May 07, 2008
•
Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, Metadata
, OCLC
Here are links to several unrelated publications .....
Reconfiguring the Library Systems Environment
portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2008.
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/archive/2008/dempsey-portal.pdf (.pdf: 195K/18 pp.)
[Lorcan Dempsey: Selected publications [OCLC]]
This is a short piece adapted from an earlier blog entry.
Lavoie, Brian, and Günter Waibel. An Art Resource in New York: The Collective Collection of the NYARC Art Museum Libraries. (.pdf: 136K/18 pp.)
[Books and reports [OCLC - Publications]]
The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) includes the Frick Art Reference Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library, and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. This report describes the results of a study of the aggregate collection of these institutions.
Godby, Carol Jean, Devon Smith, and Eric R. Childress. 2008. "Toward Element-level Interoperability in Bibliographic Metadata." The Code4Lib Journal, 2 (2008-03-24). Available online at: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/54.
[Publications [OCLC - OCLC Research]]
I mentioned this before, but in a message about another topic.
April 30, 2008
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
We got a present of a couple of children's books from Australia and were intrigued to discover their relationship to the collections of the National Museum of Australia.
Making Tracks takes young readers on a fictional journey through some fascinating Australian stories, inspired by objects from the National Museum of Australia's collection. The series is written and illustrated by leading Australian children's authors and artists. [National Museum of Australia - Making Tracks]
While looking at the NMA site ("Nice bright colors, K....") I was interested to discover reCollections, their journal. From the current issue, an article by Paul Arthur:
This paper surveys the digital history field — a broad field that is increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication, including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience. [reCollections - Papers]
In recent presentations, I have been suggesting that libraries will need to adopt more archival skills as they manage digital collections and think about provenance, evidential integrity, and context, and that they will also need to adopt more museum perspectives as they think about how their digital collections work as educational resources, and consider exhibitions and interpretive environments. I have used a capture of the home page of the Library at Oregon State University in this context, which showcases several digital collections. These currently include a resource about Linus Pauling and the peace movement which puts digitized materials in a broader context:
The three sections of Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement combine to provide an unusually rich source of information on Linus and Ava Helen Pauling's remarkable body of peace work. Navigate between the sections by using the links on the site's home page or by using the links at the top of any page within the site. [Introduction - Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement - Special Collections - Oregon State University]
April 13, 2008
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Categories:
GLAM
, The cultural and scholarly record
I am in Dublin (Ireland) for a couple of days and was interested to see Fintan O'Toole writing about archives and genealogy in the Irish Times yesterday (behind a paywall).
He contrasts two views of genealogy, one that it is about tourism, one that it is about culture and the stories we tell ourselves about succession and origin. He associates each view with a state-sponsored initiative, the latter with the National Archives' 1911 Census Online project, the former with the Irish Genealogy Project, coordinated by Irish Genealogy Ltd. I have no personal knowledge of either initiative.
About the Census Online project he says:
It is very important that you can do this without demanding a credit card number. The National Archives project is animated by a connection between public memory and public service, the idea of honouring a community's search for origins.
On the National Archives site I was interested to see this note about James Connolly whom I mentioned the other day.
Read about trade unions and see the return for James Connolly and his family [National Archives: Census of Ireland 1911]
One of the partners in in the initiative is Library and Archives Canada:
Library and Archives Canada has already mounted an online exhibition of documents in their custody relating to the Irish in Canada, accompanied by text from scholars in the field. The Shamrock and the Maple Leaf can be found at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/ireland/. [Census of Ireland - Partners in the Census online project]
Which raises interesting questions of continuity across the documents of a diaspora.
This is how the other initiative, the Irish Genealogy Project was described in 2005 in a Senate debate:
The primary goal of the project is to generate economic activity and employment throughout the island of Ireland by boosting roots tourism. The assumption underlying the strategy is that the availability of a world class, country-wide genealogy service, with the potential of pin-pointing the exact point of origin of emigrant families and supplying on-the-ground orientation in Ireland, will represent a powerful attraction for ethnically Irish visitors from America, Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Britain. The intention is to attract these visitors to the various genealogical centres, which will provide a marketing or sales opportunity. The centres could provide an opportunity for individual genealogical researchers or authors to market their wares. The diaspora is variously estimated at between 50 million and 70 million people; however, the ties between the diaspora and Ireland may well be weakening. [Parliamentary Debates (Official Report - Unrevised) Seanad Éireann Thursday, 20 October 2005 - Page 7]
O'Toole is sceptical about 'roots tourism'.
Here is his concluding paragraph:
The irony of these contrasting projects within the State sphere is that the one that came under a commercial rubric - IGL - looks like very bad value for the taxpayer, while the one that set out to achieve a cultural goal, Census Online, has been a model of the efficient and intelligent use of public resources. But even if this were not the case, there is still an overwhelming argument for genealogical information to be freely available online as a public cultural resource. Genealogy is history made personal - it connects people through their individual genetic past to the past of the communities they inhabit. And, in a society that is struggling with interculturalism, the State should encourage genealogy as an exercise in political hygiene. It has a nasty habit of surprising people and making them realise that they are not quite who the think they are. There are few more civilising experiences.
