Accept no substitutes

Category: JCDL

Live blogging of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Denver. June 2005.

JCDL – Digital Curation and Institutional Repositories

The highly efficient Carolyn Hanks writes to say:

Nearly sixty people attended our JCDL workshop, Digital Curation and Institutional Repositories, Seeking Success. The workshop agenda and accepted papers can be found at the JCDL 2006 wiki [most papers are in PDF], while the original call for papers can be found at http://sils.unc.edu/events/2006jcdl/digitalcuration.html.

We are in the process of creating a workshop website that will serve as the future home for these materials, as well as other products that may result from the workshop. Currently, workshop reports are being prepared for inclusion in D-Lib Magazine and the ALCTS Online Newsletter.

Another event from last week was the informal presentation on the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) given by Reagan Moore of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. More on his visit will be posted to the DC/IRC wiki. For now, if you would like to learn more about the Storage Resource Broker (SRB), please
visit their very informational SRB wiki.

JCDL – Jonathan Zittrain

Getting the Berkman Center vibe from Jonathan Zittrain. Starting from privacy as he talks about “Open Information: Redaction, Restriction, and Removal.” How DRM infects your computer and reports back etc citing the Sony Rootkit. Funny citing of some of the titles “protected”/infecting your computer including “Healthy in Paranoid Times” bu Our Lady Peace and Van Zant’s “Get Right with the Man.” iPod accessories market is $1 Billion per year! the new British warship comes iPod docks through out. Now on to YouTube as non-institutional contributary work including podcasts. Strong identity projected in the materials. When will things be pulled back? Or under what circumstances would you justify removing materials? 1) national security 2) privacy 3) copyright 4) fairness – jury taint/group insult/defamation 5) repudiation OR source 1) author 2) government 3) third party. — losing track here as JZ is very amusing..
Core Purpose of libraries. Other CPs Cargill to improve the standard of living around the world. Other amusing CPs. Now facebook and privacy. Now facial recognition and Riya. Are ranking systems like eBay and Amazon or the Korean CyWorld invasive or is it a good thing (aka Nock)?
Benefits of reputation systems??

JCDL – augementingg interoperability

Don Waters convening and describing OAI protocol for metadata harvesting and pointing out the paupacity of Dublin Core for this use.

Tony Hey of Microsoft. Carl Lagose of Cornell. Herbert von de Sompel. Cliff Lynch.

Tony has slides. He says that Microsoft is commited to supporting scientists and engineers via open standards. He ran the equiv of NDIIPP in UK. e-Science (aka data centered science) is the future. Microsoft has to live in the world of open source. by e-Science he means not so much data centered as dataprocessing/IT driven. Contoso virtual science library looks like Amazon for scientists with some Microsoft icons on it. (slide of Bill Gates). e-Science Mash-ups? Interoperability of repositories. Ginsparg(arXiv)/Lipman(NLM)/Harnad (eprints) cited.

Herbert has slides too. He’s at Los Alamos these days. digital objects and repositories and their value chains. Need richer cross-repository services such as discovery — must have digiobject representation and semantics. Scholarly communication workflow for say an overlay journal by recombining and adding value. Too many datamodels and service that do not interoperate.

Carl on the digital objects, data models and surrogates. unbaked says Carl but here goes. He’s presenting findings from the Pathways Project which comes from Herbert and Carl and others. Pathways he says sits above dspace, fedora, eprints, etc.
repository-centric indentifier paradigm (see J Kunze and others).

Cliff now moderates ?s. But he has his own comments first. how far we’ve come with metadata harvesting protocol but it has limits as it doesn’t really get you any objects, says CL. dealing with very messy complex objects to the point that metadata and object are confused and conflicted. basically trees with decorations on them — how to decorate the trees. pretty simplified way of looking at complex problems. How far should harvest be pushed toward search. http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop/ for notes from the April meeting. if i had it all to do again, i wouldn’t use ‘surrogate’ but ‘representations’ says CL.

Many of the questioners recall the failed attempts of the 80s and 90s to do effective data harvesting etc. Still no working models is charged. I too complained to Kunze and to CL at OAI presentations that it was not ready for adoption outside the research community. In some ways it’s like watching Wiley Coyote opening his latest Acme box with the product that will help him finally catch the Roadrunner. This time we’ll be sure to catch him! Rich interoperability is done well within constricted domains but not so well across domains. like not at all.

JCDL – Panel on Google and Scanning

Intros by Cathy Marshall of Microsoft

Dan Clancy – Engineering director at Google Books
David Ferrario – NY Public Library (a Google 5 site)
Dan Greenstein – California Digital Library
Cliff Lynch – moderator; dir of CNI

Dan Clancy starts with an overview of Google Books. only 15% of the books are in print, but how to deal with the 85% that are out of print. The 15% is fine by the publisher since they hope to sell from that 15%. G5 = Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Michigan and NY Public. Everything — not just that that is “valuable.” Sample pages (from publisher); snippet (Google claims fair use); full text (generally public domain). “Scanning is the easy part.”

David F – about NY Public’s involvement in G5. Non-exclusive agreement to do comprehensive scanning of public domain materials only.

David Greenstein – about Open Content Alliance (note UNC is a member both the Libraries and the School of Information and Library Science). A bit about the formats that come with OCA including JPEG2000 and dejaVu files. Funding is different from Google that is smaller and more diverse and non-profit. More complex entity whose members embrace the “qualities of open.” All scanning of public domain works. 3rd party indexing is allowed by OCA and not by Google.

