Ira Revels Digital World

Library helps Nigerian scholar digitize ancient documents that 'reconstruct humanity'

2011-06-03T11:08:00.010-04:00

Numerous opportunities and challenges exist to preserving ancient African manuscripts as I learned while at the Preserving Ancient African Manuscripts Conference last December in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. While attending the conference, I had the great pleasure of meeting a History Professor, Dr. Kabiru Chafe, the Director of Arewa House Center in Kaduna, Nigeria.

During our side-bar conversations, I could hear Dr. Chafe's urgency to discuss practical issues that are associated with the care and sustainability of Arabic manuscripts. Our conversations about the steps involved in the conservation of ancient manuscripts, digital preservation, and the eventual sustainability of ancient manuscripts in digital formats resulted in his recent visit to Cornell. During Dr. Chafe's visit, he met with my Library colleagues in the Carl A. Kroch Division of Rare and Manuscripts Collections and the Digital Scholarship Services unit, which is where I work.

Check out the article that describes some of the goals of his project to digitize just a few of the objects within the Arewa House archives to start. To view the article that appeared in the Cornell Chronicle on 3/19/2011, follow the link in the header or this one here: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May11/LibChafe.html

Presentation at the Preserving African Manuscripts Conference

2010-12-11T08:19:00.005-05:00

The 2010 Conference on the Preservation of Ancient Manuscripts in Africa will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on December 17-19, 2010.

My presentation is on the morning of Friday the 17th at a panel on "Sustainable Institutional and Financial Capacity Building." During the afternoon, I'm attending a session where I and the other panelists will discuss capacity building with other interested participants.

It looks like the following morning my group is one of three working groups that will make recommendations, present findings from discussions, and make proposals for solutions. On Sunday we'll make resolutions and final recommendations.

During the afternoon we will have a tour of Addis Ababa National Museum and Lucy; historical sites and churches; Institute for Ethiopian Studies; and "heritage shopping."

Sounds like a great week!

Who knew...

2010-09-22T16:29:00.001-04:00

...writing a book would be such a soul searching, mind-bending experience! Over the past year or so I have been working on my latest project - Managing Digital Projects! The writing is going well and I look forward to completing this project really soon. Thanks Angela for prodding, pushing, and sometimes pulling it out of me. Here's a link http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/03102010/managing-digital-projects to the American Libraries article on 'accidental project managers' taken from the book.

Copyright and Cultural Institutions

2009-11-19T14:54:00.006-05:00

Just picked up my copy and I'm impressed by how Hirtle, Hudson, & Kenyon are able to pack such dense subject matter into a (so-far) pretty easy read. This book provides great guidance for a challenging issue related to beginning digitization projects. I recommend it for anyone who is new to developing digital collections as it offers helpful tables, case studies, and figures that will prove useful to making decisions about what content to digitize and much more.

Reality of social networking, ICANN’s recent decision, and Americans at play

2009-11-10T13:42:00.006-05:00

Social networks are here (for the moment) to stay. Recently, I ran across this interesting blog post from June by Fred Stuzman a PhD student candidate at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. He briefly summarizes five social networks “you need to know” about. What is compelling about Stutzman’s post and what it makes me think about are the following:

Many Americans are unaware of the impact of social networks in other countries and languages.

Stutzman’s statement that “Young users are situating their entire formative internet experience around them and the effects of this social learning will inform use patterns throughout their life” is a given and this phenomenon and these young users also will inform 'net policy developments for a long time to come. To that effect, does anyone have something to say about GoingOn, which was announced just recently at Educause?

As younger social network users come online, some networks lose their flavor.

The decision by ICANN to allow non-English characters first for for Domain names, next for entire URLs will enable billions more to participate in and create social networks and search for them using their own native language, but most Americans know only their native English language and sometimes that can be both a "blessing and a curse".

How will these realities inform new modes of learning, develop new learners (by way of opening up Internet access), and change the way Americans (young and not so young) play in the global sandbox?

Tweets about OCLC Digital Forum East

2009-11-05T11:22:00.002-05:00

Check out my *LIVE* Tweets at the OCLC Digital Forum East!
http://twitter.com/irev09

A Brief History of Black Education in America: Ithaca and Beyond

2009-10-14T12:48:00.002-04:00

In 2009 the Cornell University Library hosted a panel presentation to honor Black History Month. Download the video here: http://www.cornell.edu/mediavolume/events/2009/20090225-history-black-education.mp4 or watch a streamed version here:http://www.cornell.edu/video/details.cfm?vidID=510&display=preferences.

