Millards Corner

With all the talk about a newly struggling Kodak, this article from Fast Company advocates Kodak refocusing on its film business. What? Film? Isn’t film dead?

Not so fast. I recently re-discovered some slides I took in 1984 and decided to scan them with an equally ancient Nikon slide scanner. The images linked below is what I got. Forgive the rather cliche subject choices, but I was ONLY 16 when I shot these. 28 years later, and these slides are still usable and, if I do say so, look pretty good. They were shot on Kodak film that is no longer produced.

So, you want to support open access and highlight your work at the same time? Consider creating a personalized faculty profile and contributing your scholarly work to Scholarly Commons, Miami’s portal to faculty scholarship.

Don’t have a lot of free time? No problem. The new Scholars Portal is easy and quick to setup. Here’s a step by step guide:

Step 1: Point your web browser to http://scholars.muohio.edu and click on “Create/Edit your Profile”

Step 2: Login with your Miami uniqued and password

Step 3: Edit your information (include a candid or formal photo if you want)

Step 4: Press the “Submit Changes” button.

That’s it! Four short steps and your profile is complete.

Once you’re ready to contribute your work, simply choose the “Create/Edit your profile” and then click the big red “Get Started Button”.

If you have questions about getting your work ready for submission, feel free to email commons@lib.muohio.edu or talk to your library liaison.

By way of Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog

http://www.dancohen.org/2010/11/23/a-conversation-with-richard-stallman-about-open-access/

Katie Gibson and I just finished up our presentation at the OSU Innovate! ELearning in Action Conference. Lot’s of great questions and comments. Unlike most presentations, this one felt like a true discussion. Pretty cool all around.

The Abstract:
Teaching in the Cloud: Replacing Monolithic Course Management with Web 2.0

Course management software (CMS) used in higher education is often multi-layered, poorly organized, and difficult for students to navigate. At Miami University, six librarians teaching different sections of a course in the Interactive Media Studies department bypassed institution-supported course management software in favor of Ning.com. This breakout session will present lessons learned from this experiment, discuss pros and cons of abandoning institutionally supported systems, and explain how the adoption of this new technology affected teaching.

Here’s the Link via slideshare

I thought I’d use this space to document my experience installing and running DSpace 1.6 RC1.  First off, we’ve been anxiously awaiting 1.6 for it seems like forever.  We’ve been running DSpace 1.5.x in the Miami instance at the OhioLINK DRC but were really looking forward to some of the features promised in 1.6.  The short list?

• batch metadata editing
• statistics integrated into xmlui
• built in support for qualified dublin core in the OAI module (BONUS: ORE support!
• browser-based import and export of collections

Building the SandBox

Since I wanted to run this in a sandbox, I decided to start with Virtualbox running on a Apple iMac.  Into a new Virtual machine, I installed the latest Ubuntu, 9.10 or Karmic Koala.  Since I wanted to be able to ssh into the box, and access my DSpace installation from the outside world, I also setup port forwarding in VirtualBox using instructions similar to these.  For the impatient, to enable port forwarding of port 8080 on the host to port 8080 on the guest (called ubuntu), type these commands at the hosts command line:

VBoxManage setextradata ubuntu “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http8080/HostPort” 8080
VBoxManage setextradata ubuntu “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http8080/GuestPort” 8080
VBoxManage setextradata ubuntu “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/http8080/Protocol” TCP

Installation of Ubuntu on a Virtual machine is an exercise left to the reader.

Installing DSpace 1.6

The install documentation is pretty good actually.  I was able to follow the  DSpace 1.6 Documentation to get everything to install.  Use apt-get to install any dependencies, like the JAVA JDK, maven, postgres, tomcat6, etc.  the only glitch was getting Tomcat to start (ouch, pretty big glitch)  It turns out that it’s not too hard to fix See This for DSpace 1.5, but the same principle applies.

Make sure Ubuntu is using the right Sun JDK, change the permissions to Tomcat’s files, and set the user that Tomcat runs as:

sudo update-alternatives –set java /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

sudo chown -R dspace /var/cache/tomcat6
sudo chown -R dspace /var/lib/tomcat6
sudo chown -R dspace /var/log/tomcat6
sudo chown -R dspace /etc/tomcat6

Edit /etc/default/tomcat6 to set these parameters:
TOMCAT6_USER=dspace
TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no

Start tomcat6 and if you followed all the other installation steps correctly you should have a DSpace1.6RC1 instance running.

Next time: First impressions.

