hangingtogether.org

You may recall, way back when, HangingTogether was launched as a place where libraries, archives, and museums can intersect. We don’t always do that (as Lorcan pointed out to me, very nicely, at the OCLC Blog Salon), but we do provide a place where the LAM community can at least bump into one another, or into one another’s worlds.

Happily, RLG is not the only organization thinking about providing opportunities for convergence. The Rare Books and Manuscripts 2006 preconference (to ALA) will be on libraries, archives, and museums in the 21st century. Even better, RBMS was able to secure funding to offer scholarships for young professionals who are interested in attending the conference. Not just scholarships, but very generous scholarships. More information on the conference and on the scholarships below.

I’ll be attending the conference, as will Günter and Jim. It will be an event full of LAM-y goodness, and we hope to see you there.

[Here's the part of this blog posting you should steal for your very own!]

IMLS OFFERS SCHOLARSHIPS TO ATTEND ACRL/RBMS CONFERENCE ON LIBRARIES,
ARCHIVES, AND MUSEUMS

The Institute for Library and Museum Services (IMLS) has provided
funding for thirty new and aspiring professionals to attend a major
national conference organized by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section
(RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a
division of the American Library Association (ALA). Entitled,
“Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the 21st Century: Intersecting
Missions, Converging Futures?,” the conference will explore issues of
mutual interest to libraries, archives, and museums. It will be held on
20-23 June 2006 in Austin, Texas, with the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin serving as the
primary host for the expected 300 attendees.

Students currently enrolled in graduate program of library and
information science or archival or museums studies, or graduates from
such programs with less than five years of professional experience are
eligible to apply for the IMLS-funded scholarships, which are designed
to cover all costs associated with attending the conference, including
registration, airfare, lodging and meals. At least ten scholarships will
be reserved for applicants from professionally underrepresented
backgrounds. Further information and an online application form are
available from the conference web site at
http ://www.hrc.utexas.edu/rbms2006. The deadline for applications has
been extended to March 30, 2006.

The two-and-a-half-day conference program will include a series of
plenary sessions that will address a broad range of topics from
comparative viewpoints, including collecting purposes and strategies,
audiences and access, legal issues, and professional education and
development. A variety of seminar sessions and facilitated discussions
will complement the conference theme. Participants will also be able to
take advantage of special tours of the recently renovated Ransom Center
and Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and
Museum, and other local cultural facilities.

General registration will begin in February 2006, with an early-bird
rate of $195. Lodging at the conference hotel, the Stephen F. Austin
InterContinental in downtown Austin, will include rates from $99 to $129
per night. Additional hotel and dormitory lodging options will also be
available.

Questions about the IMLS scholarships may be addressed to Tory Ondrla,
Meeting and Special Events Planner (tondrla@ala.org).

If you’ve been to RLG’s Annual Meeting at the Huntington last year, you may remember Blaise Agüera y Arcas – he wooed the crowd with a demonstration of his technology “SeaDragon,” which allows seamless navigation and zooming into large sets of digital files. Several RLG members were so impressed that they committed to working with Blaise on the spot to test the applicability of his software to the cultural heritage environment. You can see a demo of this on his company’s website, although I have to make the disclaimer that the real thing is several magnitudes more impressive than the demo. Now Microsoft just announced that they have acquired SeaDragon as part of a new initiative called LiveLabs. On a whim, I called Blaise to congratulate him and see what this meant for the technology’s future – he was clearly excited about what’s happening, but also told me he’s not at liberty to discuss any details about the arrangement with Microsoft at this point.

Looks like our “Spotlight on Innovation” program at the annual meeting did pick a winner! We’ll keep you posted as we learn more.

UPDATE: Looks as if now things are now officially official – Microsoft acquired SeaDragon, and Blaise and all other SeaDragon employees will now be on MS payroll.

In conjunction with MCN’s 2005 conference in Boston, ClearStory distributed a technology survey on current practices and outlooks in digital asset management in museums. While one presumes that ClearStory gained some nifty insights into one of their potential markets through the survey, they gave back to the community by raffling off an iPod Shuffle (Peter Guss of the Whitney was the lucky winner), and by summarizing the findings from their 40 respondents in a short whitepaper. I don’t see the paper linked to anywhere on their website, but after filling out a form, you should be able to download it here.

