How To Save The Newspapers, Vol. XII: Outlaw Linking
Brilliant. Who said great legal minds needed to understand the world around them to make decisions. Ban linking without permission? Why not just lock us all in our homes, cut the phone/internet lines and send food to the back door? That would surely prevent any use of IP without permission. Brilliant.
Scraped from TechCrunch
The announcement was made this week about the Robertson Library winning the Atlantic Regional CAUBO award for our Virtual Research Environment, or VRE. The text from the award:
The other winners are available from the CAUBO site. You can get more information on the VRE and the software that sits behind it at our VRE and Islandora sites.The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an innovative software system for stewarding research data regardless of the type of data or discipline. The VRE combines a best-practice web-based content management system (Drupal) with a state-of-the-art data repository system (Fedora) via an open source application suite (Islandora) developed at UPEI. Together, these components help solve one of the most important and challenging aspects of any research-intensive institution: the reliable stewardship of research data throughout the life-cycle of a research program and beyond.
The VRE provides a wealth of social software tools and techniques to provide a highly-functional environment that encourages collaboration. It allows users to create workflows that can transform data into more usable formats and ensure that accessible versions of research assets are available to collaborators and/or the broader public. Over 50 research groups currently use the VRE system, representing all disciplines and research approaches, including interdisciplinary projects with international communities of interest. Examples include the Mollusc Health Lab, Marine Natural Products Lab, Marxism and Psychology Research Group, Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing, and the L.M. Montgomery Institute. The VRE software is also the basis of the library’s digital collections, including newspapers, magazines, books, audio and video.
The flexible architecture of the VRE system means that any digital file can be stored, described and accessed in a variety of ways, accommodating the requirements of individual researchers, while building a generalized framework which adapts to more uses. By bringing the core philosophies of the open source community to the research effort, the VRE also provides a transformative landscape on which to build UPEI’s research excellence and outreach. By distributing the open source software behind the VRE to the larger community, these same benefits will be available to the larger Canadian and international research communities. Emerging partnerships with other institutions (e.g., University of New Brunswick) and vendors (Sun Microsystems Inc.) point to the success of the VRE and related development efforts at UPEI’s Robertson Library.
Melissa Belvadi presented at APLA on some of the transformative workflow changes taking place at UPEI.
The first section talked about how we are using Evergreen, CUFTS and GODOT to manage our serials workflow. Since only 400 of our 35,000 serials are print, we moved to managing all of these in our eJournal database - CUFTS. Some customization by the good folks at SFU allowed us to do this easily and, we think, elegantly. The end result is a user-focused presentation of journals to our users and a simple interface for staff. James Murphy, who works in Circulation and Acquisitions, presented at NASIG with SFU on this process.
The next section talked about how we are using a set of Excel sheets for our Acquisitions workflow since Evergreen (which we switched to a year ago) doesn't have one. The key piece here is that the staff love the new process and do not miss the behemoth Sirsi ILS at all.
Part 3 was a brief mention of how we are using the GODOT system to provide our own ILL form instead of using the default RELAIS form which is sad at best. This has resulted in a cleaner patron form and fewer requests for stuff we don't have.
Part 4 described how we are using Redmine to manage the cataloguing workflow for our special collections material. This project management software was a perfect and flexible tool for automating the workflow and passing pieces back and forth. The lesson from this is using the tools that fit, rather than fitting yourself to cumbersome and expensive tools that don't.
The last piece talked about how we are doing Reserves, using a combination of Evergreen bookbags and Drupal pages. This one is a moving target so is hard to describe in great detail, other than to say that the team at UPEI has a great deal of flexibility to do this in any number of ways. We will also look at the new Reserve module coming in the next version of Evergreen and decide if it is a better way to go.
Recording Industry Sullies Multiple Reputations
I've been following this piece on the Copyright report from the Conference Board of Canada ever since it broke and these latest developments make it a must follow. Amazing what good reporting and perseverance on the part of people like Michael Geist can do. We all know that groups like the Canadian Recording Industry and their American counterparts play hard (and now it would seem dirty) in their quest to lock up IP and maintain the old models of doing business, but this kind of desperate act is just sad. Why not just play by the rules, instead of ruining their reputation and that of a supposedly unbiased research group along with them? Who will ever again trust the output of the Conference Board of Canada, "the foremost independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada?" Of for that fact, the funders of the report: U.S. and Canadian chambers of commerce, the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, the Copyright Collective of Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation? What other reports have been doctored to meet the demands of those footing the bill?
More Changes in the Library Landscape
An interesting post from Sue Polanka highlights some of the issues with a bread & butter library process - book donations. [On the other hand I suspect some Collections librarians will be happy to think of a day when they don't have to consider moldy boxes of past bestsellers.] Many libraries rely on the annual spring cleaning ritual for new material, so Sue's thoughts on what happens when they are all digital is an interesting one. As she points out, the challenges with donating eBooks far outweigh the advantages, at least in the current DRM-focused landscape. What struck me with this one was how quickly another long-standing tradition, not to mention way of building a Friends network, suddenly disappears. The other sad thought was how much this highlights the death knell of public lending in the digital age - at least in a way we can fathom. Contrast this with my coming post on ways for public libraries to make use of eBook readers.
