hangingtogether.org

I have put together a brief survey, gathering data for two reasons:

1. I will be speaking at the upcoming Society of American Archivists annual meeting on a panel called “The Future of Finding Aids.” B ecause RLG hosts ArchiveGrid, I know a fair amount about rough proportions of archival collection description in MARC, EAD, and HTML. I know nothing about other formats (such as Word, PDF, etc) for collection descriptions, so I’m hoping to get a handle on this.

2. If it turns out that there are significant number of “other formats” this is interesting information for future development of ArchiveGrid.

The survey will only take a few minutes if you have:

• A rough idea of the number of described collections in your institution;
• A rough idea of how many of those collections are described ONLY in Word, PDF, or other formats aside from MARC, EAD, or HTML.

I will be happy to share results (although no personal data) after the survey.

Here’s the link.

Thank you!

We’re certainly not lacking any excitement these days at RLG – as if the recent news weren’t enough, today at around 10:30 am our nook of Mountain View had a complete power outage. Since the darkness inside contrasted rather unfavorably with the brilliant sunshine outside, I decided to take a walk through our backyard marsh with a co-worker. It turned out to be a productive walk in many ways, one of which was that we stumbled upon a rather disconcerted crew of trench-diggers, who had just hit our power line.

However, despite dismal early forecasts that we wouldn’t have any electricity for the rest of the day, the lights were on when I got back from an early lunch, and I continued with the task which had been so rudely interrupted in the morning – sending out call info and an agenda to the new RLG Collection Sharing Working Group participants. It certainly seems like the time for sharing museum collection images more broadly has finally come, at least judging by the interest in this particular group. At this point, I have 10 institutions participating in what I’ve come to think of as a peer-supported effort to implement CDWA Lite XML and OAI harvesting in a museum setting. I’m curious to see what kind of work-plan we’ll shape during our first call. I expect that there will be a cluster of issues around legacy data & data content; around exporting data from collection management systems into XML; around setting up and running OAI servers; and of course around the policy issues underpinning the wide disseminate of digital images.

I’ve been personally involved and invested in sharing museum collection widely since my days at the UC Berkeley Art Museum working on MOAC, when I built a database which exported item-level Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) for inclusion into the Online Archive of California (OAC), and eventually also RLG Cultural Materials. (By the way, the database is just in the process of being completely re-developed.) I see this new working group very much as a continuation of an ongoing effort to bring the riches of museums into the classroom, and I’m excited to have an amazing group of peers to explore a new approach with!

A recent television ad from Ask.com [you need a media player], “Librarians Love Ask.” (According to ResourceShelf, this ad was filmed in the library at Rutgers University and features unscripted comments from Ask’s head of search technology, Apostolos Gerasoulis).

In the meantime, Google is planning to shoot a “movie” on librarians and how they love Google; the audience is librarians, and the movie will be shown at ALA.

What is up with the search engine industry showering attention on librarians? Not that I don’t think that we information professionals deserve it, but it’s odd to be suddenly popular. I’ve long touted librarianship as the “stealth cool career,” but maybe we are no longer stealth.

Do librarians and other information professionals “love” search engines? I’m not so sure. I do know that the expectations that search engines have installed in our communities are keeping us on our toes and providing reasons to improve services, be more aggressive in heightening awareness about our institutions and services, and honing our missions in order to remain relevant. These are all good things, albeit painful.

I’d like to highlight what I thought was a great presentation from the recent CNI Spring Task Force Meeting. Barbara Taranto’s presentation, Embracing the (De)contextualization of Digital Artifacts gave New York Public Library’s perspective on the various challenges faced in managing and growing a large, publicaly accessible collection of digital material. NYPL has found itself in the position of having its material reused in many interesting ways. The challenge has been to remain on course and allow the reuse of material to happen without reacting in any way. The institution has enough on its own agenda that it wants to accomplish that they can’t be too worried or (even excited) by how others want to use their collections. The PowerPoint presentation is linked to from the Project Briefing description.

