such, it had a First Amendment right to use it. In August 2006 a US District Court sided with CBC. Now that decision has been upheld after MLB appealed.

In other news, the USPTO has rejected many of the broadest claims of the Amazon One-Click patent following the re-examination request by blogger Peter Calveley. To read the outcome of the re-examination request, go to the USPTO PAIR access site, choose the "Control Number" radio button, enter 90/007,946 and press the "Submit" button. Then go to the "Image File Wrapper" tab and select the "Reexam Non-Final Action" document. This doesn't mean that the patent has been thrown out -- five of the twenty six claims were found to be patentable. The document is the "non-final action" document and Amazon has rights in the process. The patent could be either thrown out or modified. It will be interesting to see.

what if google had to optimize its design for google?

Web developers have a lot of hoops to jump through to optimize their sites for discovery through the Google search engine. Getting good Google index placement is paramount, so it is apparently increasingly difficult for designers to offer the uncluttered user experience that they'd like to while building needed content into their pages. Here is a funny look at what would happen to Google's uncluttered look if Google had to design for the Google Search Engine. Not sure how accurate it is ...

Muradora

DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) at Macquarie University has released
Muradora, a repository application that supports federated identity (via Shibboleth authentication) and flexible

authorization (using XACML). Fedora forms the core back-end repository, while different front-end applications (such as portlets or standalone web interfaces) can all talk to the same instance of Fedora, and yet maintain a consistent approach to access control. A Live DVD image can be downloaded to install Muradora on a server following an easy installation procedure that is based on Ubuntu Linux Distribution. Muradora LiveDVD can be downloaded from http://www.muradora.org/software.

From the announcement email:

- "Out-of-the-box" or customized deployment options

- Intuitive access control editor allows end-users to specify their own access control criteria without editing any XML.

- Hierarchical enforcement of access control policies. Access control can be set at the collection level, object level or datastream level.

- Metadata input and validation for any well-formed metadata schema using XForms (a W3C standard). New metadata schemas can be supported via XForms scripts (no Muradora code modification required).

- Flexible and extensible architecture based on the well known Java Spring enterprise framework.

- Multiple deployments of Muradora (each customized for their own specific purpose) can talk to the one instance of Fedora.

- Freely available as open source software (Apache 2 license). All dependent software is also open source.

public personae

When I joined Facebook earlier this week I had every intention of keeping my activity to a minimum. No picture. No personal details. Minimal professional details. No groups. Why would I share my personal life online? That's personal, that's private!

Then folks started pointing out to me that I was being silly. My email address and information about my job is all over our Library's web site. Presentations that I've given are online everywhere. Old email listserv postings are available through list archives. I use flickr, and while some images are kept restricted to friends and family, most aren't (but with a Creative Commons license). My LibraryThing catalog is public. I have this blog.

Basically, I was told to get over it. I already have a public persona, even if it's not one that interests more than a few close friends and colleagues and folks interested in arcane digital library topics.

But, but, what about privacy? I know better than to share too much about myself online. I have friends who have been the subject of identity theft. One hears cautionary (but possible apocryphal) tales every day about middle schoolers getting stalked online through their MySpace pages. How did my life get so public? Gradually, without my even consciously noticing it. There's no going back.

what is publishing?

I'm in the process of making a transition in my organization, shifting into a newly created position as Head of Digital Publishing Services.

The first question that everyone asks is "What will you be doing?" The second is "What is publishing in a Library?"

We partner with faculty who are selecting content, organizing it, describing it, analyzing and identifying and creating intellectual relationships, and presenting and interpreting that content in new ways as born-digital scholarship. These projects are more frequently being considered in the promotion and tenure process. Is that the Library supporting a publishing activity? Most certainly.

We digitize collections, describe them, organize them, present them online, and promote them to our community for their use in teaching in research. Is that a publishing activity? It can be argued either way (and has been) -- I'm on the side that leans toward yes.

We provide production support and hosting for peer-reviewed electronic journals. No one would argue that we're participating an a publishing activity.

We're evaluating an Institutional Repository. Not a publishing activity per se, but a way to preserve the publishing output of our community. That's a service related to our stewardship role.

As a Library we're already very active participants in publishing activities. We have our Scholars' Lab, Research Computing Lab, and Digital Media Lab serving as the loci for our faculty collaborations. My role will be formalizing what our publishing services are, what our work flows should be, and how we can sustain and expand our consulting services related to scholarly communication.

apparently peer pressure works on me

I gave in and joined Facebook. I'm astonished at the high level of activity that some folks seem to be able to maintain. I have a very boring profile: I added a few applications; some people seem to have dozens. I haven't added much personal information. People apparently send lots of messages and post on each other's profiles. I'm going to have to remember to check it, on top of checking other places where I do my sharing and connect with folks (LinkedIn, LibraryThing, flickr). Still, I think it will be good to have another place to try to maintain contact.

digital lives project

Digital Koans posted about the Digital Lives research project, "focusing on personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories."

For centuries, individuals have used physical artifacts as personal memory devices and reference aids. Over time these have ranged from personal journals and correspondence, to photographs and photographic albums, to whole personal libraries of manuscripts, sound and video recordings, books, serials, clippings and off-prints. These personal collections and archives are often of immense importance to individuals, their descendants, and to research in a broad range of Arts and Humanities subjects including literary criticism, history, and history of science.

...

These personal collections support histories of cultural practice by documenting creative processes, writing, reading, communication, social networks, and the production and dissemination of knowledge. They provide scholars with more nuanced contexts for understanding wider scientific and cultural developments.

As we move from cultural memory based on physical artifacts, to a hybrid digital and physical environment, and then increasingly shift towards new forms of digital memory, many fundamental new issues arise for research institutions such as the British Library that will be the custodians of and provide research access to digital archives and personal collections created by individuals in the 21st century.

I very much look forward to seeing the results of this work, as university archives and institutional repositories increasingly have to cope with not only managing and preserving deposited personal digital materials, but have to potentially describe, organize, and make such collections usable.

While not the focus of their study, anyone who has ever supported teaching with images knows a tangential area of this problem space intimately. Faculty develop their own collections of teaching images -- their own analog photography, purchased slides, digital photography, images found on the open web, images from colleagues, etc. We have licensed images and surrogates of our own physical collections. They want to use materials from their own collections and our repositories together in their teaching. What is the relationship between their image collections and our repositories and teaching tools? Do we integrate their collections into ours? Do we have a role in digital curation and preservation of their data used in teaching and research, which happen to be images? We struggle with the legal and resource allocation issues every day.

elastic lists

I've been exploring a demo of the visualization model called Elastic Lists. It comes from work done on "Information Aesthetics" published by Andrea Lau and Andrew Vande Moere (pdf) and is implemented using the Flamenco Browser developed at UC Berkeley. The facets have a visualization component comprising color (a brighter background connotes higher relevancy) and proportion (larger facets take up a larger relative proportion of space).

I find this to be a really compelling visualization, easier for the user to navigate than the perhaps too-complex Bungee View. I'd like to see this applied to more heterogeneous data, such as one might encounter in a large digital collection.

Cal has its own YouTube channel for course lectures

The University of California at Berkeley has its own YouTube channel. This complements their use of iTunesU.

Ars Techina covers the launch.

It's interesting to see everything from course lectures to colloquia presentations to football highlights. This is very smart co-branding with YouTube as a web destination, and a savvy use of a commercial hosting service.

a new museum starts virtual

I am thrilled to see that the Smithsonian's newest museum -- the National Museum of African American History and Culture -- is open for business. Their opening exhibition is “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” featuring portraits and photographs of people who stood against oppression, from Frederick Douglass to Ella Fitzgerald to Malcolm X. They have lesson plans. They have a Memory Book for visitor-supplied content that makes great use of the visualization interface for browsing that's also employed on the rest of the site.

