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.

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.

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..

Daniel Cohen has an interesting observation on his Digital Humanities Blog about the tendency to want to try and transfer physical collections and processes without modification into the digital world. As an undergrad Information Management major, one of the most lasting lessons I learned was to never assume that the digital system could, would or should behave like the physical one. To extend Cohen’s analogy, The rules of one ocean don’t always apply when sailing into a new one.

The (copyright) section 108 Study Group released it’s final report today. (Interesting that it’s April 1st)

I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or relieved that the group “determined not to recommend any changes at the present time” in regard to copyright law and e-reserves. On the one hand, we are left with the same ambiguity that we have been dealing with forever. On the other hand, I’m terrified that the habit libraries have had of late to pay copyright clearance fees for fair use ereserves might have become an official recommendation. So, no news is potentially good news.

For the rest of the report, I’m not sure there is anything groundbreaking here. Judge for yourself though. The report can be found here: http://www.section108.gov/docs/Sec108StudyGroupReport.pdf

We just finished upgrading our installation of CONTENTdm to version 4.2 (now that 4.3 is just around the corner) and decided to change the way we did administrative access. It’s not difficult or brain surgery, but here’s the procedure in case anyone else wants an easy step-by-step.
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Jody Perkins and I presented a poster session today at the OCLC sponsored CONTENTdm users group meeting. Our poster discussed preliminary work implementing FAST Facets in CONTENTdm and a simple system to allow tagging of FAST-like concepts in oral history transcripts.

You can download a copy of the poster, in smaller, easier to carry PDF. ( courtesy of Scribd)

Ok, so say you have a bunch of bundled djvu files. djvu has many advantages over pdf in quality and size, but you just can’t beat pdf for it’s ubiquity. The djvu viewer on the mac is pretty flaky too. My latest problem with it is that the djvu looks stunning on screen but looks fuzzy when printed. For a project we have here, students needed to print the djvu files of musical scores so they could easily reference the hard copy whileentering the notation in Finale. That’s the setup. Using a couple of open source tools and some php glue, here’s a quick solution to batch conversion of djvu to pdf. You need the djvulibre tools and imagemagick. You also need some bundled djvu files.
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