The original storage box for the Textus Roffensis

The project will use the cathedral’s currently inaccessible and nationally significant archives as a catalyst for the development of exhibitions and workshops in the crypt and library.  These architecturally impressive spaces will be sympathetically opened up to allow access for all. The Textus Roffensis, older and considered by some to be a more significant document than the Magna Carta, is currently locked away for safety in the archives of Medway Council.  The project will make the Textus the jewel in the crown of an imaginative and dynamic treasury. For more info click here.

The CHICC team would like to send a huge congratulations to the team at Rochester Cathedral, on what promises to be a very exciting project!

(see below for a selection of image taken by CHICC at Rochester Cathedral – click on the thumbnails to see larger images)

From here our knowledge continued to expand into vast archives and libraries housing millions of texts. Their subject matter as wide ranging as the experiences they reflected. These too grew to the point of complexity where even the structure of their organisation, the systems by which their content were categorised, grew in complexity went beyond the possibility of being fully known even by the most dedicated archivist.

Now the archive as physical thing is disappearing, their records and artefacts are gradually being digitised and absorbed into a global network of computers, a virtual warehouse of unimaginable proportions, storing and sharing information on everything from ancient Greek philosophy to motor bike maintenance guides, lists of dictators victims to hard-core pornography. The human archivists are gone too, and the gatekeepers to this knowledge are now the search engines.

These engines of knowledge spend countless man hours, devotedly filtering the growing vastness of the internet. It is an unknown and unknowable vastness, estimates of its size vary from ten billion to as many as three trillion pages. Filtering it, valuing it, indexing it, ordering it, for later recall on demand in fractions of a second, these engines ‘know’ the internet as much as it could ever be possible for it to be known. Suitably enough the first web search engine was named ‘Archie’, an anthropomorphised shortening of ‘archive’.

In an atheistic age perhaps these machines are functionally the closest we know to gods. All being and all knowing, never resting, operating largely independent of us. We rely on these engines to find what we need in this growth of knowledge called the internet, a growth of knowledge which paradoxically often contributes to an increase in doubt. A growth which like an enlightened cyst is metastasising rapidly into ever more areas of our lives, making us in turn ever more dependent on the god-engines, information shamans who alone know how to traverse this virtual world in search of answers.

So what then when these archivist-idols fail, when by accident or design they are unable to return information reliably, what then? It has been estimated that only a fraction of the internet has been indexed by search engines, the pages returned are only what the engine knows, not all that is there. Even these god like machines are unable to comprehend all the knowledge we have generated, of things both sacred and profane.

They are also open to manipulation. Techniques like search engine optimisation uses an understanding of what these engines look for and how they ‘value’ sites to increase the likelihood of returning a certain result. By more sinister intent, a related technique, Google Bombing, exploits knowledge of the way search engines gather information. By knowing this it is possible to coax the engines into returning certain answers, one of the most notable was that for a time a search for ‘miserable failure’ returned information on George W. Bush. Funny as this might seem the technique has more insidious uses, for example redirecting internet searches for a hot topic like a war or a political scandal away from reliable sources of information and towards organs of propaganda.

These moments of doubt are not limited just to text. It is possible to reverse search from an existing image and have the engine find you ones it imagines are similar. Looking for a reproduction of a portrait by a grand master, I was offered everything imaginable. Photographs of celebrities, actors, sports people, porn stars, the UN secretary general, everything except what I was actually looking for.

The problem with these new archives is that when using them one is often not completely sure what one is looking for, relying instead on the engine itself to interpret what you provide and find the right answers for you. When that situation changes and you know quite definitely what you want to see it can be quite disturbing to find how far from the mark the results are.

We trust these idols implicitly, we use them dozens of times a day without even a thought. Can anyone remember their first time, their first search? Now the process has become so thoroughly mechanical, so without consideration or incident. But what cannot be disregarded is what information we are given and why, how these engines of doubt are shaping our view of a world more and more divorced from the physical and anchored instead in the virtual.

Photographs of a Google server farm from here.

STOP PRESS 30 January: according to the BBC and Time and much discussion across the twittersphere, it looks as though the loss may not be quite so bad as feared, thanks to efforts by Timbuktu’s people to protect their heritage.  Maybe 2,000 rather than 30,000 items may be lost.  More news is emerging: I’m keeping an eye on it via twitter (hashtags #timbuktu and #manuscripts).

A story in the news today that puts other threats to heritage in perspective: the burning of a library in Timbuktu containing thousands of ancient manuscripts. In this excellent and insightful blog post, Simon Tanner of Kings College tells us the story of the institution, New Ahmed Baba Institute, and its manuscripts and people.  The institute was set up “to promote the conservation, research and promotion of the manuscripts as African heritage”, using them to bridge the gap between scholarsjip on Islam and on Africa, and to raise public awareness of Timbuktu’s incredible history as a centre for trade and ideas.

Dr Tanner, who has advised on digitising African manuscripts, then reflects on the digitisation of African heritage: how digital collections are created by the ideologies of those funding and selecting them.  The same problem is faced by any institution seeking to digitise, but is greatly magnified in this situation.

As noted in the blog, the shock of such events is a reminder of just how fragile heritage (and human life) are, so vulnerable to war and conflict.  At least digitisation may mean that such events in the future do not result in total loss of  heritage: after all, lots of copies keeps stuff safe (safer, anyway).