It's a really nice experience, especially for a museum for which groundbreaking is not scheduled until 2012.

From the site:

With the help of a $1 million grant of technology and expertise from IBM, the NMAAHC Museum on the Web represents a unique partnership to use innovative IBM expertise and services to bring the stories of African American History to a global audience. Conceived from the very beginning as a fully virtual precursor to the museum to be built on the Washington Mall, this is the first time a major museum is opening its doors on the Web prior to its physical existence.

This is a very exciting collaboration, and a great way to build a community around an institution and its mission years before anyone will walk through the door.

self-determined music pricing

Yesterday it was all over the blogosphere and on NPR that Radiohead is taking control of its own distribution and releasing its new album with self-determined pricing. This was heralded as huge, earth-shattering, and a "watershed moment" according to CNET.

It's as if no one has done this before. But of course, at least one person has, and very successfully.

In the early 1980s I discovered Canadian singer Jane Siberry, who now goes by the name Issa. I own her albums. I've seen her perform twice so far (a third is in the offing -- she's coming to Charlottesville this month).

And, in 2005, she transformed her personal label's inventory from physical to digital, put it online, and allowed self-determined pricing. Some of her earlier material is not available due to licensing restrictions -- she's not encouraging illegal downloading -- but she has successfully licensed some albums and songs she did for Warner and made them available through this route. Her wikipedia article quotes an interview in The Globe and Mail where she says that since she had instituted the self-determined pricing policy, the average income she receives per song is in fact slightly more than standard price. The "Press" section of her Jane Siberry site has an interesting Chicago Tribune article from that year.

But, since almost no one has heard of Jane Siberry and everyone has heard of Radiohead, it's as if no one has ever done this before. There was a Thingology post that commented that Radiohead probably borrowed the idea from someone or thought of it on their own. Here's an example of someone who did it first. I'm not knocking Radiohead. I like their music. I'm thrilled that such a high profile group is doing this. But this is not their watershed moment alone.

freeing copyright data

Messages went out on the Digital Library Federation (DLF) mailing list and on O'Reilly Radar yesterday letting us know that DLF had helped set free the entire dataset from the U.S. Copyright Office's copyright registration database. LC pointed out that Congress set the rules for charging, but they should have known that their referring to the issue as a "blogospheric brouhaha" was just going to drive someone to do something.

DLF and Public.Resource.Org sent a request to open access to the data. Lots of sites picked this up, including BoingBoing. The registration database is a compilation of facts -- it's not copyrightable itself. The U.S. Register of Copyright agreed that these are public records and should be available in bulk.

So Public.Resource.Org and DLF made it so.

It's extremely exciting to see DLF lobbying so effectively and participating in an effort to make data available via open access, and help all libraries provide better copyright search services. BoingBoing celebrates them as guerrilla librarians. This is not your father's DLF.

cool securing tool for kids on the internet

I just saw a commercial for the Fisher Price Easy Link Internet Launch Pad, targeted for children three and up. The Easy Link -- a specialized USB peripheral with its own software -- allows children to explore sites dedicated to characters when they plug a figure of that character, like Elmo, into the Launch Pad. The kids are offered links to read and games to play, and nothing more -- there is no access to the Internet or to the hard drive and any of its applications without a password. It's $30, which is a reasonable price to introduce kids to working with a computer while limited their access to anything they can damage or can harm them.

And yes, kids that young do use computers. I remember watching my cousin's daughter playing computer games when she was four. But of course, both her parents are software engineers.

follow-up to virtual strike

Read the report and see the screen shots from the virtual strike in Second Life.

award for digital preservation tool

A press release was circulated via email announcing that DROID, a tool from The National Archives in London, had won the 2007 Digital Preservation Award.

From the press release:

An innovative tool to analyse and identify computer file formats has won the 2007 Digital Preservation Award.

DROID, developed by The National Archives in London, can examine any mystery file and identify its format. The tool works by gathering clues from the internal 'signatures' hidden inside every computer file, as well as more familiar elements such as the filename extension (.jpg, for example), to generate a highly accurate 'guess' about the software that will be needed to read the file.

Identifying file formats is a thorny issue for archivists. Organisations such as the National Archives have an ever-increasing volume of electronic records in their custody, many of which will be crucial for future historians to understand 21st-century Britain. But with rapidly changing technology and an unpredictable hardware base, preserving files is only half of the challenge. There is no guarantee that today's files will be readable or even recognisable using the software of the future.

Now, by using DROID and its big brother, the unique file format database known as PRONOM, experts at the National Archives are well on their way to cracking the problem. Once DROID has labelled a mystery file, PRONOM's extensive catalogue of software tools can advise curators on how best to preserve the file in a readable format. The database includes crucial information on software and hardware lifecycles, helping to avoid the obsolescence problem. And it will alert users if the program needed to read a file is no longer supported by manufacturers.

PRONOM's system of identifiers has been adopted by the UK government and is the only nationally-recognised standard in its field.

The judges chose The National Archives from a strong shortlist of five contenders, whittled down from the original list of thirteen. The prestigious award was presented in a special ceremony at The British Museum on 27 September 2007 as part of the 2007 Conservation Awards, sponsored by Sir Paul McCartney.

Ronald Milne, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Digital Preservation Coalition, which sponsors the award, said: "The National Archives fully deserves the recognition that accompanies this award."

xena

I spent a little time this afternoon reading up on the newly released digital preservation tool Xena.

You can point it at a directory of diverse file types and it will convert the files into normalized open formats. The list of supported formats and the conversion outcomes is available in the help docs.

This is potentially a really useful workflow tool but there's a lot to examine here. I don't know how scriptable it is. You can write plugins to add in new formats -- I'm not yet sure if you can change conversion decisions and alter the target formats. Why is the target format for pretty much every image format PNG? Could we change that to TIFF or JPEG2000 if we were willing to write the plugin? It runs on Windows and Linux and requires OpenOffice. On Linux, does it require a graphical environment, or can you run it from the command line?

I'm thinking that this could be really useful for an IR, but I'm not yet sure if it will scale for Library-wide preservation or collection repositories.

archives on the web

Technophilia lists Where the Web Archives Are. Here's what they say:

Some of the most intriguing resources on the web are located in archives—compilations of data that in the past, could only be found by making appointments in dusty libraries. Today, I'm going to take you on a quick tour through some of the most fascinating archives on the web.

So where are they? If I am reading the list correctly, they're pretty much not at any academic libraries.

In the "Government" section, there is the National Archives and the Library of Congress. There is the Internet Archive, which is indeed a library. There's the Rockfeller Archive. There's NASA. There's David Rumsey, possibly the best private map archive in the world. There is the British Library.

Otherwise, it's Calvin and Hobbes, Smithsonian Magazine, the Smoking Gun, and The Balcony Archives of movie reviews.

I don't want to knock their list -- it's an interesting list full of great collections of very worthwhile content. But where are all the other myriad Library special collections and archives on this list? Is it that we aren't visible enough? Or perhaps not cool enough compared to PBS's Nova? Where are our extensive online archives on runaway slaves or civil rights or early American literature? Or political cartoons or penny dreadfuls or sheet music? Or puzzles or jazz or the civil war?

