LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Hi there, Armchair delegate here.

Sgt. Edward “Killer” Bachta and Pfc. Rob Stein have posted the slides from their MCN 2008 “Drupal Bootcamp” to Slideshare.net.

Drupal Bootcamp Mcn2008 View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: network computer)

Also check out Peter Fleck’s “RSS Primer” and “Why I Hate Facebook or What Social Network Should we Use Today”

RSS Primer View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mcn2008 blogs)

Why I hate Facebook (Or what social network shall we use today?) View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social_web social_network)

I’ll be keeping an eye to see if any more presentations show up. If you do add your presentation, please send it along to the MCN 2008 Slideshare group.

Another MCN over. I’m probably going to have to wait a day or two for things to sink in for me to figure out what I’ve learned. Sometimes it isn’t even the presentations themselves, it is the casual mentions by a listener, or the casual conversation in a hall. My own archive, for instance, has recently wound down a project involving oral histories in New Orleans. We’re ramping up a project about WWII. Our oral historian will be delighted to continue the conversation I began with the person from the WWII museum in New Orleans.
I gave a talk, one of whose elements was about the ways we are starting to use cloud computing. To my surprise, we are relatively out on the cutting edge in this regard. It’s been about 15 years since I discovered that getting the IT department to take control of my servers meant that they had to wear beepers, not me. Some time after that it sank in that for most businesses, there is no reason to host web servers locally, and many good reasons to host them on slices, or actual colo servers, maintained in faraway cities by people who worry about connectivity 24×7 for a living. The fact that our services now aren’t on a box in a cage to which we could, should we really want, travel to and touch doesn’t seem like a particularly large transition. Quite the contrary–the idea that I can add and provision additional servers (or ditch servers I no longer need) in minutes seems like an appealing extension of the idea. It’s like making the transition from having to wire every computer in the office to a specific tether connected to a specific node back on our network panel, to simply using wireless and being able to think of capacity in a simpler, more liquid fashion.

For our specific application, backing up to storage in a computer cloud run by Amazon, the magical moment came when I first discovered NetApps boxes and realized that I could separate data storage from the servers that had to use the data, forever ending the need to copy and maintain duplicate sets of data–often duplicate sets of much data–on many identical servers. In return for sharing our experiences, however, several people have mentioned the joint Fedora/DSpace project to create a cloud specifically for institutions like my own, DuraSpace (”…Space,” the new Mellon Foundation frontier…. Oops.). We’re ready to volunteer and see if this makes more sense than using a commercial provider like aws.amazon.com.

I was gratified to realize how many Drupal users there are in MCN. This open source content management system is being used to power a growing number of our website services. One of this year’s challenges will be to find ways to collaborate so that we can share specifics, and share brainstorming and problem-solving. I think I’m going to look very good back at home when I show of the dashboard module developed by Rob Stein’s team at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. If I can talk some of these MCN Drupal users to collaborate on interfaces to the Fedora Commons repository, we’ll be able to make our software development budget go much farther, much faster, and likely help mature some still-simple tools in ways that will solve problems for all of us.

One of the most exciting sessions was reviewing early Semantic Web work by an amazing team from the Met. For those new to the concept, the idea underpinning the Semantic web is to build enough smarts into our web pages (some of which will get there using automated text analysis tools) such that one can ask better questions of data. Instead of “searching” for a match with “Emma Lazarus” on a website, one day I will be able to get the same results by asking about “the poet who wrote the poem on the statue of liberty” or “Jewish poets of the 19th century” because the implicit data from various snippets about Emma Lazarus, will have enabled the underlying semantic web engine to put bits of information together and answer increasingly sophisticated questions about what data are actually present on a site. This is big. One of the references? The accurately named (and delightfully written) Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL.

The final sessions I attended contrasted two different approaches to Open Source software planning and management, whether intentionally or otherwise–that of Archivists Toolkit and the still-largely-on-the-drawing-board CollectionSpace (nee OpenCollection, now picking up on the new “…Space” meme). The two projects address similar issues, but listening to them described it is clear that merely saying “Open Source” doesn’t tell you much about the viability or quality of a given software project, any more than “commercial” does. The label only describes part of the development and maintenance process. As you consider whether to deploy either open source or commercial software, your major costs lie in the software customization and long-term maintenance. Software license fees (or lack thereof) are a very small part of those costs.

