Short one

Sorry this one's gonna be short, and, alas, the last for the week. We settled on the new house yesterday, and I'm gonna be moving from tomorrow to sunday. Won't be gettin' Internet access back 'til Monday. And all the stuff leadin' up to kept my from doin' it until today.

Whinin' over, did anybody happen to see this Wired article: Consumers Don't Want Flexible DRM
http://wired.com/news/columns/0,71240-0.html?tw=wn_index_21. Seems that some small start up company wants to make sure you can listen to your Billy Joel tunes on any player, bought from any digital download vendor. Seems to be pretty much the same thing Real does (and when's the last time anybody actually bought a song from them), but your files and their DRM will be stored on some small company's server somewhere. What happens if these guys go belly up? Where's my files?

Much as I'd love to see open format DRM, if we have to have it at all, I agree with Wired. This one's a step back.

Baseball

Okay, may as well say it right here and get it outta the way- I don't like baseball. Much as I liked the Pirates and Willie Stargell as a kid, I lost the taste for it over the years. Don't like American rules football, either- too much wussy padding. The only things I'll watch on occasion, usually with a beer in hand, are English rules football (try to never miss the English/Irish game) and a rare rugby ruck. Please feel free to jump all over my case about my lack of sports patriotism.

Well, finished the del.ici.ous links, still have the Connotea, installed Nvu (waaahh, I want my Composer ;-) ), and created my first Zoom Cloud. My biggest problem wasn't finding things, but finding things that 500 other people hadn't posted. Yet another instance, I guess of great minds postulating similar hypotheses ;-) Goin' pretty well, though.

House settlement is Tuesday, so I've been trying to balance that, job, and homework. Success rate's a little low on thatend at the moment. Kack.

Anywho, discovered an interesting thing with our current digital vendor a couple weeks back. Asked for the access files in JPEG 2000, partially because we wanted to play with the new format and dm has built in view support (so they say- haven't tested it yet). A lot of people use it for maps, because you can zoom in and blow a mountain up as big as yer head. But what we discovered was that, although it would seem like the perfect thing to use on 3 foot long newspapers (yes, we are digitizing them, no we are NOT pitching them), it isn't. We haven't quite figured out what happened yet, but instead of being 80 percent smaller, the dang things went from 10 MB TIFFs to 25 MB JPEG 2000. Actually crashed my boss's PC trying to open one (har, opened fine on MY PC...) Only thing we can figure is that size and small font, close packed lettering mean large size explosion. Just passing on findings- surprised the snot outta me, and I've been championing the 2000 cause...

Well, back it it. No amusing links this go round- seems I've already used most of 'em ;-). Taptcha, in one format or another, later

More on dm

I needed a psoting here, and I felt like spreading the digital joy. There's a free online intro to CONTENTdm being hosted by AMIGOS and OCLC on July 20 from 2:30-3:30 CDT (that's 3:30-4:30 EST). You can sign up at https://www3.oclc.org/app/request/bin/request.asp?specialCode=cdmwebinarjul20. Enjoy. It's just a very basic overview of what the system can do.

Well, off to the land of the Scout Portal and socialist (I mean social) bookmarking. Tapatcha later.

Tappin' away

at the Scout Portal. Got 24 outta the 25, but wanna add a couple extra (I'm also the guy who used to do the 25 page 12 page paper). It's not too bad, gotten used to it, moments I almost like it (kinda scary, those moments). Almost got the del.ici.ous as well- still way behind on the Connotea, but at least that one's easier to do. Life still taken over by house settlement- supposed to happen 1:00 on Tuesday.

Found some cool things while surfing about looking for stuff to add. Printed a few of the ones that had already been added by 300,000 people, and some of the really good ones that I did add, for later parusal when I have a life again. Or something. Anywho, in the interest of interesting links, I leave you with the link to the H.P. Lovecraft Archive- it's got all kindsa nifty things about the man's works and the literary circle that grew up around it and him. Frankly, if you like creepy, low gore atmospheric horror you've already heard of him, if not you probably won't like him. The link's http://www.hplovecraft.com/. Click away, and look out for the shoggoths.

Whining and free CONTENTdm

Well, slowly workin' my way through the bookmarking and Portal assignments. Still whinin' about havin' to catalog, but at least it's under my breath now.

Anywho, I'd mention the Bureau of Library Development's CONTENTdm program- basically a free license for any PA Library willing to join AccessPA. Got a few more details today. It's now called the "Access Pennsylvania Digital Repository," and has a website at http://www.accesspa.state.pa.us/contentdm.htm with guidelines and an application. There's also a little blurb on it in the AccessPA newsletter at http://www.accesspa.state.pa.us/stat_report_05_26_06.htm. CONTENTdm has a few quirks, but generally speaking it's pretty easy to use, and the price can't be beat. They're also thinking about making a change to the guidelines to allow private collections (can be read as "not members of AccessPA) for a fee. Even so, it should still be cheaper than a regular license. Check it out.

Well, back to the scanning. Got a rare book on the desk that has to go back home by 4:30. Later.

Poor bloody catalogers...

So, I'm slowly working my way through the Scout Portal assignment, like everybody else. I know a little bit about Dublin Core, which it seems the thing's based on, so I've managed to mainly flounder in the right direction, though there are a few things that I haven't figured out yet (no, I haven't been able to use the screenshot feature either). But the more I do it, the more I pity the poor librarians who work in this stuff everyday. I mean, I used to just think they were a little... um... different, but now I really know why. I just keep thinking of HP Lovecraft and his non-Euclidian geometries. I just keep chanting "Ia! Cthulhu! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn! Ia!" over and over again as I work, and the Elder Ones of Cataloging seem to be appeased. There are just Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know...