I think we have to remember that our target audience is not just our very local community, but the global community, including non-academics. We all need to think a bit more about how to get the word out about what we've made freely available. Being available in a Google search isn't proactive enough. We need to work to get noticed.

not the usual google law suit

As seen at Tech Crunch, a Pennsylvania resident is suing Google for crimes against humanity and is asking the court for $5 billion in damages because his social security number, when turned upside down and scrambled, spells Google. His handwritten filings are on the Justia site.

virtual strike

The first virtual strike is taking place soon. Apparently there are labor actions planned by the union representing Italian employees of IBM over pay negotiations -- as one of their strategies they plan to picket the company's campus in Second Life. They're even providing orientation for IBM employees who are new users. I wonder what the corporate reaction will be? The press this action is getting is pretty intensive.

new york times open access

The story of the day seems to be about the NY Times opening up its archives. So far I've seen postings at boing boing, if:book, open access news, o'reilly radar, and teleread.

So why am I bothering to blog this? Because this made me think about something I blogged about some months ago -- Google News Archive Search. One of the things that galled me at the time was how much of what they indexed was behind a pay firewall. Now, the NY Times is opening almost all their content up (save for 1923-1986), making this a more useful service, at least for resources from one newspaper. If only there wasn't so much other for-fee public domain newspaper content controlled through ProQuest Archiver. I still hope for an OpenURL Resolver service so authorized users can get to authorized resources at ProQuest Historical Newspapers instead.

career meme

Jerry blogged about the results he received from a test at Career Cruising. Since I was sitting at home on a Saturday afternoon, it seemed the thing to do. I dutifully answered the questions and the follow-up questions, and I just about fell off the sofa when I got the results:

1. Anthropologist
2. Video Game Developer
3. Multimedia Developer
4. Scientist
5. Picture Framer
6. Political Aide
7. Computer Animator
8. Interior Designer
9. Business Systems Analyst
10. Website Designer
11. Market Research Analyst
12. Librarian
13. Medical Illustrator
14. Artist
15. Real Estate Appraiser
16. Computer Programmer
17. Set Designer
18. Cartographer
19. Animator
20. Costume Designer
21. Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator
22. Illustrator
23. Mathematician
24. GIS Specialist
25. Epidemiologist
26. Dental Assistant
27. Statistician
28. Economist
29. Graphic Designer
30. Desktop Publisher
31. Historian
32. Archivist
33. Curator
34. Web Developer
35. Public Policy Analyst
36. Esthetician
37. Hairstylist
38. Technical Writer
39. Makeup Artist
40. Webmaster

I have no idea how their questions led their system to tell me that I should be an anthropologist. Apparently I did select the correct course of study in college and graduate school! Archivist, curator, web designer and developer, and tech writer are all familiar activities to me. I did my share of amateur theatrical work years ago. This was uncannily on target.

But where did dental assistant come from? Or esthetician? Picture framer? Political aide? I just cannot imagine any of those are for me.

oSkope

I don't think that there is much that I can add to this excellent review of oSkope at if:book. I spent some time at oSkope exploring their flickr search. The mouseover shows the title and date for the image, plus whose collection it came from. If you click on the image, a popup appears that includes the above plus the tags and a zoomable thumbnail. There's a slider at the right that changes the number of images that appear in the grid -- from 4 to 500. The grid, stack, pile, and list views are great --- but I'm not sure what the axes are for the graph view.

I like the drill-down navigation through the ebay categories. As noted in the if:book entry, it didn't seem to be working and kept returning no items.

The oSkope User Agreement (pdf) accompanies the language "Use of this website consitutes [sic] acceptance of the oSkope User Agreement and Privacy Policy. Please read these agreements carefully." At six pages it is thorough. There's also a four page privacy policy (pdf).

SWORD

In January I saw a presentation by Julie Allinson at Open Repositories on the UKOLN Repository Deposit Service work. Phil Barker of CETIS has a blog entry on a number of repository standards topics, one of which is SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit), the project which takes forward the work I saw presented. The goal is to take their deposit protocol and implement it as a lightweight web-service using a prototype "smart deposit" tool for four repository software platforms: EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary. They're taking advantage of the ATOM Publishing Protocol and extending it, which seems like a smart direction to me. I'm looking forward to seeing more of this.

UNESCO open source repository report

UNESCO has issued an very interesting report -- Towards an Open Source Archival Repository and Preservation System -- that defines the requirements for a digital archival and preservation system and describes a set of open source software which can be used to implement it. It focuses on DSpace, Fedora, and Greenstone, principally comparing the three systems in their support for OAIS. The report uses as the basis for its comparison a single use case -- the management and preservation of images.

I think it's a very fair report, not deeply technical, but an overview of the capabilities of the tools. Fedora is well-reviewed, with some shortcomings mentioned -- it takes a high level of programming expertise to contribute to the core development (true), the administrative reporting tools could stand some improvement (I could use granular use statistics), and a lack of built-in automated preservation metadata extraction and file format validation. On those last two points, the Fedora architecture very easily supports the integration of locally developed automated processes in metadata extraction and format validation into object preparation. That's what we have done. That Fedora has supported checksum checking support since version 2.2 is a huge step for file preservation.

google book search features

Google Book Search has introduced a My Library feature, where you can identify volumes in GBS and books that you own and associate them with your Google account. I also ready had an account that I use with blogger and Google Analytics, so there was nothing to set up. I can search and easily click on an "add to my library" link. I can assign a star rating, add a review, and add labels. I don't seem to be able to see a list of labels that I've assigned. I'd like to be able to create individual sets, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that. The export is a lightweight xml document that's lacking publication data like date, or publisher. You automatically have an RSS feed. It's interesting, but I'm not sure what this gives me over LibraryThing other than URLs for the books in GBS.

The more interesting service is the ability to highlight and quote from a text in GBS. It only works with full view texts -- the tool is not available for any other view. I searched for the term I was interested in and went through 20 screens of results without finding a book that I could try the tool with. I had to resort to an advanced search for titles between 1900 and 1923 to try it. That's an interesting indicator of just how much is in GBS that's post 1923 -- none of the first 200 results in my search were in the domain and full view.

I found a text I wanted to quote and used the tool to draw a box around the text. Drawing the box is a tad tricky -- my first two tries I didn't get the box large enough to get the first line of what I wanted to quote. I was given the option to create an image of the text block or to grab the text. I could add it to my Google Notebook or send it to blogger (because I have an account). You are also presented with a URL that you can use to embed the note in a web page. The quote includes a link to the text in GBS.

This seems really useful to me. In our paradigm at UVA we talk about how it's not enough to digitize something -- you have to be able to use it. This is the first tool I've seen from GBS where it makes its texts into something that you can really take advantage of in a networked environment.

amazon kindle

There was an article in the New York Times yesterday on ebooks that briefly mentioned two upcoming business models:

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site.

That is a significant advance over older e-book devices, which must be connected to a computer to download books or articles.

Also this fall, Google plans to start charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database, according to people with knowledge of its plans. Publishers will set the prices for their own books and share the revenue with Google. So far, Google has made only limited excerpts of copyrighted books available to its users.

The Google announcement is, I think, a fair one -- right now they limit viewing to copyrighted books to a snippet view. If a work is still clearly in copyright and the rights owner wants to release that book for full access, they should be able to charge for that access. It's their right. Of course I'd like to see more publishers make e-versions of their title available freely ...

The Amazon news gives me pause, not knowing all the details yet. You access the files wirelessly -- do you read them via a live connection from their servers, or is the file downloaded to the device? I understand why some think it's a plus to not require a full-fledged computer to get access to a book, but it potentially seems like a really limited version of access. The ebook files will be Mobipocket format and the Kindle device seems to use a proprietary wireless system to grab the files (known through their FCC filing), so the files likely won't be available to other devices. They are not using the Adobe format for their files; it's not clear if the Kindle will support reading of Abobe ebooks from other sources or if you can only read Amazon files. Can you get the files off the device or back it up? If you can get the files off the device, will they work with the desktop version of Mobipocket? There have also been complaints about Mobipocket DRM.

