Planet Code4Lib

del.icio.us: Open Library API: Cataloging 13 Million Books

zpinhead — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:30:44 +0000

rdhyee++

del.icio.us: Wiffiti: Home

keyvowel — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:05:00 +0000

Maybe one of these for code4lib2009? via: http://player.locamoda.net/flash/media/harvardlaw/programs/wiffiti/

Johannesen, Alexander: Friday Thoughts

Alexander Johannesen (noreply@blogger.com) — Sat, 17 May 2008 01:47:42 +0000

Last week was a good blogging week for me, and I had planned a few bits and bobs this week, but alas, a combination of many things changed things on its head.

Instead I bring you three TED presentations I feel are important enough to share. The first is by Mark Bittman on not only what we eat, but how we eat, and how it affects us all and our planet. These things are extremely important to keep in mind when we plan for the future of the planet. Global Warming and all that is important enough in itself, but planning what and how we eat (i.e. dealing with foodstuff production and consumption) in lieu of its local and global impact is perhaps easily forgotten. Don't forget it, please;

Another presentation video is by a funny guy called Joshua Klein who is fascinated with crows; birds far smarter than what most people tend to think. He's created a vending machine that crows figure out how to use. They use tools. They even use pedestrian crossings as a safe way to get to food on roads. What makes humans special again?

And, if you're still with me, have a look at the fascinating juggling skills and philosophical musings of Michael Moschen, a wonderful mix of rhythm, juggling, and balls. Pay especially attention to his rhythm section, playing the coolest patterns while juggling balls through hands and feet. I was glued to this show in awe;

Now go and have a great weekend. Norway's national day with celebrations is tomorrow, Saturday, so happy birthday, Norway! I've bought special sausages for the occasion. I'm hungry already.

nodalities: Issue 2 of Nodalities Magazine is now available

Paul Miller — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:56:46 +0000

Issue 2 of Nodalities Magazine is now available online. For those who have signed up to the free subscription, your printed copy is in the mail.

Items this month include:

Blue Oceans - Ian Davis and Zach Beauvais discuss the ‘Blue Ocean’ opportunity facing those who embrace the Semantic Web
Social Networking - Garlik CEO Tom Ilube introduces the notion of ’social verification’
Environment - David Peterson puts semantic technologies to work in the fight against Climate Change
Predictable Mavericks - Talis CEO Dave Errington looks back at the company’s past, and forward to a semantically powered future
Open World Thinking - Nadeem Shabir argues that Semantic Web developers need to see the world differently
Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters - Read transcripts of recent conversations with these factual information powerhouses, and learn how the Semantic Web is being put to work.

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Duimovich, George: Web site redesign must die

George — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:38:15 +0000

Louis Rosenfeld outlines his case for killing website redesign - or at least changing your way of doing it - in a a recent webmaster forum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His Redesign Must Die talk is available on slideshare (audio not available). Rosenfeld has a library background and is the co-author [...]

McDonald, Robert: ALA/LITA Pre-Conference on DataGrid Technologies and Libraries

rmcdonal — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:19:28 +0000

Today is the last day for advance registration for an upcoming pre-conference that I am doing with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Texas Advanced Computer Center. See registration link and details below.

Datagrid Technologies and Libraries
Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00 am- 5:00 pm
Anaheim, CA

This pre-conference will be a panel presentation featuring librarians and storage administrators from the UC San Diego Libraries, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Texas Advanced Computer Center, that will cover various aspects of datagrid technologies for use in libraries. The group will cover the overall benefits of utilizing datagrid technologies with institutional repositories, digital libraries, and digital preservation systems within libraries and will look specifically at case studies of the UCSD Libraries and the SDSC based Chronopolis digital preservation data-grid. Most of the tools for these systems are open source and with very minimal instruction can become an important collaborative network for use with academic bandwidth such as the Internet2 Abilene network for sharing large collections of born-digital material and escaping proprietary hardware lock-in on large-scale or mass digitization initiatives.

Registration - http://www.ala.org/ala/eventsandconferencesb/annual/2008a/registration.cfm

Speakers:
Ardys Kozbial, UC San Diego Libraries
Declan Fleming, UC San Diego Libraries
David Minor, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Robert McDonald, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Chris Jordan, Grid Infrastructure Group, Texas Advanced Computing Center

Federated Search Blog: Review: Developing the right RFP for selecting your federated search product

Sol — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:46:03 +0000

[ Editor’s note: Carl Grant, President of CARE Affiliates, was one of the volunteers who took me up on my offer to review several chapters of Christopher Cox’s book about federated search. Following is his review of one of the chapters: “Developing the Right RFP for Selecting Your Federated Search Product: Lessons Learned and Tips from Recent Experience” by Jerry Caswell and John Wynstra.

I appreciate that this review comes from a seasoned federated search vendor; Carl Grant has been in the library automation industry for a long time and raises an important concern about the RFP process, how his experience is that the current RFP model doesn’t really doesn’t serve the customer or vendor, and he touches on what he sees as a better approach.

(more…)

del.icio.us: code4lib 2008 - Google Video

smkvt — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:58:28 +0000

Bigwood, David: MARC Online

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:19:00 +0000

More news from LOC.

The Network Development and MARC Standards Office is pleased to announce that the Full versions of the all five MARC 21 formats are now available online, along with the Online Concise.
The "full" version of a format contains detailed descriptions of every data element, along with examples, input conventions, and history sections - all of the information from the printed formats. There are no textual differences between the Online Full and the printed documentation. The Concise still contains all of the elements and enough description to serve many lookup needs. Changes from the most recent update of the formats are indicated in the text of both the Online Concise and the Online Full.

Rochkind, Jonathan: In other news

jrochkind — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:54:22 +0000

I have up to now rigorously avoided posting any content to this blog that was personal, political, or not professionally relevant. But sometimes, I guess I can’t resist it anymore. I will resist posting any commentary to the link to this article that I can not resist publicizing

Some Detainees Are Drugged For Deportation
Immigrants Sedated Without Medical Reason
by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest | Washington Post Staff Writers
Page A1; May 14, 2008

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/cwc_d4p1.html

del.icio.us: Bloug: The Redesign Must Die talk

keyvowel — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:22:30 +0000

Bigwood, David: Links in LC Records

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:12:00 +0000

News about 856 links from LOC.

I've received a couple of questions recently about the 856 links in LC records for the TOCs, descriptions, bios, sample texts, etc. and wanted to spread the word about what we did.

