Have a chair.

So when one occupies an endowed chair, does one get an actual chair to sit in?

ASIS&T leftovers

Here are a bunch of things I forgot to mention earlier, including a bunch of links. I can't really vouch for most of these, as they are on my 'to look at' list.

JC Herz mentioned soldier blogs, such as My War as a profoundly weird moment in writing (or maybe in war). Realtime public dispatches from those involved. Once this I didn't mention before about her talk is that she seemed a little too enamored of the military for my taste. But she did make note of a split in her personality--during her adult life she has alternated between hippy and defense contractor.

She also mentioned a non-violent organizing strategy game as a role playing alternative to Command & Conquer-type games--but she didn't mention the name. Anyone???

Tim Berners-Lee did mention a couple projects that I haven't been tracking on and feel silly for not knowing more about them:

• OWL
  
  an ontology description language designed for the web environment rather than for a work domain.
  


• SPARQL
  
  a query language for collections of RDF documents


• Longwell
  
  a browser for the semantic web

The k-blog group made me write down a bunch of URLs, including:

• Library Elf: RSS feeds for your books' due dates. I guess this would be a good service for people like me that are continually handing in their books late. (I know, it's embarassing--I work in a library. But mostly it's public library books that get overdue. The ones borrowed from work get back on time.)


• Share your opml is for those addicted to RSS feeds. This is a way to share your subscription files.


• Frassle looks like it just might be the aggregator for me. It also has online bookmark management. Me thinks I'll have to check it out.


• And what's this? A collaborative blog that moves from host to host? What an interesting idea. I know what I'll be reading on the reference desk today: Tangledbank. Hey--it's work related. The authors are scientists.

In another program, survey results were presented that showed that digital collections have a problem distinguishing collections and subcollections. It's sort of a conceptual problem, but one I think is probably valid: Is a library's main entry point to digitized works a collection and then every grouping inside of that entry point a subcollection? Is that main entry point not even a collection? It seems to be a nesting problem. One conspicuous absence: what do the users think? I tend to think that they are confused. Not by the nesting problem--but rather, by what the heck 'digital collections' are. We have a link that says that on our homepage, but most of the other links on that page also point to things that are collections of things that are digital. See the problem?

And that is about all I have to say for this year's conference. Don't trust my views? Go here to see a few others who were blogging. I'm shocked, simply shocked, there aren't a few more.

Repositories at ASIS(&T)

Looking over my notes, I have a lot more to say about the Institutional Repository program than I wrote earlier.

The most relevant for us here in duckland is Harvard's. The Harvard IR is for the science libraries, and its mission is explicitly to support changes in scholarly publishing—nice to see the big girls putting their money behind a worthwhile effort. It’s also an experimental system: they are intentionally scaling up to see if D-Space and the libraries can handle it.

They also building interoperability features. They want to play nicely with oai-pmh and open-url type services. And…they're putting in serials!! Just a few weeks ago we were speculating whether or not D-space could serve as an e-journal publishing platform.

The BEST part of what Harvard is doing is in policy and implementation. (Well, I don’t know if they’re the best, but I found them the most inspiring.) They are working from the notion that faculty are overloaded and that they don't want any additional work to be added to the publishing process. Their job is to get their papers in a peer review journal. Period. Therefore convenience and ease-of-use have become driving factors. One concrete result of this philosophy: the librarians are going out and determining which researchers have published papers in journals that allow self-archiving. They then contact the researcher and ask him/her to allow the library to archive the work. The only thing needed from the researcher is permission. The library does all the labor of getting the paper into the IR.

Another interesting aspect of Harvard is that they are not limiting the repository to PDFs and word documents. When Harvard talks about types of materials, they are talking about genres—not filetypes. Consequently, they are accepting scientific datasets into their IR. This has led to a metadata problem: DCQ doesn’t work very well for data—therefore they are looking at DDI.

That said, if you follow the link over there, they don’t have a big chunk of content posted yet. Hopefully in the coming weeks we’ll see it opened up a bit.