Instead, the critical issues surrounding software viability really lie with the community of vendors and users (along with your clarity as to your needs, and the actual fitness of the software to meet those needs). That, of course, is where an organization such as MCN excels–in helping you find that community, share experiences and problem-solving with peers around the world. Having said that, it will be most interesting to see how the MCN Board shapes changes to MCN community tools–currently this blog (co-run with AAM’s Media and Technology committee), the MCN website, and the MCN mailing list–adding new tools, or changing how these are run–to take advantage of current web affordances for building and sustaining community.

See ya’ll online.

P.S. Late addendum. David Dwiggins took some incredible notes of several conference sessions. Take a look at Dave’s Conference Musings. Enjoy.

It was the last day of the MCN conference today. Washington DC is cloudy, rainy, and humid, and there are a few large protests downtown, making the place extra exciting. I’ve had a whole week’s worth of exciting, so I’m happily curled up on a couch in Suzy Sarraf’s beautiful condo, relaxing and trying to think about which of these topics to handle first.

Funny thing about conferences; although they’re exhausting, they always leave me fired up and ready to change my institution for the better. Conferences are such a whirl of networking and ideas and give and take, that I can’t help but want to climb the mountain of change right away.That’s the nice thing about working in a smaller mid-sized museum: if you have the time and the passion, you can fairly easily implement some of this stuff. I think my boss was getting tired of me calling and emailing twice a day with suggestions about how we could do XYZ, though.

Anyway, since I didn’t have access to power outlets and wireless in the conference rooms, I ended up writing everything down old-school style. I don’t have my notes transcribed yet, but I’ll upload them and make them available when I do. But for now, I just want to touch on a couple of sessions which I learned a lot from.

On Wednesday, I attended Rob Stein and Ed Bachta’s (Indianapolis Museum of Art) workshop about building a website in Drupal (aka. Drupal Bootcamp - there’s a slideshare presentation available here). Since I’m going to be transitioning the Magnes website to Drupal within the next few months, this was an absolutely perfect opportunity to see experts demo the steps it takes to do this. Admittedly, I don’t think I’m going to be able to migrate the site in the space of a morning, but I’m feeling a bit more confident about the process and that I might be able to do this in a shorter timeframe than I was anticipating. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that some of the extra nifty features are easy for people with background in PHP, but which left me tilting my head as if I were trying to read hieroglyphics. Cue an excited email to my boss and the Director, begging for a class in PHP. Fortunately, not much PHP is needed, and I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to do the majority of the work without much handholding.

One of the things I’m very excited about is that IMA has released their Dashboard module for free download (it’s available for download here). As this is something our Director of Development has expressed an interest in, I attended the 8:30 AM (!) case studies roundtable the next morning. Rob talked more about the Dashboard, including some of the benefits (transparency, donors love it, trust-building, ongoing stockpile of statistics) and downsides (manual updates by users, expired statistics). Really, really intriguing.

Another session which I found incredibly useful was a Friday afternoon session on making collection assets findable on the web, moderated by the amazing Murtha Baca. Ted Dancescu (Getty Trust) talked about some of the nuts and bolts of optimizing your HTML code to Google’s algorithms. In a nutshell:

• Use the description and keyword tags, but no more than 5-10 keywords.
• Use relevant Titles and Keywords
• Match the keywords, et al. to the content body
• Pages should be navigable with less than 4 clicks
• Logical site structure
• Character length of URLs is less than 100, and use of top-level domains
• Have links to and from your site everywhere
• Use descriptive text for images and video (particularly using the Alt tag for describing images, which helps Google Image Search accurately find your image)
• Use names, content, or links as HTML or text instead of images (an aside: Flash-bloated sites, in addition to being annoying, aren’t as easily indexed by Google because of this)

There were a lot of don’ts along with this, too, including redirects, long dynamic URLs, hidden text, keyword dilution, and robot exclusion.

Of course much of this has to do with careful metadata generation and maintenance, which can be a full-time itself. Diana Folsom discussed LACMA’s information integration projects (for their library and museum) and how actively managing their metadata and search terms greatly increased access to the assets for both the staff and the public.

The key point of this session was fairly straightforward: create a lot of access points to the information. If search engines can find it, people will find it. If people can find it, they can use it. If they’re using it, you’re doing your job as an educational/research institution.

Of course now I want to rush back home and start plugging in a lot of keywords. Maybe some nice intern will help me with that, once we have that part of our process defined.

There were so many other sessions and discussions and events I could touch on, but as this is already a mini-novella, I’ll leave it at that.

For those of you who attended MCN2008, please upload your photographs to Flickr and share them in our group pools, Museum Computer Network and MCN2008. My personal photos from the trip are here, taken entirely with an iPhone. Not bad photo quality, I have to say!