Every month, around the first of the month, folks run their link checkers to validate the links in their copies of LC records. The volume of traffic against our web server was tremendous. A couple of times it nearly brought the server down. We tried several things to minimize the impact if it looked like a link checker was running against the web server, but this didn't seem to help the problem. In the end, we moved all of the files that are in the 856 fields to a different, larger, more robust server. Apparently this is causing link checkers to report that there is a redirect and people are asking if they need to change the URL for the links. I would say that there is no need to change the 856 links from http://www.loc.gov... to http://catdir.loc.gov.... In fact, I am still adding the URLs as http://www.loc.gov...

LC is committed to maintaining these URLs, you should not be experiencing access problems with them except when running link checkers or maybe harvesters. I appreciate any reports of wrong connections or other serious problems with the files. By my count, we have over 710,000 links in the LC catalog now, so you can see this is a major commitment for LC.

frbr: Third birthday next month

William Denton (wtd@pobox.com) — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:55:00 +0000

On 25 June 2005 I announced this blog to the FRBR mailing list and elsewhere. Any suggestions for what to do here to celebrate? Aside from preparing for the One Big Library Unconference two days later, that is.

Hello,

I was able to go to the May FRBR workshop hosted by IFLA and OCLC, and it
was very interesting and thought-provoking.  I'm really glad I was there.
One of the things that struck me was that many smart people are working on
FRBR but it's hard for the average person to follow it all.  It's
especially hard for people out of the loop of academic journals and
association memberships.  There's this mailing list, of course, but I got
to thinking that a FRBR weblog would be useful.

So I started one.  I've set up

        http://www.frbr.org/

and filled it with some things I'd had bookmarked.  Please have a look
and tell me any suggestions or comments you have, especially including
good things to link to.  If you have something FRBRish on the web, or a
paper in a journal somewhere, I'd love to hear about it.

I hope that over the next few months I'll have lots of interesting links
to post, and that the blog becomes a useful resource for people--not just
librarians, but anyone interested in FRBR--wanting to stay up to date.

RSS feeds are available, and comments are allowed on all the entries.

del.icio.us: Upcoming: NE ASIS&T Awards dinner on June 12 @ MIT Faculty Club

keyvowel — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:51:47 +0000

"Robert Wolfe of the MIT Libraries will speak about the semantic web,in practice."

nodalities: Semantic Web Gang talks with Barney Pell of Powerset

Paul Miller — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:45:58 +0000

May’s Semantic Web Gang show was just published, and features a good discussion with Dr Barney Pell, CTO of Powerset. Powerset launched a public beta at the start of this week, and Barney shares some of the company’s experiences of a week in the public eye.

Have a listen; it’s a good’un. Biased? Moi?

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del.icio.us: Archives of CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU

jbowen14607 — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:14:26 +0000

Murray, Peter: Long-term Preservation Storage: OCLC Digital Archive versus Amazon S3

the Jester — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:55:36 +0000

Last month OCLC announced a new service offering for long-term storage of libraries’ digital collections. Called Digital Archive™, it provides “a secure storage environment for you to easily manage and monitor the health of your master files and digital originals.” Barbara Quint has an article in Information Today called “OCLC Introduces High-Priced Digital Archive Service” in which she makes a comparison to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (or “S3″) from primarily a cost perspective: “The price for S3 storage at Amazon Web Services is 15 cents a gigabyte a month or $1.80 a year, in comparison to OCLC’s $7.50 a gig.” Barbara also goes into some of the technical differences, but I think it might be worthwhile to go a little more into depth on them.

OCLC’s Digital Archive

According to the service overview, Digital Archive is a content hosting service that provides:

Systems management
Physical security
Data security
Data backups
Disaster recovery
ISO 9001 certification
Manifest verification
Virus check
Format verification
Fixity check

It is targeted towards the preservation of digital masters. There is a document on the Digital Archive website called Our commitment that describes other aspects of a digital preservation program: “OCLC is actively developing processes for full preservation of digital assets to ensure complete renderability, regardless of technology changes. This preservation system will likely involve a combination of migration and emulation.” But it is not clear whether these services, beyond “bit preservation” activities, is part of the Digital Archive service or will be part of an add-on service to be developed later.

This “Digital Archive” is a revamping of an older product from OCLC, also called “Digital Archive” but one that included a web harvesting tools component. The service and support documentation on the OCLC website still refers to the former version of Digital Archive, so there is little information about how the service works beyond what one can infer from the sales information.

Amazon’s S3

Amazon describes S3 as “a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.” Files are transfered across the internet to Amazon’s services and stored in multiple data centers. Files can be retrieved using standard HTTP mechanisms (the same protocol that powers the web) and are protected by an optional access control mechanism. S3 does have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that offers guarantees on performance.

SLA seems to extend only to availability of the service, not to a long term commitment to keeping track of files on the service.

AWS [Amazon Web Services, LLC] will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon S3 available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle (the “Service Commitment”). In the event Amazon S3 does not meet the Service Commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit as described below.

There is no mention specifically in the S3 SLA about permanence of file storage. In leu of that, one seems to be covered by the overarching Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement, which has several points of interest from a preservation use perspective:

3.3. Termination or Suspension by Us Other Than for Cause.
3.3.2. Paid Services…. We may suspend your right and license to use any or all Paid Services (and any associated Amazon Properties)…, or terminate this Agreement in its entirety (and, accordingly, cease providing all Services to you), for any reason or for no reason, at our discretion at any time by providing you sixty (60) days’ advance notice in accordance with the notice provisions set forth in Section 15 below.

So if they desire to terminate a library’s use of the service (assuming there was no specific cause — such as a violation of the terms of use — to do so), they have to give 60 days notice. That’s when the “Data Preservation in the Event of Suspension or Termination” clause kicks in:

3.7.2. In the Event of Termination Other Than for Cause. In the event of any termination by us of any Service or any set of Services, or termination of this Agreement in its entirety, other than a for cause termination under Section 3.4.1, (i) we will not take any action to intentionally erase any of your data stored on the Services for a period of thirty (30) days after the effective date of termination; and (ii) your post termination retrieval of data stored on the Services will be conditioned on your payment of Service data storage charges for the period following termination, payment in full of any other amounts due us, and your compliance with terms and conditions we may establish with respect to such data retrieval.