Incidentally, I noted O'Toole's wonderful remarks about public libraries in these pages a couple of years ago.
March 23, 2008
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Categories:
GLAM
, Libraries - organization and services
, Metadata
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, The cultural and scholarly record
An interesting announcement from CLIR about a $4.27M competitive program to describe hidden collections has just appeared. The existence of such collections must be more fully disclosed if they are to release more of their value in research and learning:
With generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources is creating a national program to identify and catalog hidden special collections and archives. The records and descriptions obtained through this effort will be accessible through the Internet and the Web, enabling the federation of disparate, local cataloging entries with tools to aggregate this information by topic and theme. [Hidden Collections]
This is a preliminary announcement and it will be interesting to see how the thinking behind the program is elaborated as more materials appear. The call for proposals will be in June. In particular, I will be interested to see some of the observations about organization, formats and federation frameworks expanded. See for example the following statements which relate to each of these topics respectively:
The program's strategy for building a distributed organization of cataloging and collection information assumes local autonomy and responsibility but also requires centralized agreements concerning governing principles that will ensure enterprise-wide coherence. [Hidden Collections]
Because tightly defined fields can impede interoperability, recent reports on hidden collections emphasize the need to make the categories and schemes of record creation and descriptions less rigid than those of the past. Cataloging special collections and archival materials has routinely been defined as a local practice. The shift to understanding hidden collections as a national problem entails an acknowledgment that in the 21st century, collaboration, coordination, and coherence of response to users is fundamental and takes precedence over local practice. [Hidden Collections]
The process will involve adopting a technology platform (or platforms) that will allow accurate descriptive information to be entered quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. The results of each project will be linked to and interoperable with those of all others to form a federated environment that can be built upon over time. Institutions must acknowledge local ownership of the data generated through the program and agree to its persistence. [Hidden Collections]
February 15, 2008
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Categories:
GLAM
, Metadata
, OCLC
My colleague Günter Waibel writes about a new RLG Programs project looking at the exchange of metadata between museum systems. Go to the entry for more detail.
With the generous support of a $145,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, RLG Programs will gather a select group of museum partners to accomplish the following: - Creating a low-barrier / no-cost batch export capability for CDWA Lite XML out of the collections management system used by the participating museums (GallerySystems TMS)
- Modeling data exchange processes using the Open Archive Information Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) at the participating museums
- Creating an aggregation of museum content within OCLC Research for analysis
- Discussing the evidence about the relative utility of the aggregation with stakeholders from the museum, vendor and aggregator community
[hangingtogether.org]
November 28, 2007
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Categories:
GLAM
, Metadata
, OCLC
Reading the report [PDF] of the RLG Programs metadata practice survey, this quote from a respondent jumped out at me:
We use a variety of tools to produce a variety of records. Mature and established systems (such as our ILS) are generally effective. Tools for creation of XML are not as efficient - particularly EAD creation. Creation of EAD and ingest into our XML database is still a very manual process. Our tools are also generally not well integrated. Even when describing the same resource we use the ILS for creating MARC, home grown tools for creating EAD, and perhaps a third tool for creating item level descriptive metadata. [RLG Programs Descriptive Metadata Practices Survey Results - PDF]
It is pretty indicative of general issues to emerge. Metadata creation practices are fragmented across different materials workflows with variable systems support.
... RLG Programs surveyed 18 Partner institutions1 in July and August 2007 to obtain a baseline understanding of their current descriptive metadata practices. Although we saw some expected variations in practice across libraries, archives and museums, we were struck by the high levels of customization and local tool development, the limited extent to which tools and practices are, or can be, shared (both within and across institutions), the lack of confidence institutions have in the effectiveness of their tools, and the disconnect between their interest in creating metadata to serve their primary audiences and the inability to serve that audience within the most commonly used discovery systems (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.). PDF]
I was also interested to note that over half the institutions surveyed build and maintain one or more local thesauri.
For more detail see Karen Smith-Yoshimura.
Related entries:
November 01, 2007
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Categories:
GLAM
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
Well, this must be a first! The current issue of the Harvard Business Review carries an interview with Lynne Brindley, Director of the British Library.
Do you have a favorite piece from the collection?
I never answer that question. I want people to understand
that we’re not a museum. We have a responsibility to our
heritage, but our mission is to foster innovation and build
future knowledge on top of past knowledge. [Harvard Business Review, November 2007, p 32]
Via Brian Lavoie.
October 21, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, GLAM
, User experience
Quantity has a quality all its own. A focus on quality is one reason that libraries, archives and museums have not moved their collections in large quantities to the web. This reduces their visibility and impact as the web becomes central to research, learning and civic engagement. Scale matters, and fragmented small-scale activities do not map well onto behaviors in a web environment. Our intricate attempts to describe and present a few choice collections have resulted in expensive, but little-used websites. And the rest of our collections remain largely invisible. We need to stop thinking of our lovingly crafted sites, designed specifically for a particular collection, as the only way people will discover our content. While researchers value the description and organization that we bring to collections, they don’t want to have to consult dozens of specialized sites to find what they need. [Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow [PDF]]
These words are from a brief and provocative report [PDF] about special collections and digitization just written by my Programs colleagues Ricky Erway and Jen Schaffner. The report is based on speaker suggestion and enthusiastic audience reaction at a forum convened in August as part of an RLG Programs project called Bringing special collections into the large-scale digitization milieu.