This is all speculation given the lack of details. TeleRead has some speculation of their own. I look forward to hearing more about the product and the service.

fair use decision

Today the Tenth Circuit court ruled unanimously in favor of Larry Lessig, et al, in Golan v. Gonzales, a case about the scope of fair use. The court has acknowledged that First Amendment freedoms must be considered when copyright law is made.

The government had argued in this case, and in related cases, that the only First Amendment review of a copyright act possible was if Congress changed either fair use or erased the idea/expression dichotomy. We, by contrast, have argued consistently that in addition to those two, Eldred requires First Amendment review when Congress changes the "traditional contours of copyright protection." In Golan, the issue is a statute that removes work from the public domain.

internet archive and nasa

I missed this announcement last week (even though Peter Suber blogged it) -- NASA and Internet Archive Team to Digitize Space Imagery:

NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public, historians, scholars, students and researchers.

Currently, NASA has more than 20 major imagery collections online. With this partnership, those collections will be made available through a single, searchable "one-stop-shop" archive of NASA imagery.

...

NASA selected Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, as a partner for digitizing and distributing agency imagery through a competitive process. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives at no cost to the agency.

...

Under the terms of this five-year agreement, Internet Archive will digitize, host and manage still, moving and computer-generated imagery produced by NASA.

...

In addition, Internet Archive will work with NASA to create a system through which new imagery will be captured, catalogued and included in the online archive automatically. To open this wealth of knowledge to people worldwide, Internet Archive will provide free public access to the online imagery, including downloads and search tools....

From an AP article on Wired News:

Kahle said the archive won't be able to digitize everything NASA has ever produced but will try to capture the images of broadest interest to historians, scholars, students, filmmakers and space enthusiasts.

Kahle said the images already in digital form represent the minority of NASA's collections, and they are scattered among some 3,000 Web sites operated by the space agency. He said those sites would continue to exist; the archive would keep copies on its own servers to provide a single, free site to augment the NASA sites.

...

The Internet Archive is bearing all of the costs, and Kahle said fundraising has just started. The five-year agreement is non-exclusive, meaning NASA is free to make similar deals with others to further digitize its collections.

What's particularly exciting is that this is both an aggregation and a digitization project -- widespread materials will be brought together for easier discovery, get enriched metadata, and important materials will be selected and digitized to add to the corpus.

some weeks, you feel like you've just survived

This week was the first week of classes and it seemed more stressful than other first weeks. We put redirects in place for some directories for resources that we'd migrated from our former Etext Center collections to the Repository. We didn't give as much notice as we could have there and some folks were surprised. We also formally announced that our Etext and Geostat Centers no longer exist and are part of our Scholars' Lab. Those announcements required some redirects. Things then went briefly wrong with the redirects. There was a wrinkle in updating links in our catalog records -- in some cases we weren't migrating individual texts, instead pointing to LION, so where would the links go? And the redirects meant that records weren't going to as granular a location as they were before.

The increased load of the first week of classes caused some text delivery issues, but helped us find what appears to be a bug in Joost that was the cause of mysterious problems in the past that we now have worked around. Two tools the used to exchange data easily didn't anymore (but we found the cause immediately). An old assumption about what regions we included in our simple text search was proven false by some newly migrated texts and we had to make a mid-week change. One of the text sets that we migrated was missing what turned out to be a vital element from its styled delivery. We tried to be nimble in our responses, occasionally briefly breaking something else with a fix, but our amazing team worked hard to address everything quickly.

I know of two outstanding issues to resolve, then we're set until we start the process to completely replace our searching infrastructure and interface. We've got a prototype BlacklightDL almost where it needs to be to start seriously planning the swapout project. Another change management challenge ...

zotero

Catalogablog points out a new 1.0 release candidate 2 of Zotero. Of note from the Zotero site:

• Zotero now offers full-text indexing of PDFs, adding your archived PDFs to the searchable text in your collection.
• Zotero’s integration with word processing tools has been greatly improved. The MS Word plugin works much more seamlessly and we now support OpenOffice on Windows, Mac (in the form of NeoOffice), and Linux.
• Zotero is also now better integrated with the desktop. Users can drag files from their desktop into their Zotero collection and can also drag attachments out of their Zotero collection onto their desktop.
• We have begun to add tools to browse and visualize Zotero collections in new ways. Using MIT’s SIMILE Timeline widget, Zotero can now generate timelines from any collection or selected items.
• The new version of CSL (Citation Style Language), used by Zotero to format references into specific styles, is more human readable and easier to edit. We will be adding many more styles soon.

There are also announcements of new compatible sites, including Institute of Physics, BioMed Central, ERIC, Engineering Village, the L.A. Times, The Economist, Time, and Epicurious, among others.

LinkedIn

I have become addicted to LinkedIn. Two departing colleagues have accounts and I was told it was fun and interesting to discover one's level of connectedness while building a network.

It's true. I spent way too much of my weekend searching out colleagues and friends and inviting them to join my network. In one place I can see the connections between different spheres of my life, and the intersections are really interesting. I have also reconnected with two friends from my college years that I lost touch with when I moved away from Los Angeles 16 years ago, which makes it definitely worthwhile to me. Now it's up to me (and not the technology) to stay connected.

bungee view

I have been playing with a very, very cool image collection visualization and browse application called Bungee View from Carnegie Mellon University.

It was developed for the Historic Pittsburgh image collection, but I found it through a del.icio.us link to American Memory through code4lib. They have American Memory image collections available as a test set. I was particularly impressed by their browse of their music collections.

When I first started the app I thought that something was wrong with my system -- what I thought were search boxes were filled with a myriad of vertical lines. Then I came to understand the UI -- they aren't search boxes, they're visualizations of the distribution of terms in each category. Mousing over them shows links to the various terms and number of times used. You can expand each category to see multiple forms of the visualization -- the distribution of terms in the bar, a simple list of terms, or a detailed color-coded graph. You can drill deep into the collections by combining browse categories. As you browse, color-coding provides clues in the correlation between categories that will provide results or that are negatively associated. You see the results as a set of thumbnails on the right of the screen. You can select a thumbnail and see its full metadata.

Bungee View was implemented using Piccolo, a C# graphics framework that I am not familiar with. The source seems to be available, but the link didn't seem to be working when I tried it. I want to explore this more.

ndiipp grant to preserve virtual worlds

Many congratulations to Jerry McDonough at UIUC for his NDIIPP grant to investigate the preservation of virtual worlds. The work will be a collaborative effort between UIUC, Stanford, the University of Maryland, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Linden Lab.

In addition to developing standards for preservation metadata and content representation, the project will investigate preservation issues through archiving a series of case studies representing early games and literature and later interactive multi-player game environments.

This is very exciting. With this work and work developing around COLLADA as an interchange format for 3-D files, there's hope. We could preserve a very early text-based game like Hammurabi, a classic arcade game like Tempest, or virtual events in Second Life.

Preserving Virtual Worlds.

trademarking for literary protection

Via TeleRead, and interesting article in the Financial Times on trademarking of literary characters, author names, etc., as a layer of protection after copyright runs out.

Quoting from the Financial Times, "posthumous Publishers who refuse to live and let die," August 16, 2007 (might be behind a pay wall):

Because copyright comes to an end – 70 years after an author's death in Europe, sooner in the US – literary estates have turned to trademark registration for an extra layer of protection. Characters, book titles and authors' names have all been registered.

