Brandi tagged me with the Passion Quilt Meme- “Take/make a photo and caption it with a statement that you feel passionate for children, students, libraries…”

Here’s mine:

I’m a digital librarian and love technology, but in the end, it’s about people and freedom.  It’s about empowering people and leveling the field.  That’s one of the reasons I wanted to become a librarian.  I spend a lot of time at a computer, often working in isolation from users as my project isn’t a user-focused endeavor.  Still, it’s the people that are important.

This photo was taken at the Katherine Dunham Center in East St. Louis.  My wife, Brandi, is in the backrow.  Her class, LIS 451 Introduction to Networked Information Systems, build computers and a a lab for, and provided instruction to, neighborhood kids in one of the most imporvershed areas of the country.  Although my job here doesn’t look much like my job there, it’s still about empowering people.

My next objective at work is to transfer some data to Library of Congress. I have the option of pushing data up the Abilene Network and will probably give network transfer a try, but the bulk of the data will move in two 1TB USB drives via Fed Ex. I’ll load them up and ship them to LC where they unload them and ship them back. Back and forth until they get everything.

I have an 11 page document specifying the organization, naming conventions, etc,. The most important point is that I need to create a UTF-8 text file at top-level directory containing the path and checksum (MD5 or SHA-1) for each file.

So, I have 5 1TB ZFS slices sitting in a storage array in our server room. Here’s the df -h:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/storage/ndiipp1 977G 975G 1.9G 100% /storage/ndiipp1
/storage/ndiipp2 977G 972G 5.2G 100% /storage/ndiipp2
/storage/ndiipp3 977G 804G 174G 83% /storage/ndiipp3
/storage/ndiipp4 977G 826G 152G 85% /storage/ndiipp4
/storage/ndiipp5 977G 820G 158G 84% /storage/ndiipp5

There are a couple of issues I need to think through. Hopefully I have enough free space after formatting (haven’t decided on a file system to use on USB drives) to perform a 1:1 copy from partition to USB drive. Of course I still need room for my UTF-8 manifest file. It seems like I’ll have space.

We’ve got 4GFC Firbre Channel switches in our storage area network, but I’ve only got a 100BASE-T LAN connection to my workstation. I’m very curious to find out how long it will take to both transfer the data from the SAN to the USB drive (probably using tar over SSH) and how long it will take to checksum the up to 85,000 file in each partition. I’m sure I’ll be glad I kept my old Xeon workstation to chew data. I think I’ll look around for a utility to grab some network statistics like collisions and resent packets.

Luckily, this may be network, processor, and time intensive, but it’s pretty automation friendly. That’ll give me some time to figure out why Fedora doesn’t seem to want to deploy properly in Sun Java App Server. Then I can start mapping data models between the DSpace and Fedora repositories.

I got to Portland for Code4Lib early today and had a chance to explore the city with some of the usual suspects (UCSD and UNT Denton).  I learned a couple of things.  First, Rogue chocolate stout is awesome.  Second, I should replace the mess of php and javascript at work with Django.  As a bonus, I learned that packing a few terabytes of data into the trunk of a state car and driving it to DC isn’t necesarily a bad idea.

Actually, ‘today’ was in late October. I just noticed this draft and thought I’d push it out. It didn’t work out, obviously.

The Digital Curation Conference is wrapping up. There were some salient take-aways.

1. The UK has a much more focused national strategy for digital library development due largely to the structure of funding organizations.
2. Relatedly, the one off, silo-ed, unfederated, independent architecture of US digital collections, both within and without individual institutions, is due largely to the grant situation in the US.
3. Holding a digital library/data center/information management conference 2 stories below ground without wireless Internet or mobile phone reception is both hugely annoying and enormously beneficial.
4. The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, while providing me with interesting work, doesn’t seem like it will provide the national direction that I think is necessary. I trust the digital preservation experience will be valuable to others, though.
5. Conferences that include food and Internet in the conference registration rock. It’s nearly impossible for most academics I know to request funding for Internet.

I usually don’t keep an eye out for upcoming conferences, but am trying to be better about it. Here are some upcoming conferences I’m thinking about.

• 3rd International Digital Curation Conference - December in Washington, DC
• Code4Lib 2008 - February in Portland, OR
• PyCon 2008 - March in Chicago, IL
• Best Practices Exchange 2008 - May in Helena, MT

I’ll probably try to present with a friend at PyCon and demonstrate some tools at BPE. I think there are some upcoming NDIIPP meetings, too. January in San Diego, I think. I was hoping for San Fransisco since SD is so played out, but no one asked my opinion. I mean, if I wanted to hang out at a real supercomputer center, I’d head back to Champaign. (Just kidding Robert and David)

I thought I’d upload the presentation from our Hackfest project in spite of the fact that the code isn’t ready.  The idea was to create a simple GUI interface to create library Facebook apps.  It’s based on the work done at Ryerson University Library.  I started the day working on the open source Evergreen ILS, but I thought I’d be more useful to the other group.  Fun stuff.  I’ll post the application if we finish it.

I haven’t uploaded any of my photos yet, but Declan has uploaded some to his Flickr. The weather in Vitoria has been spectacular. I just wish the Canadians would watch Fox News, learn that the US economy is super awesome, and give me a better exchange rate. Bummer.

I gave this presentation last week and thought I’d post it here. The topic was Challenges and Opportunities in Digital Libraries. I was trying to give a Takahashi-style presentation and shamelessly ripped off the visual style of Peter Brantley’s Spring 2007 DLF keynote address available on his blog. I wonder if it’s clear from the slides alone what the main points were. I expect they should be. I wanted to be a little bolder, but wanted the safety of emulating someone respected on my first non-standard presentation. I especially liked slide 12, which is a PHP statement. No one mentioned catching the inside joke, but I found it hilarious. Please have a look at the presentation in pdf.

This lead to a really interesting conversation about how digital librarians view and value collections. It’s easy to see digital collections as a set of digital objects upon which processes are performed. This is in contrast to the way that collection managers often view the content- as intellectual output or as art. Clearly, the digital librarian has to be able to switch modes and view collections as data sets, as art, and as intellectual property, among other things. Being able to value and discuss digital collections on a variety of levels appropriate to the audience, is crucial. Something learned!

I also came across a few pictures from the June 2007 NDIIPP meeting in Maryland.