Presumptions aside, this was partly what drove me to take up a programming language; while I can sail through an operating system or pull apart a computer with ease, I’m still limited somewhat in what I can achieve.  I’ve often found myself muttering “I wish x could do y” or “x does y but not exactly in the way I want it to”.

Nowhere has this become more apparent than working with archives.

While digitising entire collections, the speed and efficiency of our work is determined by two main factors: a) the limits of technology and b) how we use technology.  A scanner can only scan within it’s physical boundaries, but the processing of files on a large scale is determined almost entirely by how we use the software available.  The latter factor, then, rears its ugly head when we find ourselves with thousands of files which require some menial change – for example, renaming.  Let’s say that renaming a file takes 3 seconds; if we have 1000 files, that’s almost an hour spent just renaming files.  This of course doesn’t take into account any decrement in speed due to the sheer mundanity of the task.  While there are already applications which can sequentially rename batches of files in seconds, they don’t do it exactly in the way we need them to.  Archive files are named sequentially, but may on occasion have to throw an ‘a’ or ‘b’ on the end of the name.

This is where programming becomes an essential tool.  I’m no expert, having spent only a few months learning Python in my spare time, but with what little I have learned, I can now apply in such a way that not only eliminates an unbearably dull task to the benefit of our work, but also allows me to be as creative as I wish within the boundaries of an entire programming language.  Granted it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a skill that is hugely beneficial and remarkably easy to learn these days, given the wealth of tutorials on the internet.

Working for the MRC, I have now written an application which can rename files based on a list pulled from Excel.  It’s not the most exciting of things, but I was able to call it PEAR, just because I could.

In other news, work with the Railway Review continues, myself having just finished the gruelling task of digitising a rather overweight book.  Large books appear to have become something of a trend, as not long after we were tasked with the Railway Review, another request was put in for a book which, quite frankly, cannot possibly have been made for a human.  Part of the massive collection of diaries belonging to prominent cyclists, this particular scrap book measured 1.4 metres across when opened.  A book so stupidly large that even our stupidly large scanner couldn’t hope to scan it.  In the end, we were forced to improvise with a professional DSLR camera, a broken tripod and some chairs.

Another project has also been placed in the pipeline, as we have been tasked with digitising a collection of nearly 600 play texts – mostly prompt books – dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  A few manuscripts have also been thrown in, including a play (dubiously named “The Organ Boy of Savoy”) that was written especially for the collection’s original owner – Clara St Casse.  Given that each of the books number between 30-40 pages each, our estimate puts the total number of pages at around 20,000 pages.  Prompt books are tiny and therefore easier to scan, but this may well take far longer than the Spanish Civil War project.

Here’s to hoping they’re a good read.

…Boder’s recordings, conducted so soon after the war, remain unique and utterly absorbing.  to hear them is to once again enter a room somewhere in Europe as a young man or woman leans forward and, for the first time, shares a life that for five years has been shattered, and for this wise and gentle interviewer to accumulate another fragment in his terrible mosaic.  (Mark Burman)

Boder himself had been a refugee, fleeing the Russian civil war in 1919 via Japan and Mexico and losing his second wife in the Mexican flu epidemic.  He spoke nine languages.  His training in clinical interviewing and “his multilingual, nuanced understanding of east Europe’s fault lines” made him perhaps uniquely qualified for the task.  The website, from the Galvin Library Illinois Institute of Technology, is a model of archival presentation and deserves your attention, as does Boder and his work.

The ‘Life of a Book’ tour

CMS or just ‘Collection Services’ as they are now known, offer a tour around their workroom so other library staff can see the journey that a book takes before it gets to the shelf. However, the ‘Life of a Book’ tour does not encompass the whole process, since CMS are not sent reading lists directly; they are sent to people like me in the Faculty Teams. I went on my tour earlier this month (thank you to all involved) so I will share some of the things that I learned about the following six areas:

Book and electronic publication acquisitions – the item details are taken from emails sent to the orders mailbox (although not everyone provides the level of information that Hazel would like) and are ordered online using one of the library’s main suppliers.

Cataloguing – the library employs a team of cataloguers to conduct the essential task of downloading records, checking and correcting them, and reclassifying items. Within the last couple of years, the British Library have changed their classification guidelines, which has made life more challenging for cataloguers since the British Library is one of the key places from which item records are downloaded.

Processing – this is where the physical preparation of the book takes place, e.g. inserting RFID tags and spine-labelling. Once the book has visited this desk, it is ready to go out onto the shelf.

Subscriptions – the latest journal and newspaper editions come through one man, Duncan, who showed us his system of how you work out which journal is which when you can’t read Chinese or Russian lettering (you create a physical catalogue of front cover images).

Electronic resources – Pam deals with the online side of journal subscriptions, as well as managing the library’s other electronic resources. As you would expect, this involves her spending a lot of her time looking at spread sheet data and review files.

Online course readings – or OCRs, are processed here. An OCR is when a book chapter or article is made available for students on the VLE, so knowledge of copyright regulations is essential for anybody working at this desk. The University of Leeds began providing the OCR service in 2006, in which year they received about 100 requests. Now, six or so years later, they receive approximately 19,000 requests a year.