For dead authors who are still in copyright, trademarking may help estates keep control after the term ends, says intellectual property lawyer Laurence Kaye. "If you intend to republish a book that has gone out of copyright, you would have to do it in a way that did not infringe any trademarks."

IFP (Ian Fleming's estate) has registered everything from Ian Fleming to James Bond and Miss Moneypenny, so any attempt to reproduce the books without permission after they go out of copyright would meet difficulties.

Mr Kaye says: "You would have to manipulate the book so that there was nothing in it that infringed the registered trademarks."

The article also mentions the trend where dead authors such as Robert Ludlum and V. A. Andrews just keep publishing posthumously. Ludlum at least left behind outlines for work he wanted to be written after his death. I don't know what to think of the writer who has written more than two dozen V. A. Andrews novels under her name for twenty years after her death.

pynchon in semaphore

Over a year ago the artist Ben Rubin installed a piece ("San Jose Semaphore") on the Adobe building in San Jose, California with four LED semaphore wheels that broadcast a mystery text, accompanied by an audio component. It took over a year, but two men finally deciphered what the text is -- Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49."

From the San Jose Mercury News, 8/14/2007:

The solution was discovered by two Silicon Valley tech workers, Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud, who received a commendation at San Jose City Hall today.

Using both the rotating disks and the art project's audio broadcast, they deciphered a preliminary code based on the James Joyce novel, "Ulysses," which was the key to solving the entire message. It took them about three weeks.

"It was not a real easy thing to figure out," said Snesrud, a chip designer for Santa Clara based W&W Communications.

Ben Rubin, the New York artist who developed the project, applauded the duo's "computational brute force" in finding the message. "I'm especially glad the code was cracked and that it was done in a very classical way," Rubin said.

The Pynchon book, written in the mid-1960s, is set in a fictional California city filled with high-tech campuses. It follows a woman's discovery of latent symbols and codes embedded in the landscape and local culture, Rubin said.

The semaphore is made up of four 10-foot wide disks, which are composed of 24,000 light-emitting diodes. The disks each have a dark line going from one end to another and twirl around every eight seconds to create a new pattern. It made its debut on Aug. 7, 2006 as part of the ZeroOne digital art festival. Rubin said there are no plans to stop the semaphore or change its message - at least for the time being.

"It'll change the way people look it," Rubin said of having the solution known. "Maybe in a few years, we'll revisit it.

The choice of text is inspired. I hope that he updates it.

radio interview about Google Book Search

Martha Sites, our AUL for Production and Technology was interviewed along with Ben Bunnell of Google about the Google Book Project.

Go to: http://wmet1160.com/schedule/the_beat/

Scroll to "The Beat 20070810 1100 web.mp3" and select it (the scrolling is a bit tricky)

The interview starts at ~4:00 and ends at ~31:00.

Announcing the Fedora Commons

The news is finally out there:

Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia.

There's also some staffing news, in addition to Sandy Payette becoming Executive Director:

Daniel Davis will lead Fedora core software development as chief architect, Thornton Staples will lead outreach efforts as director of community strategy and outreach starting on October 1, 2007, and Carol Minton Morris will serve as director of communications and media. Chris Wilper and Eddie Shin will continue in their roles as lead software developer for Fedora software and developer for Fedora software, respectively.

I'm going to miss having Thorny right down the hallway where I can wander down and think things through with him. He's staying local and will maintain an office at UVA, so we've not completely losing him.

The full press release is at the new web site: http://www.fedora-commons.org/about/news.php#moore-grant.

If you're not familiar with Fedora yet, check out the Portfolio portion of the site to see examples of systems built using Fedora. You might also want to check out the first in a series of promotional videos that includes our UVA Library work.

100 Year Archive report

There's an article in InfoWorld Tech Watch -- "Entering the Digital Dark Ages?" -- that notes that we have entered "an era of unprecedented information gathering likely to leave no lasting impression on the future, thanks in large part to a cross-departmental lack of understanding of the business requirements for data archiving" according to a recent study conducted by the Storage Networking Industry Association's 100 Year Archive Task Force.

The article is brief and points out a few key issues, such as data archiving not being considered a valuable business service, which is ironic when some industries have record retention standards with time frames of 50 or 100 years.

While the report was anchored by an organization representing the physical storage business, there was a lot of participation from the records management and archival communities. This work is based on a survey to identify the requirements for "long-term" storage and retention. The survey results and quite a few respondent comments are included in the report. The next steps for the group include production of a reference model similar to OAIS or the Sedona Guidelines covering the storage domain of long-term retention, creation of a "Self-Describing, Self-Contained Data Format" (SD-SCDF) for use as an archival information package in a trusted digital repository, and extending the definition and use of the XAM (eXtensible Access Method) standard that SNIA is already working on.

The report, which was issued in January 2007, is one to read. Register at the Task Force site and you can download it as a PDF.

Literature in a Digital Age

Matt Kirschembaum has an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education -- “Hamlet.doc? Literature in a Digital Age.”

Dan Cohen comments on Matt's observations on how technology such as change tracking creates new possibilities for understanding the creative process, and how important standards will become. Another part of the article resonated even more with me:

The implications here extend beyond scholarship to a need to reformulate our understanding of what becomes part of the public cultural record. If an author donates her laptop to a library, what are the boundaries of the collection? Old e-mail messages, financial records, Web-browser history files? Overwritten or erased data that is still recoverable from the hard drive? Since computers are now ground zero for so many aspects of our daily lives, the boundaries between our creative endeavors and more mundane activities are not nearly as clear as they might once have been in a traditional set of author's "papers." Indeed, what are the boundaries of authorship itself in an era of blogs, wikis, instant messaging, and e-mail? Is an author's blog part of her papers? What about a chat transcript or an instant message stored on a cellphone? What about a character or avatar the author has created for an online game? The question is analogous to Foucault's famous provocation about whether Nietzsche's laundry list ought to be considered part of his complete works, but the difference is not only in the extreme volume and proliferation of data but also in the relentless way in which everything on a computer operating system is indexed, stamped, quantified, and objectified.

I remember the discussion of boundaries when we first started talking about archiving web sites. Where does a web site "end" when it has linkages to other sites? Within the same subdomain? Within the same domain? Do you include the pages that are linked to in other sites because they might provide important context?

Many years ago I served on the board of directors of a professional organization. As part of the organizational archive, I was asked to supply my print files, electronic documents, and my email archives when my service ended. At the time I was an obsessive file archiver and I could supply all my email from four different email addresses and two different environments (Compuserve and Eudora) as well as many snapshots of document versions and web sites over a seven year period. But those were official versions. Would I want every awkward draft of a report or a brochure saved for posterity? Is that really part of the organizations' history?

While I think a lot about privacy and what an author might/should restrict access to (short-term or long-term) when leaving behind their digital legacy, there is so much potential for research. How does working on digital financial records differ from studying account ledgers? How does studying email differ from studying written correspondence or memoranda? Or blogs versus published editorials? They're the same research activities, just different media. Again, from Matt's article:

The wholesale migration of literature to a born-digital state places our collective literary and cultural heritage at real risk. But for every problem that electronic documents create — problems for preservation, problems for access, problems for cataloging and classification and discovery and delivery — there are equal, and potentially enormous, opportunities. What if we could use machine-learning algorithms to sift through vast textual archives and draw our attention to a portion of a manuscript manifesting an especially rich and unusual pattern of activity, the multiple layers of revision captured in different versions of the file creating a three-dimensional portrait of the writing process? What if these revisions could in turn be correlated with the content of a Web site that someone in the author's MySpace network had blogged?