The customer agreement then goes on to say:

3.8. Post-Termination Assistance.Following the suspension or termination of your right to use the Services by us or by you for any reason other than a for cause termination (i.e., a termination under Section 3.2 or under Section 3.3), you shall be entitled to take advantage of any post-termination assistance we may generally make available with respect to the Services, such as data retrieval arrangements we may elect to make available. We may also endeavor to provide you unique post-suspension or post-termination assistance, but we shall be under no obligation to do so. Your right to take advantage of any such assistance, whether generally made available with respect to the Services or made available uniquely to you, shall be conditioned upon your acceptance of and compliance with any fees and terms we specify for such assistance.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect, from a preservation point-of-view, deals with data security and backups. Specifically, Amazon says that data security and backups are the responsibility of the customer. The Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement says (emphasis added):

7.2. Security. We strive to keep Your Content secure, but cannot guarantee that we will be successful at doing so, given the nature of the Internet. Accordingly, without limitation to Section 4.3 above and Section 11.5 below, you acknowledge that you bear sole responsibility for adequate security, protection and backup of Your Content. We strongly encourage you, where available and appropriate, to use encryption technology to protect Your Content from unauthorized access and to routinely archive Your Content. We will have no liability to you for any unauthorized access or use, corruption, deletion, destruction or loss of any of Your Content.

That kind of security and data backup is something you’d want in a preservation service. Since activities against S3 storage is limited only by a knowing a private “key”¹ (as opposed to limiting to particular IP addresses or not allowing deletes/modifications from the web at all), it is a real possibility that the archive can be harmed if the private key is disclosed. Furthermore, S3 does not have a backup/restore service for retrieving files that were accidentally or maliciously deleted.

Feature Comparison

It is useful to compare Amazon’s S3 on a point-by-point basis OCLC’s Digital Archive service to try to put some meaning behind the cost numbers.

	OCLC Digital Archive	Amazon S3
Systems management	Yes	Yes
Physical security	Yes	Yes
Data security	Yes	No
Data backups	Yes	No
Disaster recovery	Yes	unclear
ISO 9001 certification	whatever the heck that might mean in this context
Manifest verification	Yes	No
Format verification	Yes	No
Virus check	Yes	No
Fixity check	Yes	No
“Light archive” capability	No	Yes

This is a useful comparison because it would indicate what one would have to layer on top of S3 to reach the level of service provided by Digital Archive. For instance, it would be possible to create an application that would perform the manifest and format verifications as well as the periodic virus and fixity checks against the files in S3. It would even be possible to run that application in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) — a “virtual computing environment” that allows developers to easily create and deploy software on the internet. Since data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 is free of charge, there wouldn’t be the S3 cost of periodically downloading the data to perform the virus and fixity checks.

One advantage to note about the S3 solution is that it can perform as a “light archive” — meaning the data is available to users in addition to being part of the content repository. In contrast to the OCLC Digital Archive service — a “dark archive” — access to the data is highly or completely restricted. Still, the lack of automated backups and a robust data security infrastructure in the S3 infrastructure are notable from a preservation data service perspective.

Cost Comparison

To examine the similarities and differences in costs, let’s use the OhioLINK Satellite Image collection as a prototypical example. It consists of about 2 terabytes (2TB) of high-quality images in TIFF format, with about 7.5GB of data going into the repository each month. In the interest of exploring everything that S3 can do, there is an assumption that approximately 4GB of data will be transfered out of the archive each month; OCLC’s Digital Archive does not have a end-user dissemination component.

	OCLC Digital Archive		Amazon S3
	Rate	Cost	Rate	Cost
Setup Cost	- - - redacted - - -		- - - none - - -
Startup Ingest Cost	- - - redacted - - -		$0.10/GB into S3 [#1]	$200
Initial Storage Cost	$750/100GB/year [#2]	$15,000/year	$0.15/GB/month	$3,600/year

Ongoing Ingest Cost	- - - redacted - - -		$0.10/GB into S3 [#1]	$9/year
Ongoing Storage Cost	$750/100GB/year [#2]	previous year plus $750/year [#3]	$0.15/GB/month	previous year plus $10.80/year [#3]

Ongoing Access Cost	Not available		varies [#1, #4]	$8.16/year

Note #1: Amazon S3 also adds charges by HTTP request, but those are considered negligible for the data load and the ongoing accesses.

Note #2: As listed in Barbara Quint’s article. Charge is for any part of 100GB used.

Note #3: Additions each year factor in the assumption of adding 90GB/year to the collection.

Note #4: Costs for transfers out of S3 is: $0.17/GB for the first 10TB/month; $0.13/GB for the next 40TB/month; $0.11/GB for the next 100TB/month; and $0.10/GB for outflowing data over 150TB/month.

For this prototypical example, S3 would cost $3,800 in the first year and roughly $3,615 per year after that, with the added benefit that end-users could access the content without using our infrastructure. There are costs associated with the OCLC Digital Archive service that had to be redacted from the public version of this table due to a confidentiality clause, but the costs that are assumed for ongoing storage based on Barbara Quint’s article are comparable to the quote I got from OCLC and represent a large portion of the total yearly costs.

By way of comparison, we are planning the purchase of 50TB of storage this summer for roughly $250K; that is about $5,000/TB. Amortize the cost of the hardware over five years and assume 150% of the purchase price represents maintenance, personnel support, and other factors, and we get $2,500/TB/year. This doesn’t include software costs, so it is comparable to S3 in the functions table above; software would have to be written to verify the manifest and file formats on ingest as well as the monthly fixity and virus scanning. It also represents only one copy of the data; it does not include the duplication across data centers that both Digital Archive and S3 provide.

Conclusions

OCLC’s Digital Archive product goes pretty far down the path of a preservation-worthy archive of digital files. The value-added services, in addition to simply storing and retrieving files, make it as close to a one-stop shop as I’ve seen so far. Whether outsourced digital preservation services makes sense — particularly at this price point — remains to be seen, especially since is hard to make a comparison since I’m betting that most of us aren’t (yet) doing all of the ongoing activities with digital preservation masters that Digital Archive is doing.

Amazon’s S3 is an inexpensive, network-oriented file hosting service, and as such it doesn’t have many of the features built into it that we would want to see in a preservation archive service. Beyond raw file service, one would need to add layers of software and human activities to perform the functions that Digital Archive provides now.

Looking at OCLC’s Digital Archive and Amazon S3 is almost an apples-to-oranges comparison, both in price and in functionality. Comparing functionality first, S3 is missing critical components of a preservation storage system — namely, rigorous access control and a content backup/restore facility. Comparing costs, though, S3 is dramatically cheaper…and has the benefit of serving up large files to end-users using Amazon’s distributed infrastructure.