The report discusses how current practices will need to change if this activity is indeed to be scaled up in the ways that are discussed. The report presents key areas where assumptions must change if we are to make progress.
Scaling up digitization of special collections (here defined as non-book collections, such as photographs, manuscripts, pamphlets, minerals, insects, or maps) will compel us to temper our historical emphasis on quality with the recognition that large quantities of digitized special collections materials will better serve our users. This will require us to revisit our procedures and policies. Should we be digitizing for both preservation and access, or optimizing procedures primarily for access? How can our selection approaches help us maximize both throughput and impact? Have projects produced reusable infrastructures? What is the appropriate level of description for online materials? How can we make smart partnership agreements in order to build a collective collection that will be valued by a broad audience? [Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow [PDF]]
Materials from the forum are also available: Digitization matters: Breaking through the barriers—scaling up digitization of special collections, an event co-sponsored by RLG Programs, the Society of American Archivists, and the Newberry Library.
Read the report and leave a comment on the RLG Programs' blog.
October 11, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, GLAM
, The cultural and scholarly record
Major 'memory organizations' face significant challenges as the volume and variety of what is within their potential remit to collect grows. The digital turn has presented major challenges in developing routine ways of capturing and curating digital materials in many contexts. An Australian colleague pointed me to a joint statement and request for additional funding by the National Film and Sound Archive, National Archives of Australia, and National Library of Australia.
Digital has become the preferred medium for Australian government agencies, authors, researchers, film makers, musicians and creators. Increasingly, the primary evidence of public administration is created in digital form. The vast majority of film and television works, and virtually all music and recorded sound created in Australia are now released in digital form. Australia ’s ability to maintain a permanent and accessible record of these activities is therefore linked to our preparedness to cope with this digital tidal wave of images and sounds. As the Collections Council of Australia noted in its background papers for the 2006 Summit on Digital Collections: “ The growth of digital information and the need to store, manage and preserve access is an issue of truly global proportions.” [Australia’s Cultural Heritage – A Digital Future]
As the scope of what such organizations have to do grows, as digital curation needs to become mainstream, and as they have already cut back where they can, the situation becomes more grave.
We’ve already lost many of our important moments and many of our creative ideas and cultural expressions. There is a danger that in ten years time Australians will look back at today as a digital dark-age. [Australia’s Cultural Heritage – A Digital Future]
July 12, 2007
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
, Marketing
Cultural diplomacy is a report from the UK think tank Demos which I finally read on a plane ride this week. It talks about the role of cultural institutions and manifestations in international relations and,while charting international differences of approach, notes that cultural diplomacy is sometimes underappreciated as a 'soft' influencer. The report talks about cultural diplomacy, public diplomacy and cultural literacy, and emphasizes the growing importance of the latter two. Public diplomacy aims to reach broad masses of people with a favorable image of a country, and to be effective, has to enlist a broad part of the population in support of it. Hence, in part, the importance of cultural literacy. Clearly, each issue connects to the wider range of ways in which we now communicate.
While hard power is the ability to coerce (through military or economic means), soft power is the means to attract and persuade. As one British expert has put it: 'Public diplomancy is based on the premise that the image and reputation of a country are public goods which can create either an enabling or disabling environment for individual transactions.' [14 = Leonard et al]
Libraries, museums and archives are seen to have an important role in UK public diplomacy.
Our national cultural institutions are not static depositories for cultural artefacts; they are active participants in the articulation and communication of our own and others' sense of identity. Museums, galleries and libraries in particular 'provide the means by which a nation represents its relationship to its own history and to that of "other" cultures, functioning as monuments to the nation, and as such they have played a pivotal role in the fomation of nation states'. [20 = Reinventing the nation : British heritage and the bicultural settlement in New Zealand / Lynda Dyson in Littler and Naidoo]
And, interestingly, the report recommends support for acquisitions by these organization to maintain the 'range, quality and contemporary relevance of our cultural assets'. In turn, it recommends that national cultural institutions (such as the British Library) should develop explicit international strategies which take account of government goals.
Now, shortly after finishing this document I was walking through Union Station in Washington DC and was interested to see there an extensive exhibition promoting Northern Ireland and Belfast as tourist and commercial destinations. What was interesting to me was how it was constructed around the Titanic (which was built in Belfast and has become an important part of Belfast's promoted identity) and various cultural references. There was a reference to the poet Louis MacNeice for example. And to C.S.Lewis. It noted how the Mourne Mountains were an inspiration for Narnia. I imagine most people seeing this did not realize that C.S.Lewis was born in Northern Ireland and I wondered what impact it would have on them.
Aside: it is interesting to see the climbing interest in C.S. Lewis as reflected in continued publication of his works and works about him.