Yes, there are definitely issues in accessing file formats as they age. When I rediscovered my single-sided original Mac disks from the mid-80s with my MA research and thesis written in MacWrite 1.0, or 5 1/4" disks with documentation that I wrote in 1991 in WordPerfect, I had to call in favors from folks with vintage Mac and PC hardware and buy Conversions Plus software to get at the file content (not fully successfully). I was incredibly lucky that the media could be read, let alone transform the files. Let us not even speak of the versions of files over time that I lost on on Mac ZIP disks that were accidentally discarded in a move. There went part of the history of the organization that I mentioned above.

There is a lot of education needed about preserving digital output and the file and media standards to be used. I look forward to seeing the work of Maryland's X-Lit project.

COLLADA

Reading a review of this year's SIGGRAPH, I read about COLLADA:

COLLADA is a COLLAborative Design Activity for establishing an open standard digital asset schema for interactive 3D applications. It involves designers, developers, and interested parties from within Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) as well as key third-party companies in the 3-D industry. With its 1.4.0 release, COLLADA became a standard of The Khronos Group Inc., where consortium members continue to promote COLLADA to be the centerpiece of digital-asset toolchains used by the 3-D interactive industry.

COLLADA defines an XML database schema that enables 3-D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information, enabling multiple software packages to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains.

However, COLLADA is not merely a technology, as technology alone cannot solve this communication problem. COLLADA has succeeded in providing a neutral zone where competitors work together in the design of a common specification. This creates a new paradigm in which the schema (format) is supported directly by the digital content creation (DCC) vendors. Each of them writes and supports their own implementation of COLLADA importer and exporter tools.

COLLADA is an XML schema combined with its COMMON profile that can be exchanged between proprietary software packages and an open source programs, giving more control over digital assets. The list of products that support COLLDA is impressive. Some support plugins and other directly import or export the format. It's a truly open exchange format.

Having worked in instructional technology at a school of architecture, I saw the difficulties in exchanging files between individuals and projects first hand. This is a huge step for design practice and as a potential preservation format for these files. What a great possibility for preserving and sharing these files in repositories.

wikipedia trustworthiness

There was a brief article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed last week that I didn't spot until yesterday -- UC Santa Cruz researchers have developed a simple yet clever test of the trustworthiness of wikipedia article authors:

... the researchers analyzed Wikipedia’s editing history, tracking material that has remained on the site for a long time and edits that have been quickly overruled. A Wikipedian with a distinguished record of unchanged edits is declared trustworthy, and his or her contributions are left untouched on the Santa Cruz team’s color-coded pages. But a contributor whose posts have frequently been changed or deleted is considered suspect, and his or her content is highlighted in orange.

It's a demo with only a few hundred pages, but it's still a very interesting proof-of-concept. Of course the software cannot do actual fact checking to vet content, but it's a elegant method for looking at the trustworthiness of the people who are source of the content. It's simplistic in a way -- an author could be expert in one area but not in others, or be overruled due to personality issues rather than authoritativeness -- but it's worth reviewing for the process and for the presentation of an article's authority ranking through color coding.

A conference paper describing the work is available.

DNA-driven music

I love that someone wants to use DNA as the source to generate music. It reminds me of Natalie Jerimijenko's kinetic sculpture at Xerox Parc that reacts to packets on its network. I'm saddened that someone felt the need to patent it, and it sounds like there's a lot of prior art to contradict the patent issuance.

random thoughts after reading the Ithaka report

I've read some very astute commentaries on the new Ithaka report "University Publishing in a Digital Age" from if:book, Dorothea, and Karen.

Dorothea and Karen both commented at length about the placement of IRs in the new publishing scheme. Dorothea hits the nail on the head when she points out that while IRs can be compared to dusty attics, they're still a form of distribution and preservation. An informal form of distribution perhaps, but formal archiving, where the output of scholarship in a digital form is collected and maintained. The report acknowledges this. The perception that we're receiving large sums of money to do this is surprising. We're getting money to write software; we're not necessarily getting money to sustain the services that the software enables.

Is an IR publishing? Preservation and distribution, yes. Publishing? I'm not so sure. Part of the scholarly communication life cycle, a place to preserve publishing output? Absolutely. As Dorothea points out, this is a relationship we could have with University presses. It's one we're already developing directly with the faculty for their born-digital scholarship and their published works.

To get on my soap box, not all repositories are IRs. UVA operates a Fedora-based repository to manage and make usable its locally digitized collections, collections that our subject specialists and faculty have selected, which includes our digitized collections and born-digital scholarship that we collect directly from our faculty. In this way we make digital content available for new teaching and research as well as collecting the work created from our collections and others. Fedora repositories will also have a role in the infrastructure of our digitization-on-demand service, our nascent "Academic Information Space" environment for the creation of digital scholarship, and for an IR. Repositories can have a role in all stages of the scholarly communication life cycle.

Then there's this in the report:

Librarians with whom we spoke view their role with respect to scholarly communications as making sure they have robust online collections; creating research environments (e.g. collections and tools) that will help faculty and graduate students create the scholarship of the future; finding ways for the institution to take back more control and lower the cost of scholarship; and developing infrastructure and tools to enable multimedia. Increasingly, these roles bleed into what might be considered “publishing”. The role of librarians has always been, in part, to provide services to the local community that help them find information, or learn how to find information. With the advent of online resources, librarians developed skills in accessing and managing online data. It therefore is not surprising that many faculty members and students have turned to librarians for assistance in producing electronic resources. One librarian stated that “Faculty are coming to us to help them with their electronic publishing needs. We have the technical expertise on staff to help them push the envelope of new forms of scholarship.” Another stated that “The library’s task is to create the online research environments of the future – collections, accessibility, tools.” Some librarians see themselves as pioneers and innovators in bringing scholarship online.

This statement resonated with me because that's what we've been doing at UVa for fifteen years. Now we're looking at more sustainable ways to enable this form of publishing, and for ways to preserve what we've created. It's time for a new service model.

book written via cell phone

I don't know if the claim that this is the first book written using a cell phone is true, it's likely the first book written using a phone to be published.

Italian author Robert Bernocco has amazed the literary world by publishing the world’s first book written using a mobile phone. Bernocco published it on Lulu.com, the online marketplace for digital content.

Cristel Lee Leed, European Vice President at Lulu.com, says, “We live in an age when individuals are strapped for time due to work and family commitments, and this can often stifle creativity. Robert Bernocco is a great example of the type of author we often encounter on Lulu — he has not only been creative with what he has written but also with how he has written it!”

Bernocco took advantage of his idle time while commuting to and from work by train, writing his 384-page science fiction novel, Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travelers is the English translation), on his Nokia 6630 phone, using the phone’s T9 typing system.

By dividing his manuscript into short paragraphs, Mr. Bernocco wrote his novel in perfect Italian, not your typical text-message shorthand, and saved the paragraphs on his mobile phone. Mr. Bernocco then downloaded them onto his home computer for proofreading and editing. The book took him 17 weeks to write.

It's also interesting that this press release includes none of the stigma that used to be attached to self-publishing -- that this was published through Lulu and not through a "traditional" publisher. That seems even more telling than using a cell phone as a writing tool.

Simon & Schuster digitizing backlist

I received an email newsletter from a digital content services vendor today that included an interesting promotional note -- Simon & Schuster is teaming with Innodata Isogen to digitize and convert thousands of backlist titles spanning more than 80 years of publishing history.

The interview included in the article describes the project in a couple of ways -- they see this project as a form of preservation reformatting given potential deterioration of the print, and to support future electronic distribution ventures.

I was particularly taken with their brief description of their selection criteria:

"... we selected both recently published and perennial bestsellers as well as deep backlist with low, but consistent, demand. We prioritized titles based on several factors including backlist sales numbers, “long tail” consumer interest (based on search engine traffic and backorder volume from retailers and distributors) and unexercised eBook publishing rights. We also took into account certain risks to the rich and varied backlist we offer that warranted pushing titles to the front of the line – including waning inventory availability and other factors."