It is possible to level the functionality playing field a bit by taking responsibility for the ongoing maintenance of files in the S3 archive — those things that Digital Archive offers as value-added services over raw file storage. An EC2 virtual machine running in Amazon’s infrastructure can perform the virus and fixity scanning. And with good key maintenance (as with passwords, regularly changing the private key and securing it appropriately), S3 could conceivably offsite copies of content stored offline (e.g. burned to preservation quality optical media). Again, in this scenario one has to take responsibility for refreshing the offline media and occasionally running comparisons against the S3 offsite copy.

Footnotes

S3 uses secret keys — a 40-character password — to verify the identify of the client making the request. If the private key becomes known, anyone on the internet can perform operations actions as the content owner.

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: Facebook blocks Google Friend Connect

Andy Powell — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:20:47 +0000

I beg your pardon,
I never promised you a rose garden.
Along with the sunshine,
There's gotta be a little rain sometimes.

(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden, Joe South

So Facebook - you know... that bastion of privacy protection - have blocked Google Friend Connect on privacy grounds. Yeah right! More like, "we've realised that the walls round our garden weren't high enough and we've just added a few more rows of bricks" :-(

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: Teach online to compete...

Andy Powell — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:26:38 +0000

An article in Tuesday's Education Guardian, Teach online to compete, British universities told, caught my eye - not least because it appears to say very little about teaching online. Rather, it talks about making course materials available online, which is, after all, very different. To be fair, Carol Comer, academic development advisor (eLearning) at the University of Chester, does make this point towards the end of the article.

The report on which the story is based is "a paper for the latest edition of ppr, the publication of influential thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research". I'm not sure if the paper is currently finished - it doesn't really look finished to be honest - the fonts seem to be all over the shop but perhaps I'm being too picky. Or perhaps the Guardian have got sight of it a little early?

The report suggests that the UK should:

establish a centralised online hub of diverse British open courseware offerings at www.ocw.ac.uk, presented in easily-readable formats and accessible to teachers, students and citizens alike

establish the right and subsequent capacity for non-students and non-graduates to take the same exam as do face-to-face students, through the provision of open access exam sessions

pass an Open Access Act through Parliament, establishing a new class of Open degree, achieved solely using open courseware

conduct a high-profile public information campaign, promoting the opportunities afforded open courseware and open access examinations and degrees, targeted at adult learners, excluded minorities and students at pre-university age

OK, I confess that I found the report quite long and I didn't quite get to the end (err, make that beyond halfway). I'm as big a fan of open access as the next person, probably more so, so I don't have a problem with the suggestion that we should be making more courseware openly available. I'm just not convinced that anyone could get themselves up to degree level simply by downloading / reading / watching / listening to a load of open access courseware - no matter how good it is. The report makes reference to MIT's OpenCourseware and the OU's OpenLearn initiatives. Call me a cynic, but I've always suspected that MIT makes its cousreware available online, not for the greater good of humanity but so that more students will enroll at MIT? OK, I'm adopting an intentionally extreme position here and I'm sure people at MIT do have the best of intentions - but I think it is also the case that they don't see the giving away of courseware in any way harmful to their current business models. The OU's OpenLearn initiative (treated somewhat unfairly by the parts of the report I read) is slightly different in any case since the OU is by definition a distance-based institution - or so it seems to me.

So, I should probably stop at this point - having not properly read the report fully. If you think I've been very unfair when you read the report yourself, let me know by way of a comment.

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: JISC IE blog, Val Doonican and that diagram

Andy Powell — Fri, 16 May 2008 06:51:49 +0000

A very quick note to say that the JISC Information Environment team are now blogging... good stuff.

And while I'm on the subject of the JISC IE, I should perhaps note that that diagram still seems to be doing the rounds. At the UKOLN 30th celebration Paul Walk invited me to say a few words about it from the floor, at which point I stood up and joked that I'd left UKOLN to get away from the diagram and had no intention of saying anything about it! Not quite true actually... I had prepared something to say about both the diagram and the work that went on around it but in the end I felt that the day needed something lighter and more anecdotal, so I sat down, stage front, mic in hand and said "I want to tell you a story" instead.

This resulted in much piss being extracted by various of my current and ex-colleagues by way of reference to Val Doonican - Rachel Bruce (one of the authors of the new blog above) even went so far as to send me a photo of good old Val with the caption, "picture of you" :-) I'll tell the story here, for posterity, another time - I know you're desperate to hear it. I don't have the time right now.

Anyway, I digress... back to the diagram. So having turned down an opportunity to talk about the diagram that day, I tuned into the live video stream from the JISC conference a few weeks later and found Sir Ron Cooke (Chair of the JISC) speaking to it in-front of an audience of practically millions.

Hey, if nothing else, it's certainly been good value. If someone did a tag cloud of Powerpoint slides based on the number of times they'd been shown in JISC-related events, I reckon that diagram would be pretty sizable.

Farkas, Meredith: Followup on Is this how we encourage people to contribute?

Meredith Farkas — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:20:52 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about the discussion last week about speaking, being compensated for speaking, transparency, the profession and it’s (perhaps?) inferiority complex, and so much more. Everyone contributed such unique and interesting perspectives, some I agree with, some I don’t, some that made me change my perspective a bit. We’ve all had different experiences that have colored our view of things. The real fact is that there are no absolutes. We all have to decide for ourselves what is right or wrong for us, and we shouldn’t judge people for making different choices than the ones we do.

Lots of people have strong opinions about what is appropriate and inappropriate for speakers to get. But I wonder how can we judge right or wrong when there are such differences in how speakers are treated at different conferences? It was clear from the comments on my post that speakers in Australia tend to pay registration while speakers in the UK not only don’t have to pay registration, but usually also have their travel expenses reimbursed. And here? Well, clearly it’s a mish-mosh or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

With that mish-mosh, we have to ask ourselves how some organizations can manage to comp speakers’ registration and some can’t. We heard from Michael who runs the Massachusetts Library Association Conference:

We would never require a speaker, from anywhere, cover the cost of their own registration on the day they are speaking. As g says above, it doesn’t cost the association any money to let someone come for free. I am a firm believer that you have to spend money to make money at these types of events, and MLA has been making a profit for the last several years under this philosophy. I give away a lot of free registrations, and hopefully many of those attendees will become members of the association, or come back to the conference the next year, or support MLA in some other way.