Next year, MCN will be in Portland, Oregon. Portland is gorgeous, inexpensive, and there’s no sales tax! I’m really, really looking forward to it. Hope to see many of you again in 2009!

I’m not seeing much blogging about MCN2008. (I suspect because, as usual, too many of us are having too good a time networking and attending sessions, abetted by the rather unfortunate lack of technical facilities–wireless, comes to mind–that would often be present at a gathering of, uh, techies. Expect some changes as we prepare for next year.)

Let me try to fill in one gap, at least, by posting the slides from my demo yesterday, “Open Source Digital Asset Management/Preservation on the Cheap.” In short, yet another forceful, masterful variation on my usual theme: small institutions have few resources and need to maximize use of the inexpensive, cutting edge, and especially open source technologies to have the impact, and to engage our audiences. If we do this well, those big institutions will try to learn from us ;-).

In this particular case I have been obsessing about how to reasonably assure the long-term preservation and integrity of about 6TB of digital assets at the Jewish Women’s Archive [jwa.org]. Our mission is to uncover, document, and disseminate the stories of North American Jewish women. We exist on the web, only, so if we lose that digitally documented history, there is usually no paper to fall back on. We’re it.

Last year, we took an aging collecting of audio artifacts–primarily cassette tapes and minidisk recordings–and got them all transfered to accessible digital forms. (In the case of minidisk recordings, this means copying recordings from Sony’s proprietary digital minidisk format into common WAV files). These are all stored internally on a very expensive (to us) 6TB RAID server in the air conditioned room where we keep our network gear and servers. RAID is a wonderful way of combining lots of disks with logic akin to a Sodoku puzzle. If one disk dies (and sooner or later, all hard disks die), we can slip in a new disk, and the computer logic will solve the Sodoku puzzle, filling in the missing information, and all is recovered.

But, RAID doesn’t save us from a local catastrophe. What if there is a fire? What if some unforeseen natural disaster strikes Boston? What if thieves break into our office and steal our servers?

In an ideal world, we would team up with other organizations, and each back the other up. As a practical matter, I have no budget to back up anyone else’s data, and the same, alas, is true of our peers. I had to look elsewhere.

Amazon.com offers some amazing, low-cost, internet-based infrastructure services called “Amazon Web Services” [aws.amazon.com] (AWS). It costs us 15 cents/month/gigabyte to store information on their “cloud computer” storage servers. (The service is called “S3″.) We purchased a $20 utility, JungleDisk [www.jungledisk.com] and can “drag and drop” our files to S3. We then took things a step further. We already using version control software, Subversion [subversion.tigris.org] to enable us to keep track of our software and to roll back changes as needed. What if we used Subversion for documents that change–the XML metadata files, transcripts, etc. Then, we wouldn’t just have the most recent versions of things, but would have a history of the authoritative version of each document. No more “FINAL REALLY FINAL transcript.doc” files to compare to “2008-03 FINAL transcript.doc” files. Subversion, of course, is open source. That means that instead of us being dependent on a commercial vendor developing new features every so often, we can rely on our fellow users (ourselves, included) to fix bugs and add new features as they matter and as we have the time and expertise. Quite a win-win choice.

As it happens, the instant we introduced a modicum of version control, our Board and upper management were carried away by the synergies of having a “real” repository such that all of our assets could be online and accessible. The not-quite-finished-in-time-for-this-conference next step involves use of the open source Fedora Commons [www.fedora.info] repository framework in a minimal “good enough for our administrator to cut processing time by an order of magnitude” setup, to be followed, next year, by a host of tools to integrate our open source content management system, Drupal (www.drupal.org) with Fedora for even greater synergies.

Later in the day I spoke at a panel on hosted digital asset management systems and their desirability. One listener complained that there were no open source solutions to this pressing issue, and no standards. I maintained that this was coming quickly, exactly on these lines (Fedora+Drupal) in concert with METS and subsets of same including PREMIS, Dublin Core, and a host of Cultural Heritage Institute-specific ontologies and standards. It’s time to put them together.

Interesting conversations are engendered by pajamas. Many of my deepest chitchats begin when I and a friend are safely tucked into our jammies and curled on the couch.