LSAB and Leadership Team

LSAB, the Library Strategic Action Board, is the most important meeting conducted regarding library business, as this is where the Librarian justifies the actions of the library to the Deans of the faculties. Sean and I have been tasked with minuting this meeting, as well as preparing the agenda and drafting a template for the Librarian’s Report, (the latter two of which we have completed successfully). Since this meeting is dreadfully important, we have been invited to the last two Leadership Team meetings to practice writing the minutes. However, these meetings are barely less important, so we have suffered from a little bit of worry over the last couple of weeks. Undoubtedly though, the experience has been very insightful into how business is conducted at a high level and has provided us with knowledge about the management structure of the library service. By this time next week, I will have minuted LSAB (alone), so here’s hoping all goes well.

I actually have some team meeting minutes to write up now (a walk in the park comparatively), so once again, thank you for reading.

Carla

Image courtesy of Stock Footage.

Slowly but surely we are working our way through the videotape collection of television documentaries broadcast over the past three decades and turning the lovely old VHS formatted tapes into shiny new DVDs.

Some treasures of the collection recently digitised and currently on display in the library are listed below. Click on the title to be taken to the item’s catalogue record where you can see what the programme is about in more detail and reserve it to borrow once it is removed from the display.

If you would like your favourite television documentary from within the collection moved up the queue then please ask a member of Howard Gardens Library staff.

Tunick, Spencer – Naked states

Real sex : Black strip shows

Vile bodies

Panorama : the dollar a day dress

One foot in the Festival of Britain

Light fantastic / Parts 1-4. Presented by Simon Schaffer

Raiders of the human body. Part 3, Fragonard the obscure

Human face transplant : an Equinox special

Tales of tools

Blood on the carpet. Blood, sweat and Sears

Art Transpennine

The South Bank Show : Dumas and Stehli

Brand new bra

Naked / Parts 1-4

Philosophy : a guide to happiness

Portreadau : Iwan Bala

How gay sex changed the world

Mark Lawson talks to Tracey Emin

Andy Warhol: the complete picture

Dance for the camera

Body of water: Eight dance films about water

Vendula (who features in the film) introduces a new video on our YouTube channel. The film was put together by Chris and the narration is by Lynn.

A project has been taking place at Guildhall Library. The aim is to digitise almost 300 items. Most of them are pamphlets from the 17th and 18th centuries including bills, acts, petitions and other legal material. The project is a result of a contract between the City of London Library Service and ProQuest, which is the body which publishes EEBO (Early English Books Online).

The project was scheduled for 4 – 5 weeks and was carried out by two people from EEBO and by our library staff. The pamphlets were identified and brought up from our store. Then the digitising started. Pamphlets were sorted, scanned and the digital images were made. At the end of the project all digitised items will be available through EEBO to many users around the world.

The project will have a positive impact for our library. It will open up access to our collections for researchers and make it easier to discover the content of some of the material. It will help preserve some of the rare items because the originals will need to be handled less frequently. Also it is a great opportunity to promote some of our collections, make it accessible to users outside London and generate some income for our department.

What have I been doing over the past 14 days?  I’m going to try and write about a separate thing each day for the next four or five days – in the hope that it’ll inspire good blogging practice, and just to break up what could otherwise be a gargantuan post!

Being aware of Accessibility

I’ve never really considered my duties beyond the border where the Brotherton Library meets Parkinson Court – but the week before last provided a valuable learning experience when a customer in a wheelchair wanted advice on how to access Special Collections.  Not only did it give me the opportunity to learn, but the purpose of their visit was also fascinating.

Not wanting to shy away from a learning experience, I accompanied the customers wife to Woodhouse Lane where the three of us would begin our voyage of discovery from their car.  The first hurdle was parking, though not for any normal or conventional reason – the hurdle came in the form of a dog attached to a lamp post.

In its quest to become a friend of mine, the unkempt dog seemed intent on excitedly reversing itself into the piece of road where the customer was about to park their car.  Not wanting to have a canine fatality on my hands I disregarded the questionable hygiene of the dog, and held it by its collar so that the car could be parked and the dog could continue its attachment to a lamp post.

Once that dramatic episode was out of the way we accessed the Parkinson through the Chemistry entrance, further up Woodhouse Lane, negotiating the tables and chairs of Costa Coffee before arriving at the library reception.  From there I was familiar with the route, and confidently assured the customers as we entered the lift (built in 1936) that we would soon arrive at Special Collections.

The route isn’t the easiest to navigate I have to say, but then the building wasn’t designed with due consideration to such issues in mind.  For all it’s architectural supremacy over most other academic libraries, it lacks the development of some provisions that modern builds will have in abundance.

Having said all this, the customers weren’t put off by the journey to consult the material – the personal papers of the gentleman’s grandfather who was chaplain to the British Embassy in Petrograd during WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution.  Various manuscript material was accompanied by a prison cup, and numerous glass slides – some of which the customer asked to be digitised, a process that I have selfishly asked to be involved in.  I am quite excited by the prospect of this task.  It will be very interesting just on a personal level as I find the human stories contained within our Special Collections fascinating – but also for my own development in using our state-of-the-art Digitisation Studio.  I hope I’ll be able to report back with how the process develops!