Aside 2: The seventh International JISC/CNI Conference will be held in Belfast almost exactly a year from now (July 10-11, 2008).
April 29, 2007
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Categories:
GLAM
, Metadata
, Social networking
, User experience
The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has been doing very interesting work on their collection 'catalogue'. Some of this work is described by Sebastian Chan [blog] at the recent Museums and the Web 2007 conference in San Francisco in a paper well worth reading. Internally called OPAC2.0, the new catalogue put more than 70% of the Museum's collection on-line. In order to operate effectively, OPAC2.0 collects detailed information about search terms and object relationships as well as tagging and controlled vocabulary usage patterns. With these and other evaluation tools built in to the structure of the site from day one, OPAC2.0 has been conceptualised as an ongoing project requiring continual enhancements and usability modifications. This paper examines the OPAC2.0 project and its impact on the Museum. It presents initial usage patterns, search trends, and social tagging trends over the first 6 months of operation (from June 14 to December 31, 2006). In particular, the paper explores the impacts of opening up and the driving of traffic down the 'long tail' of the Museum's collection; tag structures submitted by users using the folksonomy engine; and the internal Museum changes that have come about as a result of unprecedented user access and, importantly, user input and engagement. [ Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2007: Papers: Chan, Tagging and Searching]
He talks about three key ways in which the catalogue enhances serendipity: - object and subject taxonomies
- augmented serendipity – user keywords or 'tags'
- frictionless serendipity – user tracking.
[Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2007: Papers: Chan, Tagging and Searching]
The first involves the familiar use of 'expert' assigned terms. The second involves the collection and use of keywords assigned by users of the system. The third is especially interesting: 'Frictionless serendipity' is provided by user tracking; the aggregate behaviour of visitors to the site is used to make further recommendations based on actual behaviour. This is described as 'frictionless' because the visitor/user need do nothing other than navigate the site to lay trails of 'intentional data' for recommendations to occur. Aggregating this intentional data allows for search term recommendations, building dynamic relationships between terms, that reveal both aggregated synonyms and free associations. Thus a searcher for 'minton' currently gets suggestions for other searches of 'mintons' , 'bone china' , 'british' , 'porcelain' and 'peacock' , based on the terms other searchers of the term 'minton' have used and the objects they have viewed. [Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2007: Papers: Chan, Tagging and Searching]
The paper provides some fascinating data about search, browse and tagging behaviors.
Together the approaches he describes provide multiple paths through the collection and he concludes by suggesting that they work best together. The Powerhouse Museum's OPAC2.0 project demonstrates the importance of museums making their collections accessible through major search engines. It also demonstrates the possibilities for audience research and improved navigation of collections through the detailed recording and analysis of user traffic and behaviour data beyond traditional logfile data. User tagging and folksonomies can be used to improve navigation and discoverability but work most effectively when matched with detailed collection records and balanced with the structural benefits of formal taxonomies. When combined with these features, search tracking can provide a means to improve serendipitous discovery and enhance the ability of users to find related objects and explore deeper into a collection. [Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2007: Papers: Chan, Tagging and Searching]
It is great seeing how an interesting system was put together; it is even better being able to see this together with data about use.
Aside: I was pleased to 'virtually' attend a presentation of some of this material recently when Seb visited RLG Programs colleagues in Mountain View.
April 15, 2007
•
Categories:
GLAM
, Miscellaneous
 I have spent this last week in Hong Kong, hence the lightness in posting. I was pleased to be speaking at the Chinese University of Hong Kong at a conference named The academic librarian: dinosaur or phoenix focusing on change management, and later in the week at The Fiesole Collection Development Retreat at the University of Hong Kong. The staffs of the two libraries, and their directors, Colin Storey and Tony Ferguson respectively, were wonderful hosts and everybody was very well looked after.
I ate a lot of food and had very little sleep. I think that it was the first time that I was shifted 12 hours from home. An interesting experience: no need to change the time on any devices! Going there we flew over the North Pole. Coming back, I changed my seat thinking that I might see something interesting out the window. However, I was disappointed when the pilot announced that we were heading out over the Pacific towards Seattle.
The picture is by Lin Fengmian to whom an exhibition was devoted at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, by Hong Kong Harbour on the Kowloon side. I visited in the evening, when you can look back over to the spectacular, and spectacularly lit, skyline of Central.
More later ....
March 13, 2007
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Categories:
GLAM
, Knowledge organization and representation
, Metadata
An interesting article by Mary W. Elings and my colleague Günter Waibel on cross-domain metadata practices has just appeared.
Integrating digital content from libraries, archives and museums represents a persistent challenge. While the history of standards development is rife with examples of cross-community experimentation, in the end, libraries, archives and museums have developed parallel descriptive strategies for cataloguing the materials in their custody. Applying in particular data content standards by material type, and not by community affiliation, could lead to greater data interoperability within the cultural heritage community. [Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums]
The authors propose a framework within which to think about metadata across domains. I commented here on a blog entry in which Günter introduced the framework.
In recent discussions, I have been struck by how the issue of authorities, gazetteers, and subject resources has come up as a shared interest across these curatorial traditions. Each community has an interest in establishing agreed ways of noting names, places and things, and has a variety of practices to support it. This seems like a fertile area for investigation of shared attention across communities.
Related entry:
February 18, 2007
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Categories:
GLAM
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
In several venues recently I have suggested that it would be useful to do some content analysis on various documents to see how institutions are describing themselves, their priorities, their relationships and so on.
I am thinking of strategy documents, annual reports, but also things like websites, organizational charts and job adverts. I know that I could dig up some work in this area, but in a time of reported change it becomes interesting seeing how folks are adapting.
As interesting, or perhaps in some cases more interesting, is how the library is reported in the 'documents' of its home institution, the university or city for example. What is emphasized about value; what are seen as major achievements; what needs to change.
Curious, this morning I spent an hour or so very quickly looking at the websites of the first 30 universities in the Newsweek top 100 global universities. I was interested to see what this very superficial examination had to say about libraries in those institutions. A couple of things: - There was a link to the library on the majority of the sites. I counted four where there was not (and appearing in a drop down list did not count). I thought this was high compared to a randomly selected 30? This is just based on my own observation, I may be wrong.
- As expected there was quite a variety of ways in which the library was presented. Perhaps the largest category was where the library was part of the general infrastructure, or visible in a set of quicklinks to central services or departments. I was interested to see the number of institutions where the library was associated with university museums and/or archives, sometimes as part of a general 'collections' category. This was higher than I expected. And the number where the library was associated with computing infrastructure was lower than I expected. In several cases, the library was presented in a research or academics category. (I am just using 'category' to refer to the grouping on the website - it doesn't necessarily represent any organizational grouping at the institution.)
Now, I have spoken about stuff being more or less than I expected above. My basis for this? Nothing more than hunch ...
I do think that looking at how organizations present themselves and what is important to them in the documents they produce is revealing, documents such as annual reports, strategies, job ads, websites, org charts, and so on. It would be interesting to see more analysis of them. Of course, we would have to be cautious in assuming too much about what they do reveal!
February 11, 2007
•
Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
George Bernard Shaw is famously said to have said that England and America were countries separated by a common language (of course, Shaw was neither English nor American). Here are a couple of very small things that I ran into recently, not about language as such but about little cultural separations. A little off-topic, but it is the weekend ...
A little while ago I was thinking of doing a blog entry about Kylie Minogue and the discussion about whether or not the V&A - self-described as the world's greatest museum of art and design - should be devoting an exhibition to her "evolving image".
This was prompted by what I thought was a somewhat po-faced article by critic and journalist Mark Lawson who was worried that standards were being dropped in several venues to attract audiences. An obvious moral for both London's theatre and its museums is the recent history of television: a medium which has directed considerable energy to "connecting" with those who were perceived to have an in-built resistance to watching it. As a result, more and more desperately populist projects are announced, including, this week, a sort of wildlife gameshow in which viewers will vote on which nearly-extinct species should receive a conservation grant. [Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Mark Lawson: The pimp in the cathedral] The exhibition has now begun, and has sparked some similar follow-on discussion.
I thought that the Kylie exhibition was an appropriate venture. I did not do an entry: I think it is very interesting, but I do not have much context for the wider discussion in the museum community of the general case that this exhibition no doubt raises, so I passed on.
Now, I mentioned this in discussion the other day. I was very surprised to learn that nobody in the group knew who Kylie Minogue was. Of course, this happens from time to time, but I was more surprised than usual in this case. And some investigation revealed relatively different levels of impact. Although she's only managed a few hits in the U.S. since her arrival as a singer in 1987, Kylie Minogue is both Australia and Europe's biggest selling female pop singer over that period and a pop culture icon in those areas. Her image on the cover of magazines is guaranteed to produce extra sales. [allmusic ((( Kylie Minogue > Overview )))]
And a second example... I was watching an episode of The View, an Irish arts programme presented by John Kelly the other evening (on the web [.smil]). They were reviewing A Prairie Home Companion, the recent Altman movie based on the radio show. Now, this type of program - and Mark Lawson presents similar programs in the UK - obviously depends a lot on the guests. There is something about the structure though that lends itself to smugness, as a group of folks is apparently well-qualified to judge the diverse cultural and media events of the day. In this case, I thought the panel smugly missed the point entirely, as they seemed not to be aware of the position of A Prairie Home Companion, the radio show, in American cultural life. Whatever one thinks of the radio show, one cannot divorce discussion of the movie from it.
The world is getting smaller, and also remaining larger than we sometimes think.
December 29, 2006
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Categories:
GLAM
, General - systems and technologies
, Marketing
, Social networking
, User experience
 The British Library has an exhibition on London and its maps. There is a 'curator's blog'. And there I read:
Just a quick note to let you know about a fantastic new Google Earth layer based on London: A Life in Maps that a colleague in our web team has put together. You can download about 10 maps from the exhibition & view them as image overlays in Google Earth. [London: A Life in Maps Blog: Google Earth layer] Pretty fancy. They also use Google Maps to help organize a virtual exhibition.