I’m currently in Washington DC to attend the Museum Computer Network conference. I’m staying with the ever-wonderful Suzy Sarraf, and after a bit of a lazy day (for me. SHE had 3 computers running all at once for work!), talk ultimately turned to our line of work. We talked about the MUSE Awards and I talked a little bit about Memory Lab. In many ways, both of these topics are about history and technology, which led us to muse about how the muse-tech field has changed, and how the technological leaders of today aren’t necessarily the big museums anymore. They’re the smaller and mid-sized institutions taking advantage of all of the wonderful free or inexpensive tools now available to them.

When I was writing my Master’s thesis, one of the things I was struck by was the hesitation by curators to adopt “nontraditional” uses for museum collections databases (eg. sharing collection information and images online), and the slow adoption rate by small and mid-sized museums (mostly due to funding). Not having been present during that time period, I can only opine based on my research, but it appears that large museums were willing to invest in new technologies in ways smaller museums couldn’t, and as a result, small museums would watch and wait to see if the experiments of the big guys were a success, before trying to invest in those same technologies.

However, it appears to me that the tables have turned now. With the abundance of free and inexpensive web-based tools available to smaller museums, they are now more easily able to adopt new strategies and experiment themselves. I’ve noticed that in my mid-sized institution, we have a pretty high degree of flexibility to try new things, mandated from the top. Our curators aren’t overly invested in some sort of power structure within the institution, so we’re not limited in that way. We’re free, somewhat, to play.

This does not appear to be the case for large institutions. Curators are much more powerful in large museums than they are in many small museums, and opportunities for innovation aren’t being adopted as speedily as one might expect. I think there are many reasons for this, including concerns over control, authority, ownership of information, institutional hierarchies, and a general distrust of small companies which might disappear in a year or two.

So it seems to me that the risktaking of yore is now the mantle of the medium-sized institutions. Small museums have been a bit slower to adopt as well, but I think that’s more an issue of staffing and lack of available infrastructure to support new technologies. Mid-size institutions are seeing opportunities to do interesting things with their information which they were not able to do before, and they are showing the big dogs that some of these experiments are able to provide a significant ROI.

It’s an interesting time to be a museum technologist, particularly in the medium-sized institutions. With no little bit of pride, I’m looking forward to seeing how the work my mid-sized museum brethren and I do will affect the rest of the field.

I’ve been watching the news roll in of various friends flying off to D.C.  for MCN 2008.  It’s making me a little sad because for the first time since about 2002 I won’t be attending this year.  But this year has been an interesting year to be an armchair conference attendee.  Via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, YouTube and SlideShare I’ve watched news of good presentations and papers roll into view. So far MCN hasn’t tried to formally marshal any of these resources for armchair delegates like myself, so I thought I’d try to start a grass-roots effort to make some connections this year. (ok, it’s just my lonely little sprout, but hoping other folks will contribute their suggestions as well)

So first off let me recommend finding some consensus around a conference tag (Rob/Cathyrn may want to mention this in their opening remarks ::hint hint::):

mcn2008

OK, that’s pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised about the creativeness in designating conference tags. The only problem with this of course, is that we’re not the only MCN in the world and you’re just as likely to get information about Mendicino and motorcycles as you are about museums and computers. If anyone has any recommendations for a more unique tag, I’ll update this page - but for the moment mcn2008 looks pretty safe. The nice thing about tags is that they can help you find unexpected posts in places you may not frequent.  One of the best ways to do this is via a Google Alert setup for the tag.

Last year I created a Flickr group for MCN which has some pictures from last year’s conference. If you use Flickr, just join the MCN group (link below) and contribute your shots of this year’s conference.

#flickr_badge_source_txt {padding:0; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif; color:#666666;} #flickr_badge_icon {display:block !important; margin:0 !important; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;} #flickr_icon_td {padding:0 5px 0 0 !important;} .flickr_badge_image {text-align:center !important;} .flickr_badge_image img {border: 1px solid black !important;} #flickr_www {display:block; text-align:left; padding:0 10px 0 10px !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#3993ff !important;} #flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:hover, #flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:link, #flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:active, #flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:visited {text-decoration:none !important; background:inherit !important;color:#3993ff;} #flickr_badge_wrapper {background-color:#ffffff;border: solid 1px #000000} #flickr_badge_source {padding:0 !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#666666 !important;} www.flickr.com

More in Museum Computer Network pool

I’ve enlisted Perian to Twitter the conference as best she can (connectivity is always the bane of live blogging any conference). You can contribute your own thoughts on the conference using the #mcn2008 hashtag. (For other armchair delegates you can follow along at http://hashtags.org/)

I’ve also created an event on Slideshare. While MCN normally collects and posts powerpoints on our website, Slideshare is another service that also allows people to comment on your presentations, embed them in their blogs, etc., etc. I’ve found it to be chock full of good museum, library and archive related content
here. I’ve also made some excellent connections with other armchair delegates, sometimes long after the conference has happened.