Moleskine notebooks are a bit of a status-symbol really.   I’m not sure how much more effective they are than the bog standard reporter’s notebook that costs 15p from a supermarket.   Other than the street cred I’d gain, there’s not much which would convince me to pay a few quid more and choose a Moleskine notebook over a cheapo one.  But perhaps the Evernote smart notebook is different.  Here’s what their website says:

The Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine is the first paper notebook specifically designed to bring your physical notes to your Evernote account. Notes from your Evernote Smart Notebook can even be tagged and organized in your Evernote account automatically, using the included Smart Stickers and Evernote’s new Page Camera feature for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

http://evernote.com/getting_started/moleskine/ [accessed 21st Jan 2013]

Now, my first reaction was that this is a bit of an admission that Evernote is a flawed mobile app.  Surely it’s a digital sin to offer customers a way to augment an app by ‘going back’ to paper?  Equally, isn’t it something of pact with the devil for a kooky notepad manufacturer to team up with digital note-taking software?   Turkeys voting for Christmas?

In fact, I reckon it’s a shrewd step on both their parts.  Because let’s be honest – digital note-taking apps are a bit crap.  Especially the mobile-centred ones such as Evernote, and particularly those which run on tablet computers.  I’m always chatting to other people with iPads or Samsung Note Tablets about the lack of a perfect note-taking app.  You want to be able to view your notes and the text (usually a PDF) at the same time.  This is either impossible, or the side-by-side view is simply too small.

If you want to use your note-taking app to take notes from a paper source, there doesn’t seem to be a comfortable way to rest the tablet computer on your knee like you might with a paper notepad.  The tablet is more demanding than paper – it needs to be flat, it must be at the right angle.

The Moleskine/Evernote book seems a rather Heath Robinson attempt to combine the benefits of digital storage with the ease and familiarity of paper note-taking.  I’m not sure what the future of note-taking should be, but I’m certain that taking paper notes, adding little stickers to them, taking a photo of them with your phone camera, and storing the digital image is not the way.

The S-Notebook (see ref) seems a useful way of thinking about it – where the digital media supplement paper (not the other way round like the Moleskine/Evernote example).  This seems to retain more of what’s useful in paper.

Last week I attended the CHASE Going Digital conference.  The smart notebook puts me in mind of some of the caution that I felt at the conference.   I asked a colleague there what they hope to gain from the conference, and they replied that they want to be able to use digital methods.  ”To do what?”, I asked.  The person didn’t really know.  They just wanted to do digital stuff.   It’s easy to get caught up thinking that there is some kind of digital imperative, or that everything can be improved by ‘going digital’.  But unless you’re clear what you want to gain, and what you are prepared to lose, you’ll end up with something that has all the drawbacks of the digital with none of the benefits of the analogue.  Or a Frankenstein’s monster of a note-taking system.

It’s not enough to just be digital.  ”It’s note-taking, but… DIGITAL!”  Hmm.   Just ‘being digital’ isn’t an improvement.   The smart notebook – where paper is having to be added back in – shows that too much was lost in going digital.

And the madness of it all is how long I spend trying to find the perfect note-taking app.  Rather than recognising that note-taking apps are not an improvement on paper methods, I’d prefer to completely change how I take notes to try to make my iPad useful.  That’s the monster.  It’s me!  I’m the monster!   Bound by the logic of digitisation, but unable to make sense of it.

Look what you have created!

Reference

Thomas Pietrzak, Sylvain Malacria, Éric Lecolinet. S-Notebook: Augmenting Mobile Devices with Interactive Paper for Data Management. In AVI 2012, Capri, Italy, 2012. p. 733-736. http://hal-institut-mines-telecom.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/70/54/09/PDF/Paper_S-Notebook.pdf 

“Urdu is not my mother-tongue but the language of my heart because Urdu poetry embeds every emotion in it,” said Sanjiv Saraf, the patron and supervisor of the team that launched Rekhta: Bab-e-Sukhan, a website to promote Urdu poetry (rekhta.org).

In his welcome address, Saraf called himself an ardent lover of Urdu language and poetry. He said he faced immense difficulties while pursuing his interest in Urdu poetry as it was mostly written in a script “unknown” to him. “I now consider it as a blessing in disguise as it made me learn the Urdu script but to help other passionate non-Urdu knowing followers of Urdu poetry, I have created this website,” he mentioned.

Saraf also presented a tour of the website showcasing different features and tools of the website. The website lists the poetry in three different scripts – Roman, Devanagari and the original Urdu script. “The website lists the poetry according to their radeefs (last rhyming word) which is a first of its kind and makes the search easier. We have also made sure that only genuine works are added to the site,” he pointed out. The website also has many additional features and tools such as translation, transliteration, an e-book section containing antique books and a powerful search engine which makes ‘the love’ much easier for the lovers.

St. Christopher Woodcut being imaged using Osiris camera

    On Tuesday 15th January 2013 the Rylands were very pleased to welcome Rachel Billinge, from the National Gallery, and Ed Potten, Head of Rare Books at the University of Cambridge for some very exciting imaging.

Rachel brought with her an Osiris camera for high-resolution infrared reflectography. The camera was developed by Opus Instruments based on a prototype that was designed and built by the National Gallery‘s Science and Conservation departments. The Osiris camera records infrared light wavelengths from 900-1700 nanometres, reaching further in to the infrared light spectrum than a standard CCD sensor could. The camera takes many images of an item and automatically stiches each ’tile’ together, saving hours of post-processing time.