Just a quick 'un

Just got back from SLA in Baltimore about an hour ago. Pretty cool. They were cxomplaining about lowered attendance, but I'm guessing at about 1000 or so in attendance. Saw some cool stuff in the exhibtor's hall, but alas, not much on the digital/tech end. I was only there for the day, so I didn't get to attend anything.

Anywho, we presented a paper. Originally thought it was gonna be an hour session, but it turned out we had 15 minutes on the tech roundtable. My co-presenter, who's our Outreach person, did the first ten minutes, then I spent a few minutes babblingon about "CONTENTdm's really cool, but it's got these quirks". Answered a few questions at the end. If you happen to run outta sleeping pills, there's this paper, which we did, at the SLA website. Here's the link: http://www.sla.org/PDFs/2006CPFee-Hale-Bodling.pdf

Enjoy. Tapatcha later.

Baker half-baked

Alright, I admit it- as a digitizer I've got a bit of a natural bias on the whole Double-Fold issue. I mean, I scan books every day, and write the specs on the contracts for our vendors when we outsource. Most of the time, we don't disbind, but ocassionally, it is necessary. Gutter margins are tight in some of these old books, especially when some idiot already went at 'em with a guillotine when they were rebound. And face it, most books older than about 75 years have been rebound at some point. I mean, do you really think that when that 1885 report of the Committee on Lunacy was originally bound they did it in bright canary yellow?

If we have to disbind a book, it comes back, goes in a custom fit archival box, and gets tucked away where it does not get pulled. That's not to say that it can't be. If someone gives a good enough (usually scholarly) reason that they need to finger up the original, then out it comes. But most people are far more interested in the contents and their legibility than they are in whether it has half a mummy embedded in it somewhere (and if that were the case, it DEFINITELY wouldn't circulate).

Okay, I admit it, OCR can be pretty bad. When the Necrologies came back, the OCR was so bad we only use it as a search aid- it doesn't display. But there's 2 of us on the project, and another 160,000 images on the way, so we don't have time to correct it at the moment. We figured, and it's been proven by those who use them, that they'd rather find the obituary of Great Uncle John's second cousin's sheep Charles and print a copy of the obit than wait a couple years. And we kept the originals, thank you very much, even though the scrapbook pages are crumbling to bits around the edges.

But, can we really be expected to pay for the crimes of our predecessors? Times have changed, and we usually don't kill off the old volumes after scanning and filming now- if it's important enough to scan, it's important enough to keep. Didn't see any solutions poppin' out of Baker either. Wish we had a time machine and could go back and dumpster dive, but we can't. Guess we'll just have to live with it and learn from our history.

Google and Dublin Core

I was scanning through the Google doc to try to solidify my response to this week's discussion. Was more than slightly amazed to find that they consider Dublin Core metadata to be mere "spam". This has all kinds of implications for digital image collections, as it is the standard format for the cataloging of these items.

For example, our collections are in CONTENTdm, which uses DC as the basis of its metadata template. OCLC, the group that DiMema, the makers of dm markets its products through, has promised that if one opens one's collections for harvest, they will be processed into OAI, and will show up in the search engines, including Google. Does this mean that Google will ignore them? Does it mean that it will show the collection as a whole, but include none of the ctaloging that makes the collection usable? Our own collections don't have a start page, linking directly to the database, so the search engine can't hook on to that.

This adds a whole new set of questions to the field of digitization, and ones that we will have to answer soon. It's starting to feel like the old days, the late 1990s-early 2000s when there were no standards and everybody was just tossing things up and hoping that patrons would find them. I didn't like it then, and I like it even less now.

I'm a bad blogger

Man, keeping up with this thing's even tougher than I thought. It's been an insane week, between trying to get my house bought (still working on that one) and now 2, count 'em, 2 sick kittens (still working on that one, two).

Anywho, I'm in the middle of the Understanding Digital Libraries book. Even as a digitizer, this is more than a bit of TMI. The section on digitizing videos was pretty interesting, though. We did this once, but had to pull it down within a week due to issues with one of the people's hair. Ah, well, worked great while it was up. CONTENTdm's a tad expensive (though any Pennsylvania library in AccessPA can get it for free through the Bureau of Library Development- head to http://www.statelibrary.state.pa.us/libraries/cwp/view.asp?a=6&q=40519 and look for Sandy Nork's name in the second section), but it'll handle most any format, from text to image to video and audio.

If you want a good overview of what it takes to do a digital prject, though, the NINCH guide's probably the best. It's at http://www.nyu.edu/its/humanities/ninchguide/, and can be gotten in PDF by following the last link in the right column. Again, a tad technical, but it's got all you need to know.

Well, signing off and back to the books. Tapatcha later.

Sorry about the lack of adding here, folks. My wife and I are in the process of buying a house, and that's kinda taken over my life. Managed to fit homework in around it, but that's about it. Mortgage companies, insurance companies, etc., BLECH!

Anywho, I added my first record to the Scout Portal. Looks vaguely familiar. Our digital cataloger passes me a template in Dublin Core cataloging format for CONTENTdm, then we update the few details that change from image to image. Pretty similar, though a much vaster pain to use than dm. But I thought I'd share the URL here. Not exactly library related, but kinda cool (for a horror film analyst).

It's the Gothic Texts page at the Internet Scared Text Archives. It's got Summers' The Vampire, His Kith and Kin and Baring-Gould's Book of Were-wolves among a select few others. Site address is: http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/index.htm


Enjoy, at least if, like me, yer amused by that kinda thing. Later