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.

“The library is the parts bin of scholarship.”

Paul N Courant today at the Triangle Research Librararies Network annual meeting.

I came in this morning after having Monday off, to a non responsive computer. I’d been working at home Friday night/early Saturday morning and the network was flaky due to campus IT switch upgrades. I couldn’t ssh to my machine for the rest of the weekend and assumed the workgroup switch on my desk needed to be reset. Nope, that wasn’t it. It seems that the memory slots in my Dell Precision 470 2.8GHz Xeon workstation are corroding/burning the 4 512MB memory modules I have installed. I was able to boot after pilfering some memory from my data processing server. We’re in the year-end fiscal cycle so I probably can’t buy anything anytime soon. At least my Thinkpad is reliable.

This image sums up my morning trying to look up post codes.

This image came from Decker on boatertalk.com

I was just getting ready to head to Pasadena for DLF and realized I’ve listened to all of the podcasts on my mp3 player. I thought I’d post a few sources that I look to for podcasts. Most of them are interviews with Free Software and Open Source luminaries and library, especially digital library, figures. I also try to work in some science and the occasional book.

• NerdTV
• FLOSS Weekly
• Radio OpenSource
• LibriVox
• This American Life
• NPR Podcast Directory
• Science Friday
• Open Libraries
• Open Source Conversations
• Educause CNI
• Penn Jillette

I’ll try to clean this up, categorize these, and add notes soon. I’m always looking for other technology/library related podcasts. Suggest some.

Brandi pointed out an article on Kiplinger, 7 Great Careers for 2007, that lists librarian as a great job. Of course I’m biased, but I wouldn’t want any of the other jobs on the list. Considering library schools? Have a look at the rankings.

This is a conference week. I’m at DigCCurr, an International Symposium on Digital Content Curation today and I leave for Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2007 on Sunday. I’ve been awarded a Fellowship for Librarians New to the Profession to defray the high cost of travel to Pasadena, luckily.

I got a tip of the hat from the Libraries, I just noticed. Coincidentally, one of the other fellows, Matt Cordial, took my job at Prairienet when I left.

Update: I just uploaded some photos of DLF in Pasadena.

Congress recently passed a spending bill that, in addition to other things, recinded $47 million dollars from Library of Congress that had been slated to fund the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program. NDIIPP is the program under which my project, North Carolina Geospatial Data Archiving Project, is funded. The Revised Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2007, or H.J. Res. 20, was passed 87-14 with 4 nonvoting in the Senate. The relevant portion is Chapter 7, Section 2702, (d)(3)(A) on page 32 of the document.

However, the original champion of NDIIPP, Senator Ted Stevens (R, AK) and Senator Bob Bennett (R, UT) presented a colloquy shortly after and have pledged to request reinstatement of funding. The colloquy is reprinted below. I was pleased to see that Stevens specifically mentioned the importance of preserving geospatial data, which is my job.

My continuing employment at NC State is not dependent of the reinstatment of funding to NDIIPP, I’m told. The colloquy follows:

(more…)

I imagine that no one will notice, but I disabled the RSS feed. It was being picked up by the the code4lib aggregator and from there it was being picked up by other aggregators like oss4lib. This isn’t a professional blog and I would prefer that visitors are aware of that. Seeing a post about my cat in the shower plastered over the front page of code4lib, sandwiched between Roy Tenant and Lorcan Dempsey wasn’t fun.

So, no more RSS. This is a non-professional blog. To see my professional publications and presentations go to http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/ncgdap/.

Sometimes I amaze even myself. James and I were invited by the Digital Projects Department at Duke University Libraries to give the presentation we gave last month at Open Repositories 2007. There were about 15 people attending from UNC Chapel Hill and Duke. The subject of supporting, interacting, and rewriting legacy applications came up in the context of the GIS Lookup tool at NCSU Libraries. My department head wrote the scripts that create the indexes for the lookup in perl years ago. So, I respond, partly joking:

“If hell has it’s own language, I’m pretty sure it must be perl.”

Barely a chuckle.

Really, perl can be useful, but I’m sure most people familiar with perl would agree that it can be so obscure and difficult to work with that they’ve hated it at one time or another. Still, apparently jokes about either hell or perl are politically incorrect in North Carolina academic library circles. I say to hell with perl.