Thursday, January 27, 2005

References for a conference on digital asset management #

Here's what I've written to support David's speaking next week: David Greenbaum is speaking at Managing Digital Assets: A Primer for Library Administrators. David will be talking about "developing faculty and teacher toolkits that gather and share digital content." I'm working with David to provide attendees a reading list of "key articles, web sites, or monographs" for participants to read. First of all, I don't think that there is one piece of writing that nicely summarizes all that we are thinking about in terms of the gathering and sharing of digital content. Obviously, there the obligatory websites: Interactive University and Raymond Yee's work blog and wiki entries on Scholar's Box. If the attendees have not yet heard about blogs and wikis, we can suggest Educational Blogging (EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5) by Stephen Downes and Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not (EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5) by Brian Lamb. Weblogging presents very interesting possibilities for education. Chris Ashley’s article is an excellent introduction. Fall 2001: Weblogging: Another kind of website Raymond Yee's article on the Second-Generation Web tries to draw together bits and pieces from all these elements that have informed our technical development: The sea change of the Web: What is the Second-Generation, Semantic Web? Reading the current discussions on folksonomies and ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies can be instructive because, in many ways, it is about tensions between the institutional and the personal (themes in content development when so many have tools to develop digital content). A good entry point is Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment: There's a useful and engaging discussion unfolding about "folksonomies" -- emergent, user-shaped taxonomies of metadata like those in Flickr and Delicious (Adam Mathes' thorough and detailed paper is here, Lou Rosenfeld offers measured dissent here, Clay Shirky fires back here). Although Jon Udell's essay on internet-based collaboration in the sciences (Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration) is long and a bit dated, it is packed with insights, especially on the use of XML and the universal canvas in the context of the university. The Network Really Is the Computer by Tim O'Reilly is an eloquent speech that helped us to understand the concept of the Web as a network of computational objects. Check out some of his lates writings: Read/Write Web: Tim O'Reilly Interview, Part 3: eBooks & Remix Culture: In Safari U, what we have is a framework where we have a database of 3000 books in XML. Here's an interface that lets you pick and choose what you want, re-assemble it, mix it with your own material into specific custom purposes. We're targeting right now at two markets. One is the academic and training market, where people want to put together custom training materials - that's been a request we've had for a long time. I think similarly we're seeing it in a corporate context, where a company says: I support these technologies and I want to put together a custom library. We're not really seeing it at the user level, which I think was your question. That being said, one of the key ideas from the Creative Commons that I really embrace is the idea that all creativity is rooted in re-use. The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration. The smartest thing that any publisher can do is to make sure that we allow our customers to surprise us with ways that they have remixed our ideas and our material with their own. Lingua Franca - March 2001 | Feature: May the Course Be With You: May the Course Be With You Universities claim the right to sell classes on the internet. The faculty strikes back. by John Palattella (A good place to start in thinking about issues of intellectual property and the university is a wry and stimulating essay in Lingua Franca, which mentions prominently the University of California. ) Folks can learn more about learning objects and related standards by consulting Raymond Yee's annotated bibliography: Summer 2002: Understanding educational technology interoperability standards: An annotated resource list Princeton historian Robert Darnton’s essay The New Age of the Book in The New York Review of Books provides one of the most inspirational images of what the Web can do for historical monographs. BTW, since I am creating essentially a bibliographic/resource list, it would be cool to mark this list of resources up as a MODS collection -- but that must await another day.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 2:23:58 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

My "open wiki hreads" #

I usually like to work in parallel on a number of entries. I've decided to break out into a separate wiki page OpenThreadsOfCurrentInterest to track pieces I'm currently working on.   At this moment, the list is: Getting beyond I, I, I I am a kid in a candy store BuildingCyberinfrastructureSeminar I'm currently reading CzeslawMilosz's last collection of poetry. Some running thoughts: CzeslawMilosz/SecondSpace     Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 2:09:36 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