Again, let me say that none of this is officially sanctioned by MCN. It’s just me, alone out here in the cornfields, missing the company of everyone who’s in D.C. Maybe those of you who are there can pull up a few chairs around the bar and brainstorm how we do this better next year. Hope everyone has a great conference!

Dear MCN 2008 Delegates,

The Board of Directors of the Museum Computer Network looks forward to seeing you all soon in Washington DC.  We have a fabulous conference for you this year and anticipate a full four days of stimulating sessions, relaxing receptions, and opportunities to meet new colleagues and old friends.

MCN has taken many steps to bring you a “green conference” this year.  We hope to get better at this each year, but to begin–here are changes you’ll see this year in DC: 

Online instead of printed program! Please visit http://www.mcn.edu/ to download your Conference program.  If you choose to print all or part that’s great, or just bring it along on your laptop.  MCN will provide limited access to Program printing on demand at the conference.  Also, attached to this message you will find the conference attendee and exhibitor lists.

No tote bags this year!  We all have more than we can count already, so bring an old one along if you like.  MCN will provide conference materials in a recycled paper packet.

No buses either!  The DC Metro system is fantastic and MCN will provide metro passes for our Friday night reception at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.  If you have special transportation needs, please contact Sue Rawlyk, our conference coordinator, at conference@mcn.edu.

 

See you in DC!

Cathryn Goodwin

President, Museum Computer Network

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This was going to be the blog post on twitter. Twitter is a “micro-blogging” service in which people note their day-to-day trivia in posts of 140 characters (or least).

A few weeks ago, there was a nice discussion about the service on the MCN-L list, and it sounded like just about everyone but us was using twitter as a sort of general purpose, “here’s what we’re doing” log. This isn’t something that attracts me as a person–I’m not going to set up my own twitter account anytime soon–but I think that there is a lot to be said for doing for our organization, overall. One post would be about a new item added to one of our collections; that might be followed by a link to our blog, or to a mention on another site; followed by a notice that one of our staff is speaking somewhere…. It provides a means of sharing who we are as an organization without boring people to tears. Maybe. You can follow what we’re doing at the Jewish Women’s Archive tweet location.

But, that isn’t what I ended up being blow away by today.

We’re building a new digital repository with a team that is geographically challenged. The actual repository is being built on Amazon’s Web Services, so there isn’t any actual machine we can point to that contains the code. The development team is spread across the US. I happen to know that one person lives in Minneapolis, but I forget where the others are. I’m not sure it matters. But meetings have taken on a surreal tone that, on the one hand, and in a sort of brave new world manner, I quite like. My co-worker and I sit in our offices (not even the same office) and use Skype to connect. Then we invite the developers to participate. For slides and other documentation, someone just shares a Google Doc. In another window, we log onto the nascent site and walk through what works and how the schedule is going. Every so often we need an actual, unconnected URL, so someone types it into the Skype chat window.

On Thursday morning I’ll be doing a demo on using open source software (this repository is built using the Fedora Commons framework and some Ruby on Rails; eventually to interface to Drupal), so today we talked a bit about where the development team will be. The development methodology is based on the substance behind buzzwords like “Agile development.” In real life, that means that every two weeks or so (for this particular project) our archivist has a new set of tools. This is nicely different from traditional development. First, it means that she can get started working faster, even though many features aren’t yet implemented. Second, we can all learn about what matters as we go. The nightmare of capturing perfect and complete specs before coding disappears. Instead, we worked enough at the beginning to make sure we understood key features, constraints (including budget), and to agree on the first couple of sets of things to be implemented. A the end of the first cycle, there wasn’t much we could do, but we could look at the architecture and see if it fit our notion of what should be there. Now we’re into increasing functionality and it is sheer pleasure to consider UI possibilities, discuss what the implications of adding a given feature are, or whether the layout we all thought was perfect last iteration really fits the way our archivist works.

As I said, I’ll be presenting the work in progress on Thursday morning at the MCN conference in DC. So, Wednesday, after I check into the hotel, we’ll all meet and go over the stable version of the archive, as it is, so that I can show it off at the demo. The part that blows my mind is that I’ll check into the hotel, pull out my headphones, connect to the internet, and be as present at the meeting as I was today, sitting in my office. This takes “conference call” to a whole different level, and eliminates many constraints on how we work together and where. The limits are now, “where can I get WiFi,” not, “where can I get a phone and put up with a voice-only conference call, or where can I find a video conferencing setup so I can see what everyone is working on. Wherever my computer and headset and wifi are, I am at home in whatever meeting I choose to (or have to) attend.

