I went running this morning, if you can call it that, on the Confederate Trail in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.  The island is very picturesque and the trail is breathtaking in spots.  I’d been told that the fox population is quite high, but didn’t see any until this morning.

On the outbound trip I came close enough to pet a large red fox.  He stopped, dropped his head low, and watched me.  People must feed them.  We watched each other for a couple of minutes before he lifted his tail and jogged off into the tall grass on the side of the trail.

On the return trip I was stunned to watch a fox, perhaps the same fox, chasing a chipmonk.  I had the advantage of height watching the scene play out in a grassy spot lower than the trail.  I had to wonder for a moment whom I should root for before realizing that it didn’t matter to either of them what I thought.  They were both beautiful and the sun was still low and golden in the sky.  Flowers all around.  A perfect morning.

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 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.

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.