I’m here this weekend. It should be pretty awesome. I’ll probably be actually using my oft-maligned twitter account to post random thoughts I have, with some longer posts coming here later.
Posted on May 31st, 2008 in history, internet, library | No Comments »
Here’s mine. You should make one! And then tell me where it is because I like listening to people’s muxtapes when I should be doing other things.
Posted on March 30th, 2008 in internet, music | 1 Comment »
Hello friends,
I am bringing my moribund Internet magazine back, after a long and protracted absence. There will be a new site design and everything. I’m hoping to have it finished by the end of this month, in between the various other things that I do. In the meantime, if you have some good stories you’d like to tell, or some pictures you’d like to share, by all means send them along to [untrenchant AT gmail.com].
Posted on March 9th, 2008 in internet | 1 Comment »
There are some interesting discussions happening on the internets about the Dublin Core Abstract Model, and its relationship to RDF, and how to usefully implement a general metadata model when so many institutions are so caught up in local practices and multiple competing standards, that I promise I will try and contribute to or at least summarize when I have the time. I haven’t written about libraries enough lately.
Part of that is that I come home at night after work, and all I really do is listen to music. I finally got on the Cut Copy bandwagon about a month ago, and the Flosstradamus bandwagon shortly thereafter. All that and the new Hot Chip record have been running 2008 around my apartment. And the new Los Campesinos! record. I could go on but I won’t.
Cut Copy put out a mix a while ago called “So Cosmic” (get it here), and it’s amazing; if radio stations told the truth when they said they played the best of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, it would sound like this set. I was listening to it more or less non-stop for a couple of weeks wondering why nobody plays music like this in State College. So I’ve decided I’m going to try and make it happen, and if it doesn’t work I’ll let myself complain about it then. So all my designated creative time lately has been dedicated to planning set lists and putting mixes together. A friend of mine and I decided a while back to try and get a good dance night together; he’s got a lot of old new wave and post-punk records, and I’ve got a lot of records made by people ripping those people off. So it works well together. We’re going to try and play out once a month, I think. We don’t have a name yet, or any dates to announce, but it’s coming together. Oh yes.
I’m probably more excited about this than anything else I’m up to lately, so I’m breaking my blog-silence by prematurely announcing our plans. Rest assured I will keep you posted with details.
Audio footnotes:
Cut Copy, “Hearts on Fire”
Matt and Kim, “Yea Yeah (Flosstradamus remix)”
Posted on February 20th, 2008 in music | No Comments »
the library of congress is awesome
One of my things that I frequently get on about is the need for cultural institutions to embed their content outside their own space. Particularly now with Web 2.0 applications, where the barriers to entry are low ($20 a year for a Flickr Pro account? You could get a thousand of those for the cost of one science journal subscription!) and the relative costs of failure are fewer, it makes perfect sense for libraries or museums embarking on digitization projects to release some of those images to Flickr, or some of those videos out to YouTube. It’s a simple way to bring lots of users to your digital collections who would never have otherwise seen them.
It so happens that the Library of Congress agrees, and has launched their own Flickr account. I’ll let them explain why:
If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.
Two things about this are exciting. First, it draws upon a huge potential audience, not only of viewers of the material, but of potential contributors to the metadata and the context surrounding the photos. Users can add as many tags as they want, which will beget even more tags and associations, which will draw even more users. In future phases I’d like to see these pictures added to community image pools; this shot would look pretty great in the Gapers Block or Chicago Reader pools, for example—which would draw users who frequent those sites, too! It’s a feedback loop.
Second, this is part of a broader pilot project Flickr is taking part in with LoC called the Commons. As part of this initiative, Flickr created a brand new rights statement essentially stating that there is no known copyright associated with the image in question. This opens up the site to any number of institutions holding public domain images. If the pilot works—dare I say when it works?—they’ll allow other interested institutions to participate and to use the public domain rights statement.
I’m really excited about this project, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Posted on January 17th, 2008 in internet, library | 2 Comments »
Here is the link to that. I think it went okay, but I just remembered I had this whole other point about implicit metadata that was really interesting (to me) that I only briefly mentioned in passing. Oh well, maybe next time.
