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Separate and unequal

2009-08-04T22:13:00.006-04:00

To say I am interested in digital preservation is an understatement, so when I see a post by Karen Schneider on her Free Range Librarian blog about an idea she had about a digital humanities preservation idea I was intrigued. I enjoy reading her blog and follow her on Twitter and I respect her opinion.

Her idea of a preservation plan for literary journals, named Bristlecone, has some positive aspects, but I think misses the mark on so many levels. The basic goal of preserving a last copy of these literary journals is a lofty one, although perhaps impractical on a basic level. As pointed out in her posting these literary journals are not collected widely even by academic libraries. Knowing which copies to withdraw and which to save won't solve the problem if libraries don't subscribe to the journals in the first place. Recent economic times are hitting library budgets hard and even though these literary journals are generally inexpensive I fear that they may still become casulties in a shrinking budget. Could Bristlecone serve as a clearinghouse to insure the physical copies? That would be a good idea. Could it be funded? Not sure about that.

I think it is more problematic to suggest a LOCKSS scenario to insure the preservation of the digital content. LOCKSS works great on discrete collections of digital objects. One big question, though, with this particular content is what exactly will be preserved? Would that be the pdf files used for printing these issues? Page images with accompanying OCR? Assorted files that collectively make up the web presence? Archival TIFF images of the pages? These issues could likely be worked out but the ongoing financial sustainability would be somewhat shakier. Who would commit to this and pay for it? Publishers of the journals who are already on shaky financial ground? Libraries who are being stretched to retain and preserve humanities content already? Not so sure about that either.

I think the bigger philosophical problem I have with this idea is that once again humanities content would be settling for a separate and certainly not equal solution for long term access and preservation. Digital humanities projects are some of the most innovative and meaningful uses of technology, but most of the funding available for developing cyberinfrastructure to support digital preservation is allocated primarily for the sciences (and to a lesser degree the social sciences). The money available for humanities is miniscule by comparison.

There are many innovative, destined for success models in the works that will make real strides toward developing systems to accomodate any type of digital object - be it a photograph, an audio clip, a newspaper page, an immense data set, or a literary journal. In order to be successful the solution must scale up and scale down, it must be able to detect bit loss and correct it, it must be able to use rules applied at the time of ingestion into the system to be able to know what the ultimate disposition of the data is.

Those of us with our hearts in the digital humanities must align our projects with the larger solutions that will ultimately receive the funding needed to be successful. There is no reason that literary journal content could not be saved along with a physics data set. It is all made up of bits. We just have to make sure it happens. I respectfully suggest that to have a separate system dedicated simply to literary journals does this content no favors in the long run.

When is a phobia not a phobia?

2009-07-09T21:57:00.005-04:00

I was watching an episode of "Obsessed" on A & E online when I realized I really couldn't watch it. While it speaks to my inner OCD tendencies it was set a little too close to home for me. OK, the lady on the show doesn't like germs - I mean seriously doesn't like germs - but I am actually not that crazy about germs myself. I am a person with hand sanitizer in every vehicle, in my purse, on my desk (you get the picture?). Off went the show.

I was perusing a list of phobias on The Phobia List and was intrigued to say the least. For instance, Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words. You would be afraid even to say the the name of your syndrome. How do you get help for that?

I have a friend who confessed to me as we were walking down the street once that she was afraid of clowns - Coulrophobia according to the phobia list - and as we walked along who turned the corner and came toward us but someone in a clown costume. Now I ask you, what are the chances of that!???

Some phobias would be easy enough to avoid, Auroraphobia- the fear of Northern lights or Consecotaleophobia the fear of chopsticks, for instance. Just don't go to Alaska or Chinese restaurants. Some would be a real downer, Euphobia, the fear of hearing good news, as an example. This would at the very least be a problem when people are sitting around telling jokes. "I've got some good news and some bad news." "No, no, only give me the bad news" kind of takes the punch out of a joke.