The University of Virginia appears to have gone nuts with building their own system. Not really an IR, this one seems to be more along the lines of a ContentDM + text based documents digital library collection. This is a Fedora localization—I don’t know squat about Fedora, but it seems to be a metadata management platform a la ContentDM—but without the public interface. They built the public side on their own, and are migrating 100,000 images from a previous system into this new one.

A remarkable thing about this project is that they had an actual requirements analysis and design process—they didn’t just close the office door and pound it out. They talked about how they wanted the system to work and then mocked up the functions screen by screen. They’re image viewer is sweet—-it actually has contrast and brightness controls.

The other thing to note here is that Fedora is the repository—the interface is home grown and the search engine is a 3rd party system. I hope it was worth the effort.

MIT, the originator of D-Space, has some unique things going with their program. They have digitized all the out-of-print MIT Press books and allow on-campus access to the whole catalog. They will also be allowing off-campus viewing of MIT theses, but will maintain a fee-based printing service.

Like Harvard, MIT is being very liberal with filetypes—but is issuing strong warnings about preservation. They are also offering a ‘premium’ repository service where they will take on tasks such as metadata entry, copyright clearance, and data migration for a fee. The guy in charge of the premium service had drinks with us one evening—he seemed a little nervous about being a campus entrepreneur, but he also seemed completely capable of pulling it off. Definitely a project to watch.

Feeling a draft?

For those who weren't paying attention, the crazy folks in Congress who wanted to re-instate the draft got their bill to the floor on October 5. It failed 402-2. Oddly, the bill had 14 co-sponsors. What's up with co-sponsors voting against their own bill?

Campus trifecta

I scored a hat trick on campus activities on my first day back from the conference today.

I started by hearing an elderly liberation theologian do a Q&A session. Gustavo Gutierrez quietly answered written questions from a large audience. He wasn't as inspiring as I thought he'd be, but he fanned the coal of discontent I've felt in the pit of my stomach recently--you know, the one that says I should be fomenting revolution.

I stopped by a talk given by our head of Special Collections after that. James is a great guy--and an awfully good speaker. He talked about some of the hidden treasures that are tucked away in the library and how they came to be here and how we are trying to increase access to them. Here's a little nugget I picked up: during WWII, there was a conscientious objector camp in Waldport. It was a camp just for artists. He didn't discuss what they did (a lot of the camps either did make-work labor or had medical experiments done on them), but he did claim that in some realy sense, the Beats started there, as many of the writers moved to San Francisco after their release--even if they weren't from there originally.

This makes a nice transition to the final talk of the night: a pair of Israeli refuseniks. They rocked!

I'll finish up about the conference tomorrow--and probably post a few links. Overall, it was a good trip. I may have even picked up a couple collaborators for an info behavior study I've been trying to put together here.

It is finished.

Dang, the people KT and I invited are rock stars! The panel came off without a hitch, and we had a pretty good crowd.

For the first time, someone asked me 'So you have a blog, should I subscribe?'

I guess she'll just have to be the judge of that.

I also guess I was talking to an important person tonight. I'm not quite sure who he is or what he does. Guess I'll have to look him up. Whoever he turns out to be, Cameron was impressed that he showed up. And since I now think Cameron is an important person, I will agree that this third party is someone to be impressed with.

So dear readers, I am now leaving the wi-fi cloud. I think I like blogging a conference. Expect more notes on Friday, and stay tuned for the results of the job thingy.

More ASIST Tuesday

Really great presentation from folks in the field on Tuesday afternoon--Harvard, MIT, and UVa. These are 3 BIG intitutional repository projects. Many good tips to bring back west--including policy and outreach ideas, which Harvard seems to have a great grip on. Michael Leach, one of the presenters, didn't say any of this stuff when I saw him in August.

I'm posting this as the final afternoon begins. Many folks are looking like they're ready to go home, andmany already have. I'm glad to stick it out though and then not be in a hurry to hit the airport tomorrow.

Hung out with UW and MIT folks last night. (and a small contingent from Louisiana.) Nice to socialize. Good mix of folks. Good mix of work and social conversation.

