tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-122537632024-03-07T22:10:11.909-06:00<libraryland><i>Travels into Several Remote Digital Realms of the World</i>
PART I: A Voyage to LibrarylandRichard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1152042120448503392006-07-04T14:29:00.000-05:002006-08-11T16:32:41.293-05:00Inherent ViceIt's Independence Day here in the States and I'm taking this opportunity to declare my independence from Blogger with a new blog: <a href="http://www.inherentvice.net">Inherent Vice</a>. Hop on over to find out what will be happening there.<br /><br />This will the last post to libraryLand, except for the occasional reminder that I've moved. Thanks to all of you who have been following this for the last year, I hope you continue to participate in the conversation in its new location. <br /><br />If you're reading this via RSS, you can find the new feed <a href="http://www.inherentvice.net/?feed=rss2">here</a>.<br /><br /><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/blogs" rel="tag">blogs</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/inherent+vice" rel="tag">inherent vice</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1150349397596575402006-06-14T23:49:00.000-05:002006-06-15T00:29:57.616-05:00So a Righteous Man is Known By His WorksIt has been a busy few weeks as I've been retooling for the summer here in Champaign. I won't be taking any classes, but will be working various positions forty hours a week. <br /><br />We had another great Metadata Roundtable today, where we continued the discussion of my paper for Topics in Knowledge Representation on Folio Metaphysics. Essentially I decided afterwards that the paper itself is merde (pardon my French), but that's all good. There are several papers buried in the mess and tonight I set off and running exploring where I might go with it. I will be submitting a proposal for next year's <a href="http://www.vraweb.org">VRA</a> conference about the whole-part relationships of "works" as they are represented in VRACore and related things. <br /><br />I'm now hip-deep into <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/">OWL</a> and <a href="http://protege.stanford.edu/">Protege</a> having completed a few tutorials. OWL seemed a little scary before, but the <span style="font-style:italic;">ah-ha</span> moment came when I realized its exactly what we've been talking about all semester, including many of the formalisms I was trying to write about. At least I feel like I've got Tib by her tail and am feeling motivated to see where this takes me. <br /><br />Now, back to Ontology Development 101....<br /><br /><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/OWL" rel="tag">OWL</a>null<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Protege" rel="tag">Protege</a>null<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/VRACore" rel="tag">VRACore</a>null<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Metadata" rel="tag">Metadata</a>null<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Ontology" rel="tag">Ontology</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1148013072909894672006-05-18T21:05:00.000-05:002006-05-18T23:31:12.993-05:00Master MasterThis weekend I earned my second Master's degree, this one in Library and Information Science. I came across <a href="http://www.stewdio.org/jed/"><span style="font-style:italic;">Beautiful Ground</span></a> today and it made me think about what a long strange trip it's been to get here. I didn't get to stand up and do my Academy Award speech, so here it goes.<br /><br />Thanks to Ms. Tate, my 5th Grade teacher, for encouraging me to attend computer camp where I learned BASIC on a TRS-80.<br /><br />Thanks to my parents, I could fill several blogs with the support they've given, but I've definitely earned back every cent they spent on my very own TRS-80.<br /><br />Thanks to to Pat Stewart who taught me lots about the Apple ][ when I started working at my public library at the tender age of 15, making me the youngest digital librarian on the block at the time (OK, so I was just a lowly page then...) <br /><br />Thanks to all my instructors and professors over the years. You, big guy. I can't remember your name, but I've finally found a use for all the symbolic logic you taught me. Jackson Speilvogel gave me my first shot at teaching and at looking at problems in new and interesting ways. Carl Mitchum introduced me to the idea that technology was socially shaped (and shapable). Thanks to Lee Stout for teaching me about archives and spending all that time finding juicy bits for my thesis. Thanks to <a href="http://materialculture.udel.edu/people/faculty/garrison/garrison-ritchie.html">J. Ritchie Garrison</a> for giving me the opportunity to start building online museum exhibits (P.S. I think Ritchie and <a href="http://roytennant.com/roy1.jpg">Roy Tennant </a> were separated at birth... ).<br /><br />To Suji Gupta, who made me the SILS tech guinea pig, thanks! And thanks to Lou Rossignol for giving me a long leash to play with dBase III. <br /><br />Thanks to Barbara Benson for letting me play a critical role in the development of interactive kiosks for <a href="http://www.hsd.org/DD_main.htm"> Distinctively Delaware</a>. All those late nights scanning really paid off. <br /><br />The folks at <a hef="http://www.hsp.org">HSP</a> turned me into a one man tech support department which has proven extremely useful in getting myself out of jams and rescuing fellow panelists.<br /><br />A special thanks to Liz Bishoff and Nancy Allen at <a href="http://www.cdpheritage.org">CDP</a>. Thanks for your stories of baby librarians, your leadership and teaching me how to pull this all together. Unfortunately you overdid the whole "you need a library degree" thing, now I'm sticking around for a PhD in the stuff. <br /><br />Thanks to the whole <a href="http://www.mcn.edu">MCN</a> crew. I am always humbled by being part of such a great organization with such a long history of leadership in museum technology. <br /><br />Thanks for the encouragement of all the faculty here at GSLIS. I want to know what you put in the water. Really. I'd say more, but it's policy here to not comment on ongoing investigations.