As a person prone to motion sickness I think that Aeronausiphobia, the fear of vomiting secondary to airsickness, is a legitimate concern. One held by many seat mates I have had over the years as well. As a mother I can advise young parents that Ephebiphobia, the fear of teenagers, is not to be underestimated.

When is a phobia not really a phobia? Lilapsophobia, the fear of tornadoes and hurricanes, seems pretty darned normal to me. It's all of those people without Lilapsophobia who are out there chasing big storms with their home video cameras or leaning into the surf in a raincoat on The Weather Channel. These are the people acting all smug about conquering Lilapsophobia and throwing it in our faces.

The mother of all phobias is Phobophobia, the fear of phobias. Well, that is something I need to ponder.

Mowing as an act of love

2009-06-28T10:48:00.002-04:00

Note to self: NEVER again minimize Joe's contribution to household labor when it involves mowing.

I mowed the grass today for the first time in many years. This is a task I only take on when Joe is out of town for more than 2 weeks. Last year he didn't go to Ecuador and the year before I shamefully got my 79 year old father to do it for me. I never really thought that much about it. After all it is just pushing the mower around, right? How hard can it really be?

I think of all the times I complained when Joe mowed down the wild achillea, the clover, the violets, whatever.... OK, I am officially sorry.

My mowing experience began with starting the mower. It is hard to start. I admit I am kind of a girly girl and it takes some strength and persistence to get it going. The whole time I was trying I was thinking about when he tried to show me how to do it before he left. I stupidly said (yes actually said), "How hard can it be? I just pull the string, right?" He told me to hold the lever that pulls the throttle at the same time. "OK, I've got it."

Yeah, right. I held one of the two levers and pulled. Nothing. Repeated several times. Still nothing. Is that the lever to the throttle? What is a throttle anyway? Maybe I have to hold the other lever at the same time? So I held both. It finally started after several pulls. The problem is that the 2nd lever is the one that makes it go - self-propelling it turns out. Whoa!!!! Mower and me going - fast. Sheesh.

I completed the task. But achillea, violets, clover are completely mowed down. Mowing along I could see them coming but avoiding mowing over my precious plants was next to impossible. I now fully appreciate the patch of clover by my beehives that Joe carefully avoided mowing.

No wonder he has a plan for replacing all grass with ground cover and herbs. Great idea! I am fully 150% on board. I vote for clover and other short bee friendly plants.

I think that couples in committed long term relationships should be required to do the other person's tasks at least once or twice. And then shut up. Would make for smoother sailing. Next week is our 34th wedding anniversary, so a special note to the love of my life....I love you, too.

Video about KY-NDNP

2009-06-18T19:56:00.001-04:00

It's all about discovery

2009-06-03T11:31:00.005-04:00

These are some of my thoughts that are the result of reflecting on a presentation by Dan Clancy, engineering director @ Google: Google Book Search Project: Present Status and Next Steps for the Google Book Search Project. Presented at Archiving 2009, May 2009.

Some impressive statistics were revealed at the beginning of this talk – I think these numbers should cause the library world to sit up and take notice (if they haven't done so already). Of the 10 million items included in Google Book Search every month users preview 81% of content contributed by the partners and 78% of the public domain content. The daily numbers are equally impressive: users preview 40% of content contributed by the partners and 17% of the public domain content. That is every day. Most of the traffic comes from Google.com.

That really puts a spin on the notion of the long tail. The backlist is heavily used because of discovery. It is all about discovery. Having full text available and searchable makes it discoverable.

I was interested in what Clancy had to say about quality assessment (QA). This has been an issue that has plagued our group since we started with our first film to digital books project, Beyond the Shelf. We treated those images as if they were precious objects. We scanned and did QA on about 1,000 books. We really wanted the page images to look great. That speaks to our obsessive compulsive nature, I think. We wanted perfection. Eventually it hit us in the face that there was a huge cost to this approach and that was quantity. We had fantastic discussions about cost, scalability, feasibility as it related to the number of searchable page images that we could make available.