Cliff Lynch talks about some studies of the collections in G5. 430 different languages. only 49% English. This supported by Clancy and Ferrario.

Differences between working with Google engineers and Google lawyers are discussed at length… Research limitations are bring discussed. What should Google do to facilitate research in digital libraries? Tell Dave Clancy (he says). Greenstein says that public universities can’t possibly make all this available, but he’s mostly wrong says Clancy. Support is always an issue.

Open to audience. post-1923 stuff may be in public domain. what is being done to indentify that stuff? DG says nothing beyond the obvious (that being federal). Orphan works will be especially hard. DC says Google is in legation so they have a very conservative interpretation, but once they are done scanning that there will probably be more work on renewals and orphans. DF says NYPL same as OCA.

Linking, annotation, etc for adding value content? DC speaking as a researcher not as Google mostly restates the question (he admits). DF says NYPL wants to enhance the content. The G contract allows content sharing with places like the Digital Library Federation. DG notices that these mostly open projects are closed because some of the problems are too big to be gotten at. Orphans. etc. Persistance.

Perils of Paul

Pauline has nothing on me. I missed the storms that kept John Reuning overnight in Philly on Monday by deciding to leave DC early. But that turned out to be a teaser. Coming back to RDU from Denver was payback for the easy trip I had on Monday.
John, Megan and I were all leaving Denver at about 1 – 2 pm on Friday. Interestingly, we were all on different airlines with different connecting airports. John was on US Airways and heading back through Philly. Megan on United would change in Chicago. I was on American and thus doomed to fly through DFW.
But it was leaving Denver that was the problem — for me at least.
We went to our separate flights. Mine changed gates a couple of times as the rain outside turned to hail. Even at that our loading was only delayed by about 20 minutes and I had plenty of transfer time planned in for DFW.
Once in the plane and having pulled onto the tarmac, things were not so smooth. The hail returned as did lightning. We pulled into the deicing lane and sat. Then air traffic control had us turn around and head to a different runway. Repeat this four times.
To make us feel better while we waited, they showed us the second Bridget Jones movie. Even though Helen Fielding was one of the authors of the screen play, it was sad to watch for anyone who could still remember the first Bridget Jones film. Despite what Roger Ebert wrote in his review, this Jones is contrived all the way through and over Hollywooded throughout. Knowing that we were aimless driving around the runways of Denver didn’t improve the film.
Hours and I mean hours later, we took off. To avoid the storms, we went in directions far from the normal flight plan. Then the pilot came on and started talking about Tulsa.
We were out of fuel or nearly so from our tours of Denver in the rain. Stuck on the plane whilst in Tulsa then everyone in a panic about connections as we aproached DFW.
We finally arrived at DFW at 8 pm CDT. Only one flight to RDU was left for the night. Leaving DFW at 9:30 CDT and arriving at RDU after 1 am EDT.
Even though a large and somewhat friendly woman broke in line as the people from our flight were frantically rebooking, I did get a flight back. My seat the last row window. Only there is no window for the last row.
The plane was full and as we waited the line-breaker found me and wanted to talk about our previous flight. The David Sedaris story from the current New Yorker was speaking to the evil side of my brain. I managed to control myself and was lucky that she was given a seat near the front.
The flight from DFW to RDU was uneventful. We were back by 1:30 am.
Good to be home.

JCDL: Panel: Tick, Tock – Google as Library

Because of flight times, this will be the last session that I get to attend. Panel: Tick, Tock – Google as Library includes Richard Luce, Clifford Lynch, Barbara Quint and moderator Jim Williams [Dean of Libraries at UColorado-Boulder]. With luck I’ll get a seat with decent wireless access.

Panelists will engage one another and audience members in discourse on present and future relationships between (digital) libraries and dominant players in the world of e-commerce, typified by Google and Amazon. The presentations will emphasize how matters that seem threatening (to traditional library roles) may be viewed as opportunities for enhancing the value of digital libraries to their users.

Richard Luce from Los Alamos’ Library Without Walls and a NISO fellow.
Offers what he calls scattered observations:
Who do you trust? [asked about Google as in “when will Google suck?”]
Events often change corporate cultures. [again “when will Google stop doing good?”]
Libraries collect information too. Europeans fear what happens when libraries share data about patrons, say.
He now mentions Bell Labs, IBM, Microsoft and now Google as diff dominant players. Libraries endure he says.
High tech vs high touch. Libraries win on high touch.
Personalization is a winning area for libraries, but they need to have local data — as Los Alamos has to provide for their patrons.
Collaboration tools should be an edge for libraries. [he thinks Google won’t be there soon. I think he’s wrong]
Libraries can use a barter economy to federate and collaborate to get better services for their patrons. He thinks that Darwinism will select winners and kill off losers.
More about opportunities for libraries.