<br /><br />Whew...the music is coming up and I haven't even gotten to friends, drinking partners, acquaintances, or strangers in the night yet. Thanks to all of you! <br /><br /><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/graduation" rel="tag">graduation</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1147192636140584782006-05-09T11:31:00.000-05:002006-05-09T11:37:16.153-05:00w00t! RBMS PreconferenceI've been awarded a scholarship to attend the ALA <a href="http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/rbms2006/">Rare Books and Manuscript Preconference</a>, August 20-23 in Austin, TX.<br /><br />Congratulations to all the other scholarship <a href="http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/rbms2006/scholarships">winners</a>! Looking forward to meeting all y'all in Austin.<br /><br />If you're coming to Austin or are an Austin-ite, give me a shout. I'm looking for recommendations for sites to see and music to hear.<div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/RBMS" rel="tag">RBMS</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conference" rel="tag">conference</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/libraries" rel="tag">libraries</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/austin" rel="tag">austin</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1146503634711685582006-05-01T11:52:00.000-05:002006-05-01T12:13:54.730-05:00End of Semester UpdateWith the launch of <a href="http://www.musematic.net">Musematic</a> I can get back to writing about my ongoing adventures as an LIS student. There's only a few more days left in the semester and I'm busy wrapping up final projects.<br /><br />This morning I finished our group report that analyzed metadata workflows at our local public broadcasting station, <a href="http://www.will.uiuc.edu">WILL</a>. The <a href="http://www.pbcore.org">PBCore</a> working group just released a draft schema that seems like it will be well suited to both WILL's capabilities and the need to record information specific to the audio-visual content they create. But like other standards based on <a href="http://www.dublincore.org">Dublin Core</a>, it's only part of the picture. I'm actually finding WILL's metadata environment not all that different than some of the museums I've worked with - distributed metadata creation by curators/producers largely driven by their own needs, systems designed to do one thing well being leveraged to do something totally different. They have a good foundation to start with, and with a little guidance and planning can make significant improvements in their current workflows. <br /><br />I've created a second prototype for a virtual gallery in Second Life based on Roman collections at the <a href="http:/www.spurlock.uiuc.edu">Spurlock Museum's</a> and with the help of David MacCaullay's <span style="font-style:italic;">City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction.</span> I decided to pass on some of the more complex scripting required to create a more interactive gallery for the moment. Just like building a real exhibit, building in a virtual world also takes careful planning and development of a good script. It was outside the scope of the assignment to go that far, but I did find a good example in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Pot Healer Adventure.</span> PHA is a <span style="font-style:italic;">Myst</span>-like puzzle game built inside of SL that could be a model for a museum artifact based adventure. I haven't been able to find out too much about its development, but it uses some fairly complex scripting that would require a good programmer (or more time than I had to become a good Lindenscripter) to pull it off. But it demonstrates that it is possible to do in SL. I also started a "Museums in Second Life" group, if you're a SL citizen you can look it up under Find->Groups. <br /><br />Stay tuned for the update on my Knowledge Representation paper that explores part-whole relationships in museum artifact descriptions. <div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/LIS" rel="tag">LIS</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/PBCore" rel="tag">PBCore</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/metadata" rel="tag">metadata</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/museums" rel="tag">museums</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Second+Life+" rel="tag">Second Life </a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1145286151645154862006-04-17T09:06:00.000-05:002006-04-17T10:54:36.143-05:00MusematicAt the November <a href="http:/www.mcn.edu">Museum Computer Network</a> conference, several of us were discussing how few museum related blogs we were able to find. At the board meeting we resolved to help correct this dirth of museum blogging by creating one focused on museum technology issues. This proved to be a great opportunity to collaborate with the American Association of Museums <a href="http://www.mediaandtechnology.org">Media and Technology Committee</a>. Over the past few months a group from both organizations has been working to get the blog off the ground. <br /><br />Now, without further adieu, MCN and AAM M&T are pleased to announce the birth of (drumroll please!): <br /><br /><blockquote><br /><a href="http://www.musematic.net">Musematic</a><br/> <br />At Museumatic you will find rants and raves on the latest trends in the world of museum informatics and technology. An intrepid cast of experts from the Museum Computer Network and AAM's Media & Technology Committee share their insights, observations and tricks of the trade.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Enjoy!Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1142967498806802842006-03-21T11:39:00.000-06:002006-03-21T12:58:18.846-06:00IMLS Status of Technology and Digitization Report<a href="http://www.imls.gov/publications/TechDig05/index.htm">IMLS Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation's Museums and Libraries</a><br /><br />IMLS has released the results of its 2004 survey that followed-up on an earlier report in 2001. The new report shows that museums and libraries continue to increase their use of computing technologies to achieve their missions. Just as in 2001, libraries continue to lead the way in adopting technologies to achieve their goals. <br /><br />I miss the side-by-side comparison charts of key finds from the <a href=http://www.imls.gov/publications/TechDig02/index.htm>2001 survey</a>. IMLS may have good reasons for this, but I'm of the opinion that a graph is worth a thousand words. I'd also be interested in taking the data and slicing it in different ways, e.g. an across-the-board comparison of small museums and public libraries, since they are often serving the same communities. <br /><br />One of the most surprising - yet not so surprising - key findings is that many of the institutions who are engaging in digitization have no policies in place to guide their work. Nor do many of these institutions conduct evaluations of the work that they do. This is un/surprising because a) staff time for digitization remains one of the biggest challenges b) a lack of staff time to do digitization suggests a lack of time to do planning c) a lack of planning means making ad-hoc decisions or decisions that are not strategic and do not reinforce each other, leading to a lack of staff time for digitization..planning...and the cycle starts all over again. <br /><br />The lack of policies, best practices and quality guidelines will impact us when we reach the digital preservation hurdle. It will be interesting to see how much of a hindrance this becomes in the next decade. In some ways we've already seen it from the creation of automated museum catalogs - the difficulties and expense of migrating to new systems, the difficulty in preparing records for public access via the Internet, etc. can be traced back to a similar needs (lack of time, lack of staff, lack of money, lack of policies) over the last 10-15 years. The disconnect between goals and activities seems pretty striking. The primary goal listed among museums (survey says...48%) was to "preserve materials of importance or value," yet this goal appears to be undermined by the lack of policies governing digitization standards, quality control, plans for migration, etc. <br /><br />As a former historian, I'm still intrigued about how we've arrived at these results. What are the choices we've made along the way that produce the numbers we see. Is there anything we can learn from those choices that will influence our future direction? <br /><br /><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/museums+libraries+digitization+technology+survey+research" rel="tag">museums libraries digitization technology survey research</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1140491379647327162006-02-20T20:24:00.000-06:002006-02-20T21:09:39.660-06:00The aura of ownership<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.smithsonianlegacies.si.edu/photos/77.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px;" src="http://www.smithsonianlegacies.si.edu/photos/77.jpg" border="0" alt="Martha Washington Gown (1780)" /></a><br />Through the synergies between my Museum Informatics and Metadata courses I've had the chance to look over several metadata standards such as <a href="http://vraweb.org/vracore3.htm"> VRA Core</a> and the soon-to-appear <a href="http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/cdwa/cdwalite/index.html">CDWA Lite schema</a>. <br /><br />While the VRA and the Getty should be congratulated on their efforts, I do see a problem with extending these schemas beyond the art community and into general historical museums. Each of these schemas allow objects to be identified by their creators, but I haven't seen a schema that allows one to identify the "owner" of an artifact. Often artifacts in historical collections are not significant by themselves, but from the aura they attain because a historical figure owned them. <br />There is some mention of "ownership" in the <a href="http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/index.html">CiDOC CRM</a>, however it seems aimed at tracking legal ownership. I suppose one could consider the transfer of an object from the creator to the "owner" a legal transer does take place. Chaining this all the way to the present would allow scholars using the resource to see an artifacts provenance. <br /><br />One of our examples was this <a href="http://www.smithsonianlegacies.si.edu/objectdescription.cfm?ID=77">gown</a> owned by Martha Washington. While it may be a good exemplar of 18th Century costume, it's significance is closely tied to its owner. This information probably gets dumped into descriptions rather than being tagged seperately. <br /><br />A quick scan of <a href="http://vraweb.org/ccoweb/index.html">Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO)</a> doesn't seem to offer any suggestions on the best way to include this type of information in a record. <br /><br />Another challenge to providing a common metadata format for museums as a whole. <br /><br />I spent the weekend at a <a href="http://www.tei-c.org">Text Encoding Initative (TEI)</a> workshop. I'm wondering if the modular nature of TEI might also be useful to adopt for cultural heritage information. Each community who uses TEI has the ability to create customizations for their type of markup, but it's all built on a common chassis. I can already see the interoperability issues present in this approach, but at least it constrains things from being too hetrogenous. <br /><br />(A quick aside - if you ever have a chance to attend a TEI workshop given by Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman I'd strongly recommend it. They are excellent and entertaining presenters!)Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1140209139971686312006-02-17T14:31:00.000-06:002006-02-17T14:45:39.983-06:00Policing Porn Is Not Part of Job DescriptionIn the library community there's often talk about the Patriot Act and its conflicts with their core values of free access to information. While the arguments about the 'decency' of past museum exhibits aren’t directly related to Homeland Security, you have to wonder if the porno cops will be showing up next at the National Gallery of Art. <br /><br />There are issues however related to the broader idea of making cultural heritage available. I understand that the USGS has removed locations of archeological sites from new maps in order to protect them. What are our responsibilities if we digitize older materials that reveal these locations and might be misused by looters, black marketeers, etc. What if we receive a cease and desist order from Homeland Security because those historic photos of a dam being built could be a security threat? Do we have a firm enough grasp on what <span style="font-style:italic;">our</span> values are to respond appropriately?<br /><br /><br /><br />Via <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/17/county_homeland_secu.html">BoingBoing</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">County Homeland Security Officers Try To Police Porn, Fail</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Mo "Here's a story in today's Washington Post about two Montgomery County Homeland Security officers who try to police porn at a public library. After one patron is targeted and asked to step outside, the librarian resists. The police are called and the only ones ushered outside are the failed porn cops. I hope the librarian gets the librarian-of-the-month award for standing up for free speech and privacy."<br /><br /> Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.<br /><br /> The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.<br /><br />It's sad to see what happens when you give some people a tin badge and a cap. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021602066.html?sub=AR">Link</a></span>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1139853831253097072006-02-13T11:26:00.000-06:002006-02-13T12:04:27.673-06:00Can images be metadata?I spent some time last week reviewing various metadata formats for the Metadata in Theory and Practice course. It occured to me that discussions about metadata priveledge text over other ways we might provide metadata for cultural heritage artifacts. <br /><br />Often museums create records that describe physical artifacts and attach an identification image to those records. In some ways this ID image is serving as a form of visual description, just as the textual metadata does. <br /><br />Some of this bias may be due to the fact that the tools we have for analyzing images do not have a sufficient level of visual literacy to be able to extract meaning from the images. Image formats also differ from text, because they are essentially a long uninterrupted string of bits. In "Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing," Coombs, et al. mention ancient practices of <i>scriptio continua</i> in which there is no whitespace in the text, just a continuous string of characters. In essence, this is what we have for images today, proably even less so since the right reader can make pretty good guesses about what the words are in a <i>scriptio continua</i>. <br /><br />For text we moved from presentational markup to descriptive markup to solve some of the problems in encoding meaning in texts. I'm now wondering what would a similar system look like for creating meaning out of the undifferentiated bits in an image. Web services like Flickr are allowing users to crudely "tag" portions of an image with text (I assume using outside textual metadata). I'm not familiar enough with the bits under the hood for common image formats to tell whether it would ever be possible to markup portions of the image the way one does with text. Medical and astronomic imaging might provide some hints, but generally they start with a set of data that gets represented visually. <br /><br />Within METS one can specify an <area> of a visual image, but I need to look more closely about how the coordinates of the area are represented. Could it be possible to export a vector map from Photoshop into a METS record that would allow me to associate textual metadata with just a portion of an image? <br /><br />Imaged-based searching also seems like an area to explore, although like simple text indexing that matches character strings, it appears focused on colors and shapes - not the "meaning" of those color and shapes. Some form of image markup (possibly still relying on text) could serve the same purpose that descriptive markup provides for literary texts. Importanly image markup could provide the contexts that make shapes and colors meaningful.<br /><br />While I haven't seen anything clearly state this, there do seem to be assumptions in practice that suggest that images <i>are</i> metadata in certain contexts. How can we refine and explicitly state this practice? <br /><br />References:<br />"Markup Systems and The Future of Scholarly Text Processing." Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 30, no. 11 James H. Coombs, Allen Renear, and Steven J. DeRose (1987). <br /><br /><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/metadata+images+text+markup" rel="tag">metadata images text markup</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1139539994561003272006-02-09T20:47:00.000-06:002006-02-09T20:53:14.593-06:00MCN 2006 Proposal DeadlineThe proposal deadline for the MCN 2006 Conference is coming up February 16, 2006. Proposal forms are available online at <a href="http://www.mcn.edu/conferences/">MCN</a>. <br /><br />I'm currently working on a panel proposal for museums integrating game technologies into their practices. If you or your museum has something interesting to show please feel free to contact me in the next week.<br /><br />Also while you're there, check out the great new MCN website.<br /><br /><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/MCN+museums+conferences+games" rel="tag">MCN museums conferences games</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1137729968870897002006-01-19T22:05:00.000-06:002006-01-19T22:06:08.883-06:00Spelling with FlickrIt's amazing how many creative things are coming out of social web services like Flickr. The little tool below sort of does a reverse OCR to find images that spell what you want. How can we capture this creativity in our digital library/museum projects?