I used the presentations without powerpoint template that Jessamyn uses for her presentations to make this, and will probably continue to do so because it’s awesome.
Posted on January 4th, 2008 in library, me | No Comments »
Posted on December 25th, 2007 in chicago | No Comments »
some thoughts on bibliographic control
Fridays have sort of become my default research days, since they’re relatively meeting-free most of the time. Perhaps I will celebrate this by trying to comment on the things I’m reading and thinking about once a week, Mark Lindner-style.
Today I spent some time with a couple of things I’m pretty late in coming around to: the LC Working Group Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control, and the RLG Programs Descriptive Metadata Survey results. There are quite a few overlaps in content between the two of them, as you might expect; they both talk about increasing the work we do with outside partners and pushing our metadata out through multiple channels.
There were some interesting points of contact between the two reports that caught my eye. My favorite talking point in the LC report was the one having to do with repurposing bibliographic control to make it more effective for pushing out to Web applications. In particular, it cited the need for “flexible, extensible metadata carriers” in which to encode our records (presumably this would be RDF), and opening up our metadata standards to application developers so that they might build things around them. The RLG report cited 90% of its respondents as saying that an “interested public” was an audience for their metadata; I would definitely count an application developer as such. So, in my mind, I think they ask the wrong question in response to that statistic (emphasis mine):
What descriptive metadata is really needed in an environment where users look first to search engines to fulfill their information needs?
I’m reminded of something Clay Shirky wrote in “Ontology Is Overrated” about how Google took off as a search engine at Yahoo’s expense, which I will quote in full:
Let’s say I need every Web page with the word “obstreperous” and “Minnesota” in it. You can’t ask a cataloguer in advance to say “Well, that’s going to be a useful category, we should encode that in advance.” Instead, what the cataloguer is going to say is, “Obstreperous plus Minnesota! Forget it, we’re not going to optimize for one-offs like that.” Google, on the other hand, says, “Who cares? We’re not going to tell the user what to do, because the link structure is more complex than we can read, except in response to a user query.”
I don’t think cataloguers need to say that anymore. We’re at a point where, with the descriptive metadata we have and with the Web standards already in place, developers can write applications to do that for us. So I do believe there’s still a place for that information, and that it is still necessary in a world where 97% of information users are keyword-searching first. What I would argue is for displaying less of that metadata in our public catalogues, while pushing more of it out to the Web at large. GIS metadata is already going this way; you can see it (or not!) in Google Maps with KML. This is the sort of thing I would like to see embedded within our digital collections more and more going forward.
Posted on December 7th, 2007 in library | No Comments »
I’ve been playing around in Google Maps this evening, envisioning ways in which Ontario and Michigan might have passenger rail connections again, when I noticed at one point that the Street View tab came up for Detroit when it hadn’t earlier in the evening. I thought this was weird because the blue outlines that usually accompany that tab weren’t showing up. Thinking it might be a bug, I scrolled around the Midwest a little bit to see if it was getting influenced by Chicago’s Street View for some reason, and after a while I noticed that a bunch of other cities have the same thing going on. So far I’ve noticed it for:
Detroit
Indianapolis
Minneapolis-St. Paul
Dallas
Boston
I’m still poking around to see what else I can find, but I’m half-expecting an announcement from the Maps folks soon about this. Can you find any others?
Posted on December 6th, 2007 in internet | 1 Comment »
Tomorrow I am going on the sort of ridiculous adventure I was hoping I hadn’t gone and gotten too old for; I’ll be driving to New York with a friend of mine to see Los Campesinos! again, because obviously once isn’t enough. And last time, the Spinto Band didn’t open for them, so it’s going to be totally different. Yeah! Anyway, we’re immediately driving back here, which means I’ll be going to bed at like 7:00 in the morning tomorrow night. I reckon the days I can embark on this sort of absurdity are numbered so I should take advantage of them while I can.
Let’s all listen to their best song now:
Los Campesinos!, “Sweet Dreams Sweet Cheeks”
Posted on November 29th, 2007 in music | No Comments »