Now, think of what that means in terms of the people visiting our websites, or using our websites to prepare for visits to physical cultural heritage institutions–or who want to capture and share that experience. How does location independence change all that? For that matter, consider that I could do all of this with a standard modern cellphone/pda type device like a blackberry or iPhone–I don’t necessarily need anything as big as my laptop. Exciting. Hyperparadigmshiftdrive, indeed.

Recognizing outstanding achievement in museum media, the AAM Media and Technology Committee announces the 20th annual Muse Awards competition.

The 2008 Muse Awards competition received nearly 200 applications from a wide variety of museums in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Entries included audio, cell phone and interactive handheld tours, interactive kiosks and multimedia installations, podcasts, blogs, games, websites, online collection and image databases, videos and e-mail marketing campaigns. This year we are expecting another exciting round of projects that reflect innovation in the museum media community.

We will accept online applications from museums and producers on the AAM Media and Technology website from Dec. 1, 2008, to Jan. 31, 2009. The cost is $25 per entry.

Visit www.mediaandtechnology.org to enter your project. If you have any questions, please contact us via muse@mediaandtechnology.org

We look forward to your participation!

Forget browsing the web from your computer and clicking those links. Forget HTTP.

OK, that’s a bit melodramatic, but to combat the web’s high entry barrier for the developing world, which would be literacy and a computer, IBM in India is developing what they are calling the Spoken Web for the nearly 300 million Indians who use cellphones. Oh, and the 8 million new subscribers per month. This is a parallel web based on the spoken word, where:

www -> wwtw (world wide telecom web)
Website -> VoiceSite
HTTP -> HSTP (HyperSpeech Transfer Protocol)
URL -> phone number
Hyperlink -> Hyper VoiLink

A VoiceSite can only be accessed by a phone, and only requires the user to be able to speak and listen. Callers can create their own VoiceSites or access those of others. They can also surf, jumping from VoiceSite to VoiceSite using speech.

Say a plumber wants new customers. First he calls a number and “VoiGen” software guides him, in his local language, through the process of setting up a VoiceSite. Relevant information, such as a welcome greeting and the plumber’s contact details are recorded. Behind the scenes, the VoiGen system creates a VoiceSite. A phone number (URL) is then assigned to the plumber.

VoiceSites can be linked, just like in the web. To create links, VoiGen prompts the user at predetermined points to provide the phone number and a brief description of related VoiceSites - of a friend’s hardware store, say. Then, a caller to the plumber’s site who chooses to listen to the plumber’s recommended links will hear the description and can press a key or say a word to be transferred to the hardware store’s VoiceSite.

New Scientist, October 24, 2008

Just because there is no information access alternative in developing countries, I think this will be hugely popular - and hugely popular by our standards would only need to be a small percentage uptake of overall subscribers. But just because we have more advanced systems and higher literacy in the developed world, there’s a considerable chance of something like this taking off here: kids and teenagers who can’t afford/parents won’t pay for a data plan and seniors who just can’t come to terms with the web.

As you might expect, there’s a wikipedia entry, Spoken Web; and some interesting papers: WWTW, VoiKiosk, Raising a Billion Voices

This reminds me of when Apple launched Casper as part of the MacinTalk/PlainTalk package in the early 90s, so that we could control our Macs just by talking to them - awesome… for about 2 minutes. The major problem (which is still a problem today is some voice recognition systems) was that the development was done in North America by predominantly North American men. As a British male, the only way to get my Mac to understand me was to speak with an American accent. I kid you not. High jinks ensued as we would creep up behind someone and yell (in an American accent) “Close Without Saving!” or “Delete All”…

Recently, the wife was interacting with an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system and having a frustrating time - it was a precious moment when I told her to lower her voice and speak with an accent. Told ya so…

In honor of the tenth anniversary of the DMCA, here’s the link to a hilarious send-up of DRM, the DMCA, EULAs, and Larry Lessig’s PowerPoint style.

“These friends of mine (among them Eric Rescorla, who co-wrote SSL/TLS… http encryption) saw a legal notice in a paper towel dispenser and created a mock Lessig presentation for a cryptography conference rump session… hilarity ensues.”
With thanks to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, UC Berkeley School of Information.