Finishing my thoughts #

The last little while, I started a lot of essays but finished very few of them.  Yesterday, I started completing them and will continue working on finishing up other thoughts before starting too many new threads of writing. For instance, I pushed out to my blog a statement of my professional aspirations for 2005 and a statement of my research interests (which I entitled Seamless Use and Reuse of Digital Content By Scholars). Moreover, I wrote some very preliminary thoughts about content authoring, based on the bibliography I assembled for David's upcoming conference talk -- and wrote a quick update on the progress Tom and I have made on integrating MetaLib functionality into the Scholar's Box. I started some new threads too (actually quite a few yesterday), but want to discipline myself to finish more of my thoughts before rushing off to the next ones. Making myself write relatively coherent and self-contained prose, which I then "publish" to my weblogs is part of my process of finishing what I start.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 1:51:41 PM from the Personal Notes dept. Discuss

Update on Scholar's Box/MetaLib integration #

Tom and I have been working on implementing an interface between the MetaLib X-Server and ScholarsBox. Here are two basic screenshots of what we have so far: A keyword search of CDL; search results can then be individually or collectively dragged into other collections. Records have been dragged from search results to a local collection. We are now figuring out to generate OpenURLs from the search results. In essence, we are now working on figuring out how crosswalk MARC XML to OpenURLs.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 1:49:36 PM from the Scholar's Box dept. Discuss

collages in the New York Times #

Generating my own collages prompted me to notice The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Making Art From Bits and Pieces: In rescuing and dignifying scraps of local life - a matchbook from a bar, someone's tossed-off photo-booth portrait - Mr. Evans can be thought of as a historical preservationist, operating on an unusually intimate scale. Yet his own moods seem reflected in how he handles the materials. In one day's collage, ticket stubs and candy wrappers explode like fireworks against an ebulliently bright background. In another, juxtaposed images of Hitler and Oliver North make a grim political statement.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 12:00:30 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

Picasa collages #

Disappointed with version 1 of Picasa, I am pleasantly surprised with Picasa 2: Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized. I've been taken with the beauty of the collages that come out of Picasa. (See some of my Picasa-generated collages.) Picasa 2 blog: Collage Tips and Tricks showed me how to shuffle the images and the locations of the images in my Picasa collages.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 11:55:42 AM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

Some very quick thoughts on content authoring #

David Greenbaum is speaking at Managing Digital Assets: A Primer for Library Administrators. David will be talking about "developing faculty and teacher toolkits that gather and share digital content." The world of content authoring tools (as it pertains to the world of higher education specifically) is in such tremendous flux. It is hard to distill what I know into a short essay about that topic, primarily because I don't know how all it fits together. I have only intimations of important but hidden connections. The Scholar's Box represents one of our major attempts to synthesize our thinking about content authoring in that the Scholar's Box stands at the interstices of digital libraries, educational technology, desktop authoring tools, and social software. Let me list a number of themes and ideas to consider: blogs and wikis are really promising platforms for content development the second-generation XML web is an important background "the network is the computer" reuse and bricolage pursuit of machine-actionable semantic web the mass creation of content and metadata is bringing into question the value of institutionally created and sanctioned formal taxonomies. intellectual property right issues still need to be addressed rationally If I were in David's shoes, I'd do a bit of introduction on all these themes and then point them to the list of references I assembled so that my audience can then go off to learn more on their own.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 11:31:35 AM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

Firefox extensions #
As I get up to speed on writing extensions myself, it would be worth checking out what are considered exemplary extensions: Best Firefox Extensions - Reticent | gaming to the marrow .   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 9:17:04 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Desktop search #

I'd like to explore desktop searching at some point. Google has demonstrated the great power in internet based search engines. I'd really like to be find my own content located on my hard drive. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have all released free desktop search engines. (I'm also aware of commerical products that preceeded these systerms and which may be superior. Ones that come to mind are DTSearch and Enfish.) I would like to read the evaluations of the various systems, pick one or two to try out. I'm hoping to find one that has a useful API which I can access to connect desktop search to the Scholar's Box and other tools I'm building. As an avid user of Yahoo maps and yellow pages, I agreed with MIT Tech Review's identification of these local search features as strong points in Yahoo's arsenal. (The reason iI bring this specific point up is that it is this article that got me thinking about desktop search in general.) I also hope that Yahoo will open up its search engine to publicly accessible APIs as a way of competing with google.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/27/05; 9:07:20 AM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss