Tennant: Digital Libraries
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Posted by Roy Tennant on October 30, 2009
Not long ago I wrote about information on the Internet that should go away. Sure, there's the photo of you at that party that you sincerely wish would disappear, but I'm also talking about just plain outdated information, such as how to fix a software problem for a version of an application or operating system that is no longer used by anyone on this planet.So imagine my surprise when someone whose opinions actually matter happened to agree with me. He was interviewed on NPR's hit show "Talk of the Nation," no less. It turns out that this Viktor Mayer-Schonberger has even written a book on the topic: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in t...Read More Industries: News & Features
Posted by Roy Tennant on October 28, 2009
 After several months of hard work and preparation, the Library 101 video and web site debuted today to a roomful of rapt and engaged librarians at the Internet Librarian Conference. Spawned by the creative forces of Michael Porter and David Lee King of "Hi-Fi Sci-Fi Library" fame, this project combines a variety of techniques and technologies to get across the important message that libraries must both change a great deal and also get back to our root...Read More
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Posted by Roy Tennant on October 27, 2009
 In a post last week, I introduced the eScholarship redesign and refocus of mission on the publishing needs of faculty, with repository capture being a side benefit. With this second part, I seek to lift the hood of the technical infrastructure, which I'm doing with the help of Lisa Schiff of the technical team that worked for two years on this major refactoring of eScholarship. As Lisa said in part in an email to the Code4Lib and XML4Lib mailing lists:Some h...Read More Industries: News & Features
Posted by Roy Tennant on October 21, 2009
 This week, in honor of Open Access Week, the California Digital Library released a complete redesign of the eScholarship Repository. But what at first glance appears to be a gloss on one of the earliest and most successful institutional repositories is, in fact, much more. It is a major refocus of mission and goals toward the publishing needs of faculty, with the requisite changes in both messaging and tools to support them."There were three things we wanted to accomplish with this redesign," said Catherine Mitchell, CDL Publishing Group Director, in a phone interview, "1) ...Read More Industries: News & Features
Posted by Roy Tennant on October 16, 2009
 Whether it was the haiku I wrote to help justify my request for a Google Wave account, or the universe was just smiling on me, I entered the world of Google Wave this week. Boss, I have to admit, my output this week has suffered as I've worked to learn this new tool. I didn't mean for it to, but it did.Part of the issue is that it is just so different than anything you've ever interacted with before. Plus, it's an early beta and there are times when you are painfully reminded of that fact. If something doesn't seem to work like you think it should, part of the time it is because you're working with new paradigms and part of the time it's because it is si...Read More
Posted by Roy Tennant on October 14, 2009
MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC), a carrier standard for bibliographic information used along with rules described by the Anglo American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition (AACR2), has not (yet) died, despite my plea that it do so, nearly 7 years ago to this very day in the pages of Library Journal. Although that screed was not completely on the mark (do with that pun what you will), it helped to spark a conversation about our bibliographic standards and where we need to go in the future. For what it's worth, I corrected and expanded on the ideas in that less-than-800-word column in an award-winning journal article not long thereafter.I was reminded about this in recent days by two independent and yet related events. One was the ...Read More
Posted by Roy Tennant on October 12, 2009
While surfing the blog/twitterverse I ran across this interesting post on linked data. In case the term "linked data" catches you flat, see this earlier post of mine where I identified linked data as the practical part of "the semantic web". A number of library organizations have been putting data sets up as linked data, including most notably the Library of Congress and OCLC (my employer, here and here).These first steps into the linked data world are necessary to begin to create an ecology of nodes (individual data points) that can be linked to ...Read More Industries: News & Features
Posted by Roy Tennant on October 7, 2009
 Not long ago I complained that the better a presentation was in person, the more likely it would be useless when posted online. This is because the very factors that make a live presentation engaging (very little text on the screen, etc.) make it singularly difficult to get anything from when posted online without speaker notes. Although this remains true for anyone who simply puts the slides on a web site, there are clearly strategies that can put you in the audience virtually, long after the last suitcase is wheeled off to the airport.I was reminded about this by the excellent job the Access 2009 Conference has done wit...Read More
Posted by Roy Tennant on October 6, 2009
 When I talk about digitization, I often mention how inexpensive and easy it can be to digitize these days. A low-to-mid-range consumer camera can capture an image that is much better than what is required to make content accessible online. So when I happened to get a new camera last week I thought it was time to check in on how far technology had advanced in consumer cameras.Since my budget was limited, I spent well under $300 on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS1. I picked it largely for its 12X optical zoom, which I thought would come in handy in a number of shooting situations. Other salient features are that it can capture over 10 megapixels and it sports a 25mm Leica ...Read More Industries: News & Features
Posted by Roy Tennant on September 30, 2009
Ithaka has just released a new report: “What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization” that analyzes which journals can be withdrawn responsibly from library collections. The web site states:For journals that are principally accessed in digital form, preservation is the primary remaining role of the print original. This study analyzes the rationales for retaining some copies of scholarly journals in print format, determining that actual ongoing community needs for print materials in the face of high quality and well-preserved digitization are significant but not unlimited....Read More Industries: News & Features
Posted by Roy Tennant on September 27, 2009
In my last post, "The Next-Gen E-Book Reader" I made it clear that I thought the rumored tablet computers from Apple and Microsoft were potentially the game-changing e-book readers. I've long said that single-purpose devices were not it. Now with potentially both Apple and Microsoft fielding devices that may be the perfect multi-purpose device for supporting e-books in addition to many other computing tasks, the game seems just about ready to change -- and dramatically so.Therefore I found it interesting that a story in the New York Times q...Read More
Posted by Roy Tennant on September 25, 2009
 Apple Computer is widely believed to be near to announcing a tablet computer. Meanwhile, Microsoft has not be sitting on its hands. As reported by Gizmodo, Microsoft is hard at work on a device called Courier: Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque hom...Read More Industries: News & Features
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