Google has settled the suits by authors and publishers over its massive book scanning project. The agreement awaits court approval.

Google will pay $125 million for the right to continue. So much for fair use. Google has just proven a market for digital versions of out-of-print books, meaning the fourth fair use factor kicks in (effect on potential markets for a work).

As one commentator put it, this is a change in the ecosystem, not just in the foliage.

From techdirt:

“Pretty much any way you look at it, Google caved here — and this is unfortunate for a variety of reasons.

Two years ago, there was a story in the NY Times about how Google’s legal department saw all of these lawsuits against the company as a way to stand up on principle and make better law. Specifically, the company positioned itself as being willing to fight certain lawsuits on principle in order to get precedent setting rulings on the books in support of openness, fair use, safe harbors and many other important issues. The company suggested that, rather than settle, it would fight these lawsuits knowing that it alone, with its big war chest of money, could fight some of these battles that tiny startups could never afford.

It may not be surprising, but it’s safe to say those days are long gone… “

ELECTRONIC VISUALISATION AND THE ARTS
EVA London 2009
Monday 6th - Wednesday 8th July 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS

http://www.eva-conferences.com/eva_london/

*Visualising*
ideas and concepts in culture, heritage and the arts: digital arts, sound,  music, film and animation, 2D and 3D imaging, European projects, archaeology, architecture, social media for museums, heritage and fine art photography, computer arts

OFFERS OF PAPERS AND WORKSHOPS by 31 January 2009

EVA London 2009 will be co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society, a Special Interest Group of the British Computer Society, and by the BCS.

We invite offers of papers. For proposals we require only a summary of the paper on not more than one page. It must be submitted electronically according to the instructions on the EVA London website, http://www.eva-conferences.com/eva_london/.

Papers may be on any aspect of EVA London’s focus on visualisation for  the arts and culture, broadly interpreted, including technology, use and  users, creative, visual and performing arts and music, strategy,
organisational implications and policy. Papers are peer reviewed and may be edited. They will be published as hard copy and online.

We hope to offer bursaries again to attend EVA London for those who do not have access to grants.

***********************************************************
EVA London 2009’s conference themes will include, but are not limited to:

* Enabling the arts through digital technologies
* Crossing disciplinary boundaries
* Visualising ideas and concepts
* Moving and still images in museums and galleries
* Web 2.0 technologies in cultural heritage organizations
* Digital and computational arts
* Sound, music, film and animation
* 2D and 3D imaging
* Virtual and augmented worlds
* Fine art and photography
* Interactive technologies

http://www.eva-conferences.com/eva_london/

Just ran across this link, to the original article by Vannebar Bush in The Atlantic, July 1945, envisioning what would become the Internet / Web. It’s simply so much fun to read I have to pass it along. Here’s a sample:

This has not been a scientist’s war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership. Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next? …

…Will there be dry photography? …Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.

…The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers…

It’s a great read. Enjoy.

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 I sometimes despair. While I think that we slowly make slow progress in terms of doing smarter work, better, I occasionally encounter the heated query from elsewhere that makes me wonder whether those of us who are paid to be thinking about IT actually think. (Given the bizarreness of some of the election charges and countercharges, I know, to paraphrase Lincoln, that many of the people, much of the time, aren’t thinking hard enough to be fooled. But this is IT, where, in theory, logic prevails. Never mind recent economic evidence that logic does not prevail, if only to the surprise and consternation of our most recent past-chair of the Fed.)

So, what has me wallowing in a miasma of “why are they asking such pointedly wrong questions?”

It started with a discussion at a local university library’s IT staff. It was noted that piling materials on a shared network drive resulted in a growing body of lost data. That isn’t to say that any particular file was lost, but rather that, over time, there were increasing megabytes of files claimed by no one, matched to a lesser degree by ongoing sadness that no one knew where the file with the documentation about X was stored and which was really the most recent version. They decided to move the problem online to a hosted service, as though “a change of location means a change of luck” (old Jewish proverb).

This is an ongoing and familiar problem. Just as we finally grew out of the idea that an 8-character filename was enough to identify the contents of a file past immediate memory, it is now increasingly apparent that longer filenames and increasingly complex directory structures don’t mask a need for metadata in some form, and some sort of control/ agreement/ standards with regard to what files are placed where. When this doesn’t happen, files get forgotten, the emails referencing them get lost, and no search engine in the world can unravel where the project manager who left last year stored the updated versions of those templates that we need, or prove that this set of files is, indeed, the final edited version. (Yes, the word “final” is in the folder name, but it seems to have been used several times as “final” became stretched a bit past expectation.)