St. Christopher Woodcut being imaged using Osiris camera

View of Osiris capture as it happens, the camera automatically stitched together each ’tile’ to create a full high-resolution image of the page

Rachel Billinge from the National Gallery working on a capture of the St. Christopher Woodcut using an Osiris camera

Rachel produced images of the St. Christopher Woodcut, in a bid to produce a legible image of the watermark to confirm, or otherwise, the dating of the Woodcut. The St Christopher woodcut, 1423, is the earliest dated example of European printing. It is preserved as an endpaper in a manuscript dated 1417 from Bohemia, the ‘Laus Virginis’. Rachel also imaged the Annunciation Woodcut, although no watermark is believed to be present in this print.

Members of staff from across the Library were on hand to support and analyse the images as they were produced. We await the results with bated breath… we will share the findings with you in a follow up post as soon as we possibly can.

Analysing the results… watch this space!

An example of the eclectic mix of Pamphlets in the collection

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout

This project aims to digitise the Sir Robert Stout Pamphlet collection currently held by the J. C. Beaglehole Room. The Stout Pamphlet collection contains around 1000 early primarily New Zealand pamphlets collected by Stout and donated to the Victoria University Library. The pamphlets were then bound into their present volumes.

The collection represents Stout’s interests at the time which included evolution, land reform, law and the temperance movement.

To complement the pamphlet collection we have digitised K. A. Coleridge‘s catalogue with indexes. This catalogue contains valuable information on the history of the collection, the process of binding the collection and Stout’s relationship with the Victoria University library. You can find the catalogue here.

Some notable ones I have read:

Is Man An Automaton? A Lecture Delivered in The City Hall, Glasgow, On 23rd February 1875

Science and the Soul Telepathy Scientifically Demonstrated

Open Access has become a major theme of interest within the research community and those interested in dissemination of information and knowledge.

In the debate around Open Access, the sadness around the loss of  Internet activist and programming star Aaron Swartz highlights that we have much to learn, and little time to learn it. Computer hacking Swartz was a vocal open-access campaigner, and died at the age of 26. Swartz was integral in creating RSS, and created a company that later merged with popular internet destination Reddit. However, more recently he was investigated for hacking JSTOR, the subscription-based journal service, and extracting its database with the intention for public release. For more on Swartz – and the impact of his work on free-data, and the world he leaves behind – read Lawrence Lessig’s piece “Prosecutor as Bully.” BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow also has a must-read tribute to Swartz, including information on the organization, DemandProgress, Swartz helped establish.

But what exactly is Open Access?    In this video  Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen take us through the world of open access publishing and explain just what it’s all about.

Historically, the two main types of obstacles to information discovery have been barriers of awareness, which encompass all the information we can’t access because we simply don’t know about its existence in the first place, and barriers of accessibility, which refer to the information we do know is out there but remains outside of our practical, infrastructural or legal reach. What the digital convergence has done is solve the latter, by bringing much previously inaccessible information into the public domain, made the former worse in the process, by increasing the net amount of information available to us and thus creating a wealth of information we can’t humanly be aware of due to our cognitive and temporal limitations, and added a third barrier — a barrier of motivation.

Open Access publishing is aiming to bridge the gap in higher education areas. Good research should have no boundaries. Here in Australia the Australian Research Council (ARC) is the largest funder of basic science and humanities research in Australia. So when the ARC talks, academics listen. The ARC has introduced a new open access policy for ARC funded research which takes effect from 1 January 2013. According to this new policy the ARC requires that any publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve (12) month period from the date of publication.

In most cases, this open-access publishing will occur through electronic institutional repositories – university websites where one can freely download researchers’ articles. Search engines such as Google Scholar will automatically index these articles and link them to related research. The resulting stream of freely available research will be a boon for our society and economy. But it’s not perfect, just a step in the right direction, as publishers also get ‘a say’ in what happens with published information.

Check the ARC Open Access Policy for more information. While  the ARC policy will shift some power away from the publishers by putting institutional repositories centre stage, there is a counter-flow that is not in the same spirit of Open Access. Just because public domain content is online and indexed, doesn’t mean that it’s useful.

Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers

Scholarly Open Access showcased the Beall List of Predatory Publishers 2013. The first includes questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. Each of these publishers has a portfolio that ranges from just a few to hundreds of individual journal titles. The second list includes individual journals that do not publish under the platform of any publisher — they are essentially independent, questionable journals.

In both cases, the recommendation is that researchers, scientists, and academics avoid doing business with these publishers and journals. Likewise, students should exercise some caution when reading and referencing these articles in their own academic learning.

Follow Scholarly Open Access for more insights into the contentious field of Open Access publishing.

Image cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by kevin dooley

As  Burnable books states, it’s hardly controversial to note that the digital revolution over the last ten to twenty years has changed the face of medieval studies. Nearly every major manuscript archive has launched a digitization project, with hundreds of high-resolution images added every week, it seems, and eye-catching portals inviting new users to click through and examine the treasures within.

Medieval manuscripts have entered the era of Big Data, a phrase that emerged a couple of years ago to capture the character of information storage, retrieval, accessibility, and usage in the networked worlds of the early twenty-first century.

Burnable Books will feature over the next several months a series of invited guest posts on the topic “Medieval Studies in the Age of Big Data.” Medieval Studies in the Age of Big The Data serial forum is worth reading, especially as it deals with the issues of big data, digitisation, digital revolution, speed vs wisdom, culture and knowledge.