Cliff Lynch. Google is a word that is obcessing everyone for whatever reason. The Google digitization project has captured public imagination in a broad way. He will talk more broadly about mass digitization projects mentioning others like Brewster’s — err Internet Archive’s. Mass digitization was underway before Google stepped in and will be after [whenever after might be]. Has our Network failed to deliver on promises? Can we share and provide access to the world’s knowledge (as we promised back in the day)? Brings up copyright and business model disruption issues. Alludes to Deanna’s keynote (see earlier in this blog. International dimension delights Cliff. Folks claimed that the Net collections would be English only (makes joke about non-English holdings at US institutions). France started a competition to digitize more stuff to head off Englishers. Books are no longer the definitive part of our intellectual materials. Multimedia, audio, video, photos, etc are taking on new importance as those archives come online.
Notes a coming divide about what is online — out of copyright (aka safe) material — will become more important to our remaking and remixing. We can, as Brewster says, digitize all the public domain literature and we can have it all on a personal device! Not just in the big library in the sky. But it will stop someplace in the 1920s! That will bring things to a public policy crisis and force a revision of IP laws.
Last point: Google as library? Frames things wrongly. G is amassing a giant collection with rich access tools. But they are not the only ones. Libraries are not just collections, says he. How do libraries think about themselves in this new world? Do they hoard or share? Museums are in the same situation or more so. How centralized are collections? Who will get access?

Barbara Quint on by phone. This panel is named from her article, Tick Tock. Research libraries spend 15 billion $$$ per year [for what?] After Harvard etc, where will Google go? It will sell access to smaller libraries. Google may spend 1 billion to digitize, but they can make 15 billion on that investments.
She wonders not about libraries but about librarians. We can’t get stuck in the stacks. Germans aren’t fighting via copyright but are digitizing themselves (as are French). University Presses complains and challenges. Authors will step up as well. Authors may take on the case themselves by taking out of print books back. Google doesn’t really won content but instead library patrons.
Comments on her article. Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg to give her props. Folks, she says, agree that Google has already won. But so have users (maybe). Even the French will and probably should cooperate with Google. Will Yahoo or MSFT begin to compete?

Cliff and Rich respond.
First Rich. Google has captured imagination and we lack it. There is an issue about librarians futures. It is about libraries! People still come in the buildings even if they are some sort of information commons. Why will people come in? Social/Starbucks buildings.
Barbara say damn straight there is a problem. The bucks for bricks are too high. Libraries pay for overhead and salaries — not for collections. Why would we pay? Library is a purchasing consortium. Why do we need that consortium when most stuff is free.
Jim moderator picks up on free vs pay access.
Barbara says collections only $$$ could pay for all citizens without buildings
Cliff responds. Buying collections/library in a box is coming for say community colleges. Journals are already treated that way (Barbara confirms). Next monographs.
But stewardship and curation are there in larger libraries. This will split public and research libraries say.
Cliff talks about publisher pushback on Google digitization. Digitize all then figure out what is public domain and release that. If you digitize and don’t show it to anyone, is that a copyright violation? Sounds zen to Cliff.
Now Cliff starts to diss University Presses — as does Barbara. B says in an interview with the AUP head that he says “we are a niche market group” B then asked “do you want to stay a niche market group?”
Last thing from Cliff [hee hee] author publisher relations in book market. Journals take all rights from authors so digitizing those work was easy. But the ‘out of print’ clause in book authors’ contracts causes problems when ‘out of print’ is difficult to define. When will the author ever get a work back. Orphan works and/or out of business publishers brought up. This last is subject to inspection by LC and the copyright office.
Cliff says Michigan is interested in sharing legal information especially. what other collaborations? the five institutions with Google have not comprehensive digitization of thier entire collections. This corpus is only the beginning. Partnerships with users/patrons is/are the real juice.
Barbara says she will wander back to the initial trust issue with Google. What if Google is stopped by the Presses? Whose side will we be on? Could Google become a public utility? [ala Martin Greenberger’s Information Utility]
Rich. goes back to barter. notes Google partnerships and their rules.
Barbara. GooglePrint will not allow printing but only onscreen viewing — except for NYPL. Even if public domain.
Cliff says that non-commercial use would be okay.
Barbara says Google told her “No downloads” (period)
Questions:
Martin of Emery. like the nationalization of google. makes joke
Ed Fox of VT. speaks of dream of universal access and how to keep it alive. (not a question). giving props to NSDL and his own early work. (still no question). More props for instutional repository movement (he doesn this). Electronic theses (he does this — still no question).
Cliff comments. Likes his point that mass digitization is very backwards looking. Ed hinted within his props that we need to get new new new material. capturing 75 year old materials is only a small part of that we need to be doing. we need to manage the stream of new authorship.
Gary M of UNC. agrees that digitization of public domain is old school. wants to talk about remix and reuse. who will take care of the new derivative works? where will they reside? will they be in a “Dim archive”?
Barbara. wrote on blog/books and book/blogs.
Rich. is Google a library? 9-11 changes the access rules as far as sharing material. Los Alamos has had stuff taken away. Google content also disappears. The Memory Hole [not called that here but is by me] is the big problem for our future.
Barbara. tells a scholarly journal that killed an article once the author was convicted of fraud. the bad stuff needs to be there not removed!
Rich. on disinformation campaigns. google and yahoo and others gamed and used by disinformationism (is that a word?)
Barbara. talks about the censorship role in libraries in the process of selection.
Cathy Blake of UNC. likes the collections of agreement and disagreement. so early on we need speculations and even wrong ideas so we can see the evolution of say scientific discourse.
Barbara. she is bothered by GooglePrint and GoogleLibrary agreements and selections. Google doesn’t collaborate on working with the materials as well as she would like.
U of Penn guy John asks about large corpuses as attractors to patrons. what will libraries do? googleScholar
Barbara says she talked with Elsivier is not up to Google. Google does clustering with GoogleScholar in a great way. Could there be clustering for “reliability” or for
“truth”?
Intergrating and distributed searches. Cliff notes that Google is centralized not distributed. We’ve been at distributed but not so successful (we worked with Brewster and with Cliff on WAIS even).
?? Canadian person. talks about Canadian issues and the commercialization of knowledge. Now about digitization standards and digital preservations. Please talk about it, panel.
Cliff. need LOCKSSish. make lots of copies. Google is too centralized for example. not all vulnerabilities are technical. political or religious or legal purges can kill copies.
He doesn’t see Google as a long term cultural preservation activity. They need profits. What will Google do when there are not profits to be had on some stuff?
[jones starting to burn out]
Barbara says standards are fine, but Google will do whatever they want.
Rich. talks about reliabilityand uptime and the like.
Cliff will disagree with Barbara. Public domain materials will return to libraries and libraries should and will handle it.
Barbara says focus on journals immediately to be players (research librarians).
More discussion, but I must go.