I needed to find a quick way to harvest the dublin core metadata from a CONTENTdm collection, without being able to export it out of the admin interface. A little PHP, the CONTENTdm OAI-PMH interface, and some experimentation on the Open Archives Repository Explorer (http://re.cs.uct.ac.za/) and I was able to come up with this quick hack in php. Presented here in case it is ever useful to anyone besides myself.

http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/~millarj/cdmtab2dspace/oai-harvest.php

There are probably lots of ways to do this, but this is mine.  As part of our migration to the OhioLINK DRC I’ve created a quick php script to 1) take the default export format of CONTENTdm, 2) translate a mapping of fields to the appropriate dSpace ones, and 3) create the DSpace bulk submission package for it. You will need php5+ running on a unix-like system with allow_fopen set to true. It may work on Windows, but I haven’t tested it and I probably won’t. You could upgrade your Windows Installation and have better luck though.

You can find the scripts here. CAVEAT: These are ugly hacks at best http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/~millarj/cdmtab2dspace/

Instructions:

1. Export your data from CONTENTdm in the control panel. Select a Tab Delimited export and make sure to check “Return field names in first record”
2. Next, open the resulting text file in a spreadsheet application of your choice. If you don’t want to munge dates and other non-text data, make sure each column is imported as the “Text” type. Excel for example, has a hard time with ISO dates.
3. Add a row to the top of the spreadsheet and place the appropriate DSpace fieladn mes (minus the dc. prefix) above the CONTENTdm field to be mapped. If you want to skip a field, just use “skip” as the DSpace field label.
4. Save it back out as a tab-delimited file.
5. Download the script and edit it to customize to your hearts content.
6. Run the script from a unix/linux/macosx commandline “php cdmtab2dspace.php”

At the top of the script are various customizations/configurations. To see how things will look, set $test_mode = “on” When ready to run it live, change that bit to “off”

In particular, customize/rewrite the “move_bitstreams” function to, you guessed it, move the bitstreams (digital objects) from wherever you have them into the submission package.

I keep having to google for this, so I decided to write it down here. This is how to change the case of every file in a directory to lowercase. It’s a great way to fix the case insensitivity seen when moving files from a windows filesystem to a Unix-y one. We have several windows PC’s in our lab for special machines with windows only requirements.

When in the directory where the files are stored, issue this command from the Bash shell prompt

for i in `ls`; do mv $i `echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`; done

http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/

The website of a “collaborative effort by federal agencies formed as a group in 2007 to define common guidelines, methods, and practices to digitize historical content in a sustainable manner” I think this is something worth watching. Hopefully some meaningful frameworks can be developed as a result. I’m reminded of the early Federal Geographic Data Committee and their efforts to establish a base metadata standard and accompanying dissemination software. That resulted in a fairly robust set of tools and standards that helped the field handle an explosion of geospatial data in the early 90′s

I like that one of the first working groups deals with Audio-Visual materials, an area where there is a mish-mash of often conflicting standards, best practices, etc. The kind of clarity we now have with digital image standards would be really helpful in this area. The proposed table of contents of the “Recorded Sound Digitization Overview and Guidelines” Looks promising.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on their RSS feed.

My only criticism: They *really* need a clever acronym.

Well, it took the USGS 10+ years to pull it off, but they have finally discovered that Landsat data is a valuable enough resource that it should be free. See Press Release for more detail. For those just checking in, this was the original position of the OhioView project when it started in 1996. Our basic premise then was that data that was too expensive to use was worthless. OhioView (and others) spent the next decade working with the USGS to bring the price down to the purchasing power of mere mortals (about $600/scene)

Now, according to the above press release:

The USGS is pursuing an aggressive schedule to provide users with electronic access to any Landsat scene held in the USGS-managed national archive of global scenes dating back to Landsat 1, launched in 1972.

And the’re doing it for free! If it’s not recent, and the standard recipe is ok, just click and order it. An email notification later and a quick download and you’re in business. If it IS recent, just download it. No waiting! That’s a far cry from the 30-40 day window to get a tape that OhioView (and every other user) faced when we first started

OhioView has since moved on to concentrate more on applications and research and development than on Data stockpiling. However, we still maintain an increasingly brittle data infrastructure with few resources available to maintain it, so this news is welcomed.

The thing is, OhioView was never meant to be the permanent solution to the problem of data distribution. It was a way to work around the obstacles that kept that data out of the hands of ordinary remote sensing folks. I think it’s been a phenomenal success at doing that, even spawning a national effort. But, it’s time to focus efforts on other more fruitful areas.

This is awesome news. To the USGS? My tired RAID arrays thank you!

UPDATE: Jury is still out on whether this will a) replace the need for terrain corrected data and b) be available with the needed 48 hr turnaround. Don’t spin those arrays down yet..