Thursday, March 29, 2007
Libraries as educational, technological hubs
Via Blake at LISNews.org, from Inside Higher Education, Libraries at the Cutting Edge, e.g., "A quick look at two familiar Web sites will demonstrate that academic libraries now play a vital role in how students and faculty find and gather information via the Web as well as in the stacks. Both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland offer a full range of online library services, from catalogs (formerly known as “card catalogs") to research help to DRUM — the Digital Repository at Maryland, which provides a permanent online address for computer files and eliminates the need to attach them to e-mail messages. The Julia Rogers Library at Goucher College subscribes to services that provide students with access to over 22,000 online titles, while Baltimore City Community College’s library gives students technology support and online access to research materials."
Public Library Geeks and Web 2.0
Blake at LISnews.org cites from Wired. Excerpt: "Learning 2.0, developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe." Library staff encouraged to take on 23 Library 2.0 assignments.
"Essential" Knowledge Management sites
31 Essential Knowledge Management Sites as identified by Lucas McDonnel on the unCommon Knowledge blog. Cited in March 28 AL Direct.
Digital Preservation funding cut at LC
The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) has a mandate to “capture, collect, preserve, and provide access to important ‘born-digital’ material and web-based information”. However the Congress has rescinded $47 million in the latest budget, which means another $37 million of matching funds will be lost, for a total of $84 million. James Billington is asking Congress to reconsider. Cited in March 28 AL Direct.
Open Content aggregator (Index Data)
Also from March 28 AL Direct: Index Data is offering free aggregator of open content (e.g. ebooks, open access digital repositories, encyclopedia articles, and human-reviewed Internet resources), using OSS Zebra and Metaproxy and SRU and Z39.50. Note the demo of their MasterKey tool which works off the open content and standards.
Steven Bell on RSS Aggregators
March 28 AL Direct cites PALINET Technology Conversations podcast featuring Steven Bell, Director of the Gutman Library at Philadelphia University (though he seems to have recently been appointed AUL at Temple University). Bell advocates use of open-source RSS-toHTML converter that produces java script, and then plugs in as newsfeed to Blackboard courseware. Also talks about routing blog postings via RSS to library news channel. Bell has written a tutorial on RSS and news aggregators. Maintains that few Americans know what RSS is, and that, once faculty are shown effectiveness in courseware, usually want it.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Friday, March 23, 2007
MyLibrary 3.0
Chuck mentioned release of Eric Lease Morgan's MyLibrary 3.0 which includes a perl script that converts resources to RDF
Sunday, March 18, 2007
LJ Movers & Shakers
Library Journal published its annual "Movers & Shakers" list on 3/15/2007. Includes "mad scientist" Casey Bisson, citing his innovative WP-OPAC, "Uber-resolver" Ross Singer, and NCSU's Emily Lynema, among many others.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Asakawa Conference at Yale
On the occasion of the centennial of Asakawa Kan'ichi's appointment to the Yale faculty, the Council on East Asian Studies sponsored Japan and the World: Domestic Politics and How the World Looks to Japan [pdf] on March 9-10, 2007. Jun Saito, Naomi's husband, read a paper on "Japan's New Nationalism" (co-authored with Frances Rosenbluth and Annalisa Zinn) dicussing recent trends in text book revisionism, state visits to Yasakuni war shrine, growing popular support for revising article IX of the Japanese Constitution ("the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation ..." ), and other indicators of Japan's "cool nationalism".
S. Yabuki delivered a paper entitled: "K. Askawa's View on History: Science Prefers the White Light of Truth". He begins by recounting the "legend of the Asakawa Cherry Tree" as reported by Dartmouth 1899 classmate G. G. Clark: "K would memorize two pages of the English-English dictionary daily, then literally 'devour' the pages, a practice in those days not uncommon. When the last pages were gone and only the covers were left they were buried by K at the foot of a cherry tree on the school campus. The tree was known as the Asakawa Cherry Tree." In the first section of the paper, Yabuki maintains that Asakawa's research on the village of Iriki "debunked the concept of serf and serfdom in medieval Japan". [What does the term 'medieval' even mean in a country like Japan? Doesn't it come from the European experience of losing Greco-Roman civilization and then recovering it with the Reformation and Renaissance?]. In the second section, Yabuki explores Asakawa's role in negotiations following the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The upshot of these negotiations was the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, (for his contributions to which Theodore Roosevelt would received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906). Asakawa was teaching (nearby?) at Dartmouth at the time, and was able to observed the entire conference at the Wentworth Hotel.