Bibliotheca Apostolica

The Bibliotheca Apostolica, as the Vatican Library is known, is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains nearly 90,000 historic books, documents, papyrus texts and other ancient treasures. Among its treasures are early copies of works by Aristotle, Dante, Euclid, Homer, and Virgil. Yet today access to the Library is limited. Because of the time and cost required to travel to Rome, only some 2000 scholars can afford to visit the Library each year.

Digitizing its contents in order to preserve the Vatican’s historic treasures and make them available to scholars and historians around the world has become a priority, and the Vatican is embarking upon a multi-year project to digitize, store, archive and put the entire collection on line.

Image: Rothschild Canticles (in Latin) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Beinecke Library

Related articles

• Vatican Preservation (stevetodd.typepad.com)
• Israeli library unveils ancient Afghan manuscripts (sfgate.com)
• Houses in medieval illuminated manuscripts (blogs.independent.co.uk)

Ruth Rikowski

BEYOND THE CLOUD: IMCW 2013

This is the Second Call for papers for the 4th International Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World (IMCW 2013) in Limerick, Ireland, 2013.

IMCW2013: The 4th International Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World,
September 4-6, 2013, Limerick, Republic of Ireland

Beyond the Cloud: Information … Innovation …Collaboration… (Second Call for Papers)

Symposium web site: http://imcw2013.bilgiyonetimi.net 

SCOPE

IMCW2013: The “4th International Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World” will take place at the Strand Hotel (http://www.strandhotellimerick.ie/) in Limerick, Ireland, from September 4-6, 2013 (http://imcw2013.bilgiyonetimi.net/).

Cloud computing has transformed the ways in which both individuals and enterprises make use of  IT services and network infrastructure within the last decade.  Everything including infrastructure, platforms, applications, software, data, and communication is now seen “as a service”.  Information, the life-blood of scientific progress, economic growth and social development, is mostly produced, disseminated, used, shared and re-used in digital formats nowadays.  Science, industry and business enterprises tend to become “information” enterprises in that even “money” as matter gets converted to “bits” so as to be stored digitally in computers and transmitted as “information” over the network.  Enterprises have tended to spend well over 70% of their time and money to support the information technologies (IT) and network infrastructure. Now they embrace cloud-based services to manage information more efficiently and effectively. As information managers we must now look Beyond the Cloud, collaborate in order to innovate and inspire while trying to predict what the future holds.

Using cloud-based services increases efficiency, provides cost savings, and enables “collective intelligence” to flourish.  Not-for-profit memory institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums are also making use of cloud-based services.  To name a few, OCLC’s WorldCat, HathiTrust, OAISTER, and Europeana are providing web scale discovery services and aggregated data repositories accessible through the Net.  Yet, information organizations and memory institutions should go beyond the cloud-based services to reap the full benefits of the digital age.

MAIN THEME

“Beyond the Cloud: Information…Innovation…Collaboration…” being the main theme of the Symposium, IMCW2013 aims to bring together information professionals, computer and information scientists, business people and engineers to discuss the implications of cloud computing on information management and to contemplate on how to design and develop innovative and collaborative information services beyond the cloud. As organizers, we thought this is an opportune time for IMCW2013 to review the challenges for information organizations, libraries, archives and museums providing information services in the digital age.  Such challenges range from developing useful services and workflows embedded in users’ work and study environments to benefitting from economies of scale by pooling resources, eliminating redundancies and innovating through collaboration.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions can be theoretical as well as technical and practical.  Informative case studies are also welcome.  The audience will be information professionals, librarians, archivists, computer and information scientists, and business people, among others.

We accept extended abstracts (no less than 750 words) for full papers; short communications, Research in Progress reports and posters on all aspects of innovative and collaborative information management. Extended abstracts for student papers and posters are also welcome.  Extended abstracts of PhD students to present the interim findings of their ongoing research will also be considered. Please use the template available on the Symposium web site to prepare your contributions and send them to us using the Conference Management Software (openconf) by March 4, 2013.

We also accept proposals to organize workshops, panel sessions and short visual presentations (“pecha kucha”).  Proposals should include a title, a short abstract, proposal type (eg, workshop), the name and contact information of the convener (for sessions and pecha kucha) and be addressed to imcw2013@bilgiyonetimi.net by March 4, 2013.
Accepted extended abstracts and proposals will appear in the “Book of Abstracts” to be published prior to the Symposium.

Accepted extended abstracts may be developed as full papers by May 27, 2013.  A short list of papers will be selected so that the revised and extended versions of these papers and posters will appear in the proceedings book to be published by Springer under its Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) series and the Symposium web site (decision pending).  Papers that appear in Springer’s CCIS series are indexed in Thomson Reuter’s Conference Proceedings Citation Index.