It's not an open access project (they started publishing in 1924), but not every digitization project is. They're frank in saying that their goal is to open up new sales avenues. I'm not sure about their statement that they will be "protecting the intellectual property of our authors and illustrators." I can only assume they mean that by making legal digital versions that they will be curtailing illegal digitization and distribution.

It certainly was effective marketing for S&S -- It got my attention.

Open Library

I haven't had much of a chance to explore this yet, but the Internet Archive has announced a demo of its Open Library project:

http://demo.openlibrary.org/

It aims to be an open catalog of works in print. It's a wiki of sorts, where users can edit the metadata in the catalog. If a work is available online, there can be a link to it. Cover images can be added, and summaries, reviews, and in some cases the first chapter.

From their site:

It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply "free to the people," as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it's more important than ever to be open.

The metadata follows their own schema, transformed from MARC and other formats. They're gathering records from everywhere they can. I don't know how much people will edit metadata, but I expect we'll see people enrich data with links and subjects. They've linked to OCA books in the demo, as well as to buying options. I assume that this service will include links to other available digital versions.

Check out the guided tour at http://demo.openlibrary.org/tour.

study on copyright term

I came across a posting on Ars Technica about a study by a Cambridge University PhD candidate in economics on the optimal terms for copyright.

According to Rufus Pollack's paper [PDF], the optimal term is 14 years, calculated based on the premise that the optimal term for copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down: It continually grows less expensive to produce, reproduce, and distribute works using new digital tools, so the therefore the costs for creative work has dropped and will continue to do so. His work presents a set of equations focused on the length of copyright term based on what empirical data there is to determine the "break even" point for the value of a work in copyright. His proposed optimal term is designed to encourage a balance between the incentive to create new work and the social good that comes from works entering the public domain. It's a very interesting set and assumptions and some even more interesting math. I expect to see this attacked, though, not only for its conclusion, but because there is a lack of empirical data for some aspects of his calculation: the data just isn't available to use. He makes plausible estimates and defensible justifications, but I still expect that will get his work attacked. A shame.

collection development

This past Thursday and Friday I attended a workshop on basic collection development taught by Peggy Johnson from the University of Minnesota, who literally wrote the book on collection development.

It was a great group, mostly from academic libraries, but also from public libraries and government libraries. I went because I thought I could use some additional grounding in traditional collection development -- print and serials -- which I deal with not at all.

I felt somewhat like the odd person out. Almost none of the other attendees dealt with digital collections other than e-journals. While there was a discussion of institutional repositories and open access, there wasn't really any talk of collection development strategies for IRs. When I raised issues of collecting directly from faculty and born-digital scholarship, there was agreement that this was a developing area of concern, but it didn't seem to be relevant yet for most of the attendees.

It was in no way a bad workshop. On the contrary -- she covered a lot of ground, and there were many lively group activities and discussions. I recommend it for folks who want to learn the basics. I discovered that I already knew a lot more about what was covered than I expected to. My experiences with collection reviews at museums and archives where I've worked in the past, my time on the Collections Group at UVA, and my work the digital collections had served me well. It should not be a surprise that the core activities -- analysis and assessment and outreach -- really are very much the same for digital collections as they are for "traditional" collections.

Google exposes plain text

An interesting post from the "Inside Google Book Search" blog:

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2007/07/greater-access-to-public-domain-works.html

For the works that Google deems to be in the public domain, they are exposing the full text "text layer' of the work. This is not the pages images, but what one assumes is the output of their OCR process. The plain text is organized into pages and retains punctuation and line breaks. You can toggle between the plain text and page image view.

This is a huge breakthrough in terms of accessibility -- the principle reason that they cite for the new feature. What is slightly disappointing is that you cannot download the plan text version to use offline reader tools -- you have to read online. That could be burdensome for some.

It would also be nice someday if the downloaded PDFs included the plain text behind the scenes to support searching within the PDF.

honors from Computerworld

I am thrilled to see that the Getty Trust has won a 2007 Achievement Award in Media, Arts, and Entertainment from Computerworld for the Getty Vocabularies. I'm really struck that the nominating company was Unisys. Quoting:

In addition to being essential resources for the documentation of art, architecture, and material culture, the Getty vocabularies are also invaluable lookup tools and knowledge bases, and powerful searching assistants that increase both precision and recall in online queries.

I worked at the Getty Research Institute when the vocabularies were first being built and released -- we were cataloging and creating controlled vocabulary from our own experiences that we submitted to the project. When I worked at the Historic New Orleans Collection, we submitted a a lengthy list of Mardi Gras related terms and documentation. Every organization that I have worked at for the past 20 years uses the vocabularies. Talk about impact! The award is well-deserved.

Also on the awardee's list is Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. Quoting:

... the EMC Information Leadership Award recognizes individuals whose personal leadership has made a critical contribution to the effective use of information technology throughout the world.

She had key roles in developing their digitizing initiatives and "American Memory" and NDIIPP. Another well-deserved award.

http://www.cwhonors.org/archives/2007/index.htm

Syndetic Solutions ICE

Librarian in Black pointed to the new Syndetic Solutions release of its ICE product.

We have a subscription to Syndetic through SirsiDynix, so book covers, tables of contents, and reviews appear in records displays in iLink. The new product claims to support direct searching of the Syndetic content in addition to the MARC content. Previously it was just part of the display, retrieved from a separate source at the time of the search. This could be very promising.

The more exciting tangential selling point is that this product is available directly to the Library and works with a discovery product separate from the ILS. It only works with AquaBrowser, but that's a step in the right direction. A widely used value-added discovery content service is now unbundled from the ILS environment.

Espresso Book Machine

That the Espresso Book Machine exists is not new news -- World Bank and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina went into beta-test last year. On Demand showed models at BEA earlier this month. The story of the company is an interesting one, as is the QT movie of the alpha version (called Perfect Book) on the On Demand Books site.

What is news is that New York Public Library has received the first production machine. They plan to begin by offering 20 titles on demand from the 200,000 from the Open Content Alliance. It's been variously described as a "vending machine for books" and an "ATM for books."

It was also announced that the New Orleans Public Library, the University of Alberta campus bookstore, the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and at the Open Content Alliance are the next to receive machines. I am particularly excited about the possibilities for New Orleans Public -- what a great way to offer services to patrons while they are still re-building their collections and facilities two years after Hurricane Katrina.

Do I even need to say that I think print-on-demand is a technology with huge promise? It makes digital files usable in an additional way, it provides quick fulfillment, and reduces wasteful production that takes up warehouse space and might end up getting pulped if there is no demand.

Adobe Digital Editions

A colleague pointed out to me that Adobe had released the 1.0 version of Digital Editions yesterday.

It's an interface for managing, sorting, annotating, and reading electronic text files, not unlike iTunes or iView or Picasa in look & feel. The library view lets you manage your collection (drag-and-drop bookshelves) in thumbnail or list view, while the reading view lets you work within one text at a time, including make annotations. The double page view is a plus. It's a different rendering engine than regular Adobe reader, but I'm not yet sure of the differences. Once review that I read said that the rendering is worse, and apparently there's also a flavor of PDF that can be read only by Digital Editions and not by regular Reader. I usually read ebooks on my Palm device, so I can't compare my past ebook reading experience with this. Digital Editions also supports the EPUB XHTML etext format. Let's hope the ability to create EPUB files using InDesign improves.

