Praise for GPO and “bootleg” withdrawal
As James Staub noted a few days ago, GPO has posted crystal clear audio of the recently closed Spring 2007 Depository Library Council meeting on a new podcasts page. GPO's page is a true podcast since they offer a subscription through iTunes. Thanks GPO! Comparing their page with our podcast page, they have everything we had with the exception of the LOCKSS session. They also had several other sessions our recorder couldn't get to. Therefore, as a gesture of goodwill, we have pulled our less than perfect audio files from our podcast feed with the exception of the LOCKSS session. We congratulate GPO on its fine and swift work in making the work of the Council available to the entire community. Assuming this is the way and schedule that GPO plans to provide future DLC/FDLP conference content, we will cease our duplication of audio effort, though we'll still continue to post participant notes. Keep up the great work! Continue reading
TIGER Mapping Service using public geographic census data
Most map librarians know about the Tiger Mapping Service, but for those of you interested in learning more, check out the U.S. Census Bureau's Mapping and Cartographic Resources. TMS is a geographic map service which produces public domain GIF images of map data which is derived from Tiger/Line® data. The primary goal of the service is to provide a public resource for generating high-quality, detailed maps of coverage within the United States and outlying areas, using a public geographic data source. To find out about the project, Click Here To go straight to the maps, Click Here Continue reading
“Everything is Miscellaneous”
David Weinberger -- technologist, speaker, co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School -- focuses on how the Internet is changing human relationships, communication, and society. He's just published a new book called Everything is Miscellaneous: the Power of the New Digital Disorder. I'm just starting to delve into it, but already am impressed enough to recommend it highly. In this book, Weinberger delves into the organization of the internet and explains the "digital order" (or the order of miscellany!) -- which, because it's made of bits rather than atoms, can ignore traditional organizational schemes, can be user-organized, can be reshuffled, reorganized and multiply organized to make digital objects easier to find. Weinberger's not a librarian, but this book will have a great impact on librarians -- Karen Schneider called it "dangerous." Go out today and get a copy or three for your library, borrow it from a friend, buy it from amazon if you have to, but read this book!
(p.22-23)...But now we -- the customers, the employees, anyone -- can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them. The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and -- perhaps more important -- who we think has the authority to tell us so.Continue reading
BPE 2007 – File Formats and Preservation
At Best Practices Exchange 2007, there was much talk about appropriate file formats for preservation. I brought this up during my presentation on LOCKSS and there was general agreement about how we need open, non-proprietary formats to have any real chance of doing long-term digital preservation. Some states, including Oregon are converting documents they receive into more open formats like HTML and PDF. Oregon even has an automated tool for doing so, but more about that in another posting. Glen McAninch of the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives gave a presentation specifically on this topic, called Format Issues in Digital Preservation. His slides will hopefully show up on the schedule page in the next few weeks. Glen described Florida's work in providing "risk assessment" information to state agencies about different kinds of file formats. They take several factors into account - open vs. closed, current market share, existence of current conversion tools, etc. After describing Florida's work, Glen suggested that Kentucky might go down a similar path. It looked useful, but I couldn't find a link to the Florida document to share with you. There are some snippets from the Florida document in Glen's presentation, which will hopefully be posted soon. While not mentioned at the Exchange, two good sources for information about file formats and their link to digital preservation are the PRONOM Registry of file format documentation and the File Formats Blog. Continue reading
BPE 2007 – Tracking New Publications
As I mentioned in my introduction to the Best Practices Exchange 2007, one of the tracks was Metadata & Discovery. Under this heading were a number of sessions aimed an answering the question, "How can we find out about new state publications if the agency won't tell us when they put out new stuff?" This is a question that still plagues me in Alaska, even though I have a spidering program that generates a list of new files added to agency web servers. The basic problem is that what I get is a list of files, which me and an assistant need to comb through to see if there are any documents to be claimed, printed, etc. This is time intensive, taking between 10 and 20 hours for a state with a gov't as small as Alaska's. The holy grail for us would be any way to be notified just about documents. One of the sessions I attended offered two options that I think will really help my program. I intend to start implementing these options this week. If they work well and I remember, I'll report back in six months or so. The session was done by Michelle Reilly of the Arizona State Library and Mary Jo Lazun of the Maryland State Law Library. Michelle's presentation was on using the calendar in Microsoft Outlook as a way of reminding program staff to check for new agency serials and annual reports. While we have a paper "print from web" listing that my assistant checks every Friday, what I like about Michelle's use of Outlook Calendar is the ability to check off issues captured and that we can key reminders to publication frequency. So instead of visiting EVERY serials page every Friday just in case, we can put frequency appropriate reminders so only a small set of pubs needs to be visited on any given day. Michelle's instructions and screen shots should be available on the presentations page in the next few weeks. Mary Jo is interested in capturing new titles the library doesn't know about yet. Her presentation was concerned with using page alerting software to track agency pages. I tried and discarded this option about three years ago but alerting services appeared to have improved since then. Mary Jo is currently using WatchThatPage, which seems to be working for her, but encourages people to try other options. Mary Jo sets her page watchers on agency home pages and any obvious "publications pages." She currently has about 500 page watchers organized by agency. She estimates about 2/3 of the page updates are trivial changes (date changes, etc), but that the rest hold some value for her library. Because the conference held five simultaneous sessions most of the time, I didn't get to most of the metadata and discovery tracks. Hopefully we'll see more writeups from attendees. Continue reading