MAIN TOPICS

Main topics of the Symposium include (but not limited with) the following:
Challenges of Information Management in the Digital Age
Developing digital information services
Semantic information management
Information management in the cloud
Distributed collection management and licensing
Innovative information management
Collaborative information management
Infrastructures and networks for information management
Systems, tools and services for information management
Virtual research environments and information management
Community of practices
Data ownership
Data security
Long-term stability of data
Privacy
Economies of scale

Cloud-based Information Services

Web-based services
Data-centric services
Services lifecycle management
Information management in the cloud
Web scale information discovery through the cloud
Data aggregation and data repositories in the cloud
Innovative uses of cloud-based information services
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for Information Management
Platforms as a Service (PaaS) for Information Management
Applications as a Service (AaaS) for Information Management
Software as a Service (SaaS) for Information Management
Storage as a Service (SaaS) for Information Management
Everything as a Service (EaaS) for Information Management

Information Discovery, Organization, and Retrieval Beyond the Cloud

Information discovery and identification
Information representation
Information search, indexing and retrieval
Curation, preservation and long-term access
Mobile information retrieval
Metadata harvesting
Metadata extraction
Metadata management
Metadata interoperability and standards

Ontology development
Ontology mapping

Mining large data sets

Information Architecture for Cloud-based Information Services
Information architecture and web design for the cloud
Grid Networks, services and applications
Service Oriented Architecture

Designing usable cloud services

Information usability
Interaction design for cloud services
Information visualization tools

Scholarly Publishing, Open Access and Institutional Repositories
Scholarly publishing process

Open access
Institutional repositories beyond the cloud
Digital libraries beyond the cloud
Data warehouses and federated databases beyond the cloud

E-publishing

Open science
Open access to publicly funded scientific information
European Infrastructure for e-Science Digital Repositories (e-SciDR)

Digital Preservation of Scientific and Cultural Heritage Beyond the Cloud

Digitization of scientific and cultural heritage
Digital science museums and digital exhibitions
Digitization of 2-D and 3-D scientific and cultural heritage objects
Digital re-discovery of culture
The European Digital Library, Europeana, beyond the cloud

Permanent archiving of digital scientific and cultural heritage beyond the cloud

Social and Cultural Issues Beyond the Cloud
Digital information policies
Intellectual property rights
Digital rights management
Legal and cultural issues
Value of information (VOI)
Information quality standards

Education for Information Management
Blended librarianship
Cloud librarianship
E-science librarianship
Data curation education
Information stewardship
Biomedical informatics
Environmental informatics
Bioinformatics
Digital humanities, arts and e-social sciences
Support services for researchers, students and general public
Life-long learning
Information literacy

ORGANIZERS
Hacettepe University Department of Information Management, Turkey
Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
§  Yaşar Tonta (Hacettepe University, Turkey) (Chair)
§  Umut Al (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
§  Jerald Cavanagh (Limerick Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland)
§  Padraig Kirby (Limerick Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland)
§  Serap Kurbanoğlu (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
§  Mícheál Mac an Airchinnigh (Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland)
§  Orçun Madran (Atılım University, Turkey)
(list incomplete)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
§  Serap Kurbanoğlu (Hacettepe University, Turkey) (Chair)
§  Umut Al (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
§  Ágnes Hajdu Barát (University of Szeged, Hungary)
§  Carla Basili (Sapienza University, Rome, Italy)
§  Albert K. Boekhorst (The Netherlands)
§  Fazlı Can (Bilkent University, Turkey)
§  Jerald Cavanagh (Limerick Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland)
§  Milena Dobreva (University of Malta, Malta)
§  Maria Francisca Abad García (Valencia University, Spain)
§  Ayşe Göker (City University London, UK)
§  Ian M. Johnson (The Robert Gordon University, UK)
§  Rajkumar Kannan (BHC Autonomous, India)
§  Padraig Kirby (Limerick Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland)
§  Willy van der Kwaak (The Hague University, The Netherlands)
§  Aira Lepik (Tallinn University, Estonia)
§  Mícheál Mac an Airchinnigh (Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland)
§  Orçun Madran (Atılım University, Turkey)
§  Angela Repanovici (Transylvania University of Brasov, Romania)
§  Fernanda Ribeiro (University of Porto, Portugal)
§  Egbert J. Sanchez Vanderkast (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico)
§  İrem Soydal (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
§  Yaşar Tonta (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
§  Nazan Özenç Uçak (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
§  Yurdagül Ünal (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
§  Sheila Webber (University of Sheffield, UK)
§  Sirje Virkus (Tallinn University, Estonia)
§  Bülent Yılmaz (Hacettepe University, Turkey)
§  Daniela Živković (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
(list incomplete)

LOCAL COMMITTEE
*  Jerald Cavanagh (Limerick Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland) (Co-chair)
*  Padraig Kirby (Limerick Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland) (Co-chair)
(list incomplete)

IMPORTANT DATES

First Call: October 2012
Second Call: December 2012
Third Call: February 2013
Last date to send all types of extended abstracts and proposals: 04 March 2013
Authors notification: 22 April 2013
Submission of extended abstracts in final form: 17 May 2012
Registration starts: May 18, 2013
Submission of full papers (if desired): 14 June 2013
Symposium: 4-6 September 2013

All suggestions and comments are welcome. Please send us your ideas about possible invited
speakers at imcw2013@bilgiyonetimi.net

Symposium Facebook page:

Twitter hashtag: #imcw2013

Register your e-mail address here if you wish to receive updates on IMCW2013 Symposium.

E-mail: ____________________

Looking forward to your contributions to and participation in the Symposium.