JCDL: Integrating Collections at the Cervantes Project

Integrating Collections at the Cervantes Project by Neal Audenaert. Looking to support humanists who work particularly of a single author. Much like the Blake Project so far. This is a good presentation but it’s getting late in the day.
I wonder how does this talk about the tricks of Cervantes such as the idea that Don Q comes from a manuscript discovered by Cervantes that there are layers and layers of the story that we often miss in cleaned up translations. Not part of the business of the presentation, but what’s on my mind. The way that C works with narrative is complex and amazing. I want to know more.

Question period:
How to deal with language issues? Spanish mostly but remember that spelling in Spanish of the period was not standardized. Over 15 languages used overall including that from the icon collection.

Will the limits of the tools be discussed by scholars — of course.

JCDL: To Grow in Wisdom

To Grow in Wisdom: Vannevar Bush, Information Overload, and the Life of Leisure by David Levy
The “library problem” how to take on the problem of “information overload’
Josef Pieper “Leisure the Basis of Culture” same time as Bush. Why we need leisure and need to avoid the world of total work. Can we be more than complete functionaries and full time workers? Can we enter the world of slowness and stillness [and quietness]? Leisure is related to scholarship as in being receptively attuned. The first scholastics looked at ratio or rational the other intellectus or simply looking.
What happened to intellectus? Web helps solve only ratio. says Levy.
[Levy elides the profound religious and directly Catholic basis and some would say bias of Pieper’s work
He uses Bush as an empty vessel to fill with an areligious Pieper. To say well Bush was much like Pieper when he talked about info-overload say. But how much of that is really in Bush. Not much from what I recall from the biography of Bush.]
What can we do, ask Levy. Expand the dialog and metrics beyond effeciency and productivity. What does it take to become comtemplative? Great reading rooms in libraries inspire contemplation. What would it mean to create sanctuaries in cyberspace? [I think he means Sanctuaries] He did a conference on Information, Silence and Sanctuary
at LC he hopes to do a workshop on mindful work and technology winter 2006.
Without irony, Levy asks us to Google to find the references to the conference and to learn about his workshop. It has streaming video, he tells us.
In the question time, more comes about the importance of reflection. Does he recall that many monastaries saw a work as a form of contemplation?
Some good discussion. One questioner notes the inherent problems of supporting the contemplatives which forced so many to be virtually enslaved in order to support the meditators.

JCDL: Creating Information Representations for Education

Sarah Giersch moderating. Cathy Marshall first speaker.
“Turning the Page on Navigation” from Microsoft. A bit about the materiality of the book with the british library’s turning the pages project with a three d library. Turning a wodge of pages will be explained. Meaning what a wodge might be.
this a lot about ebook readers. i like cathy. i doubt ebook readers. observational methods about book-like interfaces for digital libraries. shows picture of some very geeky reading devices. says that this changes reading. now compares reading new yorker and reading new yorker online. watching people reading is like paint dry. funny web page of paint drying.
3 readers. regular new yorker readers. they self-recorded themselves reading. Start new New Yorker supposedly for the first time. 8 readers in the lab reading ebooks on ebook readers. Not online but on a now canceled microsoft ereader. readers read less pages on ereader.
citing roland barthes about “the pleasure of the text” here.
a lot about individuals who are studied talk about reading. amusing stories mostly.
one goes to poetry and to the funny last page first, for example.
now about navigation. the ebook folks did about the same things as paper readers. majority of navigation acts were forward page turns. but wait! pause for a wodge teaser. based on google image search.
Very detailed description of how folks read: touching head. turning page slowly or faster, dropping off to sleep, etc.
hands go into position for turning very much earlier than the action might require.
description of the materials and the materiality of the new yorker.
page flipping and imprecission is helpful Cathy argues.
Ben S asks how about the ways that paper does a crappy job and that we as new interfaces could improve? got any?
do you have an evolving theory of reading? ben says looks like 10 proposed research projects here looking at the kinds of reading, say. pleasure, business, factfinding, etc.

Next Nancy Kaplan. Network is going in and out on me so expect problems.
In the Company of Readers: The digital library book as a “practiced place.” de Certeau defines “Practiced places” as places in which an activity happens and where we feel in the presence of others — even while being alone. say like reading or walking on a well-worn path.
about reading by children in particular. those that are tweens and/or early teens. also a look at libraries’ social lives. notice people in all the library pictures.
books have annotations, dogears, left articles etc.
much said that annotations were great in their day but today kids are socialized away for annotation/
digital materials have no good annotation systems and none at all for children.
http://www.icdlbooks.org international children’s digital library.
needs. etc are needs not as defined by kids but by adults who “know whatm kids need”
kids want uniform actions. and they want games.
participatory design with kids to make interface elements using paper prototypes.
Alph is a flash delivered application that provides bookish interfaces with annotations or possibilities of annotations.
looking at “holes” louis sachar in the reader as one example. notes and about notes is shown.
now look for social interactions and learn about social interactions in digital reading.