Yale was involved in the negotiations even though Asakawa hadn't yet joined the faculty (though he'd already been a graduate student there). Barnaba Tokutaro Sakai, sent to the U.S. on a public relations mission, had written a letter to his friend Anson Phelps Stokes , Secretrary of Yale University ,on Oct. 3, 1904, asking "What is the feeling or sentiment among the learned scholars in New Haven as to what terms of peace Japan should make, etc.?" Stokes in turn consulted Yale's international law professor Theodore Woolsey and oriental history professor Frederic W. Williams (son of Commodore Perry's interpreter Samuel Wells Williams), and provided a set of recommendations. Asakawa had already published his book the Russia-Japan Conflict and a highly-regarded pieced in the May 1904 issue of the Yale Review, and was therefore well-known and respected at Yale, and a major influence on their recommendations.
S. Yabuki delivered a paper entitled: "K. Askawa's View on History: Science Prefers the White Light of Truth". He begins by recounting the "legend of the Asakawa Cherry Tree" as reported by Dartmouth 1899 classmate G. G. Clark: "K would memorize two pages of the English-English dictionary daily, then literally 'devour' the pages, a practice in those days not uncommon. When the last pages were gone and only the covers were left they were buried by K at the foot of a cherry tree on the school campus. The tree was known as the Asakawa Cherry Tree." In the first section of the paper, Yabuki maintains that Asakawa's research on the village of Iriki "debunked the concept of serf and serfdom in medieval Japan". [What does the term 'medieval' even mean in a country like Japan? Doesn't it come from the European experience of losing Greco-Roman civilization and then recovering it with the Reformation and Renaissance?]. In the second section, Yabuki explores Asakawa's role in negotiations following the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The upshot of these negotiations was the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, (for his contributions to which Theodore Roosevelt would received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906). Asakawa was teaching (nearby?) at Dartmouth at the time, and was able to observed the entire conference at the Wentworth Hotel.
Yale was involved in the negotiations even though Asakawa hadn't yet joined the faculty (though he'd already been a graduate student there). Barnaba Tokutaro Sakai, sent to the U.S. on a public relations mission, had written a letter to his friend Anson Phelps Stokes , Secretrary of Yale University ,on Oct. 3, 1904, asking "What is the feeling or sentiment among the learned scholars in New Haven as to what terms of peace Japan should make, etc.?" Stokes in turn consulted Yale's international law professor Theodore Woolsey and oriental history professor Frederic W. Williams (son of Commodore Perry's interpreter Samuel Wells Williams), and provided a set of recommendations. Asakawa had already published his book the Russia-Japan Conflict and a highly-regarded pieced in the May 1904 issue of the Yale Review, and was therefore well-known and respected at Yale, and a major influence on their recommendations.
Naoyuki Agawa spoke on "Asakawa Kan'ichi's American Journey: Its Time and Place in the History of Japan-U.S. Relations". Some highlights: Asakawa was born into a samurai family that had been loyal to the Shogun. For this reason, he was among the disenfranchised after the civil war of 1868-69 and the Meiji restoration. The winners of that struggle were disproportionately Satsuma, Choshu, and other samurai provinces that lost to Tokugawas in Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. Those on losing side this time around had special incentive to travel to U.S.
Asakawa came to U.S. in 1895, same year as China ceded Taiwan following Sino-Japanese war, and 3 years before Spain handed Philippines to U.S. following Spanish-American War. "As a result of these respective territorial acquisitions," Naoyuki notes, "Japan and the United States suddenly found themselves physically facing each other across a relatively narrow strait, a reality that transformed the nature of the bilateral relationship."
In 1905 Asakawa married Mirriam. This was the same year as Japan's victory in Russo-Japanese war, and two years before he returned to Yale as an instructor. In 1921 Asakawa wrote letter to Japan's Deputy Foreign Minister Masanao Haniwara and U.K. ambassasor Gonsuke Hayashi, that widespread anti-Japanese feeling in West was largely due to a vast Jewish conspiracy. He cited the Protocols, which he acknowledged were fake, but still somehow illuminating.
In November 1941 he drafted a concilliatory letter for FDR to send to Hirohito; it arrived too late to do any good.
Asakawa died in 1947, 2 years after WWII ended and 4 years before Japan regained independence.
Friday, March 16, 2007
"Mastering Regular Expressions"
Chuck recommends Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd Edition, by Jeffrey Friedl, published by OReilly. Includes separate chapters on Perl, Java, .NET, and PHP. A full index to the book (along with chapter specific code and snippets) is available at the companion site: http://regex.info. Regular expressions contain two types of characters: metacharacters (e.g.,the wildcard * in *.txt) and literals (i.e., normal text characters). Lots of technical details, though, and 542 pages, so not sure how quickly I can read it through.
Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums
Per Matthew, 3/16: "The article [i.e., Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums] provides an overview of some recent activities and trends in libraries, archives, and museums. Its focuses on the standards infrastructure in the 3 communities and looks to content standards like Cataloging Cultural Objects to play a pivotal role in integrating access across collecting institutions. It is worth a look." To which Steven Yearl responded, "This should be qualified by US or, at least, North American communities. With one of Yale's stated primary strategic objectives being 'globalisation', we might all do well to consider our leadership role in the _global_ research community. To this end I shall offer, somewhat parenthetically to Matthew's forwarding of this otherwise very interesting piece, a European--particularly Gallic-- perspective.
Abridged and filtered through an American Archivist's eyes, the recent comments on Google's digitisation efforts by Jean-Noël Jeanneney of the Bibliothèque nationale de France ... Of course, one could do far worse than read his, Jeanneney's, thesis in entirety."
Abridged and filtered through an American Archivist's eyes, the recent comments on Google's digitisation efforts by Jean-Noël Jeanneney of the Bibliothèque nationale de France ... Of course, one could do far worse than read his, Jeanneney's, thesis in entirety."
Why Cornell DSpace Still Empty
This article in the March/April 2007 issue of D-Lib (and cited by LJ Academic Newswire) explores reasons for Cornell's e-repository (e.g., faculty fear of being scooped, availability of discipline-specific repositories (e.g., arXiv.org), missing functionality).
Thursday, March 15, 2007
LibLime in Google Summer of Code
LISNews reports that LibLime has been selected as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code program. Most project ideas are related to Koha.
Tags and Participatory Networks
3/15/07: Michael Johnson (following Bill Drew) cites Participatory Networks : the Library as Conversation on a Library 2.0 wiki forum and asks: " I wish to receive advice on how best to introduce what may be the paper's principal recommendation: '... the authors [Lankes, Silverstein and Nicholson] recommend the creation of a shared participatory test bed for libraries. This network would not only experiment with new collaborative Web technologies, but also work with library organizations and vendors to speed innovation in traditional library systems.'" Seems to me that Library 2.0 is doing this already, at least the first part.
1/15/07 Interesting article on The Need for Creating Tag Standards
1/15/07 Interesting article on The Need for Creating Tag Standards
CCQ notes
Some news items worth following up on for my next column, e.g.: ALA | Margaret Mann Citation honors Robert Wolven; Library Thing profiled in NYT business section, 3/4/07. Andrew Pace on significance of LibraryThing (" am very, very impressed by the work of Tim Spalding at LibraryThing. Libraries should be licensing his database's social tags. LibraryThing's interface design is also very, very good. I'm sure Amazon.com has taken notice") and future of bibliographic control; "History Digitized and Abridged" in 3/10/07 NYT magazine; Automated Web searching at MetaWeb Technologies with Daniel Hillis. Intro to mashups for Health Librarians by Allen Cho.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Statistics
A useful book for getting more advanced functionality from Excel is Microsoft Office Excel Step-by-Step ; another is F1 Get the Most out of Excel, e.g., Tip 177: "Summing Values from Cells in Different Sheets" (both via Books24x7). See also catstats page.
Bib Control WG
Interesting people involved in the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. And some are taking notes. E.g., Karen Coyle and Lorcan Dempsey. Others--not necessarily in attendance--are also following the story, e.g., Karen Schneider , ALA TechSource , Talis. Karen Coyle has also posted a more integrated version of her notes from the first session.
The current discussions on RDA and OPAC 2.0 are closely related. Karen Coyle, Diane Hilman, Jonathan Rochkind, and Paul Wiess have posted their Framework for a Bibliographic Future on the FutureLib wiki.
CCDA is currently discussing the RDA "Scope and Structure" document, on which Paul has commented "There are a number of misuses of DCAM and the Metadata Framework, the major ones of which are raised below. It seems that JSC is not sufficiently familiar with the models it hopes to take advantage of. " DCAM is the Dublin Core Abstract Model. Diane Hillman has posted her notes from the second session ("Scope and Structures") at the LITA Blog.
The current discussions on RDA and OPAC 2.0 are closely related. Karen Coyle, Diane Hilman, Jonathan Rochkind, and Paul Wiess have posted their Framework for a Bibliographic Future on the FutureLib wiki.
CCDA is currently discussing the RDA "Scope and Structure" document, on which Paul has commented "There are a number of misuses of DCAM and the
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
"Many Eyes" data visualizations
This service from IBM allows anyone to use current datasets or upload new ones and create interesting visualizations. One featured example is a Proto-/Indo-European language tree. Cf. Google GapMinder and Swivel. I think the site's been slashdotted though (i.e., 3/6/07), since I can't seem to view anything.; On 3/13/07 Eric Lease Morgan cited a MARC record tag cloud he created with a set of 14,000 bibliographic records of new books, "but most of the content ... is administrative and does not lend itself [to] discovery".
DST 2007
DST used to start on first Sunday of April (e.g., April 1, 2007) and end last Sunday of October (e.g., Oct. 28, 2007). Now it begins second sunday of March (e.g., March 11, 2007) and ends first Sunday of November (e.g., nov. 4, 2007).
Need to update Microsoft OS and Palm
Need to update Microsoft OS and Palm
Japanese Language (MIT OpenCourseware)
MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) includes several Japanese languages classes, e.g., Beginning Japanese I
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Web applications with CGI (IBM)
Abstract from Peter Seebach article: "Writing local Web applications can be quick, easy, and efficient for solving specific Intranet problems. Understand why a Web browser is sometimes a better interface than a GUI application, and when a CGI script may be the simplest and most elegant solution.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
"Gold" at the AMNH
I enjoyed visiting the exhibition on gold a few weeks ago at the American Museum of Natural History. Learned some interesting facts, e.g.: 60 tractor trailers would contain all the gold in the world extracted so far (152,000 metric tons); and the Aztec word for gold is teocuitlatl (lit. "excrement of the gods"). Also, "A one-foot square cube is about the size of one ton of pure gold." And "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds the world's largest accumulation of monetary gold. Only a small portion belongs to the U.S. government. The bank serves as guardian for it, as well as the gold monetary reserves of approximately 60 foreign governments, central banks and international organizations. The vault is 25 meters (80 feet) beneath the street and holds $147 billion worth of gold bullion. The bedrock of Manhattan was one of the few foundations strong enough to support the weight of the vault, its door and the gold inside."
Dan Chudnov on openURL
Dan Chudnov interview with John Udell on OpenURL, context-sensitive linking, and digital archiving. Follows a related interview Udell had with Tony Hammond.
Problem dates back to world of print ... academic research requires that readers be able to consult sources, and easily verify results and claims. Hence enforced consistency of style manuals and authority files. In networked environment, openURL provides consistent citations formats. Mentions ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) work on impact factor by Eugene Garfield. Also DOIs from CNRI Handle System
Unlike DOIs, URLs are not succinct numbers, but rather more like canned queries, e.g., http with name-value pairs. Effectiveness in identifying target resource highly dependent on robust metadata.
Dan mentions dspace project he contributed to at MIT, initially designed to offer stable URL for self-archiving authors, and open access publishing. Now working on metasearch tool called "LibraryFind" at Oregon State University.
OhioLink has O-Link sytem, provides text string citation type.
COinS: way to specifiy openurl in HTML span tag. Packages query in openURL style, but without resolver. Context object is part of openURL specifying metadata package to sent over wire. Requires companion piece of software something like greasemonkey on user end. Similar to microformats. OpenlyInformatics has COinS generator. There are also blog plugins, and structured blogging tools.
OCLC has OpenURL Resolver Registry, records from over 1,000 institutions. Dan has worked with OCLC to assemble database of bookmarklets, greasemonkey, etc., scripts. Can be obtained and distributed on campus.
Once COinS formed, appears as href anchor links, binds to resolver for ones own institution, the icon for which should appear for browser.
Problem dates back to world of print ... academic research requires that readers be able to consult sources, and easily verify results and claims. Hence enforced consistency of style manuals and authority files. In networked environment, openURL provides consistent citations formats. Mentions ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) work on impact factor by Eugene Garfield. Also DOIs from CNRI Handle System
Unlike DOIs, URLs are not succinct numbers, but rather more like canned queries, e.g., http with name-value pairs. Effectiveness in identifying target resource highly dependent on robust metadata.
Dan mentions dspace project he contributed to at MIT, initially designed to offer stable URL for self-archiving authors, and open access publishing. Now working on metasearch tool called "LibraryFind" at Oregon State University.
OhioLink has O-Link sytem, provides text string citation type.
COinS: way to specifiy openurl in HTML span tag. Packages query in openURL style, but without resolver. Context object is part of openURL specifying metadata package to sent over wire. Requires companion piece of software something like greasemonkey on user end. Similar to microformats. OpenlyInformatics has COinS generator. There are also blog plugins, and structured blogging tools.
OCLC has OpenURL Resolver Registry, records from over 1,000 institutions. Dan has worked with OCLC to assemble database of bookmarklets, greasemonkey, etc., scripts. Can be obtained and distributed on campus.
Once COinS formed, appears as href anchor links, binds to resolver for ones own institution, the icon for which should appear for browser.