Yaşar Tonta, Chair of the Organizing Committee
Serap Kurbanoğlu, Chair of the Programme Committee
Hacettepe University
Department of Information Management
06800 Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey
Tel: 0312 297 82 00
Faks: 0312 299 20 14
E-posta:  yasartonta@gmail.com, serap@hacettepe.edu.tr

Padraig Kirby BA (Hons) HdipLIS
Tempus Project Coordinator/Senior Library Assistant
The Library
Limerick Institute of Technology,
Moylish park
Limerick
Ireland
00353 61 448516
Padraig.Kirby@lit.ie<mailto:Padraig.Kirby@lit.ie>

Ghost Cloud

**END**

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales); and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Glenn Rikowski’s MySpace Blog: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski/blog

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

My name is Lynsey Green. I am currently a student at the University of Glasgow doing the Information Management and Preservation Msc. I completed my undergraduate degree in History at the University of Strathclyde. Throughout my studies I volunteered at the University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections which gave me a good grounding for understanding both traditional and digital archives. I also currently work at the Mitchell Library Special Collections Department which partakes in digitisation projects.

Why join Imps?

I decided to join the Information Management and Preservation program after careful consideration about the future career it could provide. I thoroughly enjoyed my volunteering and decided that it was the right choice for me.

First impressions of the class?

My first impression of the Management, Curation, Preservation of Digital  Materials (MCPDM) class was that it seemed a relevant and necessary area to pursue. As the digital environment is ever-changing, the archival field must keep up with such advances and I feel the course will provide a solid understanding of how to tackle the many challenges the digital aspect provides.

The conference will be of value to anyone working in or studying the archaeological, heritage, education and museums sector, and is designed to allow informal networking and exchange of ideas within a friendly and diverse audience made up of individuals from commercial, public and third sector organisations. Open House sessions will also give the opportunity for display and demonstration of projects or products, and the chance to talk to heritage organisations, product developers and retailers.

Registration cost for the 2 days is £55, including lunch and refreshments on both days.
Limited places are available and early registration is advised.
We look forward to welcoming you to Digital Past in 2013.
The Digital Past Team
http://digitalpast2013.blogspot.co.uk/%20
Digital Past 2013 – registration form (PDF file, 0.1MB)
Digital Past 2013 – registration form (Word Doc) (DOC file, <0.1MB)

Journalists discover news and report it – so what or who is a journalist in 2013?

Journalism is, I genuinely think, a defunct term in the here and the now. I can’t see it coming back into full use any time soon either. I can’t even think of the last time I used it; maybe at school when I was asked to fill in my UCAS at school in the late 90s.

Sensible published books on Theory and Practice suggest that true journalism is founded in many central aspects of an individual’s solo-production of words in paragraphs made into article… such as:

Do I make interesting stories out of events?

Now that I do, do. I can make a table sound like something that you must have, or at the very least, must see housed in a warehouse as part of an exhibition outside London, even if that means in Korea. Oh you’ll go. You’ll want to go. Because I’m telling you it’s worth the trip. I am tooting my own abrasive and blindingly bright gold sparkly horn here, but that’s because writing is the one thing I got.  (I meant to talk like a toddler there) After only a day to two weeks in employment as anything but a writer throughout my years of work, all written material has mysteriously ended up being ‘Chrissy’s department’ and on my desk by the end of the month. Chrissy will do it, she’ll know, give it to Chrissy.

Do I understand the basic vocab of news and journalism?

Well, yes, I would have thought so, if my schooling has done even a small bit of its job. But then also, AS IF! There is one thing that strikes me about our age, the digital, and that is a) that some people don’t place as much emphasis on technically grammatically accurate writing (like with the slang that has accompanied speech since the dawn of time) properly. But then language itself has changed; a great deal of what was assumed blasphemy then, is now just another term or expression that has been added to the dictionary, and not even a joke dictionary. The real Oxford Classic!

B) Kudos is not accrued in certain circles, from knowing HOW to write a structured, balanced, grammatically astute piece of reporting, not anymore. Hell, if it’s gona be a good read why don’t we just write like we talk, thereby endowing character and personality, outbursts and obscure quotes from box sets (streamed on watchseries fittingly) that we and only we watch with our closest pals? If you understand the basics though, then those are the tools that you use to subvert the basics, the rules. I guess that therein lies the knack to writing well, and being a good ‘journalist’. Damn.  Ok so yes is the answer to that one then.

Do I use rational analysis and argument?

Right, at this point I can see this becoming a bland academic thesis on theory rather than what I really want it to be – a ‘let’s pin this thing down’ type investigation into the here and now and what journalists really do with what they know and what they are. I.e. what makes them one?

Just because you upload an image you have taken to instagram and you have one of the effects that others don’t that makes you look as if you re in a fish tank with a head torch, or whatever, does that mean you are a journalist, a reporter, a marketing rep for the power of instagram or does it simply mean you are using the resources that contemporary digital media offers you to demonstrate that you exist online. We don’t now need sub-editors or printers to fine tune and colour insert our work, we simply edit and upload ourselves! Job done. Self-publishing is where it’s at. Now who’s the journalist ey?!

Essentially is the World Wide Web that has changed it all. Time scales are different, expectations are different, newspapers are different; it is all very very…different.

We are the citizen journalists, the luminaries, those who have it all to give and at the touch of a keyboard from home, with our favourite mug. Journalism is now not one thing; it is many. But it is certainly not about managing a newspaper or being employed by it. It is something entirely different. Only time will tell what journalism really is or what the term means. I find it all pretty exciting really. I guess that’s why I keep writing. There’s just so much to get stuck into!