<br /><br /><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/95229107@N00/45921785/' id='fs_1' title='L'><img alt='L' border='0' src='http://photos27.flickr.com/45921785_1ce6313c04_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/36797000/' id='fs_2' title='i'><img alt='i' border='0' src='http://photos33.flickr.com/36797000_11f457e09d_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/8567294/' id='fs_3' title='b'><img alt='b' border='0' src='http://photos5.flickr.com/8567294_803cd256b7_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/57484672/' id='fs_4' title='R'><img alt='R' border='0' src='http://photos24.flickr.com/57484672_d63951535f_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/55643567/' id='fs_5' title='A'><img alt='A' border='0' src='http://photos24.flickr.com/55643567_924dabce89_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/38634939@N00/44313496/' id='fs_6' title='Nostalgiques Epoxy letter R'><img alt='Nostalgiques Epoxy letter R' border='0' src='http://photos29.flickr.com/44313496_4b5c58bbb2_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/97245938@N00/45178184/' id='fs_7' title='Yy'><img alt='Yy' border='0' src='http://photos24.flickr.com/45178184_5935d5a6c9_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/34817627804@N01/3569127/' id='fs_8' title='L'><img alt='L' border='0' src='http://photos3.flickr.com/3569127_8385fb74ba_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/29090889/' id='fs_9' title='A'><img alt='A' border='0' src='http://photos21.flickr.com/29090889_ff733b4f3e_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00/31767061/' id='fs_10' title='N'><img alt='N' border='0' src='http://photos23.flickr.com/31767061_fc3a124a89_t.jpg' /></a><a href='http://flickr.com/photos/97245938@N00/45177118/' id='fs_11' title='Dd'><img alt='Dd' border='0' src='http://photos27.flickr.com/45177118_c86b1ac913_t.jpg' /></a><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Flickr" rel="tag">Flickr</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tools" rel="tag">tools</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/fun" rel="tag">fun</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1137694436288346472006-01-19T11:56:00.000-06:002006-01-19T12:14:41.873-06:00Digitize Everything BlogEarlier I mentioned DigiWik, a wiki for all things digitization. Now it's patron, Michael Yunkin has started his own blog, <i><a href="http://www.digiwik.org/digitize-everything/">Digitize Everything</a></i> (<a href="http://www.digiwik.org/digitize-everything/">RSS feed</a>). Michael makes it clear that the blog is about his own work, whereas DigiWik is a owned by its community of users. <br /><br /><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/digitization" rel="tag">digitization, </a> <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/blogs" rel="tag">blogs</a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1137624327674156502006-01-18T16:24:00.000-06:002006-01-18T16:45:27.706-06:00Forecast: Mostly Cloudy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://static.flickr.com/26/88344351_933e32c8b8_o.gif"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://static.flickr.com/26/88344351_933e32c8b8_o.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />The current issue of <a href="http://www.dlib.org">D-Lib Magazine</a> includes <a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html"><i>Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?</i></a>. I had just been playing around earlier this week with <a href="http://www.tagcloud.com">Tag Cloud</a> (which BTW, doesn't seem to be working for the FeedBurner URL I submitted). The article included a link to <a href="http://kevan.org/extispicious">extisp.icio.us</a> which I used to generate the <a href="http://kevan.org/extispicious.cgi?name=rjurban">cloud</a> above. I've been in love with this kind of visualization ever since learning about <a href="http://www.textarc.org/">TextArc</a> last spring. <br /><br />I'd love to get hold of some collections management data to see what this kind of visualization could tell us about a collection. Extisp.icio.us also runs an image search, which wasn't quite as interesting as the tag cloud. But if tags could be tied to images in a collection db it could be interesting - or for example if a similar search worked on aggregated <a href="http://www.openarchives.org">OAI</a> records.Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1137553307455032842006-01-17T21:00:00.000-06:002006-01-17T21:02:00.550-06:00Hurricane Digital Memory BankThe folks at the <a herf="http://chnm.gmu.edu">Center for History and New Media</a> launched a new prjoject this week in order to capture first-hand accounts, images, e-mails, audio, etc. related to recent hurricane disasters.<br /><br />With so many people creating digital images or relying on digital media for correspondance its all at risk of being lost, especially since most of us haven't implementted fail-safe digital preservaion strategies at home. CHNM's earlier <a href="http:/www.911digitalarchive.org">9/11 Digital Archive</a> has already proven invaluable as a collection of collective memory. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.hurricanearchive.org ">The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank</a> already has a growing collection of materials, some contributed by users and others contributed through partnerships with museums and media organizations. The site also uses <a href="http://maps.google.com">Google Maps</a> to geolocate submissions. <br /><br />I'm continually impressed by CHNM's can-do attitude and ability to just get stuff done. I wish them the best of luck in this new endeavor. <br /><br /><div class="tag_list">Tags: <span class="tags"><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/digital+preservation+history+new+media+" rel="tag">digital+preservation history new+media </a></span></div>Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1137170718442917372006-01-13T10:30:00.000-06:002006-01-13T10:45:18.456-06:00Happy New Year!Hi Everyone and Happy New Year!<br /><br />Apologies for the long lag since the last posting. I honestly had grand plans to spend part of my holiday break spiffy-ing things up here, but a bad case of the flu ate up the timeslots I had available after family commitments.