Scraped from No Shelf Required
Trina and I are at the OVO show in Montreal, the Cirque de Soleil show. I thought it best to show my ovo against the REAL OVO ;-)
Tim has a nice post about OCLC's recent decision to ditch their new license policy and how it reflects on the nature of the OCLC hegemony in the Library community. Jennifer Younger's presentation about the decision is well worth listening to, as it highlights some of the feedback of the member community as well as the self interests of OCLC. It still concerns me that The Board is unable to recognize fully the nature of the current information ecosystem and our role as librarians in ensuring it is open and accessible. The OCLC world is still imbalanced towards the physical manifestation of OCLC (and the revenue stream derived from member's records), and away from a rich online ecosystem that encourages sharing and innovation. I was particularly concerned with the statement "Identify threats to the sustainability of WorldCat and strategies for protecting it against unreasonable use." Duh. That's the whole point that OCLC still fails to get - there is no unreasonable use of this information, as it belongs to everyone, and any attempt to describe a use as unreasonable is itself unreasonable. Listening to Younger's presentation gave me the chills, as it described the "threats" to the "members" information. Please. Stop already. Find another revenue stream and release the records, the information commons will be better off and we will get more out of it than we could ever possibly lose.
I was at OCLC in Ohio last week speaking at the Rethinking Resource Sharing conference (a nice bunch of librarians it is) and without going into detail, my closing keynote was not appreciated by all, due to a slam of the proposed OCLC license (I didn't know about the planned reversal, but likely would have slammed anyway). Why is it that some can't accommodate constructive criticism of our own profession, particularly that as reflected by OCLC? I'm not real sure, but this whole thing does make me a little sad...
Scraped from Thing-ology (LibraryThing's ideas blog)
Matthias Razum (FIZ Karlsruhe) gave A Closer Look at Fedora's Ingest Performance. The group used vanilla hardware with single processor and 2 GB RAM to look at ingest speeds and optimization options. The ingest consisted of about 4.9 million objects/500 million triples (PDFs from the patent database, which took 3 weeks to ingest) CPU was not really the limiting factor, it was I/O. There was no difference from JDK 1.5 to 1.6. There was no real difference between the various triplestores or no triplestore, meaning that using triples does not add significant overhead. The most promising areas of optimization were with Postgres tuning - they switched off Postgres's ability to respond when the machine goes down during an operation. This resulted in a highly significant change in ingest rates (130ish ms compared to 40ish ms). With MySQL tuning the InnoDB/MyISAM tables resulted in similar levels of performance improvement. Putting the DB on a separate machine, even with network overhead had a significant improvement as well. Other findings: there was absolutely no impact with a growing number of objects indicating the scalability of Fedora; combination of I/O (re database) and other tuning can see an improvement factor of 4. Another thing the group has considered is creating a number of Fedora instances and then merging the indexes later. Dan Davis provided an update on the work with Sun and highlighted the conclusions of the Karlsruhe work. They will be using the open source Grinder app to create a testbed for ongoing work in this area.
Gert Schmeltz Pedersen (Technical University of Denmark) spoke about Fedora and GSearch in a Research Project about Integrated Search. Gert looked at integrating multiple Fedora/GSearch implementations in a federated search kind of opportunity. Zoned on this one - to much data on little slides.
Tom Cramer (Stanford University), Richard Green (University of Hull), Lynn McRae (Stanford University), Tim Sigmon (University of Virginia), Ross Wayland (University of Virginia) presented on Case Studies in Repository Workflows: Three Approaches. This is critical stuff for the Fedora community - workflows are what it is all about and I think will an area of major activity for the next couple of years. One nice thing about the new Hydra project is the intention to build a standard workflow tool and the fact that the 3 partners are each using a different framework for building workflows means they have a greater chance of coming up with something cool. See: being different is good :-)
Jeesh. I was in business-y type meetings most of days 2 and 3 so I wasn't able to take in any sessions. A few comments that I did pull from
The first session on the last day was Courtney Michael, Chris Beer (WGBH Educational Foundation) speaking on Disseminating Broadcast Archives: Exposing WGBH Materials for Scholarly Use and the Open Vault project. They use PBCore for the metadata, which sounds like a good option for describing rich media. The interface was built in PHP. They have a Tab/Annotate feature which allows them to add a tag or annotation to a specific timestamp. They use a video, transcript and metadata datastreams. The video CM has 3 separate video streams (archival, proxied and streaming). The WGBH group has done a great job of modeling the while "video assets for scholars" context - well done. UPEI is working on a number of video-based projects, so we will definitely be giving Chris and Courtney a call to use their content models and applications.
David Paul Descheneau (University of Alberta) talked about Agile Fedora: AJAX, Low-cost Clustering, and Dynamic Metadata Forms for a Multicultural Website Project. Their project is an ethnomusicology study that worked with a number of cultural groups and ultimately stored 500 hours of video 500 hours of audio and 2500 images. The group found that one of the key issues for them was the workflow, with a number of concurrent independent processes. Their SAMC Media Processor back-end sounds like a must-see for the workflows associated with video/audio file formats, including the OpenPBS software that was used to create a media cluster using surplus equipment. The SAMC Cataloguing tool was VERY nice, lots of AJAX and smart screen design with live updates of the XML datastream. I liked the way they had high-quality documentary style videos for each major theme, and then they listed all the videos clips used in the piece at the end of the page. They used h.264 low/med/high Quicktime and H263 low/high Flash outputs for the video targets. They also created their own metadata schemas from the ground up to reflect the data they needed to capture for music, events and cultural expression. This was also done to provide a more sensitive context in which to engage the cultural groups and reflect their ideas about how t describe their culture.
Jon W. Dunn (Indiana University) talked about PhotoCat: Implementing a Cataloging Tool for a Live Fedora Repository. They created a photo cataloguing tool which allows things like: the creation of "bags" to run the same edit operation on a collection of images; managing a controlled vocabulary database with auto-completion.
I love this Fedora community! So many bright people making their brightness available to the larger community. Brilliant.
The afternoon session featured John Kunze and Sayeed Choudhury talking on NSF DataNet: Curating Scientific Data. John started out with a number of examples of big data examples from the climate change arena. The 4 challenges he highlighted re this domain are:
Sayeed talked about the Data Conservancy project, which I unfortunately missed :-(