So what is the solution? I think that we have to find a way to tie documents together with more metadata—that could be anything from explanatory paragraphs in a CMS or wiki pointing to the docs, and/or use of that programmer’s essential tool—the version control system—for essential docs, or perhaps even eschewing the practice of emailing copies of documents around in favor of editing one common document in Zoho, or Google Docs, or a wiki. I’m not sure how to get there, but I am very sure that there are at least three components to the problem: First, ensure that people work on one document, rather than multiple versions circulating via email or stored in various places on a network drive. Second, ensure that there is some form of version control—that can be the “history” feature built into wikis, or tools from the programming world like Visual Source Safe or Subversion.

If you stop here, you may feel comfortable with a book I am currently throwing against the wall called “wikipatterns”. Having discovered one hammer (wikis), the author evangelizes it as the solution to all ills, and does so by assuming that wiki users are always wise (he and I may not inhabit the same universe), and that every bad usage pattern belongs to the world of “CMS” (ditto). This wouldn’t bother me so much were it not so apparent that whatever wisdom the author has gleaned from his work in Knowledge Management or Community of Practice support has been reduced to feel-good platitudes in this particular book. Feh.

The truth is that neither wikis (renowned for taking the spaghetti nature of old-fashioned file-systems and making them less penetrable and less organized over time) nor any other current tool answers the third, biggest problem: Context. You can’t stick a document somewhere, whether in Google Docs or on your network drive, or as a link off a link off a link in your wiki, and expect it to be found next year–much less found with provenance: This is the document I meant to find, the authoritative version. This is true regardless of your search engine or the creativity of your file and folder naming conventions. That means that you need some thought as to how you organize things in whatever CMS, Portal, or wiki you use. You have to allow enough flexibility so that people can do their jobs, and especially, so that the people who know and use information are the ones maintaining it in ways that make sense to their uses. I can’t know where that balance lies. It is different for every organization and it changes over time. No structure is like having unregulated anything else. Sooner or later it goes catastrophically bad. Nobody can find anything and you have terabytes of swamp impeding everything. Too much structure stifles getting work done to begin with—you start off bad and never get the chance to do better.

But, it is that feel for how to find a useful balance and move things forward that matters most. Coming up with partial solutions—moving to Zoho or into a wiki—can help resolve some of the simpler problems such as multiple versions and version control. This is important, but it is also the last decade’s problem. If you are still wrestling with those issues (to be honest, we all are, regardless of how I try to pretend that they are old, resolved issues), don’t lose sight of the fact that the bigger problem isn’t that immediate issue of how to edit the document this week. It’s how to find that document a year from now when it is next needed, and how to manage your organization’s knowledge so that each year staff are working smarter, not just slogging through a deeper swamp.

If you’re in an institution that has a publications division, its likely that they went to the Frankfurt Book Fair last week. The Frankfurt Book Fair is an amesome event, drawing nearly 300,000 attendees this year and more than 7000 exhibitors - puts our quaint little AAM annual conference in its place.

I went to the book fair once. The memory brings on waves of nausea, based on the considerable consumption of some Peach Schnapps, which I cannot recommend. I keep a bottle of Peach Schnapps in my bar at home. It has remained unopened, but stays there as a reminder not to over-consume. I haven’t been ill on drink since the 2004 AAM conference in New Orleans. It was not my fault - you know who you are…

They survey the crowd at the book fair and this year’s survey was about digital publishing. By the numbers, 1000 industry professionals responded:

• 40% said digital content will overtake traditional printed book sales within 10 years
• 33% said digital content would never surpass traditional books sales

Who’s “driving” digitization efforts:

• 22% said consumers
• 21% said Amazon
• 20% said Google
• 13% said Telecommunications sector
• 7% said publishers
• 2% said authors

Challenges realizing the full potential of digitization:

• 28% said copyright
• 22% said Digital Rights Management
• 21% said adopting universal standards
• 26% said they needed a better base of “knowledge and strategy”

Important future collaborators:

• 22% said mobile handset manufacturers and networks
• 13% said the gaming industry

A slow demise:

• 25% said the traditional retail bookseller would be obsolete within 60 years
• 21% said the literary agent
• 14% said the editor

The book is dead, er, long live the book:

• 50% think users will pay for online content (hmmm…)
• 70% said they felt ready for the digital future, but 60% said they do not currently use ebooks or e-readers at all.

At Frankfurt, Many Say Digital Will Take Over Print Books by 2018