And there is more. I enjoyed the video journeys through London, hung around a very nice conceit:: The story-line for each journey, portrayed through cabbies' voice-overs, is based on the idea of ‘appearances'. Appearances are the occasions when trainee taxi-drivers are tested by an examiner. [Videos] I particularly enjoyed the trip through South East London, where we lived for a while, starting out from one of our favorite places, The Horniman Museum (pictured), and finishing up at the British Library. En Route it passes, alongside much else, the notable Peckham Library [ wikipedia], the Imperial War Museum, and a wall plaque for Charles Babbage. There are accompanying learning activities and a book.
I have not seen the physical exhibition at the British Library: this is an imaginative and engaging set of web presences which makes me want to see it.
Coda 1. The blog also talks about the importance of immigration to London and the role of maps in illustrating social issues and conditions. It points to a feature in the Guardian some time ago which uses maps to illustrate London's ethnic diversity (it claims that London is the world's most diverse city). Somthing that is on display in the video cab journies.
Coda 2. I mentioned another National Library exhibition a while ago, that of the National Library of Ireland on the life and works of W.B.Yeats. That was an engrossing exhibition with a meagre web presence. The Horniman Museum was founded by tea merchant Frederic Horniman [wikipedia]. And of course, his daughter, Annie Horniman [Wikipedia] [fuller biographical history from collection description of the Annie Horniman Papers at the John Rylands Library on the Genesis website] was a friend of Yeats and, importantly, financially supported the establishment of the Abbey Theatre.
November 26, 2006
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, GLAM
, Miscellaneous
Light posting this week as we spent Thanksgiving and a couple of additional days in Chicago. Here are some vaguely work-related remarks, and some less so: - Discovered in Chicago Comics on North Clark St the following volume: The Illustrated Librarian: 12 temporary tatoos for librarians and booklovers. Includes 'I love Dewey Decimal System', 'Read or die', 'Born to read', 'Literate 4 life' with conventional assortment of hearts, skulls, scrolls and gothic script. Also spotted here were several sets of The Cubes - Cubicle Playsets (previously seen on ThinkGeek.com), meaningful to cubicled OCLC employees. I particularly liked seeing the Corporate Zombies up close (I mean the playset at Chicago Comics, not folks at OCLC).
- The T-Shirt Deli on North Damen Ave is a winning idea.
We make t-shirts - but like a deli, you can customize everything about your new shirt. Choose a shirt style and size, pick the font that suits you best, and hold the lettuce. After we cook it up, your shirt will be rolled and wrapped in butcher paper, and served with delicious potato chips. [The T-Shirt Deli - Made Fresh Daily - FAQ] You can order online and apparently they are coming to other locations soon. Nice idea, but the downside is the large choice it presents to a child, especially horrifying if that child is yours. - A big choice at Myopic Books also, where used volumes comfortably cram narrow aisles on several floors. I was interested to see that it opens until 1 a.m. - unfortunately we could not stay that long - and had a diverting small display of book art in the window. I learn later from the website that this is their annual Book Arts Show, where they feature 'books by artists'.
- We missed out on other good bookstore activities as we headed into the University of Chicago having spent an exhausting few hours in the wonderful Museum of Science and Industry. Unfortunately, but luckily for the children, bookstores were closed as it was Thanksgiving. I was interested to walk past the striking Regenstein Library, particularly in the context of current discussions about offsite storage, and Chicago's aspiration to maintain the physical integrity of its collections in one browsable location.
- I read that John D Rockefeller described the University of Chicago, in whose founding he was instrumental, as "the best investment I ever made". I returned to Columbus to find the current issue of The Atlantic carrying a feature on 'The 100 most influential Americans of all time'. John D Rockefeller is listed as eleven in that list.
- A sidebar in The Atlantic story lists Frank Lloyd Wright as one of America's most influential architects, and part of what made us walk over to the University of Chicago was the Robie House. The next day we landed in Oak Park, where he lived for 20 years, wandering around the streets gawking at his houses, looking at his home and studio, and visiting Unity Temple (the children enjoyed how the space unfolded in levels). This density and detail made him seem more real, less iconic, for someone so much written about and looked up to. Indeed, look at today's NYT where there is a review of yet another book about him.
- There is also a story about the much-heralded Sony reader. A less than positive review. On the website, I also notice a rather neutral review of Carl Hiaasen's new novel, which I sort of resent having to buy in hardback if I want to read it now (yes - I could also wait in line in the library). However, I was interested to see that they are releasing, and promoting, an audio version on CD at the same time. This shared valuable airport display space with the hardback at O'Hare. I wonder what proportion of people would listen to, rather than read, a novel like this? Mind you, is 'listening' to the audio version generally covered when you say 'I have read that'?
- Which brings us to King Tut and the exhibition at the Field Museum. We got the children audio, but went without ourselves. Usually resisting the lure of audio, I had tended to think that it added little to materials available for inspection. However, answering the children's questions showed that there was quite a bit of additional succinct commentary on the audio. Given this, I confess to feeling a little miffed that the audio was not more integral rather than an optional paid extra. It did make me wonder about the different experiences that folks had, with and without audio.
