iNODE

It is such a pleasure to work with people as smart and creative as Dan Cohen over at the Center for History and New Media.  Yesterday’s announcement (read about it here, here, or read what  Dan blogged yesterday) is the latest manifestation of an idea I know he’s been refining for several years.

Back in 2004, I met with Dan to talk about ways I might help the group working on SmartFox (Zotero’s original name) capture bibliographic data from our web-based library catalog. Truth is, they didn’t really need any help from me but it was fun to spend time with them talking about the project’s future.

In one of those meetings I suggested that it would be really cool if a researcher could somehow expose his local database to other researchers across the network (I had in mind some sort of embedded SmartFox service–you’d give a person access to your machine and they’d be able to query the items in your local database that you tagged “shareable”). It might have been an interesting idea but it wasn’t terribly original or very ambitious. I guess that explains why Zotero doesn’t do something like that today.

You want original and ambitious? How about a site where thousands of researchers are uploading and downloading gigabytes of data without benefit of quality standards, agreed-upon metadata guidelines, normalized naming conventions, and so on. Chaos, right? Well, maybe not. As I read Dan’s post, I think this new Internet Archive partnership has game-changing potential.

Speaking as a librarian, it might be just what our profession needs to drive home the fact that it’s time to stop worrying so much about exchanging metadata and start focusing more energy on facilitating the actual exchange and use of digital objects.

As I understand it, the “metadata’ for these objects will be drawn from OCR scans and (I’m guessing here) some sort of tagging (perhaps drawn from the contributor’s local Zotero database or something created on the IA server by the user community). There will be persistent URLs which will have embedded timestamp metadata but that’s about it. The actual content of the objects will be the primary source of both discovery and organization.

Won’t it be instructive to see if this turns into a unholy mess or a self-tuning, extremely valuable resource? Either way, we’ll have lots of new data on this question: “if we have full access to content just how important is metadata, anyway?”

Going through some older documents today, I stumbled across an interesting URL. Imagine my surprise when I pasted it into my browser and got this back:

Mason’s homepage from December, 1996. The oldest working page I can find on Brewster Kahle’s Wayback Machine dates from 2000 so this pushes us back an additional four years.I served as sysadmin/webmaster in those days (as I recall by this point we had moved from a SPARC 5 to a SPARC 20) and as you can plainly see I had just about mastered Web 0.5 design. The fine print on the “MasonLink Crawler” section (a Harvest installation I had running at the time)  shows that there were 12,000 documents on Mason’s web.  Googling “site:gmu.edu” today returns 784,000 documents so clearly it’s growing…

In some cases, the URLs still work but most take you to a newer page. In a few cases, the old 1996 stuff is still hanging around. A gold star to the campus web crew for their stealthly (and likely unintentional) archiving.

http://www.gmu.edu/dec96home.html

Earlier today my news reader let me know that Dorothea had posted a preprint of her forthcoming article from Library Trends, so I hopped over to MINDS@UW and grabbed a copy.

Here’s the abstract:

Trapped by faculty apathy and library uncertainty, institutional repositories face a crossroads: adapt or die. The “build it and they will come” proposition has been decisively proven wrong. Citation advantages and preservation have not attracted faculty participants, though current-generation software and services offer faculty little else. Academic librarianship has not supported repositories or their managers. Most libraries consistently under-resource and understaff repositories, further worsening the participation gap. Software and services are wildly out of touch with faculty needs and the realities of repository management. These problems are not insoluble, but they demand serious reconsideration of repository missions, goals, and means.

It’s vintage Dorothea: alternatively provocative, amusing, outrageous, informative, annoying, self-effacing, insightful, self-absorbed, and well, if you’ve spent any time reading her work or talking to her, you know it will be worth your time.

http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088

A note to help the next person trolling Google looking for a clue…

A month or so ago we had an older 2.3GHz PowerMac G5 just refuse to boot. Well, that’s not quite right, it would begin booting…startup chime, disk spin-up, grey booting screen…then a little patch of color appeared in the middle of the screen…then nothing…after a minute, the fans would jump to takeoff speed.

I swapped out the video card (mistakenly thinking the little patch of color in the center of the screen perhaps meant the video had failed). Nope. Reseated, then tried swapping out the memory chips. Nothing.

I booted the machine in target mode (holding down the “t” key while turning it on), ran a firewire cable between the G5 and my laptop, and transferred important data off the recalcitrant machine. This seemed odd—it would boot into target mode and let me access the internal drive but it wouldn’t boot into the OS?   Well, if it can get almost there (function as target drive) surely it will boot from a installation disk.  Nope.

At this point I figured it was a motherboard problem and with Apple that’s very close to being the end of the matter (good luck finding multiple sources of inexpensive replacement parts for old Macs).

Finally took out the memory, video card and drives and put those pieces in other machines. Figured it wasn’t worth spending $700 to get a new motherboard for a PowerPC box. Moved the G5 “shell” into the closet and forgot about it.

Until last week. I was listening to The Mac Observer’s Mac Geek Gab (I have a long commute so I follow close to 25 different podcasts—and not all technology-related, either) when there was mention of an older iMac that wouldn’t boot until the coin-like PRAM battery was replaced. Hmmm…sounded familiar. I decided to order a PRAM battery for the G5—just to see if a $5 part could revive the thing.

The battery came today in an Other World Computing box, along with 2 sticks of G5 memory (figured if this didn’t work, I could use them elsewhere). Swapped out the battery, put in the memory and an SATA drive and Voila!…it booted right up.

Spent a bit of time today plowing through the recently released LC Working Group Draft Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control. It is an interesting document and I imagine there will be quite a few public comments.

I confess I’ve never been able to sustain my end of a theoretical conversation on cataloging but when I hit this set of paragraphs on page 24, well I began to think there might yet be hope:

Recently, there has been a proliferation of standards—both officially registered and de facto—prompted by the needs of digital materials and digitizing initiatives. While it is useful to continue the explorations embodied in such standards development, the library community needs to be much more focused on identifying and addressing real needs with workable solutions. Too much development is based on unvalidated assertions or professional ideology.

Our metadata environment is becoming extremely complex, comprehending AACR2/RDA, MARC 21, MARC XML, MODS, Dublin Core, and ONIX—amongst others. Our retrieval protocol environment is also complex, with Z39.50, SRW/U, MXG, and the need to work with OpenSearch and other protocol approaches. This standards proliferation is a distraction to national bodies, a confusion for practitioners, and a vexation for developers.

Leaving aside the fractured syntax of the second paragraph, could this excerpt actually represent a call for pragmatism? I hope so. I know more than once I’ve felt distracted, confused and vexed by what might charitably be called our profession’s proclivity to favor over-engineered solutions in response to least-use scenarios.

It will be interesting to see the reaction to this report.