Clancy observed that as projects want to get to a 99.9% confidence in the quality of the image/ocr that each “9” leads to an order of magnitude in cost.

This reflects our experience as well. While we really want excellence across the board at some point we have to cave to quantity and develop a good workflow for correcting errors as they are reported.

Clancy said that Google Books Search is doing this…they strive for as good of an initial capture as possible and then have developed good QA to catch errors. They also fix problems as they are reported. They have committed to: a. keep making software smarter, b. keep taking user input, and c. fix things as needed. It is cheaper to fix errors because it is a small problem.

I think this is really the bottom line for those of us creating digital content. It is about quantity and developing methods and processes to create the content faster and cheaper. Here at Kentucky we have learned to do one of the hardest types of content – newspapers. (here is a link to information about our NDNP participation) We are looking at developing efficiencies and balancing quality and quantity – is there a happy medium? Newspapers present the added challenges of small fonts, reading order problems, publishing errors (metadata problems for the most part), etc. If we can make newspaper digitization faster and better it is all to the good.

As we examine what else we choose to digitize it seems to me that we can look in our collection for the unique items and start there. There is no point in us duplicating efforts of those libraries already participating with Google. As we mine our collections I believe that we will discover a great deal of unique material in our special collections. Adding those items to the corpus of digital, discoverable content will be good for everyone. Let’s get going!

Search, Explore, Connect

2009-04-17T13:51:00.006-04:00

Favorite iPhone apps

2009-04-12T21:44:00.006-04:00

I do not know what I did before iPhone. Apparently many others feel the same as Apple is approaching a billion app downloads. In honor of the impending milestone I am making a list of my faves. Here they are - not in order...

Tweetie - one of many Twitter apps available. It is straightforward and easy to navigate.

Shazam - not only can it listen to songs (on the radio, cd's, etc.) and identify them, but then you are linked to performances on YouTube and links to iTunes to purchase.

SnapTell - take a picture with your phone of any book, DVD, CD and within get a rating, desription and links to Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. Handy for comparison shopping and for remembering items that you see.

iNeedStuff - My favorite shopping list. Add items that you need to the list. When you use it to shop the geolocator feature of the iPhone identifies the store where you are and the application learns what items are where in the store. There is a desktop application so you can sync your phone to that master list.

NowPlaying - what movies are on? Also geolocates.

Games - Drop7 and Wurdle - I was completely addicted to Drop7 (described as tetris meets sudoku) until I played Wurdle. I have spent countless hours trying to beat my scores on both games.

Amazon Kindle - Book reader for the iPhone. I can access all of my Kindle books from my iPhone and it syncs to the last page I read on my Kindle! And vice versa.

Tipulator - figures tip amount on a check and can split the check, too.

Evernote - Helps you remember anything in your life. Notes, photos, recordings. I use it to capture web snippets, tweets, wine labels, where I left my car at the airport, directons, loyalty program numbers (who really carries all of those cards), emails, receipts, recipes, restaurants. Makes my life searchable. Syncs to the cloud and to my desktop. Word recognition makes all searchable. In conjunction with the Griffin Clarifi case you can get good photos of business cards (for instance) and have them all searchable in Evernote.

Apple FTW

Taiga Provocative Statements

2009-04-05T20:28:00.010-04:00

I received a tweet last week with a link to the 2009 Taiga Provocative Statements that came out of the Taiga Forum held in January in Denver. The Taiga Forum is a group of Library AULs and ADs. The statements all begin with "Within the next five years...". The draft version has an item about Google meeting virtually all of the information needs for both students and researchers, but is item was struck before the final version was released.

You can find links to this year's statements as well as the 2006 list. Information about the process can be found in the press release located here. This is a list that all librarians should sit up and pay notice to. Very interesting.

Examples:

2. ... collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron driven. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.

6. ... libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation,instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology.

9. ... the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or regional consortia.

10. ... 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the decline of the library profession.

The State of Newspapers - living in a transitional time

2009-03-16T16:32:00.006-04:00

It has been months since I have posted here - too busy I guess with holidays, traveling, work, blah blah blah. I came across a blog post by Clay Shirky on the future (or demise) of newspapers as we know them and I thought it warranted a mention.

His posting is interesting and highlights the fact that sometimes successful ventures end before new ones take their place. This has happened repeatedly through history with many examples in the last hundred years. The point is it is difficult to identify the direction and impact of change while you are living through it.

Here is a link to the full article - read it for yourself. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

Photos and videos from the China trip

2008-11-10T21:41:00.007-05:00

I finally put some of my photos on Flickr and my videos on YouTube. Here are the links:
China food set of photos, photos of markets in China, video of the street food, video of morning exercise in Shanghai, and video of eating hot pot in Shanghai.

I hope you enjoy them!

Shopping in Shanghai

2008-11-02T06:03:00.002-05:00

Who knew shopping was so great in Shanghai? Certainly not me! We have been on the power shopping tour since we got back from Jingdezhen. We went to the fabric market where they sell yard goods plus all kinds of clothes imaginable. They can also make anything you want. The silk and the silk things are especially nice, but they also have cashmere anything. It is absolutely luscious. I found a winter coat I liked, but of course the model that they had in the booth was a size six or so. Lola the sales girl said they could make one to fit me in 5 hours. It is modeled after a Chanel design and is great. I decided to think about it since I have no more space in my luggage and will need to carry it on the plane. I got to thinking - a great coat, tailor made to fit me, for far less than I could buy a coat at Target. What's to think about!??? I went back today and they will bring it to my hotel tomorrow.

We also went to look for eye glasses. The glasses mall was four floors of glasses shops. If you can't find glasses there you aren't going to be finding glasses! Joe found two pairs and I settled on one. Mine were $109. and his were two for $150. They are fantastic frames that are totally unique. One of his looks like it is carved out of wood - they are designed by a Japanese designer. Mine look Italian, but I don't really know for sure what they are.

Add to this the silk, cashmere, lotus shoes, antiques, tea, pottery and other assorted things we have purchased, I think we have done enough shopping to keep my shopping black belt. Yikes.

Great bargains can be had - you just have to also buy the airline ticket.

Noodle Man

2008-10-30T20:42:00.005-04:00

One of the best places to eat in Food Alley in Jindezhen is at the Noodle Man's place. This gentle noodle maker, his wife and two beautiful little girls run this little restaurant. He makes the BEST noodles. He makes them all from scratch. You can have them as soup or stir fried. They are spicy and tasty. Here is a video of the noodle making. You can catch glimpses of his wife and girls, too.

Traditional pot trimming, China

2008-10-30T06:04:00.005-04:00

Jingdezhen is all about ceramics. There is a wonderful ceramics museum with kilns, pottery makers of all kinds, shops, and on and on. I managed to get some video of one of the artists trimming a pot. For those who don't know about ceramic process, the wet clay is formed into a shape by throwing it on a potters wheel. The pot is then dried and then it is trimmed to make it's final form - thinning the walls and making the foot of the pot the right shape. In the states the trimming is generally done when the clay is "leather hard" - firm but not completely dry. Here, the pot is trimmed when the clay is "bone dry." This man in this video is using the traditional methods all around. Notice how he makes the wheel spin at the beginning. No power except his own. My potter friends can probably find all kinds of things to correct in my description of this process, but watch the video and you will get the idea.

The Holiday Hotel

2008-10-28T04:28:00.002-04:00

Our hotel here in Jingdezhen is called the Holiday Hotel....not to be mistaken with the Holiday Inn. It is brand new. In fact last June when Joe was here it wasn't even started. I would not exactly call it finished. The room where we are staying is more or less finished, but there are big parts of the hotel that are still under construction. Certificate of Occupancy? We don't need no stinkin' C.O.!