November 07, 2006
•
Categories:
GLAM
, Knowledge organization and representation
, Metadata
Günter has a nice entry on metadata and explores correspondences across the GLAM sectors - libraries, archives and museums. He notes a specific content type in each domain, bibliographic, archival, and material culture, respectively. Then he compares the metadata stack for each type of material, using a useful typology: data structure (e.g. MARC), data content (e.g. AACR2), data format (e.g. ISO 2709) and data exchange (OAI). Check it out for fuller enumeration of acronyms. Of course, one can add other acronyms along various dimensions ...
Reading the entry prompted several thoughts, largely from a library perspective: - Conceptual models. The library community has FRBR; the museum community has the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. Each attempts to identify and define concepts important to a domain and, importantly, the relationships between them: they aim to provide a model of the world of interest, which in turn provides a basis for design of metadata approaches. Of course, although I say 'world' there are things in the world which are not included. FRBR, for example, identifies some of the concepts and relationships of interest, and not others. Other models have been developed in more specific areas. A couple which are influenced by FRBR are Michael Heaney's work on collections, and, more recently, Andy Powell and Julie Allinson's work on the model underlying the E-prints application profile.
This work uses a combination of FRBR and the DCMI Abstract Model to create a description set for an eprint that is much richer than the traditional flat descriptions normally associated with Dublin Core. The intention is to capture some of the relationships between works, expressions, manifestations, copies and agents. [eFoundations: DC-2006 Special session - ePrints Application Profile] INDECS and the work built on it is in a similar space in the rights world. - Abstract model. The Dublin Core Abstract Model is a data model, whose purpose " is to provide a reference model against which particular DC encoding guidelines can be compared, in order to facilitate better mappings and translations between different syntaxes". More broadly, its supporters see it as having application beyond DC, potentially providing a consistent framework for how one groups properties about resources. In a way, it shifts emphasis from particular fixed 'data structures' in the typology above towards constructs like application profiles.
- The data structures mentioned by Günter, and other data structures, will typically designate some elements whose values are taken from controlled lists or vocabularies. We are used to thinking about controlled vocabularies for people (e.g. authority files), places (e.g. gazeteers) and things (e.g. subject schemes like LCSH, MESH, and so on). This is clearly an area of strong shared interest for libraries, archives and museums even if approaches have diverged. There are other controlled lists. For example, Thom talks about MARC relator terms and codes, where the redundancy he discusses would seem to limit the usefulness of the controlled approach. This is a pity, as relationships between entities are probably among the most useful things that we can record about them especially as we try to improve navigation, clustering and retrieval in large bibliographic systems. We have lists for languages or countries and so on. Onix has codelists; indeed its approach is to 'control' a large part of the data. An advantage of control is predictability, simplifying design and processing. A more permissive or discretionary approach may appear attractive to some, but ultimately may make data less useful and applications harder to build.
- In the library community, the ISO2709/MARC/AACR stack is in widespread use but is not universal.
- Although they are intricately connected, the data structure (MARC), the data content structure (AACR/RDA), and the conceptual model (FRBR), are managed through different structures and on different schedules. One might argue that while they are conceptually distinct; in practice they are closely linked and mutually interdependent.
- At the data structure level, a library may have some interest in MARC, various flavors of Dublin Core, MODS, EAD, and potentially IEEE LOM and Onix. Given the variety of levels at which this data can diverge, issues of transformation are complex.
One could go on. Does this all seem a little too complex in our fast moving world?
I hope that the Advisory Committee on the Future of Bibliographic Control, established by the Library of Congress, considers some of these issues. (Disclosure: I am at at-large representative on the Committee.)
Note: I have benefited from some discussion with colleagues on these matters and am certainly interested in more general views about the 'future of bibliographic control'.
Related entry:
October 19, 2006
•
Categories:
Digital asset management
, GLAM
, Libraries - organization and services
, ebooks and other e-resources
Collections of personal papers are important areas of interest for libraries and archives, and for the scholars and students that use them. In the last few weeks, several examples of digital - or digitized - personal papers have come over my horizon:
Cambridge University has just launched The complete works of Charles Darwin online, a project which aims to be completed in 2009. This site currently contains more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publications and handwritten manuscripts. There is also the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest manuscript catalogue ever assembled. More than 150 ancillary texts are also included, ranging from secondary reference works to contemporary reviews, obituaries, published descriptions of Darwin's Beagle specimens and important related works for understanding Darwin's context. [The complete work of Charles Darwin] This has generated some media attention in the UK. "It is astonishing to see the notebook that Darwin had in his pocket as he walked around the Galapagos - the scribbled notes that he took as he clambered over the lava," said Randal Keynes, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. [BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Charles Darwin's works go online] Work is underway to create the Desmond Tutu archive: Over the next five years, world-leading computer experts from King's will collaborate with the Universities of Western Cape and Witwatersrand to assemble, catalogue and digitise thousands of documents, film materials, videos, audios, photos and even personal letters into The Desmond Tutu Digital Archive, to be accessed around the world as a free on-line internet resource. The project constitutes the most comprehensive digitisation of a personal archive in the world. [About King's College London : News and What's On : King's College London] And according to the Sunday TImes, "The National Library of Scotland is to create an archive of the blogs, journals and e-mails of leading Scots, which curators claim are the manuscripts of the 21st century". The websites and blogs of leading cultural figures, including writers such as JK Rowling and Alasdair Gray, will become prime exhibits. [National Library to store blogs - Sunday Times - Times Online] And finally, the British Library notes its support of a conference discussing how to secure archives of UK writes for the nation. The cultural benefits of retaining the archives of pre-eminent UK authors within the UK for research, educational and creative use are significant and wide-reaching. As well as national collections, regional and university libraries collect papers with local connections and international reputations. The acquisition of significant modern literary papers enhances the reputation of collecting institutions throughout the UK, raises their profile worldwide, and in turn encourages new writing as the nation is seen to value its writers. [Save our written heritage: Making UK writers archives available to future generations] Now, although it is not stated, one assumes that much of this resource may be available on a flash drive rather than in a box or cabinet.
I note these examples because I have recently come across them; of course there are many others and it will become routine to accept papers in digital form. What is not yet routine though is the processing and management apparatus for such papers, especially as our notion of 'papers' extends to include blogs, emails and other documents.
July 23, 2006
•
Categories:
GLAM
, User experience
I spent several hours at the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland earlier this week. It was very nicely done and I will come back to some more specific thoughts it prompted about evidence and exhibition, and shared interests between libraries, archives and museums.
Motivations for the exhibition include acknowledging the generosity of the Yeats' family, and encouraging use of the collection. On the former, here is the Economist: Yeats's son Michael, an Irish senator like his father, had been asked to open the exhibition as a way of honouring him as the person principally responsible for the riches of the archive. Although the Yeats estate still benefits from reproductions of the master's poetry, over a period of 45 years Mr Yeats has given most of his father's archive and his books to the National Library. “If they'd put the papers on the open market, they'd all be multi-millionaires,” says Catherine Fahy, one of the curators. [Irish letters | Word made flesh | Economist.com]
On the latter, now that I am back at home, I was curious to explore the exhibition's web presence. It is really only a high-level pointer to topics. It is interesting that the impact of this major investment of effort and thought is limited in this way.
June 09, 2006
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, GLAM
, General - distributed environments
, Metadata
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
A colleague drew my attention to an advert for a Bioinformatics Curator at the University of Manchester, which interestingly touched on several different issues that have been on my horizon recently. Here is an excerpt from the ad: We have an opportunity within the highly successful myGrid project for a bioinformatics curator. myGrid provides a set of tools for bioinformaticians that supports their research by providing a personalised workbench to describe, store and analyse in silico experiments. myGrid currently has around 3000 web services and this number is increasing rapidly. In order for our users to identify the services they need and discover how to use them in workflows, we need a bioinformatics curator to provide functional descriptions of the available services. The service descriptions will be used by several myGrid components; Feta semantic discovery, a service registry and the metadata/provenance store; and will be a fundamental part of the myGrid offering. The curator will also be responsible for cataloguing and describing our growing corpus of workflows to allow re-use and repurposing. [The University of Manchester: Bioinformatics Curator. jobs.ac.uk Reference: EPS/188/06] So, three things: - E-research. The ways in which the practice of science is changing (and this ad gives an example) calls for research and learning support services to change or emerge in response. Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see how such support gets configured, at what levels (department/institution/discipline/national), and what services may be expected from libraries. I was at a CENDI meeting at the National Agricultural Library last week, where Cliff Lynch was talking, among other things, about issues of data curation in this context.
- Registries. I like to think of metadata as data which relieves a user (a person or an application) of having to have full advance knowledge of the existence, characteristics, or behaviors of resources within a particular framework. In this sense, metadata provides 'intelligence' which supports more efficient operations on resources. Library systems have typically supported operations such as discovery, selection, acquisition, management and circulation of information objects such as books and journals. As more activities move onto the network - again, look at the example in the advert above - so more resources need to be managed and to interact with each other in automated ways. Examples of resources are information objects (of many types, compound and simple, metadata and content), collections, services, institutions, instruments, policies, and so on. Examples of operations are discovery, execution, preservation, purchase, reformatting, embedding, analysis, extraction of components, and so on. To facilitate smooth operation we need more 'intelligence' in the system, more metadata which reduces the burden of interaction. This is one reason that we have seen growing interest in registries, services which manage metadata about resources in the system. So, the example above talks about a service registry, where data about available services is managed. In this environment, users will want to discover and use appropriate services. It is also interesting to see the requirement to describe workflows to support use.
- Curation and information management. jobs.ac.uk is a central jobs site for the UK academic community. One of the interesting things that it has to do is to categorize jobs in various ways for presentation. Currently, it has an 'information management' category. And in that category it has 'curatorial studies', 'information science', 'librarianship' and 'other'. 'Curatorial studies' is a new addition. At the moment (and of course this will change) this section includes ads for a 'curator of topography' at the British Li
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