JCDL: CI Track Panel: Cyberinfrastructure as Computation vs. Support for Meaningful Interaction

Session called: “CI Track Panel: Cyberinfrastructure as Computation vs. Support for Meaningful Interaction” Panel.

Mostly a talk about NSF Cyberinfrastructure Initiative. Not just tech issues. Human and social themes. Tech is not the problem. IP spoken of as copyright is — again. Funding etc.

Reagan Moore first. From SDSC. Overview of NSF presentation on cyberinfrastructure. TeraGrid noted. Diskspace dedicated at SDSC for “good projects in supercomputer areas” Very much a talk Dan Reed would love and could give. Most of this on the SDSC site where cyberinfrastructure is a front page feature.

Steve Wheatley of American Council of Learned Societies. About Humanities and Social Sciences. Here is their page. How small the funding is for Humanities as opposed to Science is addressed and to make sure that Humanites and SS are included in the funding. Are they really only trying to put their fingers in the NSF money pot? No No No Of course not ;-> This talk mostly borrowed from one by John Unsworth of UIUC and from the ACLS site linked to above and here. Stories about Humanities successes such as cuneiform compilations at Stanford. Humanities will help us know about the evolving cybercultures. Copyright and privacy are the two biggest problems. Privacy biggest for social science says he.

Cliff Lynch next. See his talk at UNC Symposium on ibiblio. No slides of course. This is Cliff afterall. He will be brief (hee hee we know better). He will offend us all eventually says he.
Nature of Cyberinfrastructure. What an odd word. In Europe, they use eWhatever as in eScience or eGov. That lets us focus on changes of practices of scholarship instead of changes of tools.
Questions of knowledge representation for example. Draft report from National Science Board about the management of long-lived data collections. And about digital curation centre in the UK [alert Helen Tibbo]. What are the disciplinary norm for sharing need to be paid attention to. Platforms for collaboration. How does the corpus of literature fit in? How to handle and mine this.
Two or three other things in conclusion. Funding strategies are not so new. Consider the history of the role of funding in the development of high performance networks for example. We cannot be nationally bound or disciplinarily bound. Especially Humanities for international cooperation and peer relationships. Break disciplinary silos [or siloes]. Funding agencies need to be open and not worry so much about which agency owns what parts, but they should collaborate even more broadly. Include arts, libraries etc. Don’t look from large gifts from on high, but plan to contribute [as we have in the past]. CI must be a multiway partnership.

Questions from audience:
Asks Steve about Privacy as an issue. News to her. Huge gov databases including census and health don’t allow some innovative access to their data.
Cliff steps in to talk about the dark side of CI. He says that Henry Brady on UC-Berkeley is the best on this problem. Medicine understands this, but social science has problems here. IRBs are also a big problem as they interfere with say oral histories. He cites this as a problem of privacy over-reach.
Greg Crane of Tufts. Begins rant about NSF funded research not funding any humanities or acknowledge previously funded humanities projects. Why should NSF or anyone fund this? Wikipedia has the biggest impact on general public without our [our being scholars] participation.
Reagan first. No examples in the slides, but yes humanities scholars do use supercomputers. He wavers to explain them tho. How do we reach the public? National Virtual Observatory is one he likes.
Steve now. Perhaps he was too subtle or too ironic in his talk. He nods to Cliff’s representation of knowledge. He sees CI as a way to open the discussions. He agrees that Humanities scholars don’t reach out to the public in production or in research.

Back to the panel. Some stuff not covered here. Cliff talks about DLI2 and about the need for more policy clarity from the federal agencies and about the ambivilence of NSF toward the humanities.
Cliff now gives props to text searching as not so bad, but worries about our ability to support image use across the broad world of scholarly communities.

Person from Bath asks about the silos of vocabulary that separate the disciplines and about standardizing datastructures with crosswalks. Reagan says that they are on it and mentions the multivalent browser for text parsing.

What about the cultural norms for sharing and for preservation within each discipline. People have to release their intellectual property [says Liz the moderator]
Steve: progress in the humanities moves forward funeral by funeral [he says he quotes someone he will not name]. Presses are understrain and must move to new technologies and social practice must also change. Learned Societies are acknowledging the need for collaboration.
Cliff: progess in datasharing are improving. Science does active collaboration and how multi-authored papers are now the norm. But humanities cannot cope well with that. back to datasharing. Reproducability of scientific work demands datasharing. Dead Sea Scrolls noted as bad humanities practice.

Cathy Blake [from UNC] talks about her work and how can tools get to agreements and disagreements and bring them to the fore via text mining (say).
Steve talks about the slowness of the cycle of discussion in the print culture. We are getting better he says.
Cliff says that in Health Sciences does this with analysis of clinical studies. Humanities are harder to do for various reasons.
Reagan says turn the question inside out. Publishing data is often required in science. what is the similar publication in humanities? sources? etc? he doesn’t see that in the same way.