<br /><br />I'm just back from the <a href="http://digitalpreservation.gov">NDIIPP</a> partners meeting and getting ready to start the new semester.<br /><br />On deck for this spring:<br /><br />Storytelling - What does this have to do with digital stuff? Nothing! or at least very little on the surface. But much of what we do, from grant writing to confernece presentations is all about telling the story of our work (not to mention blogging!). This has come as a highly recommended course here at GSLIS, and I'm really excited to have something a little different on my plate. <br /><br />Museum Informatics - This course was one of the main reasons I decided to come to UIUC, and I'm glad it's being offered before I leave. It's been gathering dust since Paul Marty left for Florida. This will be another course that continues to evolve through input of students during the semester. I'm looking forward to contributing my experience and also having the oppotunity to do some more research in the area.<br /><br />Metadata in Theory and Practice - After last semesters exploration of traditional lirbary cataloging I'm looking forward to getting back to metadata. Somehow I feel more comfortable working in this area rather than trying to navigate through AACR2 rules. I'm glad they are there, and rules are still critical for metadata. I'd rather be manipulatinng the rules that others have applied. More opportunities to flex my XML muscles and an opportunity to work with the father of METs, Jerry McDonough.<br /><br />Knowledge Representation - Will be a small seminar exploring the semantics and logic of XML markup and document structures. This will probably be the most challenging class this semester. I've been encouraged to drag out my symbolic logic textbook from 1991. This will add a nice theoretical dimension to the other practical work I'll be doing this semester. <br /><br />I will be continuing as a GA on the UIUC NDIIPP project. We've gotten over some of the initial hurdles of setting up DSpace, Fedora, etc. and will be getting down to serious evaluation of the various repositories.Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1133843117277527262005-12-05T22:09:00.000-06:002005-12-05T22:25:17.290-06:00del.icio.us and Social TaggingIn the weeks since I've been back from MCN I kept coming back to the <a href="http://www.steve.museum">STEVE</a> session where I was reminded about <a href="http://del.icio.us">del.icio.us</a>. I'm now bouncing between my desktop PC, the PC at work and my iBook - keeping track of bookmarks was just getting silly. I've started migrating <a href="http://del.icio.us/rjurban">things I'm currently using</a> (or will be in the near future) to del.icio.us entries. <br /><br />In the process I stumbled across <a href="http://www.citeulike.org">citeUlike.org</a> which may solve my other problem - keeping track of resources used in research. The advantage of citeUlike over del.icio.us is that it allows you to export entries as bibTex entries. Since I'm already using <a href="http://jabref.sourceforge.net/">JabRef</a> to manage my citations, this sould make life a lot easier. Find it on the web, a quick click to tag it - <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yoink">yoink</a> off the net into JabRef and into a bibliography. <br /><br />Now, if I can just get that data jack installed in my spinal column...Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1133799236119514732005-12-05T10:05:00.000-06:002005-12-05T10:13:56.133-06:00CFP: MCN 2006 Access to Assets: Return on InvestmentPlease share this with friends and colleagues!<br /><br />Call for Proposals<br /><br />34th Museum Computer Network Conference<br />Access to Assets: Return on Investment<br />November 8-11, 2006<br />Pasadena, CA<br /><br />Proposal Deadline: February 16, 2006<br />Proposal Submission Forms: <a href="http://www.mcn.edu/mcn2006/proposals/">http://www.mcn.edu/mcn2006/proposals/</a><br /><br />At MCN 2006, we will explore ways we've found to demonstrate useful, <br />successful methods for accessing technology; we'll share our <br />challenges and triumphs as we network together to creatively and <br />effectively improve our bottom lines. We'll discuss the many ways <br />we've found to maximize the compelling value of our technology <br />collateral, keeping in mind that the bottom line is not always <br />financial, sometimes it's intellectual, and sometimes, it's just for <br />the greater good.<br /><br />Proposals will be accepted in one of the following three formats: <br />panels, workshops, or roundtables. Each session must have a <br />chairperson responsible for finding other speakers and coordinating <br />logistics. All chairs must be affiliated with an institutional member <br />of MCN or be an individual MCN member. Topics for the sessions should <br />fall into at least one of the categories listed on the proposal form. <br />All proposals for sessions and/or workshops must be submitted on the <br />Call for Proposals form. To obtain more specific information, visit <br />the MCN website, <a href="http://www.mcn.edu">http://www.mcn.edu</a>.Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1133451924530948812005-12-01T09:30:00.000-06:002005-12-01T09:53:22.530-06:00DigiWikMichael Yunkin at UNLV libraries has created a new wiki called DigiWik:<br /><br />http://www.digiwik.org<br />"Digiwik is designed to be a repository of digitization information for use by individuals, museums, libraries, researchers, and any other entities with digitization needs."<br /><br />"Who can post to DigiWik? Anyone knowledgeable about the subject matter."<br /><br />One of the things we strove for at <a href="http://www.cdpheritage.org">CDP</a> was making high level technical standards accessible to the LAM community. I'll be interested to see what sort of "voice" emerges from DigiWik.Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1133305663618979572005-11-29T17:05:00.000-06:002005-11-29T17:07:53.323-06:00Atom Feed AddedI added a link to the <a href=" http://libland.blogspot.com/atom.xml">Atom feed</a> for this blog. I'm looking forward to the winter break as there's lots of little maintanence things I'd like to do here. Namely get RSS feeds not supported by Blogger to work.Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1132860589266001822005-11-24T12:58:00.000-06:002005-11-24T13:37:39.616-06:00'Social' Networking using OAII've recently been conducting some research on "collections understanding" among humanities faculty. While a number of studies have been conducted on the information-seeking behavior of humanties scholars, many of these ignore the role that knowing about collections plays in their research activities. <br /><br />At a meeting yesterday I learned that in the <a href="http://www.openarchives.org">Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metdata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)</a> has the ability for repositories to indicate that they have "friends." From the OAI-PMH Implementation Guidelines, "friends" are "a recommended schema allowing a repository to list confederate repositories as a means to support automatic discovery of repositories by harvesters." Here at UIUC Tom Habing is mapping the connections specified in repositories that say they have "friends" (See the <a href="http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/searchform.asp">UIUC OAI Experimental Repository for graphs in various formats</a>). <br /><br />While the Implementation Guidelines suggest this is really about discovery of other repositories, I'm now wondering what it means for institutions and collections to have "friends." Does it mean they have some institutional/administrative connection? Can collections be friendly with other collections that have similar or related materials (e.g. I'm a archival manuscript collection who has a friend that has a museum collection of physical objects from my creator...). <br /><br />We can and do build some of these relationships by searching or clustering metadata with similar descriptions. But I can search <a href="http://www.friendster.com">Friendster</a> and find other people with similar interests as mine, it doesn't necessarily mean they are my friends. If someone is my friend, I can also indicate what kind of friend they are (family, social friends, work friends, "in a relationship" or my favorite "it's complicated" - and we all know about those kinds of collections!). The XSD for the friends schema has a place for "friends:type" but I don't see any suggested values for types. The friends tag is implemented by a data provider, I wonder how these institutions are deciding who their friends are (do they ask permisssion?, do people just point to repositories they think should be friends?) <br /><br />I hadn't really considered this when I was conducting my research, but from what I've learned, establishing these kinds of relationships could actually enable some of the "citation chaining" behavior that scholars engage in. And being able to specify what type of friend a collection/repository is could be useful. <br /><br />I'd be interested in hearing about any research going on about social networking of organizations or individuals that might offer some suggestions. I'll post any interesting examples of the use of "OAI" friends.Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1132607677719700942005-11-21T15:09:00.000-06:002005-11-21T15:14:42.716-06:00Museum Anthro in MindSeems like museum folks are starting to come out of the proverbial woodwork...or maybe recent discussions have people thinking. Anyway, here's today's latest museum blog:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.museumanthro.squarespace.com">Museum Anthro in Mind</a><br />www.museumanthro.squarespace.com <br /><br />What do museums offer?<br /><br />"Knowledge is now well understood as the commodity that museums offer." (Hooper-Greenhill 1992:2). If museums offer knowledge, it is important to know how this knowledge is approached and conveyed through exhibits.<br /><br />Anthropology finds itself in an interesting position in the museum world - it can be found in natural history, art, history, natural science, and other types of museums - it can be a hard subject to pinpoint.<br /><br />This blog seeks to understand the mentality to approaching anthropology in museums, and more specifically, the purpose and structure of ethnographic exhibits.<br /><br />Issues of the objects and how they are interpreted in museums are central to understanding how the public can best be reached. Forward-thinking is important also, as one considers how new media can be involved to make anthropological objects “come alive.”Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1132341969333294462005-11-18T13:25:00.000-06:002005-11-18T13:26:09.343-06:00Welcome to <libraryLand>Thanks to Günter for posting about <libraryland> in <a href="http://www.hangingtogether.org">hangingtogether</a>, a blog run by staff at <a href="http://www.rlg.org">RLG</a><br /><br />In his post he asks "why not museumland?" The answer is both simple and complex (and occasionally regetable..). <libraryland> was conceived as a record of my current stint as a student in the <a href="http://www.lis.uiuc.edu">Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign</a> and as a way to get my feet wet with blogging. <br /><br />At the <a href="http://www.cdpheritage.org">Collaborative Digitization Program</a> we often jokingly talked about the different communities we were trying to bring together as if they were different nation states. Things happened in libraryland, and museumland and archivesland. Each place had its own culture, values, languages, laws and governance. As a collaborative project I often felt like an emissary shuttling between these lands negotiating treaties for a cultural heritage “United Nations” of metadata, standards and best practices. <br /><br />When I decided to pursue a Masters in Library Science after working in both the museum and archives communities it felt a little like applying for citizenship. But I’m still an émigré, bringing with me the culture and experiences from my previous life. <libraryland> is a bit like the letters and postcards my ancestors sent back to folks at home in the “old country.” I hope it will be filled with the wonders and sites I’m seeing as I tour through the insides of the library community. I also hope, in the end, this tale will be like those of previous generations. That will tell of both assimilation and of infusing the culture and values of museumland into a richer, more diverse digital community. <br /><br />I’ll be posting more later about why decided to settle for a while in libraryland on the <a href=http://www.museumpro.org>Museumpro blog</a> Stay tuned!Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1131814921301770202005-11-12T10:44:00.000-06:002005-11-12T11:02:01.313-06:00MCN Young ProfessionalsAt MCN I participated in a roundtable discussion for "young professionals" to discuss some of the challenges they face. One of the reasons I'm in a library program is that there are no formal programs where museum professionals can learn about the application of technology. Sure some Museum Studies programs have begun introducing technology-based courses, but they still only scratch the surface compared to the depth of study in library land. <br /><br />At the roundtable we discussed both the day-to-day challenges of museum information professionals and some long term needs of better educating ourselves.<br /><br />To keep the discussion going, the chair has established the <a href="http://www.museumpro.org">Museum Professionals blog</a>. Stay tuned as I'll be contributing to the conversation there. <br /><br />It will be interesting to see where this goes. Many library programs are working to identify what's needed for digital library curriculm. When I've had the chance I've encouraged them to consider the needs of other cultural heritage professionals who are turning to LIS programs for education. We're already merging our collections in digital spaces, and a true convergence within digital library programs would be welcome. I still say that the cultural heritage community needs to come to this party with a clear articulation of our needs, traditions and values. If library programs are becoming more willing to embrace us, museum studies programs need to to likewise and offer more choices for teaching technology in museums.Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12253763.post-1131813880502184852005-11-12T10:21:00.000-06:002005-11-12T11:15:48.243-06:00Museum Computer Network ConferenceLast week I attended the <a href="http://www.mcn.edu">Museum Computer Network</a> conference in Boston. The focus of this years meeting was Digits Fugit! Preserving Knowledge into the Future and featued many sessions on the topic of digital preservation. If you haven't been to MCN I strongly recommend it, as these conferences just get better every year. A call for panels for 2006 should be available soon on the MCN website. <br /><br />Keeping to the theme our keynote speaker this year was Alexander Rose from the <a href="http://www.longnow.org">Long Now Foundation</a>. I had learned about Long Now a few years ago after reading about the <a href="http://www.rosettaproject.org/live">Rosetta Project</a>. <br /><br />Some might say their attempt to look ahead to the next 10,000 years is a bit silly. Rose spoke of both the Rosetta Project and the Long Clock project as icons for long-term thinking. Even though many of us are working on the challenges of digital preservations, they are at best a mid-term solution to the problems. As Rose commented, we are now in the digital dark ages. Only a small portion of what we create digitally will be available to future generations. In may cases it's already lost and with the contiued growth of digital appliances in everyday life (digital cameras, iPods, etc.) still more is at risk. <br /><br />When I was doing digitization training one of the questions that inevitable came up is where to store the large quantity of data that you produced. For larger institutions we're already moving away from static storage like CDs and DVDs. Rose discussed the idea that this isn't "storage" but "movage." Live data will continue to move and migrate to new devices and that static media is just sustainable or safe choice. <br /><br />One of the more intersting solutions that Rose spoke about was peer-to-peer archiving. Smaller organizations (say museums) do not always have the resources to host large data storage solutions. Using P2P technologies, Rose suggested using individual computers within a network as a distributed storage array. Some academic libraries are already using P2P in the form of the <a href="http://lockss.stanford.edu">LOCKSS</a> (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) project. A collaborative model like LOCKSS would seem an ideal solution for museums if they were able to embrace the idea of distributing their information across the community through P2P. But like many things, the technical problems are far easier to solve than the social/political inertia of the community thatWe a probably would prevent this from ever happening. <br /><br />A new project of Long Now is the <a href="http://www.formatexchange.org">File Format Exchange</a>. The Exchange provides access to utilites that allow digital preservations to migrate files from one format to another. The Exchange will be supported by the community who contributes new files, and also judges which of the file converters might work best. It fills a very immediate need while also encouraging long-term thinking. If you try to convert between proprietary formats, the Exchange will also suggest utilites that convert to open-source or open-standard formats that have a lower risk for long term preservation.<br /><br />So what does this mean for museums? Rose believes that this only strengthens our role as "memory organizations." With mountains of data, it will still be our responsibility to sort through the chaff in order to identify the things truly worth preserving to the fullest extent. Many LAM professionals have been reluctant to accept the presence of digital things as collection items. Recently we may have turned a corner as we all realize how much of this stuff will be gone in the future. We just don't know all we need to know in order to curate this in a professional manner. How we do this is still unclear, but it may be a task that we can't take on as individual institutions.Richard Urbanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09459069626374030794noreply@blogger.com0