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.
Interesting post by Lorcan Dempsey on moving computing infrastructure to the “grid” in much the way we do with electric utilities now. A great takeaway quote:
They (libraries) spend too much time getting their systems to work, and not enough time putting them to work.
As an example, a huge chunk of OhioView’s funding went to building out infrastructure both at the library level and the federal level. One of the great presentation slides I saw from that process was the before and after shots of USGS EROS Data Center. The before picture showed an empty data center room. The after photo showed the same room just crammed full of servers.
I wonder what we could have done in 1997 with a cooperative agreement with Amazon for discounted S3 storage and compute power from something like Google Maps.
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
I’ve just finished switching this site from a static site created with RapidWeaver to one based on the latest WordPress. Aside from being completely open-source, WordPress has provided a lot more flexibility. For the most part, the answer to adding new functionality to wordpress is “there’s a plugin for that” Being able to post from any computer, anywhere may turn out is a plus as well. At least the “I left my mac at work” excuse isn’t a viable one anymore.
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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About a year ago, I gave up my G5 tower and began using a MacBook Pro as my primary desktop computer. So far, it’s worked out fine. I have the desktop power I need at work complete with external keyboard, mouse, and Cinema Display and I have the mobility I need to work at home or on the road. The only problem is making sure that everything is backed up regularly so that if anything happens while the machine is “in the wild” I won’t have to worry about losing everything.
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On May 10, 2007, Bob Van Kirk passed away. Bob was a friend to many and he was a friend to me. I will miss him.
Robert W. Van Kirk
December 14, 1929 – May 10, 2007
Robert W. Van Kirk died May 10, 2007, in Pendleton. He was 77.
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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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