Cyberspace is here, says guy from Norway whose name I didn’t catch. Rant about how it is here like it or not and detailed. Rant in a nice Norway way. How many funerals does it take for things to change? [humourously asked] but seriously what is the funeral rate necessary for progress?
Steve sees a tipping point at this very moment. We need to provide the infrastructure so that scholars don’t have to build a printing press before they publish. Infrastructure should be open so that any field can use it. That said the work may change the entire intellectual and scholarly landscape.
Cliff threatens to be controversal. Two different folks Active rejectors. Time will fix that. But there are also folks who don’t want to use the new stuff and why should they as long as they don’t block others. Now on younger scholars. Just because folks grew up with technology doesn’t mean that they know how to use it. So folks born after photoshop don’t necesssarily know how to use photoshop but need to be taught image manipulation say. So curiculum reform is needed.
Reagan says different research questions will be asked now that were not asked in the past. Since large scale analysis will be the future, collaboration will be necessary.

JCDL: Bud Tribble

Bud Tribble is now back at Apple. Once he was at Eazel a startup that almost made a great difference by creating the Nautulis file manager (it did more than just that) for Linux, but 2001 interfered and the company never found second round funding. I have a warm spot in my heart for him because while he was at NeXT he was the Vice President of Software Engineering and a key architect of the NextStep operating system. My NeXT is still alive! and I loved NeXTStep, an OS and interface to which Mac OS X still attempts to match.
Bub Tribble is the keynote speaker on “Digital Content: Creating, Sharing, Searching”

The wooden house of books or the house of wooden books or the house of wood carved to look like books — an amusement while we wait.

Tribble begins. I avoid, almost, saying the “trouble with Tribble.” Apple taps the human need to create and communicate. That is the soul of the company. How Apple leads digital content:
print with words and images. partnering with adobe and pagemaker to create desktop publishing.

also always involved in creation of sound and of music. iTunes roots etc are in the long relationship with musicians and with studios.

photos videos and movies from home to k-12 to major studios.

itunes, iphoto, imovies idvd garageband = ilife. consumer-based products

then “prosumer” products like final cut pro

then professional products

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info
from 2002. [see also 2003 report]

New information creation is growing at about 30% per year most on hard disk. 0.01% went onto paper.

What about material that needs to be digitized? Google is doing a lot of it. But most content is yet to be created and will be created digitially. Pulls out the “Digital Immigrants” v “Digital Natives” discussion [picked up from Marc Prensky but uncredited here]. 5 year old expects to be able to “pause” the TV (because TiVo has always been a part of her life).
State of Maine program in which every 7th grader gets an iBook (some years back). Universal access changed education there. We see a promo video about the program. More about the program here. Replicared at over 100 places [what places? not 100 states obviously]. The funds come often from not buying text books. [think vitalbook here]

So much for creating now on to sharing content.

Storage. lots and more to come.

Networks for sharing for moving things around. lots and lots more to come. thanks to dotcom boom. need better distribution of the bandwidth though. say to homes. US is 5th to 17th in the world for at home high speed access. wireless kicks this in the immediate term

legal framework to allow sharing. DRM is complex and not even understood well. p2p works great but the legal issues… bitTorrent gets attention here.

[break by Jones]

Open Standards – [interesting to hear from Apple, but he was at Eazel] he says open standards will win in the long run. American Memory’s maps are in some non-Apple viewable format. Props to European govs work on require open standards.

Funny retro pictures of what 5mbs then 4 gigs looked like shown. leading to ibm microdrive. Storage costs per MB drops faster than Moore’s Law. Drops by more than half in less than 12 months. gigabyes per square foot chart. No sign of slowing down.

Apple and content sharing — itunes music store. is sharing the right word for selling stuff online? one interesting thing is that they don’t use a browser; you can buy in the ‘jukebox’ instead. no adverts on the itunes music store [he says]. ownership is a personal issue rather than rental models which Apple sees as an emotional issue. that’s why they sell rather than rent music. Every songs of the 1.5 million at the itunes store has been bought once at least. Props to the Long Tail. Much about access for new musicians. Now more people buy mostly from itunes than get music via p2p.

Searching for digital content. Google for searching the net. But searching on your own laptop is a pain. Quote from star trek next gen about search command from picard. V. Bush gets props “As we may think.” Notes how Bush complained about “too much published” even in 1945.

Promotes Spotlight. [I have Tiger so I have Spotlight. I love it.] Shows off Spotlight [non-Tiger folks feel free to die of envy].
A bit about metadata there. You can add metadata. But no normal person will ever do that.

Open source projects. About 1/2 of the Mac OS is built on open source.

Long term archiving is hard. [thanks for telling us] Formats change as do the devices. Brewster gets props for Way Back.

univerally accessible digital repository:

continued operation of moore’s law

long term archiving

legal framework for ip needs attention

open standards

Questions:

not a question: guy talks about owning music and downloading. he hates the DRM from apple especially the “fair play” DRM for shuffle which killed his music.
tribble says work not done yet on drm. apple wants to innovate as is real and microsoft. not time for standards for drm because we are still in an innovation period.

follow up on drm. do you see how you can solve drm for long term archiving.
tribble gives props to lessig. how does stuff get into the public domain when it’s encrypted?

more on itunes. itunes is not sharing, says he. but selling only major labels there. how about “real music” by “real bands”
itunes now getting indys. over 1000 so far. started with the 4 majors for example. nine inch nails garageband mix gets props. questioner wants more emerging bands.

