Leslie Harris on CRS Reports
Leslie Harris, Executive Director of the Center for Democracy and Technlogy, spoke eloquently today about CRS reports. You can read her comments here or watch and listen to her on the video of today's press conference about the release of the OpenHouse Project Report (minutes 19 to 26). Continue reading
Nebraska joins the State Library party on SL
The Nebraska Library Commission has announced a grand opening of their Second Life presence. To the best of my personal knowledge, Nebraska is the third State Library Agency to set up shop in Second Life, following Kansas and South Carolina. I did not see any reference to government information in Nebraska's announcement, but the Library is planning a rotating photo exhibit. Photo exhibits seemed to work well for Kansas and I wish this new effort well. The big party is May 11, 3-5pm Central Time. I won't make it then because I can't install the Second Life client at work, but I will try to visit the NLC building and get back to you. Continue reading
BPE 2007 – Shoestring Repositories
There were so many good presentations at Best Practices Exchange 2007, that is doesn't seem fair to single out any one of them as "really cool", but I can't think of another phrase for Robert Hulshof-Schmidt's Creating an Online Documents Repository on a Shoestring presentation. Robert is on the staff of the Oregon State Library and he described how his library used a new depository law, the mixed blessing of a statewide Content Management System and some nifty programming to create a system that automatically harvests agency publications, deposits them to a library web server and creates a URL for document catalogers. It's not entirely automated. Nothing can be in the current state of affairs, but it sounds like it minimizes the need for human review of a lot of files. Another nice feature of the Oregon system is that it automatically converts ingested documents into either HTML (if text based) or PDF (if binary based, like Word/Excel). So it looks like OSL is able to do some important potential preservation work at the point of ingestion. Oregon's document repository can be found at http://egov.oregon.gov/OSL/GRES/REPOS/. Continue reading
Lunchtime listen: Crisis of the Commons
Last week, Shinjoung and I were invited to participate at the Crisis of the California Commons Conference. Our panel discussion was with Megan Shaw Prelinger, Annalee Newitz and Bodo Balazs entitled, "Information Commons: Rebirth or Siren Song?" I think there was a lot of discussion about different commmons (environmental, cultural, information etc) that resonate for librarians in general and documents librarians (keepers of the public domain!). You can access the audio here. One of the best talks (well besides ours!) was Rick Prelinger's plenary on the cultural commons was especially interesting (at 44:20 of the audio file with Jeff Lustig, Jonathan Rowe, Ruth Rosen, and Iain Boal). Rick talked eloquently about interoperability, sampling, and openness, issues near and dear to our collective heart. Enjoy!
Commons requires interoperability so it can be open to all; you don't need a special key to enter the commons... Here's some examples of openness taken from the cultural domain: Openness means not just seeing the image of a bookpage but seeing the text too and being able to grab it, mix it, manipulate it. It means not just watching a movie but being able to download the shots and the edit list and make your own cut. It means not just the music but the MIDI. It means not just the freedom to read, listen, watch, feel, smell, taste, but the freedom to remix in all of these sensory domains. So in the world that we're entering, the digital world, it means that we have to be able to touch the digital object itself and touch the code that makes it play, display, or manifest itself. In other words, not just see things but be able to transform them.Continue reading
Open House YouTube Video
The Open House Project has posted a clever YouTube video about their efforts: If you're a YouTube member, please rate or comment the video. If not, please consider linking to it in your blog or web site. FGI participated in the Open House Project and contributed to the report. Continue reading