But then we also heard from a woman who helps to organize the California Library Association Conference who stated that the speakers constitute around 1/4 of their attendee costs. So, clearly, if they’ve been depending on registration revenues from this population, it’s not something they are going to change. I have no idea what percentage of the Massachusetts Library Assoc. Conference’s attendee population is speakers, but it’s interesting to me that they can manage to comp the registration of speakers. As can the Vermont Library Association (though we’re small fries up here). I have no idea how these large-scale conferences are planned and budgeted, but it’s pretty clear to me that the people organizing conferences in different states could probably benefit from talking to each other and sharing tricks of the trade. After hearing about how the Vermont Library Association Conference is planned and run, it has become very clear to me that some state conferences are run much better and more efficiently than others. I certainly have sympathy and respect for those who run conferences and have to make difficult decisions.

I’ve heard from others that invited speakers are different from non-invited ones and should be compensated. I think it’s fine to make that distinction if that’s what the organization chooses to do. People can decide for themselves what is or isn’t acceptable to them. I think the big problem is that invited speakers are not always compensated. I was asked to speak at the New England Library Association conference back in 2006. They told me they’d pay my travel expenses but couldn’t pay me an honorarium. I figured since it’s a big conference in New England and it sounded interesting, I’d do it. A few days later, I get an email saying that because I live in New England (even though I’m not explicitly a member of NELA), they couldn’t reimburse my travel expenses and I’d have to pay registration. Needless to say, I’ve never been to the New England Library Association Conference.

We also saw the argument that people who would have gone anyways should have to pay their own expenses including registration. I often wonder how people know that someone would have gone anyways. It’s not like every member of an organization attends the conference. I would not have gone to ALA Annual in 2007 had I not been invited to speak by three different groups. Yet, I still had to pay registration while another speaker on one of the panels I was on got paid because they’re not a librarian. I can live with organizations having the rule that everyone who is a member or even everyone who is in their target population has to pay registration. People can make any policy they want. But there is no logic to the idea that all of those people would have gone to the conference anyways and that’s why they should pay. It’s like saying that all handgun owners would all be going to NRA events. No likely.

Another argument I’ve heard is that we have a duty to serve the organizations we’re a part of. I personally don’t feel like our feeling of duty should go beyond paying our dues — unless we want it to. We all serve the profession in different ways. I don’t serve at the state level, because I’m so involved nationally. I’m involved with ALA and I contribute to the profession through the many projects I’ve been a part of that have nothing to do with an organization. There are so many different ways to contribute that no one should be made to feel like it’s their responsibility to give to their state, national, or any other organization.

It was made clear in the comments that there are two negative things that can come from not spending more money on one’s conference speakers. The first is that you get a lower quality of speaker. Plenty of in-demand speakers will not speak for free unless they are a member of your organization (and some still won’t). The second (and most frustrating) is that you discourage from contributing those new librarians who barely make enough to support themselves. I know, I know, the benefits to your career, yadda yadda. But how much does that matter if they can’t make their rent that month because they spent hundreds of dollars (or more) to speak at a conference? The woman who works on the CLA conference stated that “our member/leaders have chosen to deeply discount conference registration for students, support staff, retirees and members who are unemployed.” I see nothing there about brand-new-just-out-of-school librarians. Librarians who probably aren’t making a lot. Librarians who are just now starting to have to pay off their student loans. Maybe a good solution is for CLA to offer free registration to speakers who are 0-3 years post-MLS and deeply discounted registration for those in that same group who are not speaking. This might bring some great new untapped talent to the conference.

There are some people whose response to those who complain is basically “suck it up.” From what I’ve noticed, these tend to be people who have spent quite a bit of their own money on conferences. It feels to me like the “I walked ten miles through driving snow uphill both ways to school” argument. Ok, so you spent $2000 of your own money on library conferences recently. That was your choice. To say that people who want to be compensated are “whining” is just as bad as those people saying you’re crazy for spending that much money.

I’ve also heard people say that folks are greedy for wanting to be paid to speak. While I don’t think our profession as a whole devalues itself, I do feel like people who make that argument devalue us and themselves. Absurd! Why should we not get compensated? We work hard to create a presentation, we travel to get to the conference, we speak, and they charge people to hear us speak. I feel like my time and intellectual property are worth something. That doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to speak for free. I donate my time for things I feel connected to, like local libraries, my state organization, library schools or any webcasts that are offered for free. I’ve actually refused honoraria in a number of situations where I didn’t want to cost the organization any money. But that was my choice. I also speak for free when I think the opportunity will be really good for my career or to travel somewhere I’ve never been before (like Denmark and Iceland). Money isn’t the only benefit.

I feel strongly that each of us needs recognize the value we provide when we speak, decide what that means to us, and then make decisions about speaking opportunities accordingly. You should define whether it’s an honor to speak; not someone else.

I also find it frustrating for people to advise others to give up an important career opportunity because their acceptance of that might be a tacit acceptance of librarians not getting compensated for speaking. It would be very easy for me to tell my friend to not go to the conference and tell the folks at CLA why. However, giving up that opportunity might be a mistake and one person doing that isn’t going to make a difference. Anything like that needs to be done on a larger scale and in a more organized way. Asking one person to sacrifice a career opportunity for all of us is unreasonable.

I think the economy for speakers is skewed by the whole tenure track process. Whether or not those of us who aren’t on the tenure track choose to speak for nothing, there will always be people who have no choice but to take the opportunities they can get because their job depends on it. And of course they’re in the same boat as those other new librarians not on the tenure track in terms of being the lowest on the totem pole salary-wise. I was offered a job at an institution where librarians are tenure-track faculty and have to write and present, and they were actually given less professional development funding than I get at my University where I’m not tenure-track. This makes no sense to me. If this is a requirement of your job, then it should be funded. End of story. And I know other faculty have to do this, but do tenure-track library faculty get paid the same amount as teaching faculty do? And do they always get the same amount of conference support?

Steven Bell said that my friend should have “[found] out in advance if the conference you want to present at gives speakers free registration or not. That should be easy to do and will save a lot of hassle for everyone involved.” I agree that it’s important to find things out in advance, but is it that easy? I’ve seen a real lack of transparency from people organizing conferences. Yes, my friend should have found out what the deal was for speakers at the California Library Association Conference, but why the heck does the organization make that information so difficult to find? I looked all over their website and found no information. I created an account and logged into the site where people were supposed to submit their proposals and couldn’t find it there either (see below).