Scientific collaboration pt 3

I really enjoyed all these presentations, so I feel it's ok to make a critical remark (cause saying you like something means it's ok to criticize it, right?)

Everyone distinguished between 'intellectual collaboration' and other types. Liberman talked about technicians who get acknowledged, but never cited as authors. Cronin harped on how hard it is to manually mine the acknowledgement sections of large numbers of articles--'manual labor' that I sincerely doubt he did himself.. In response to a question, Small reminisced about the glass blower that worked in his chemistry department. What's my point? No one had any suggestions on how to track the information flow from these 'non-scientists.' They all mentioned them (except for Cronin--so maybe he really did do all his own coding), but no one quite seemed ready to tackle collaboration from a social point of view. Wouldn't it be very interesting to study how information flows thru a lab? Do new lab methods get invented by the h

Scientific collaboration pt 2

Sofia Liberman, a psychologist from Mexico, presented a nice study of how author order and task assignment is determined in physics and biotechnology labs. What she's talking about is who gets listed first in the list of authors for a journal article. There didn't seem to be a consensus in physics (which matches their collaborative, non-hierarchical working groups), but the biologists seem to agree that those that do the most work get put first.

Blaise Cronin got a little closer to actually talking about collaborative work, and argued that acknowledgement sections of journal articles can be used as a metric for what Patel, in the 1970s called 'sub-authorship'. He had great, lengthy examples from "Cell." From his own ('tedious and labor intensive') studies, and from someone else's newly automated (as yet unpublished) analysis, he says that some people become acknowledgement superstars.

Scientific collaboration pt 1

I guess I get overly excited when I see something that might apply a science studies / sociology of science approach to LIS, because I thought this was going to be a great session. It WAS awfully good.

Henry Small noted that collaboration does not necessarily mean coauthorhsip, and then he mentioned a bunch of methods for studying it (notably Sociology of Science type methods), but then all he talked about was coauthorship and cocitation. (And he measured that coauthorship has been on the rise for 20 years--including a doubling of mega-authorship (gt 500 authors) in the past few years.)

Ji-Hong Park and Jian Qin have measured that Open Access is not well covered in citation indexes and have attempted to analyze the methodologies and level of collaboration used in the LIS literature about OA.

k-logs

There was a really nice blogging session this morning with 2 folks from Harvard and a Johns Hopkinsite. It was supposed to be about knowledge management and blogs, but it was really a blogs-in-the-workplace presentation.

Where it really succeeded was that it was a group of people who know how to talk to librarians and other ASIST type people. They avoided getting bogged down in technical details, but they introduced a set of technologies that are proving to be valuable to practitioners and should soon prove to be a fertile environment in which to do research.

Why can't Johnny file?

I'm not going to comment much on Tim Berners-Lee's talk (semantic web, blah blah blah). It was ok, but I wanted to be wowed.

4 folks came together to toss out oturageous statements about why we are bad at filing. Gary Marchionini was really the only person that rose to the task. He said: "Why bother?"

His take-home message was that systems are getting awfully clever, and that we are approaching the point where we won't need to file anymore.

Of course, everyone took him to task for ignoring the fact that filing, sorting, and organizing are all things that help us to think. He's too clever a guy not to have had an answer to that prepared: we need to be anticipating ways to teach those thinking methods once index cards, building blocks, and file folders stop being usable metaphors for our digital objects.

Marcia Bates and Carol Kulthau didn't really take the ball and run. Mostly they summarized their (considerable, respected, and well researched

Palm blogging...

is harder than i thought. But I'm pleased to be doing it now. I seem to havr figured out where the connectivity is, and thru a mix of memos and copy-paste I can post fairly easy.

NOTE: I'm throwing grammar and spelling to the wind for the next few days. Also, since there's a clipboard limit on memopad most posts will be short and snappy.

Sunday notes

JC Herz made some nice observations about our current state of affairs, ie how we are adapting technologies to match our cultures. At some base level, we live in a cult of documents. For example, students at NYU use
Friendster religiously in order to carve a student community out of New York City.