The biggest potential flaw is that Digital Editions offers no web portal for locating and downloading books or for automated importing if one expects the iTunes model of ebook discovery, sales, or collection building.

Zebra

Every so often I have heard mention of the Zebra XML indexing tool. I'd peeked at it once some time ago -- while cool, it wasn't right for what I was working with at the time.

Now I'm looking at solutions for how we're going to make our Fedora-based Digital Collections Repository available as a target for our Serials Solutions 360 Search. The first idea was to take advantage of our OAI data provider because it already exists and exposes our objects. SS wasn't ready to set up an OAI target.

The most sensible thing is to set up a SRU gateway. My only qualm about setting a gateway up on top of our Repo indexing environment right now is that we're making the transition from XPAT to Lucence/Solr, but we aren't there yet and I don't want to set it up for one and then have to set it up again when we migrate. It could be so easy that I don't need to worry, but I need to take it into consideration.

Then, I wondered if I could still take advantage of our OAI data provider and set up a SRU gateway on top of that? I asked on the OAI list and got a few responses, one of which I am researching.

Then someone emailed me about Zebra, because 2.0 has templates in place to handle OAI as input and provide a SRU gateway using Yaz. I haven't spent a lot of time on it yet, but it looks really interesting. I don't know yet if it's the solution for me, but as an XML indexing tool, Zebra 2.0 seems a real step ahead of its earlier versions.

Facebook lending club

I in no way deny that I don't fully get Facebook. I have all sorts of issues with sharing a lot of personal information online. Maybe I'm just not a social network kind of girl.

I briefly signed up a couple of years ago thinking that I might participate as an alumna of UCLA -- where_ are_ the folks I went to graduate school with? -- but there wasn't much activity and I never checked in. While I have an archived email message that I registered, I just tried to log in and my email comes up as unregistered. Maybe I had my account deleted? I don't remember.

But this phenomenon really interests me -- Facebook Lending Club. Here's the page on how it works: http://blog.lendingclub.com/how-it-works/

It's person-to-person "social lending," using the Facebook platform to enable lenders to find borrowers and vice-versa. Would-be borrowers fill out an application in Facebook and request to borrow between $1,000 and $25,000. Lending Club analyzes their credit rating and suggests an interest rate between approximately 7 and 12 percent if the person meets risk standards. Lenders who sign up enter in the amount they’re willing to loan and the interest rate they want. Lending Club takes advantage of Facebook's data about group memberships and personal connections in its “LendingMatch” technology to then pair the lender and borrower based on the shared connections it finds.

This is a really interesting model. A friend of mine participates in Kiva, which makes person-to-person microloans to support entrepreneurial businesses. A small amount of money -- $25 or $5,000 -- can change a person's life.

beCamp

I spent Friday night and all day Saturday at the Charlottesville beCamp:

http://www.barcamp.org/beCamp

The recap hasn't been populated yet, but will eventually be fleshed out:

http://www.barcamp.org/beCamp2007Recap

I got to know a lot of folks that I should have already met in the last five years, including some folks that I see walk by my office almost every day without knowing who they were. I also met a lot of folks from the greater community that's not the University. I had a great time even though I'm not a hard-core coder type. My fears of appearing an outsider and having nothing to contribute besides going on ice-buying runs were unfounded.

The planning was a bit chaotic at times -- next time we need to make sure that only the event is free form, not the implementation. Companies stepped up to the plate to be sponsors, and lots of folks pitched in on the setup and cleanup and making sure that the trains ran on time (you know who you are!). There will be another beCamp!

Erik Hatcher gave an overview of Blacklight, including some of the developing BlacklightDL work. I took part in some great discussions:

• How we understand what to build (on setting and iterating through specifications during development)
• Reputation on the Net (building it and protecting it)
• Agile methods (Scrum in particular)
• How to Screen Scrape (I was curious what non-Library folks use screen-scraping for -- mostly feeds and filtering)

The Agile methods discussion was one I was particularly looking forward to, because the Library is working with OpenSource Connections on BlacklightDL and they employ Scrum procedures. Eric Pugh from OSC led the discussion, and I got more insight into the process that I am currently part of. I very much need to look into this as a potential mode for our development operations.

The reputation on the Net discussion was a livelier one than I expected, given that it was opposite a session of various REST APIs. One man had had his identity spoofed in a blog and hate messages associated with his name, some were really concerned about privacy, some wondered if messages they posted while in college would ever age off the Net, and others were concerned about how to develop their reputation online, and how to identify their varied work and handles over time as all being one person. It's personal name disambiguation! Bess and I remembered a paper we saw at JDCL in 2006. There was also some discussion about Spock. I pointed out just how much is already available from public records, as I found when I searched my own name in peoplefinders.com. It's interesting how little we think about what can be easily discovered about ourselves.

another browser to test when developing

Apple has released the beta of Safari for Windows.

http://www.apple.com/safari/

RomeReborn 1.0

As a technologist who trained as an archaeologist, I am excited by every virtual reconstruction of archaeological sites that I come across. I remember how impressed I was by the very early virtual Trajan's Forum project co-developed by UCLA's Urban Simulation Teams and the Getty, and UCLA's Virtual Los Angeles Project, both of which I first saw at the 1997 ACM Meeting. I was so impressed I invited Bill Jepson from UCLA to speak at the 1998 MCN Conference about virtual world building.

Today, the Comune di Roma celebrated the unveiling of RomeReborn 1.0. Bernie Frischer from UVA and Diane Favro from UCLA led an international team of archaeologists, architects, and computer modelers in assembling a huge recreation of Rome as it existed circa 320 AD under the Emperor Constantine, covering the area within the 13 miles of Aurelian Walls that encircled it. Virtual visitors can navigate through and around all the buildings and streets, including the Colosseum, the Senate House, and the Temple of Venus and Rome.

http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=2223

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSL1114988420070611

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2142/ancient-rome-restored-virtually

LibX at UVA

Some times things just come together the way you want them to.

A few weeks ago we started casually looking at LibX, following the announcements of beta tests at other institutions. We liked what we saw, but other projects got in the way of immediate follow up.

Last Tuesday one of our subject librarians mentioned that she'd seen a demo, and it \seemed time to get back to it. Jim Campbell pulled together what we needed and sent the configuration file off to Virginia Tech at 5:13, and received a test version UVa LibX toolbar back at 5:26. I had it installed and was searching at 5:29.

It was meant to be. A couple of other folks had seen the same LibX demo as the subject librarian who contacted us. They had decided that this was something we needed to look into, and there was some surprise when Jim sent out the announcement that we'd set up the prototype because we hadn't yet let folks know that we were working on it.

It all came together, and just nine days after setting up the test version (and making some config changes) it was announced that the UVa LibX toolbar was open for business at a Library-wide meeting. And we've arranged for the toolbar to be added to Firefox on all public Library machines for fall.

Quoting the email that Jim sent to the Library staff:

You can search Virgo as well as our ejournal list, WorldCat.org and Google Scholar.

LibX will also put the little orange Rotunda on pages from Amazon, the NYT Book Review, and other sources linking to a Virgo search.

If you highlight a term on a Web page and then right-click, you'll get a menu of search options.

But truly the coolest thing is highlighting the title in a citation on a Web page or in a PDF and dragging it onto that Scholar button. The LibX developers call it their magic button and a lot of the time it really does seem to work that way.

If it's an article we have electronic access to, you don't really even see Google or our Resolver -- you get to the article that quickly. It's a lot more efficient than going to our citation finder, typing or pasting in the info, being taken to a results screen, and then to the article (if not to the journal issue before that).

And the first time I saw a UVa symbol next to a book title in Amazon (David Wienberger's Everything in Miscellaneous) It was just plain cool.