JCDL: One Minute Poster Madness

Everyone of the 50 poster presenters is given 60 seconds to describe their project as presented on their posters. After 60 seconds, an annoying sound begins. So far everyone has been on time. Very close to the limit too. Several persentations from the Digital Library for Earth Science Education, nearly 10, here in Colorado. Xerox PARC will be doing a demo of a zooming information tree. Also their UpLib systems a personal digital library. 7 million PDFs scanned by SETI@home like techniques. M2K from Indiana and EVIADA for ethnomusicial videos (need to talk to them about folkstreams); part of their work is with annotations of the video etc. Several from Indiana on Music projects. Michael Khoo is very funny. Aihara has videos of arts and crafts masters — a reciprocal platform? Video recommenders from includes work by Gary Geisler and Mike Nelson using Open Video. NCSU has a wood anatomy database — giant project as far as wood goes. Small image library for PDAs in booth 32. 33 is annotation for health portal from UNC SILS. More than one BioPortal in the world — this one is in Arizona. The mic wasn’t on for John when he started talking so he lost maybe 8 seconds. He still came off well and folks seemed interested. We’ll see if they stop by later. We are near the food so chances are high.

JCDL: Interacting with Media session

Cathy Marshall of Microsoft is chairing the session called “Users and Interaction Track: Interacting with Media”

  • *Addressing the Challenge of Visual Information Access from Digital Image and Video Archives
    Michael G. Christel, Ronald M. Conescu
    Mike Christel presenting. concept-based vs content-based retrieval of video. concept-based using manually described text descriptions of what is in the video. very labor intensive. annotation is incomplete and inconsistant and based on the annotators own experiences and knowledge. words have a tough time describing pictures. content-based is done by computers. good at color, texture and shapes and motion or lackthereof. but people don’t know how to ask for content-based systems. a symantic problem. even forming a query is difficult. can content-based get to concept desctiptions — know if the image is of buildings cars etc?
    TRECVID – is a TREC video search. NIST sponsored corpus of news videos. next year international news video. given a multimedia need and topic can a user find the document (aka video)?
    CMU created an interface of storyboards of keyframes. 3 kinds. one “best sets” like best roads. best people done imperfectly by machine. one color match — all with yellow background. third, text query. 24 novices in the study. independently worked for 15 mins to do 4 topices. full system vs video only.
    precission was very close between the two runs of the two systems. full system generally but no always wins. when does video only win? generic topics v specific copies. man-speaking v bill clinton say. on generic full always beats video only. and people liked the full system better. so full system (includes closed captions etc) always wins. same for experts as novices. people do better than automatic (run without interactive feedback).
    experts used “best search” much more than novices. novices even with video only used much more text in their searches than experts. why do novices use text even when there isn’t hardly any text there?
    see paper for more

    For novices, text annotated is much better than video only. Interfaces encourage text only.
    http://www.infomedia.cs.cmu.edu

    Questions:
    Cathy asked about improvements. how to get there and be as good as Google Image search? better detectors (like road detector) will get more precision even tho recall will still suck.
    what about color and texture searches? find more like this. worked sorta.

  • *Assessing Tools for Use with Webcasts
    Elaine Toms, Christine Dufour, Jonathan Lewis, Ron Baecker
    Christine Dufour speaking. Reusing webcasts is the topic. abstract here. How do people use the tools for webcast. ePresnece webcasting system used. 5 tools: video window, slide window, timeline, search button, table of contents. users given three tasks. n=16 students. 56% had never used ePresence. Not sure what to take from this one. Useful critique of who folks use ePresence and of ePresense Interactive Media I guess. Can we extend from this? And to what? Looks like text is the big winner again here.
    Questions:
    what is the user modivation? so far assigned tasks, not true user needs.
    rate of tool use. how much time spent with each and does that matter afterall?
    Cathy asks how was table of contents created? by powerpoint or by human annotation — inconsistant. since powerpoint was the most useful (since it had the most text i bet) how would people do if just given powerpoint (NB Cathy’s company owns powerpoint)?

  • Exploring User Perceptions of Digital Image Similarity
    Unmil P. Karadkar, Richard Furuta, Jin-Cheon Na
    Unmil speaking. Texas A&M. MIDAS Multi-device integrated dynamic a? systems. abstract here. MIDAS user studies here.

JCDL: Is Digital Preservation an Oxymoron?

Panel on (mostly) born-digital preservation. MIT prof at retirement turns in his laptop as his personal archives.
Average life of a document on a government web site is only 44 days. Brewster gets props for some goodness but links are often broken. Long-term access fails (says she, she being Liz Bishoff).

Robert Horton – Minnesota Historical Society – speaks first.
largest of state historical society. 300 employees. broad collections including tv, video, audio of legislature, etc etc. every 20th century medium difficult to preserve. think of silent films and varieties of audio. what is the “use value”? the more something is used the more likely it will be preserved in some form.
government records perspectives now. move to egovernment makes records management extremely difficult. procedures now used are no longer sensible or even doable.
minnesota does not try to control behavior. everyone shouldn’t have to be a records manager (says minnesota). starting with lower hanging fruit with specific results. have to have partners. UCSD’s supercenter has been their partner. Using grid technologies and GIS resources via SDsupercenter. 1.5 terabytes there.
Technology is not the problem, but organizational change is. How to fund and educate and to manage partnerships. How to move lessons learned at the edges of the organization to the center.
From eGov. must connect to enterprise architecture.
Must build capacity by showing immediate return — to get funds. Like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors — Feed Me!