This results in interesting stuff, such as competing to collect friends--and stealing, or changing in a cute way, the definition of what a friend is.

This also touches us deeply as primates: it allows us all to say: I see you, I see that you see me. This is where non-shooting MMPORGS work best--if 12 people download your Sims table runner, that makes you feel good. She talked extensively about blogs in this light.

She also pointed to interesting uses of wikis as collaborative work environments, and said that people are even using them as the missing logistical piece of teleconferences.

It is these group dynamics that seem most interesting to JC, and where she spent the bulk of her time. She talked about analytical tools that help groups identify themselves and establish credibility of individuals, such as blogdex and technorati. She also said that we need to take the lessons that game developers have learned and design them into our systems: we need to strike a balance between explorers, winners, spoilers, and socializers. We need to reward the work that each group does, and prevent each from being disruptive to the system.

Interestingly, she didn't implicitly acknowledge that a lot of these systems have (usually) social functions that weren't designed in. She found the table runners in the Sims, but she didn't mention the child prostitutes and organized crime.

In the afternoon I attended a session about E-science which discussed emerging systems and infrastructures for large datasets. NSF, EPA, and JISC (UK) were all heard from.

Limited connectivity

It tood me a bit to get online at the conference. The Palm won't connect from the hotel at all. So I wandered across the skybridge this morning and am now reporting to you from the annual American Rabbit Breeders Assocation show.

So forget Tim Berners-Lee and info sci: I'm going to talk about bunnies!

Expect a conference post later today.

Prepare for take off

Getting ready to fly off to Providence for ASIS&T. Looking forward to a purely educational conference. August's chemical meeting was more of an experiment. This one shouldn't be as hectic as Philadelphia, as I know not a soul in Providence (although I'll know more people at the conference itself).

I notice that the post I recently thought I lost actually showed up. Oops. Although I have seen a marked improvement in my mood this week. It's definitely a combination of having a paper finished and having the interviews finished. And it's not quite pins and needles time, because there's another candidate coming to ducktown yet--so there's no decisions to be waiting on yet.

I think the whole period came to an end last night when a large group of us took over an ice cream parlour and then went to see The Incredibles. So much more wholesome than celebrating at Tiny's.

And I forgot to mention in all the mayhem: L made the very first picture in the darkroom!!! It is finished.

How come nobody told me Ashcroft resigned?

You could have interrupted my job interview with this news.

I guess now we have to start worrying about this Gonzalez guy. Hey wait a minute, isn't this the guy that said it's ok to torture prisoners as long as it didn't permanent physical damage? The linked to article quotes Gonzalez as calling Geneva Convention protections "quaint."

Completely non-election post

Reading a today about efforts at UCSB (which bears a striking resemblance to either an environmental scane or a needs assessment), I stumbled across two new references.

The first I've seen before, but they've come a long way: The Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science. A nice set of tools and resources for inserting a little GIS into any of your social science projects. What I like most about this is the combination of research and teaching--often when you see curriculum materials, they are at sites that completely lack a research focus, or vice versa. Wasn't I just saying that you could put GIS into any part of the curriculum? And here are people setting out to prove it.

The second is the Center for the Analysis of Sacred Space, which is just a plain old neat idea. Seeing that I am currently on a 10 week cultural geography tangent (hey--and I'm writing a paper about the American West as a sacred space! I've been looking at this site for 20 minutes and I just made the connection) this one is especially timely.

Anyway, an intersting point made in the paper is that researchers frequently only upgrade their technologies when it is necessary to do so for their own research. It's intersting to think that as we move to electronic-only journals in the library that we will actually be forcing upgrades for people that are clinging to outmoded technologies.

But more interestingly, in my opinion, are those few that are already pretty savvy, but choose not to use certain technologies like Windows or cookies. We don't make any efforts to make a lot of our services available on multiple platforms or to the select few that are real privacy nuts (despite the fact that many of us profess to be privacy nuts). For the unix workstation user who tries to cover her footsteps, will we actually be forcing a downgrade?