Some select findings (in my own words):
- 40% of respondents claim they are in the early stages of a DAM project, while 28% are busy weighing implementation options.
- 63% of respondents use cross-departmental committees to cut through the fog of DAM issues
- Digital asset management was identified as the area of IT spending with the highest expectation of a spending increase in 2006
- The most important consideration in deploying a DAM for museums is the integration of the DAM with the CMS (Collections Management System) (cited by 78% of respondents)
These results don’t seem very surprising, and they confirm my hunch of how prevalent the DAM discussion currently is in museums.

What fascinates me about the whitepaper is how it blurs the line between DAM and digital preservation – for starters, the authors chose to call their document “Museum Digital Preservation Initiatives,” and towards the end of their paper, they declare that “a DAM solution can serve as a singular platform for digital image preservation, collections management, marketing communications, and exhibit innovations.” I understand the need for ClearStory to highlight the many benefits of DAM to their audience, yet equating asset management with digital preservation seems to seriously underplay the additional complexity involved in the latter.

I would chalk it up to an issue of semantics (i.e. their understanding of digital preservation is different from mine, which is heavily colored by library initiatives in this arena), yet the survey curiously also includes questions about the Open Archival Information System (OAIS). ClearStory knows enough about what incredibly sticky kind of a tar baby they are talking about to include one of the large-looming standards in the field, and so do 47% of the respondents, who consider OAIS conformance as a “very important” feature of a DAM.

I personally remain very skeptical that a DAM can or should be thought of as a digital preservation system (in the sense of a trusted digital repository) – managing assets for everyday institutional use and managing them for the long term seem sufficiently distinct challenges to deserve their own dedicated solutions. While having enough control over digital files to efficiently track and share them is a huge step towards maintaining access to those files, Digital Preservation writ large in addition demands a host of preservation services which probably go beyond the scope of a DAM. Furthermore, only a subset of preservervation issues is addressed by technology – any technology has to go hand-in-hand with policy and institutional commitment. I’m curious to see how this discussion will shake out.

Having posted my early thoughts about the Open Content Alliance I thought you might be interested in the progress since late October. It was clear shortly after the launch that supporters of this vision were going to have to move quickly from shared enthusiasm to the difficult operational problems that such a massive effort will have to solve. It’s only movement towards robust operations that will convince the necessary cohort of institutions that this is a long-term shared vision to which they can contribute and from which they will benefit. I’m pleased to say that the OCA has structured a work agenda for 2006 and announced it on their site. Along with others, I was happy to be consulted and contribute to the development of these next steps.

The OCA is taking a community approach, structuring its efforts to be consistent with the way collaboration happens on the Web. Success in a grand venture like this is far from assured, but this first set of steps is very heartening. The necessary working groups have been chartered, chairs have been appointed and a variety of tasks will now get addressed through these vehicles.

A few things in these steps that please me:

- keeping the OCA a project of the Internet Archive sidesteps the kinks that long, premature conversations about governance would engender

- declaring a collection focus – Americana, specifically North Americana – provides an essential filter for quick progress and priority setting

- stating a target of October, 2006 to unveil a significant digital collection allows all the contributors to focus their efforts

You’ll see that RLG is taking a significant role—RLG program officers are providing leadership and support throughout. (nods of thanks to fellow RLG bloggers) This is an exciting opportunity as part of the OCA to work with all institutions who have something to contribute.

It’s very early days, however, and while the working groups have been announced, they haven’t yet been populated. Nor have the chairs coordinated with one another on dependencies and timelines. (Nor have we had a chance to discuss more accurate and congenial naming of these groups.) But all this ought to happen soon and enable those institutions that have been watching for OCA progress to make an informed decision about their own participation.

Following up on my previous post on blogs in museums, it looks like the issue continues to enjoy interest. Two of the Walker blogs have some interesting write-ups of museum efforts in the blogosphere – Off Center mused in August that there weren’t many other museum blogs out there focusing on art; the New Media Initiatives blog picks up the conversation again to highlight both an art-focused as well as a museum profession blog, and promises to introduce more museum blogs in coming posts. I hadn’t seen the Smithsonian’s Eye Level yet – as the co-production of a team including new media, publications and curatorial staff, this should be one to watch.

Since the hangingtogether.org crew hasn’t offered much choice reading in the New Year so far (some of us are nursing colds, some of us are on the road), I thought the least I could do to bridge the gap is point you to the latest Cites & Insights. Our colleague Walt Crawford has performed a tremendous feat in reviewing the extensive amount of discussion around Library 2.0, and serving it up with his frank and opinionated commentary. Download the special 32-page issue here [pdf].