About the Video

Ira Revels, Margaret Washington, and Sean Eversley-Bradwell look at American education from the African American perspective.

Ira Revels discusses the role of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in black education during the mid to early 19th century, using images from the HBCU Digital Collection, a collaborative project involving Cornell University Library and twenty-one HBCUs;
History professor Margaret Washington discusses black education in antebellum New York City, with a focus on the African Free School. At a time when no public education existed, this privately run institution provided formative education for individuals who became the most important African American leaders in the pre-Civil War era;
Ithaca College Professor Sean Eversley-Bradwell presents the history of black students in Ithaca, NY, revealing numerous examples of resistance and agency. This history helps to map how race impacts and structures local communities.

Wepapers.com is cool

2009-10-08T17:29:00.002-04:00

Wepapers. com officially opened its doors to the public in November 2008 and people haven't stopped talking about it since. It is a social network for students of all types to share and collaborate on...papers! Some of the coolest features include a vast index of types of papers, including abstracts, lecture notes, and essays. Students from all over the world can view and share feedback on topics (and sub-categories of each) ranging from the social sciences to world lit, law and legal studies...the list just goes on and on...

Another feature is the ability to view results from your own institution, if papers are available. This is helpful to students who may want to connect to their peers locally.

It's easy to sign-up and create a profile and did I mention that it's free?

I like the look...

2009-04-09T11:22:00.002-04:00

...of the new Go2Web2.0 site. Go2Web2.0 is a web applications index chock full of interesting new website applications. View the new site here at http://go2web20.net/ or see the classic site. The new site categorizes web apps into a long list of topics. Everything from e-learning to design, collaboration, and community apps are covered.
~Ira

Catch me in Seattle

2009-03-13T08:51:00.003-04:00

I'm in Seattle, Washington this week at the Association of College and Research Libraries Annual Conference. The photo above is of a tourist learning throwing fish at Pike's Place Fish Market during the salmon throwing contest on Friday, Aug. 17, 2007, in Seattle. The public market is famous for its fishmongers who send fish flying through the air after they are purchased by customers.

Libraries and Digital Preservation Top List of Topics in President Obama's Open Government List

2009-03-04T07:24:00.004-05:00

While reading the news this morning, I came across this article. Check out the Truthout article here "Web-saavy Obama Team Hits Unexpected Bumps", then head over to The Sunlight Foundation to vote or comment on Our Open Government List at http://feedback.sunlightfoundation.com/oogl/. As evidenced by the comments. It seems libraries, digital preservation, and metadata are taking a front row. John Wonderlich's post at the Sunlight Foundation blog titled "Free Government Information." http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/3 provides a closer look at Obama and the topic of "Affirmative Disclosure."

Fighting the good fight...

2008-05-08T14:54:00.001-04:00

As if the current administration couldn't get any scarier, here's a recent article posted on Truthout.org about a small victory for digital libraries:

FBI Withdraws Digital Library's National Security Letterhttp://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050808A.shtmlPaul Elias reports for The Associated Press: "A nonprofit digital library has successfully fought an FBI attempt to seize information about one of its users, and is calling on other groups to challenge government agencies attempting to obtain online customer information without a judge's order."

Is Web 2.0 Played Out?

2008-04-28T09:43:00.006-04:00

Is Web 2.0 played out? My friends in libraryland often complain that some folks use the term "Web 2.0" too frequently and way too inaccurately. So I decided to do a little digging on my own into definitions of Web 2.0 for libraries and archives. I settled on Wikipedia for simple definitions, however my ultimate goal is to post examples of Web 2.0 integrated into library digital collections. Keep a lookout for those posts. In the meantime, below is a glossary of Web 2.0 terms. Oh, and before I forget Go2Web.com has a list of Web 2.0 technologies for you to try.

Glossary

Web 2.0[1]

Blogs (short for Web logs) are online websites where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.

Collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges as a result of collaboration and competition among many individuals.

Mash-ups combine data from many sources into one tool (i.e. Google maps and Flickr.)

Peer-to-peer networking is a computer network that uses the collective bandwidth of network participants rather than conventional centralized resources where a relatively low number of servers provide the core value to a service or application.

Podcasts and vodcasts are audio and video recordings distributed through an aggregator such as iTunes.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or Podcasts.

Social networking services uses software to build online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.

Web services isdefined by the W3C as "a software system designed to support interoperable Machine to Machine interaction over a network."

Wikis are a software that allows users to easily create, edit, and link pages together.