Mark Halbert from Emery U – part of DLF’s Aquifer Project also NDIIPP funded etc. Preservation is not boring, says he. Now he explains his NDIIPP project which is about getting 3 terabytes of Southern (that’s Southern North America) resources as a Metaarchive.
distributed preservation strategy – LOCKSS (lots of copies keeps stuff safe)
dim archiving – not necessarily high accessible. in fact. hold costs by not letting people see it!
flexible organization model
formals content selection process – use the farris encyclopedia of southern culture as the framework
project time line – network underway now. initial archiving will be done in august.
metadata schema – standards based http://www.metaarchive.org
cooperative agreement designed to grow and change over time.
copyright ambiguities are the biggest challenges. LOCKSS is not friendly to copyright restrictions. lawyers see copies are well copies; archivists see copies as preservation and necessary.

Taylor Surface next up. He’s from OCLC. Director of Content Management something or other (says intro). He too is part of NDIIPP with UIUC. OCLC on digital content preservation. OCLC as a service provider for other organizations. Two services. Web archiving service to provide permanent access via links and/or archived materials as captured from the web for certain constituents. Digital masters supports digitization services and preserving “digital masters” for control and management. Used by about 10 state libraries.
Preservation planning. the OCLC policy, which you can read on the web (says he). Global digital format registry. (my my spelling is bad). Specificially informed risk accessment methodology (INFORM). Trusted digital repository registry for a national and/or international repositories to show that your work will be preserved.
Question time.
What is a “dim archive”? Martin answers. That Dark Archiving is impenatrable, but they don’t like to provide high availability to preserved materials. That means that you can get to a registry but you may not be providing access especially high availablity.
Gary Marchionini asks about software for preservation etc. Emery uses LOCKSS (open source etc). Bob says storage resource broker from SDSC and contentVM in minnesota. OCLC guy makes his pitch and says they currently use Oracle but that that is changing even now. and there will continue to be changing.
selection at emery. the most difficult issue is what formats will preserve what including the relationships in software and in databases. how to preserve intellectual content? files of ?? format will have rotted (say like wordstar?). migtation will be concerned with the selection.
formats for gov records. only about 1% of gov records is preserved. content is more important than structure for gov docs says Bob of minnesota.
More on structure and on formats.

JCDL Keynote – Deanna Marcum of LC

Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress gives the keynote here at JCDL. Good news is wireless access in all the conference meeting rooms and there is no charge.

“The Sum of the Parts: Turning Digital Library Initiatives into a Great Whole” Can there be a discussion of digital libraries without worrying over Google in various ways? — appearently not. American Memory project has grown to 9 million items from over 100 collections. Originally designed for school children but now 3.4 billion hits from all over the world by (as near as they can tell) from people of all ages. Various projects from Library of Congress discussed (whilst Jason Moore IMs me from Rhode Island to tell me about his new job at UC-Irvine where he will be Digital Services Manager at their Library). Now about starting and maintaining born-digital collections. Buncha stuff about Dspace which is called “a newly developed digital repository created to capture, distribute and preserver the intellectual output of MIT.” Project Gutenberg gets props. Digital Librares Federation has 600 collections. [frankly there are many many not in DLF for various reasons]. TEL (The European Library) still seeks a “single access point” [why do libraries still think like AOL? and why are they obcessed by portals? Why not be more open and more flexible? Funding? Egos? Nationalisms? Continentalism? Or ease of use?] DLF has 34 members in their Aquifer portal. A bit about Open Archive Initiatives. More about how portals are so wonderful [I’m much less sure about that — portals seem so AOL]. A “dream of a universal library” cited [bypasses Borges — is he too obvious?]
Four major things to allow for the universal library:

  1. Update copyright to allow better access and open the Commons. Jamie Boyle gets props for his fencing in the commons and enclosure essay. Fear of licenses supplanting copyright. Problems of extension. Database access problems. Need to protect fair use for public access. Public Library of Science and SPARC get props. As does J-STOR (which I love less because of their charging scheme blocks access). Fear of Google initiative — sorta. Publishers are up in arms — especially University Presses who should learn better. Section 108 study group (sec. 108 of copyright law) described as looking for balance. [but Google is forcing the issue] Orphan works not mentioned though.
  2. Ensure Long-term Preservation. Need procedures and techniques or we will experience massive loss of knowledge and of digital resources. NDIIPP is one attempt at helping this happen [UNC and ibiblio are working on an NDIIPP funded project now with open video. We are one of 8 projects in this area.]
  3. Link Libraries and Digital Collections. Open Archives gets props here. Metadata improvements and metadata sharing. $292K to DLF for Open Archives Initiative.
  4. Get more Funding. [love this one] Google Initiative is a result of lack of federal funding? Brewster gets noted for his concern of private control of public resources. But Google is serious about very large scale digitization (says Brewster who has his own massive digitization projects).

Question time:
Big institutions favored by these approaches. What about personal and unique collections?
[wikimedia projects are not noticed. that shows how much is missed here I think]
Gary Marchionini at the mike now. Asking about funding. “Let Google do it” vs national and international initiatives. [misses the obvious wiki answers. the wiki way is unmentioned at this conference so far. to me that’s the most interesting model and biggest growth area]
Organizations serve their members. This causes problems.
Copyright issues up now.
Digital divide questions up now. Stories of funding for collaboration projects in poorly served areas.
Postman and media education mentioned. Contextual access to information needed.


[The unnamed challenger is Wiki Commons. pj]

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