So, why bury this information? Why not make it more obvious? I don’t think anyone does it to intentionally keep people in the dark (at least I hope not), but still, it still ends up making people feel like they’ve been deceived (and really, to send someone an email right after their proposal is accepted saying “all conference related expenses, including registration fees, travel and hotel, are at your own expense” instead of before feels like a bait-and-switch). I’ve been there too. I’ve been asked to speak and was told that all my travel expenses would be covered. Then it was, well, everything is covered except ___. And then the money they were willing to pay for a hotel wouldn’t cover a hotel in the area. Etc, etc. I know these people weren’t trying to lie to me, but the effect was the same in that I felt deceived and annoyed.

Every group has different rules. Some make it so easy to make arrangements and get reimbursed. With others, you practically have to sign over your first-born. That should all be made clear before people make a decision to speak. When I ask for all the information, I find that I only get the whole story perhaps 50% of the time. And it shouldn’t be that way, because it only leads to ill feelings from the speaker. That person is traveling (perhaps a very long way) to speak at your conference. They are preparing a great presentation for the people paying to attend your conference. It seems only right to give them all of the information up-front so they can make an informed decision.

I think transparency is the critical thing missing in all of this. And maybe it will help to have a wiki for conference speakers like the one Cliff Landis created, where people can disclose how they were treated when they spoke. But it’s even more important for conference organizers themselves to make everything crystal clear to potential speakers. While pay is nice, communication is the key to a happy speaker. Lots of people probably will choose to speak for free and even to pay registration to speak, but they should be given all that information ahead of time so that they can make that choice.

Reese, Terry: Ok — I’ve given blood, now you do too

Administrator — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:22:44 +0000

As a universal donor, I try to give blood when I’m not on my bike (thank you roofing staple) — so, the red cross was at OSU today and without a good reason not to give blood, I dropped by and gave a pint. I actually wish I could do it more often — but part of what stops me is a horrible fear of needles. I can’t stand them, look at them, etc. So, when I give blood, it’s always an interesting experience as I tried to pump the blood out of my veins as fast as humanly possible (about 8 minutes today).

Anyway, the point — I probably should do it more often. In fact, more people should probably do it more often — so, if I can give blood and survive the terrible needles, you can too. If you are able, give blood and save a life.

Cheers,

–TR

Murray, Peter: JPEG2000 to Zoomify Code4Lib Lightning Talk Video Now Available

the Jester — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:16:33 +0000

Thanks, Noel, and everyone else who made the video editions of Code4Lib 2008 presentations possible. I just had a chance to notice that the video from my JPEG2000 to Zoomify Shim lightning talk was online:

Some updates since the post and the presentation were first done. The code that exists in the source code repository now was refactored to use JJ2000 as part of the Sun ImageIO package. We were seeing non-threadsafe problems with Kakadu and thought that using the multithreaded ImageIO package would help. Unfortunately, even with extensive caching, it did not. My next task is to bring Kakadu back into the picture using the threadsafe JNI implementation that is part of the ImageIO-ext project to see if that helps.

Unfortunately, time ran out before this needed to go into initial production with the OhioLINK DRC roll-out, so it isn’t in production. The scheme shows promise, though, so I’m going to keep working with it…

del.icio.us: Web Curator Tool

tom.umw — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:35:02 +0000

In-house archiving of web content?

JISC Information Environment Team: ReStore workshop

Andy McGregor — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:29:59 +0000

I attended a very interesting workshop for the ReStore project last week. The project is run by Southampton’s ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and is investigating the use of a repository to host and maintain orphan web resources.

The problem that the project is addressing is that very useful web resources are produced by research projects. However when the project funding stops the maintenance of the resources often stops. This means that the resources start to decay, broken links flourish and the usefulness of the resource deteriorates quickly.

ReStore aims to address this problem by accepting suitable resources after a review process and then hosting and curating the sites with a mixture of automated and manual processes.

The project is funded by ESRC and aims to produce a prototype repository that curates a few web resources that have been produced by other ESRC projects.

The workshop was chiefly concerned with introducing the project and discussing some of the major issues such as technical challenges, IPR and sustainability. The presentations from the day can be downloaded from the project website: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/restore/slides/. These include some mockups of the proposed system and an overview of the proposed review and curation process.

The project’s work on development of a long-term strategy for ESRC in sustaining on-line resources will be very relevant to JISC.

The technical challenges in hosting a range of resources that may all use different software and hardware are significant and it may be better in the short term to use Amazon Web Services or a similar service to host the sites and avoid a large hardware bill.

Mignault, John: Google doctype

jbm — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:16:32 +0000

New developer resource from Google:

doctype

Doctype is a Google-sponsored open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications. By web developers, for web developers.

* Open source
* Open content
* Open to contributions from anyone

Looks like a very useful resource and an interesting new application of social media. Not sure if it’s wiki-based, or whether this is something new from Google. Found via Gruber.

Murray, Peter: Getting a Hyperlink of the Last Sent Message from Mail.app using Applescript

the Jester — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:15:15 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Getting Things Done as a technique for managing projects, but it was only recently that I settled on OmniFocus as the “trusted system” collecting all of my next actions. One of the things I like about OmniFocus — as a rich, Mac-only application — is its ability to hold links to messages from Mail.app as notes for each action. This occurs, for instance, when you use the “Clippings” function of OmniFocus to create a new action based on the message that you are currently viewing in Mail.app. (There are other ways to do it, such as the method described by Adam Sneller.)

One of the things I find myself doing is creating actions in a “Waiting” context based on e-mail messages I’ve just sent. Initially, I’d just create the action via the OmniFocus Quick Entry window. But I found myself needing to refer back to the message I sent when the person I’m waiting on doesn’t come through. So I started clicking and dragging the message from the Sent mailbox to the action. But to do that I’d have to click into the Sent mailbox and have the Mail.app and the OmniFocus windows set up just right. Or I’d have to follow a select-sent-mailbox, select-message, OmniFocus-quick-entry-with-clipping, select-Inbox, select-next-message workflow. And that took time and effort. So I’ve created an AppleScript ditty that does the work of creating a hyperlink on the clipboard of the last sent message. The results can then be pasted into any RTF-aware application, including OmniFocus.