We are on the top floor with a great view. That part is great. The weird thing is that the wall that separates our room from the adjoining room doesn't quite reach the front wall so there is a 4 inch (or so) gap. You can't see through to the adjoining room, but you can sure hear! When the guy staying next door turned on his TV late at night it was like it was in our room. He also smokes and I was convinced he was blowing smoke through the gap. I woke up on the night smelling smoke and then was worried that this guy (dubbed Smelly Greasy Guy) was smoking in bed. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to believe this as people smoke everywhere here.

SGG checked out today so perhaps no one will be in there tonight.

Eating in Jingdezhen

2008-10-25T23:26:00.003-04:00

We are here in Jingdezhen, China after having traveled from Lexington to Cincinnati to San Francisco to Hong Kong to Shanghai to Jingdezhen. Whew, a long trip. Thankfully it wasn't all at once! This morning we went in search of breakfast and found a street near the food market with stalls selling all kinds of steamed dumplings. We ate a few from this one and then a few from that one. They were beyond wonderful. Tender dough pockets filled with various fillings - some meat some vegetable. Savory. Spicy. Mmmmmmm! The bamboo steamer baskets are stacked high over woks of boiling water keeping them all piping hot.

After stuffing ourselves on the dim sum we wandered through the food market. It was bustling. They were selling anything imaginable that could be cooked. Piles of incredible produce; tanks of fish, turtles, eels, and frogs; a huge variety of peppers and other spices; meat of all varieties; cages of ducks, chickens, pigeons; eggs of many colors and sizes.

I guess the culinary tour of China has officially begun. With a vengeance.

I voted with pride!

2008-10-04T08:54:00.004-04:00

Because we will be returning from China on election day (we will be watching returns in a hotel in San Francisco) we went yesterday and voted absentee at the Clark County courthouse. We had to hurry because they were scheduled to close at 4:00. We made it in by the deadline, completed the paperwork and the very kind worker from the Clerk's office led us to a small room where the voting machines were set up.

She had to do some set up on the machine to make sure our vote was attributed to our precinct. While she was getting things set up I noticed that this was the same room that stored the marriage records for the county. The marriage records are recorded in books that are labeled with dates back to 1793. Standing there looking at these records we also noted that the older ones are also labeled "white" and "colored". This is a part of history that I obviously don't like, but it is what it is.

When I stepped into the voting booth I pushed the button to select a straight democratic ticket. Before I pushed the "Vote" button I stood there for a moment and checked to make sure that I was good with all of the choices. My eyes fell on Barack Obama's name and tears welled up in my eyes. The significance of voting for this man who I feel is (without any doubt whatsoever) America's best hope for the future while standing in a room where marriage records were divided into "white" and "colored" was overwhelming. I stood there savoring the moment, collected myself and pushed "Vote". A very proud moment in my life.

McCain - yikes!

2008-09-27T10:43:00.001-04:00

Books for Kids

2008-09-18T06:33:00.008-04:00

I posted this video to the meta blog this morning, but it is worth posting here because it relates not just to transformation of content, but also to ubiquitous access to words and sounds for everyone. Say what you will about Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive (and I have heard criticisms leveled about some quality and preservation issues) anyone would have to admit that he is doing it! Go Brewster.

I don't really know the practicality of the book machine being taken to developing nations to make books for kids, but I know many kids (and librarians) in Ecuador who would be so excited by the concept. Many kids there simply do not have books. Kids in the small pueblos have no hope of getting access to books. There are some workbooks in the schools, but to peruse the shelf to actually select something you want to read...unheard of.

Next summer we are planning a trip to a small jungle village that is near and dear to our hearts to make the final connections of laptops/solar panels for the schoolkids. If these kids could have access to the International Children's Digital Library - now that will be huge.