[1] Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Homepage Startup - "making life a little more manageable"

2008-04-08T22:13:00.013-04:00

We all suffer from webpage overload. Each day I have to open no less than 20 webpages. Typing URL's into the address bar of my favorite browser is time consuming. I've tried saving pages in the page options on my browser, using a variety of web apps - everything from Google Reader for rss feeds to StumbleUpon to manage my favorite web links. Then I ran across Homepagestartup.com and that's when life got a little easier.

Homepagestartup.com is a web app that provides quick access to your favorite websites. It's so simple to use. Just go to http://homepagestartup.com/ to add sites that you visit frequently. Click on a square box in the center of the webpage and type in the page title and the URL. Click save and you're done.

Since I began using the site about a month ago, I've even used their tab feature to add multiple webpages in specific categories such as "Conferences", "Health", and "Finances". If you're like me, you probably pay many of your bills online. This site makes it so much easier to access those company websites.

While the site delivers on its ability to help you manage multiple frequently-visited websites, it could use a few tweaks. First, when I tried to move "squares" from one tabbed area to another, I couldn't. I had to create a new "square" under a new tab and then delete the one in the location I did not want it to be. Sometimes a page doesn't automatically appear in the square to which it is assigned. I have found that by tabbing through the form, I am able to have more success when I press the enter key to assign a webpage to a square instead of clicking on the "Save" button. Another annoying feature is that when I change the custom settings to add or remove squares, some of the remaining squares get disorganized such that I have to rearrange them individually.

There are several cool features that make the site very useful. You can share your page with your friends and colleagues in Facebook or MySpace in read-only format. That means you don't have to settle for telling someone about your websites, you can actually show them. Some minor customizations are available at this point which means you can customize the look of your page using the color picker. Perhaps, in the future I will be able to perform more interesting customizations, but for now I'm satisfied just not having to remember all of those websites.

iPodU

2007-08-12T14:26:00.000-04:00

iPodU is a collection of video lecturettes and features from several prominent institutions of higher education. Among them are Vanderbilt University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Stanford. I found a couple of engaging videos at NJIT on Black Heritage in Technology and Creative Thinking and Problem Solving. Stanford University has a lecture series titled "Entreprenurial Thought Leaders" within their Technology Ventures Program. Visit Stanford's lectures at http://itunes.stanfordu.edu.

Getting Lost?

2007-07-06T21:53:00.000-04:00

Let your friends know where you're going with bliin - http://bliin.com/
Bliin "lets you share your location and geo-tagged photos in real time"

This week's favorite sites

2007-07-06T21:35:00.000-04:00

CMS - Joomla - http://www.joomla.com/
Future of the Book Demo - http://www.futureofthebook.org/sophie/files/Making_a_Sophie_Book.html
UNC-CH Infobits Newsletter - http://its.unc.edu/news/feed/

Hey, can I get one of these for my office?

2007-07-06T16:42:00.001-04:00

MILK - to call it a desk would be a sin. http://www.milk.dk/

What do SOLINET members say about the future of libraries?

2007-07-06T10:59:00.000-04:00

from AL Direct...

The Southeastern Library Network has released a 10-page report (PDF file) detailing results of recent discussions regarding the future of libraries. The report is the result of a series of 12 discussion groups SOLINET facilitated with its member libraries. The discussions focused on three scenarios (PDF file) that depict libraries three to five years into the future. Participants debated what was likely, unlikely, and missing in each of the scenarios....SOLINET, July 5

Second Earth?

2007-07-06T10:58:00.001-04:00

from AL Direct...

Second Earth The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an immersive, 3-D visual environment that combines elements of social virtual worlds such as Second Life and mapping applications such as Google Earth. What happens when the virtual and real worlds collide? Wade Roush writes that 'many computer professionals think the idea of a "Second Earth" mashup is so cool that it's inevitable, whether or not it will offer any immediate way to make money.'...Technology Review, July/August, pp. 38-48

From American Libraries Direct

2007-07-06T10:56:00.001-04:00

Your job prospects in 2030 Stuart W. Elliott, director of the Board on Testing and Assessment at the National Research Council says that by 2030, the question of what skills current employers might want could be moot for most jobs. By then, according to his pilot analysis (PDF file) of how many jobs might be gobbled up by computers, 60% of human jobs as we now know them including 74% of U.S. library, training, and teaching positions may disappear....

2007-06-29T14:50:00.001-04:00

Sign me up

Second Life Research

2007-06-29T14:26:00.000-04:00

If you're interested in research on SL there are a couple of websites to choose from.

Mark Pepper has an annotated bibliography at: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib. Second Life in Education is a wiki site located at: http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/secondliferesources.