The script is based heavily on Speedy creation of rich text links to Mail messages by Brett Terpstra. In particular, he had the missing link about creating RTF hyperlinks on the clipboard using a bash shell script. The meat of the AppleScript is:

tell application "Mail"
 
	-- Ask the user which account to use
	set _accts to get accounts
	set _enabledAccounts to {}
	repeat with eachAccount in _accts
		-- Only offer the enabled accounts for the user to choose
		if enabled of eachAccount then
			set the end of _enabledAccounts to name of eachAccount as string
		end if
	end repeat
	set _selectedAccount to (choose from list _enabledAccounts with title "Select Account" with prompt "Select the account from which to copy a link of the last sent message..." default items (item 1 of _enabledAccounts))
 
	-- Quit script if the user selected "cancel"
	if _selectedAccount is false then
		return
	end if
	set _selectedAccountName to _selectedAccount as string
 
	-- Get the "last" message of the Sent mailbox of the selected account
	set _msg to first message of mailbox "Sent" of account _selectedAccountName
 
	-- Get various properties of the message
	set _date to _msg's date sent
 
	try
		set _recipient to name of first recipient of _msg
		set _test to _recipient
	on error
		-- if the Recipient's name property was blank, use the e-mail address instead
		set _recipient to address of first recipient of _msg
	end try
 
	set _sub to _msg's subject
	if _sub starts with "Re:" then
		-- Remove the "Re:" prefix from messages
		set _sub to text 5 through (length of _sub) of _sub
	end if
 
	set _msgid to _msg's message id
 
	-- Create the URL to the message
	set _msglnk to "message://%3C" & my urlencode(_msgid) & "%3E"
 
	-- Create the anchor text for the link
	set _anchorText to "Message sent " & _date & " to " & _recipient & " regarding '" & _sub & "'"
 
	-- Execute the external script to generate the RTF hyperlink on the clipboard
	do shell script "/bin/bash -c \"" & _script & " \\\"" & _anchorText & "\\\" \\\"" & _msglnk & "\\\"\""
end tell

It first prompts the user for which account to use based on the list of active accounts. Then it gets the last message in the Sent mailbox of that account, gets various metadata properties, and sends the results to the bash shell script. The shell script comes from Brett; it creates the RTF snippet and pipes it into ‘
Manual Page For pbcopy(1)">
Manual Page For pbcopy(1)">
Manual Page For pbcopy(1)">pbcopy‘ to put it on the clipboard:

#!/bin/bash
# Places a rich text link on the clipboard
# usage: rtflink.sh "Title of link" "URL to link to"
#
# This will paste *nothing* into applications that don't recognize rich text
 
echo "{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf949\cocoasubrtf270
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\margl1440\margr1440\vieww9000\viewh8400\viewkind0
\pard\tx720\tx1440\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\tx5040\tx5760\tx6480\tx7200\tx7920\tx8640\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural
{\field{\*\fldinst{HYPERLINK \"$2\"}}{\fldrslt 
\f0\fs24 \cf0 $1}}}" | pbcopy -Prefer rtf

The end result is a hyperlink with an anchor that looks something like:

    Message sent Thursday, May 15, 2008 8:36:33 AM to Jane Partner regarding 'Can you pick up milk?'

…waiting on the clipboard to be pasted into an action note. With that bound to a keyboard trigger via QuickSilver, copying a link to a message is now a simple matter of keystrokes.

If you are interested, you can download the “Copy last sent message as RTF link” AppleScript bundle and try it yourself. Let me know what you think.

Update 20080516T1219 : I had to modify the part of the code that gets the recipient name or (for recipients without name parts) the e-mail address. The downloaded version has been updated.

nodalities: Kingsley Idehen talks about OpenLink Software, Linked Data and the Semantic Web

team.liveservices@talis.com — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:46:58 +0000

In our latest podcast I talk with Kingsley Idehen, President and CEO of OpenLink Software. We discuss OpenLink’s approach, and the role that semantic technologies play in this, before turning to a broader discussion of Linked Data; a movement with which Kingsley has been closely involved.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

4GL
Tim Berners-Lee keynote, WWW2008, Beijing
Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data principles
Dataportability
DBpedia
Orri Erling
Giant Global Graph
GRDDL
JDBC
Kubl
Linked Data
Linked Data on the Web workshop
Linked Data Planet
Microformats
ODBC
OLE DB
OpenLink Dataspaces
OpenLink Software
Oracle
Postgres
RDF
SPARQL
Sybase
UMBEL
Unisys
Virtuoso (and its history)
Wikipedia
WWW2007, Banff, Canada
WWW2008, Beijing, China
XMLA
Zitgist

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Tuesday 13 May, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband. Thanks are due to Andrew Peterson for his advice on editing the audio.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

Share This

In our latest podcast I talk with Kingsley Idehen, President and CEO of OpenLink Software. We discuss OpenLink's approach, and the role that semantic technologies play in this, before turning to a broader discussion of Linked Data; a movement with which Kingsley has been closely involved. During the conversation, we refer to the following resources; 4GL Tim Berners-Lee keynote, WWW2008, Beijing Tim Berners-Lee's Linked Data principles Dataportability DBpedia Orri Erling Giant Global Graph GRDDL JDBC Kubl Linked Data Linked Data on the Web workshop Linked Data Planet Microformats ODBC OLE DB OpenLink Dataspaces OpenLink Software Oracle Postgres RDF SPARQL Sybase UMBEL Unisys Virtuoso (and its history) Wikipedia WWW2007, Banff, Canada WWW2008, Beijing, China XMLA Zitgist This conversation was conducted using Skype on Tuesday 13 May, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband. Thanks are due to Andrew Peterson for his advice on editing the audio. For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

Semantic Library: One protocol to rule them all?

Fiona — Thu, 15 May 2008 13:03:46 +0000

Data seems to be the hot topic right now. It’s all about how we store it, share it, and make it play nice with other data. There is an enthusiasm for openness and a move towards standardisation of data and the ways we share it, but there’s a also a worrying trend - competing standards and protocols.

Ross Singer at Panlibus discusses a draft recommendation from the Digital Library Federation ILS and Discovery System Task Force and notes that while it’s certainly a welcome move, that -

The problem here is that they generally give multiple options for achieving the goal of any given method. So this means that any ILS vendor can choose from a variety of protocols for implementing the spec and that a different vendor can choose alternate standards for the exact same functionality.

Singer goes on to describe scenarios in which this causes all sorts of problems - for example, vendors choose differing open standards and systems still can’t communicate.