*Thanks to keen-eyed readers Roy Tennant and Jennifer Hartzell for nicely pointing out my typo. Now we know that both of our blog readers can spell better than I can!

The emails have been flying thick and fast today, and many people have asked me what’s up at RLG. Here’s a press release and a FAQ. RLG staff found out about this at 10 am Pacific. Beyond what’s outlined here, I know virtually nothing (but it’s very flattering to find out that so many of you think I’m in the know!).

Another week, another conference. Now I’m getting ready for the annual Art Libraries Society (ARLIS) conference, which will take me to Banff this year. (For those amongst you who are jealous, I personally think it’s only fair, since I’ll also have to go to DC 3 times this summer.) I’ll give a talk on the changing landscape of licensed digital resources called “No data is an island, entire of itself”, and in gathering my materials, I e-mailed with Christina Updike and some of the programmers who work on the Madison Digital Image Database, better known as MDID. They’ve devised an ingenious way for bringing images from CAMIO into their instructional technology tool, which allows instructors to select, arrange and project digital images. CAMIO has a feature which lets a user e-mail an image to an address of their choice. Release 0.7.0 of MDID exploits this functionality. An instructor e-mails an image to a generic local MDID account; the MDID application checks the account, ingests the image along with the descriptive metadata (supplied by CAMIO as a csv attachment) and adds it to the instructors’ personal image collection. Furthermore, it also suggests the image to the visual resources curator for the MDID installation as a potential addition to the database.

I think this is a great way of getting images out of the database and into the classroom, and letting your users help with content selection to boot. In an upcoming release, MDID will also make use of the XML Gateway for RLG Cultural Materials to seamlessly integrate that content into its interface, and ARTstor has promised to do the same.

If you still hunger for more visual resources news, consider downloading the new report “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences” from the Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley. Enjoy!

Continuing my walk down memory lane….

I attended the Coalition for Networked Information Spring 2006 Task Force Meeting and gave a project briefing titled, Archiving and Preserving the Web: Future Directions and Applications. [I am hopeful that our presentations will be linked from the abstract soon.] I was joined by two colleagues from the Internet Archive, Dan Avery and Kristine Hanna.

My part in the presentation was to give background to the importance of web archiving (capturing what will surely be the basis of tomorrow’s scholarship today), and to give an overview of RLG’s members who are currently engaged in web archiving. Most of these institutions are national archives, national libraries, and other organizations such as the Library of Congress who are doing web archiving in a big way. However, a broad range of smaller member institutions, such as Indiana University, Swarthmore, and University of Toronto, are also interested in web archiving. Some institutions are interested in archiving their own web domain, others are interested in saving web sites that represent a particular subject area.

Because RLG members, both large and small, are interested in web archiving, we’ve launched a program on web archiving. I’ll get back to that in a moment, but want to say how some of our smaller institutions are stepping up to the daunting task of archving the web. Those are are not able or ready to step up to web archiving on their own (or who might want to get their feet wet slowly) might be interested in taking a look at Archive-It, a new product of the Internet Archive. Archive-It makes it possible, at a fairly modest price, to get started with web archiving without a lot of technical expertise or investment. Because Archive-It makes use of the same open source tools as many of the big dogs are using (Heretrix for web crawling and creating ARC files, Nutch WAX for searching, etc.), it’s possible to start out using Archive-It and then later switch to your own internally hosted service.

Once an institution gets up and running with web archiving, there are still a lot of issues beyond the technical: description, sharing collecting, end user issues, etc. RLG’s web archiving program is bringing together large and small institutions who are working on web archiving to start to document best practices and procedures for the rest of the community to use. If you are at an RLG member institution, and want to participate, please let us know! More information about RLG’s web archiving program can be found here.

Incidentally, all of the podcasts from the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting are now available.