Ladylocks

2008-09-07T09:49:00.004-04:00

Last weekend at the family feast day one of the relatives brought a big tray of some tiny cream horn like things called Ladylocks. They were so good and I thought they would be a good thing to make for parties or potlucks - whatever. I was surfing for recipes on the internet and thought I would look for the recipe for ladylocks. I founds numerous versions – some with a cooked filling and some with an uncooked filling. I found one recipe that made 500 (!!!!) of them. It turns out one of the primary ingredient for these delicacies is Crisco....that right, Crisco!!!!! This recipe for 500 of the little tidbits calls for 20 cups of Crisco! Once I got over the shock I looked at the whole page and the ad that came up at the bottom said “How I lost 90 pounds” I laughed out loud. I thought to myself - “you didn’t do it by eating ladylocks!” Maybe the message is that anyone that makes 500 ladylocks and eats them will have at least 90 pounds to lose. Yikes. I am including the link to the recipe (for fewer than 500) if you want to make them. Don't offer me any if you do.
Ladylocks recipe

double standards

2008-09-05T21:37:00.007-04:00

John, John, John (shaking head)....

2008-09-03T06:04:00.006-04:00

I try not to let this blog be a political blog (OK, I don't try very hard), but I can't let the appointment of Sarah Palin as John McCain's VP pick go by without a comment. Sheesh, John, what were you thinking???? I can't believe anyone would actually be sucked into this ploy...but I listen to the coverage of the Republican circus going on in Minneapolis and sure enough people are "energized" and "excited" by this choice. OMG, I can't believe it.

I read a post on another blog entitled Barefoot and Pregnant in the West Wing that sums up my sentiments. This whole fiasco of a choice has allowed my favorite candidate, Senator Obama, to take the high road. Yay for him. At the same time his staffers and campaign workers must have been high fiving it when the choice was announced.

I think that we can't afford to make many assumptions though about the American electorate. Remember, dear readers, who got elected to the highest office....twice.

Killer apps for scientists - or anyone

2008-08-26T11:07:00.006-04:00

Chris Rusbridge is a great mind always thinking about implications for scholarly communication and how best to capture information into repositories. That summations doesn't really do justice to the thrust of Chris' work, so let's just say I admire his work immensely and have great respect for his observations. One of his lastest posts on the Digital Curation Blog is an adaptation from a posting on Science in the Open about how Nature could make Connotea a killer app for scientists. Chris' point is that the same concepts could be applicable to making repositories killer apps for scientists.

I think the same concepts could be extended to much of what libraries offer. Please read the original posts but essentiall the take-aways for me in these posts are that

Tools (and services) we offer must integrate seamlessly in what people already do
Tools (and services) we develop must outperform what is already available
Tools (and services) must function perfectly 100% of the time
Tools (and services) must include at least one feature to make things that make things measureably better

We have a bad habit in the library world of bringing on new tools and services that require users to change what they do with no value added. Additionally we make things so hard that they require instruction to make them work. Is there any mystery that less than 60% of faculty in sciences and less than 70% in social sciences rate the role of the library as "gatekeeper" as "very important". I have perceived this from my conversations with faculty colleagues over the last several years, but now this has been substantiated through research. A new report from Ithaka studying key stakeholders in the digital transformation of higher education has documented this phenomenon. Not surprising this has received a good deal of press. The report was a cover article in the August 26 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (at least it was in the digital version - I don't read the paper edition). Educause did a webcast with Roger Shonfeld, one of the report's primary authors that was also very interesting.

From the Chronicle article:

Since 2003, faculty members across the disciplines have shown a marked decline in how devoted they are to libraries as information portals. Eighty percent of humanities scholars are still devoted to library research—although that may be not because they're traditionalists but because they can't yet get what they need in digital form. But only 48 percent of economists and 50 percent of scientists value libraries as gateways.

That should worry librarians whose budgets are eaten up by high-priced science journals. What if the designated users of those materials are sidestepping the library altogether?

Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of librarians still consider the gateway function of libraries as essential. "Obviously there is a mismatch in perception here"—one that librarians need to confront if they want to stay relevant to campus intellectual life, Mr. Schonfeld and Mr. Housewright caution.

My assessment - the handwriting is on the wall. Can we as librarians read it?

addicted to apps

2008-08-22T23:28:00.006-04:00

I am just crazy about my iPhone and even crazier about the appstore. I find myself looking at the apps...starting with the free ones...then the 99 cent ones...then what the heck it is only $8.99. Here are my favorites (both paid and free)...

Koi Pond - a little zen fish pond in my hand
Facebook - easy to use access to another addiction
Shazam - listens to any recorded song and tells me what it is (how does that work?)
reMovem - easy game of strategy
IQ Boost - a game based on dual n-back exercise - read the article in Wired!
INeedStuff - a georeferenced shopping list

If these things aren't enough reason to love an iPhone then I don't know what to tell you.

can librarians re-envision themselves?

2008-08-17T12:54:00.005-04:00

I am starting to wonder if it is indeed possible to re-invent our profession to meet the information needs of a changing world. We can organize discussions until the cows come home, but until we as a profession start to think differently about the nature of information provision I think we are dead in the water. Oh sure, there are pockets of librarians who have actually shifted their weight to the other foot, but as a whole I think our profession is doing a terrible job of changing with the times.

I reflect back on the last meeting of the American Library Association in Anaheim and I was repeatedly struck by the old school nature of the meeting. There were precious few sessions where the conversation wasn't about a slightly different version of the same old thing.

At our faculty retreat we had a really good example of a new way of doing business when we heard from a clinical reference librarian about how they now accompany doctors and residents when they go on their rounds. This serves as the reference interview as they then follow-up and provide information that is needed to answer the questions that come up in interactions with the patients.

They have moved out from behind the reference desk and into a new information space. What strikes me as I try to generalize this to other parts of our profession is that we don't seem to be able to adequately identify where that new information space for faculty and students. One of the readings from our retreat pointed out that we are a profession in need of taking risks but generally speaking we are a profession of people who are risk averse.

Librarians clearly need to move out from behind the reference desk and stop waiting to be approached with questions, but the part that we do not seem to be able to grasp is where that new information space is. It is not sitting with faculty in their offices, it is not in residence halls, it is not in the lobby of the library, but rather it is in the new information space - Google searches, Facebook, My Space, etc. I am not discounting the need for the short term to have some way to answer questions for people that make their way to the library, but I think this is a dying proposition.

Developing systems that require instruction for the user is an activity with diminishing returns.

In a time of diminishing resources, we need to (and as quickly as possible) get the things that are unique to us - generally called Special Collections - processed, cataloged in a way that this metadata can be moved into the new information space. Items from our collections need to be digitized in mass and exposed to the world. We need to forge new relationships and strengthen ongoing relationships with IT professionals to develop new tools to expose our content into that new information space.

We have the ability to do this - do we have the will?

teminology

2008-08-01T09:23:00.003-04:00

This is a post about a post I read that was referring to another post (ahhh, the infectious nature of the internet!) The post was by Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre about the terms we use in trying to "sell" digital preservation. His contention is that we have tainted the term "digital preservation" because it describes a process and not an outcome. We have also sold the idea that it is very complicated and very expensive. Both are true, but there are degrees to everything.

I think the point is well taken and perhaps we should consider what Chris suggests in talking about "long-term accessibility" and "usability over time" to describe what we really want. That actually is the goal, right?

I am reminded of the Seinfeld episode when Jerry was standing at the rental car counter bemoaning the fact that the company did in fact "take" his reservation, but "keeping" his reservation was a problem.

This analogy applies to all of our digital stuff. We don't want to simply "take" it (with all of the expectations that implies) but we want to "keep" it and make it usable.