Something similar looks to be happening in data exchange, with Google, Facebook and MySpace all announcing last week that they have their own ways of sharing profile data. There are two key concepts in play - data portability, and data availability. In the first, instance, the goal of data portability is user control and options over how you use your data. In the second, companies are entering agreements with eachother and I don’t see this giving the user the level of control many really want. It’s not a huge leap further than allowing, say, Facebook to access your Gmail contacts. You still have no way to export that data for yourself - it is handled company-to-company. Data portability is definitely my preference.

As we look to the future of the ILS, which may include data sharing and embedding on other services (with formats like RDF) and other semantic developments, it’s interesting to see how we face many similar issues in different domains at the same time. On the reason why Data Portability has taken off this year, Daniela Barbosa who has been involved with the project from inception says -

Call it timing, call it good marketing, call it luck- call it what you wish- i like to say it has to do with a need…a need by users, vendors and technologists to have one forum to discuss and act on the various issues and opportunities around user data and the usage of that data (the ‘Graph’).

I will be interested to see if the wider social networking world and libraries will turn to other forms of networking and identity down the line. Laura J. Smart wrote about Thompson’s ResearchID platform, which for want of a better term you could describe as an identity service for researchers. You can post a profile of yourself, link to your papers, and in theory meet other people working in the same field as you. Other companies have similar services, like CSA’s Scholar Universe. It would be really great if these services, like Facebook and mySpace, were a part of the data/identity portability movement.

So it seems that we’re all moving in the same direction at the moment, and though there may never be just one protocol or standard to rule all of our identities, hopefully they will at least talk to eachother.

ShareThis

Engard, Nicole: Citricon: Library Defender

Nicole — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:48:16 +0000

This sounds too cute not to share with you all. Orange County Library System has created a new game to promote gaming in their library:

What has the Orange County Library System been up to lately? We just made our new flash game, Citricon: Library Defender, live! Aliens have stolen the Library’s books, DVDs, and CDs, and we need your help! Play Citricon: Library Defender and help squirt get them back! You can play the game here: http://www.ocls.info/Virtual/Galleries/Events/gaming.asp

Learn more on Web4Lib

del.icio.us: decodeunicode.org . Unicode Blocks . Miscellaneous Symbols

technosophia — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:28:49 +0000

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: Google Friend Connect

Andy Powell — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:41:54 +0000

This did the rounds fairly extensively on Twitter yesterday but is still worth a mention here...

Google have announced Friend Connect (currently on a limited beta release as far as I can tell) which "lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website". The following video gives a nice introduction to its use:

I haven't yet worked out if this is anything more than a set of widgets that allow you to layer social features onto an existing non-social Web site or whether it provides APIs that support proper integration with your local content and services?

Whatever... there's no doubt that it is an interesting development, and one that deserves more investigation, especially as we begin to see growing dissatisfaction with Facebook. Google Friend Connect would, for example, have allowed us to add social features to the main symposium Web site this year, without needing to go out and create a separate social network on Ning. Having said that, I have to confess that the example sites aren't very compelling currently.

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: An @foo convention for blogs

Andy Powell — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:12:44 +0000

I've noted before in this blog that Twitter has a very simple convention for prefixing someone's Twitter account name with '@' to indicate that you are responding to them in your tweet - @andypowe11 for example. (In Twitter, being made up of messages that are only 140 characters of plain text, all conventions are by definition simple!). This allows me to reference another twit (someone who tweets) but doesn't tie my response directly to a particular tweet, or thread of tweets. It works, within the confines of tweetspace because all Twitter account names are unique.

In the blogsphere we have the opposite problem. If I want to respond to a particular blog post I can do so using the entry's trackback (or ordinary) URL. But if I just want to refer to someone, as I did in my recent entry about podcasting, there don't seem to be any lightweight conventions for doing so. I could use a microformat or an OpenID I guess, but my current blogging tool, Typepad, doesn't give me an easy way of doing so afaik? In any case, the complexity of this approach makes it hard to see it taking off in the way that the @foo convention has done in Twitter.

So what I'd like, and please tell me if it already exists, is an easy way of dragging and dropping the names of the people I regularly refer to in my blog entries (there aren't that many btw!) into a blog post such that the result is more machine-readable than just the person's name as a text string. Does such a convention and/or tool exist?

Planet Code4Lib

del.icio.us: Open Library API: Cataloging 13 Million Books

del.icio.us: Wiffiti: Home

Johannesen, Alexander: Friday Thoughts

nodalities: Issue 2 of Nodalities Magazine is now available

Duimovich, George: Web site redesign must die

McDonald, Robert: ALA/LITA Pre-Conference on DataGrid Technologies and Libraries

Federated Search Blog: Review: Developing the right RFP for selecting your federated search product

del.icio.us: code4lib 2008 - Google Video

Bigwood, David: MARC Online

Rochkind, Jonathan: In other news

del.icio.us: Bloug: The Redesign Must Die talk

Bigwood, David: Links in LC Records

frbr: Third birthday next month

del.icio.us: Upcoming: NE ASIS&T Awards dinner on June 12 @ MIT Faculty Club

nodalities: Semantic Web Gang talks with Barney Pell of Powerset

del.icio.us: Archives of CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU

Murray, Peter: Long-term Preservation Storage: OCLC Digital Archive versus Amazon S3

OCLC’s Digital Archive

Amazon’s S3

Feature Comparison

Cost Comparison

Conclusions

Footnotes

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: Facebook blocks Google Friend Connect

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: Teach online to compete...

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: JISC IE blog, Val Doonican and *that* diagram

Farkas, Meredith: Followup on Is this how we encourage people to contribute?

Reese, Terry: Ok — I’ve given blood, now you do too

Murray, Peter: JPEG2000 to Zoomify Code4Lib Lightning Talk Video Now Available

del.icio.us: Web Curator Tool

JISC Information Environment Team: ReStore workshop

Mignault, John: Google doctype

Murray, Peter: Getting a Hyperlink of the Last Sent Message from Mail.app using Applescript

nodalities: Kingsley Idehen talks about OpenLink Software, Linked Data and the Semantic Web

Semantic Library: One protocol to rule them all?

Engard, Nicole: Citricon: Library Defender

del.icio.us: decodeunicode.org . Unicode Blocks . Miscellaneous Symbols

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: Google Friend Connect

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: An @foo convention for blogs

Powell, Andy and Johnston, Pete: JISC IE blog, Val Doonican and that diagram