Jeremy recently made a couple of our sites, Watzek New Additions and accessCeramics, PicLens compatible. The new additions browsing is pretty cool. It lets you scan through images of book jackets.
Basically, this requires search results to be in a format called media RSS.
This is a good example of making a website extensible so that it's content can be repurposed in another application and potentially another context.
Friday, June 13, 2008
on ARTstor, MDID and moving to the network level in visual resources
ARTstor just released a new interface--probably in beta. I think it does away with the Java in favor of modern AJAX techniques, a good move. ARTstor and, more generally, the provision of images of art and cultural objects to academic populations is a good example of how things are moving to the network level.
Visual Resources is one of my areas of responsibility here at Watzek, and its interesting how much faster things are moving in this area than in "mainstream" library collections. The continued viability of the monograph has kept the pace of going digital relatively moderate in library stacks.
With our College slide collection, however, we've seen our users (mainly Art faculty) almost totally abandon slides over the course of five years. It would be quite a shocker if library stacks fell into disuse at that pace especially because there is so much organizational and physical infrastructure surrounding them.
When Margo, the Visual Resources Curator, and I approached the problem of "going digital" in visual resources back four years ago, the route we choose was to build an institutional collection of digital images using MDID. The images would be a combination of images scanned for faculty and purchased high quality digital images. MDID software is designed to provide a comprehensive environment for teaching with digital images. It stores an institutional collection of digital images, has a space for personal images, and a suite of presentation tools geared towards teaching Art or Art History. Our vision was that MDID would be the central place to find and work with digital images for teaching.
Though MDID@LC has grown and faculty use it to find high quality stuff, things haven't quite turned out as intended. Faculty, especially the ones that are confident technologically, have their own tools that they know and like to use for presentation, chief among them, Powerpoint. They also like to maintain their own collections of images on their own computers. (It would be nice to nudge them along to networked software for their personal images like Flickr, but that's another topic).
Except for the faculty that follow our guidance directly (those that tend to be the least confident technologically) most folks don't use MDID to present. It's just another silo that they check when they are looking for images, along with ARTstor and the web. This is leading us to the conclusion that in the interest of breaking down silos, we should mount all of our institution specific images in ARTstor.
Fortunately, ARTstor offers a hosted collection feature which does just that, albeit with a few limitations. In the past, when libraries purchased collections of digital images, they had to host them themselves in their own digital asset management systems. Now, when we want to license a set of images from a company like Archivision, they just "flip a switch" and the collection shows up in our ARTstor account. We can also upload our own collection of images into ARTstor at certain intervals (which will need to be increased to really use ARTstor to provide our image services to faculty).
ARTstor is a great example of the advantages of "moving to the network level." It's platform that's being continually improved and a collection of resources that's being constantly expanded. One of the cool things about it is that it groups together different images of the same work of art--sort of a FRBRization of images.
Our experience with both ARTstor and MDID really shows that building isolated, institution focused collections just doesn't make sense. In this networked world, our local assets need to co-mingle with those on the network and become part of that greater whole. I suppose this is also the idea with the WorldCat.org platform and its various permutations. To invest heavily in our local library catalog database and its search platform bears some similarity to investing in MDID.
Now, I'm not saying ARTstor couldn't go further. I've always thought that they should "mobilize" their content by syndicating thumbnails of their content in search engines. And then there's the matter of the academic Flickr.
Visual Resources is one of my areas of responsibility here at Watzek, and its interesting how much faster things are moving in this area than in "mainstream" library collections. The continued viability of the monograph has kept the pace of going digital relatively moderate in library stacks.
With our College slide collection, however, we've seen our users (mainly Art faculty) almost totally abandon slides over the course of five years. It would be quite a shocker if library stacks fell into disuse at that pace especially because there is so much organizational and physical infrastructure surrounding them.
When Margo, the Visual Resources Curator, and I approached the problem of "going digital" in visual resources back four years ago, the route we choose was to build an institutional collection of digital images using MDID. The images would be a combination of images scanned for faculty and purchased high quality digital images. MDID software is designed to provide a comprehensive environment for teaching with digital images. It stores an institutional collection of digital images, has a space for personal images, and a suite of presentation tools geared towards teaching Art or Art History. Our vision was that MDID would be the central place to find and work with digital images for teaching.
Though MDID@LC has grown and faculty use it to find high quality stuff, things haven't quite turned out as intended. Faculty, especially the ones that are confident technologically, have their own tools that they know and like to use for presentation, chief among them, Powerpoint. They also like to maintain their own collections of images on their own computers. (It would be nice to nudge them along to networked software for their personal images like Flickr, but that's another topic).
Except for the faculty that follow our guidance directly (those that tend to be the least confident technologically) most folks don't use MDID to present. It's just another silo that they check when they are looking for images, along with ARTstor and the web. This is leading us to the conclusion that in the interest of breaking down silos, we should mount all of our institution specific images in ARTstor.
Fortunately, ARTstor offers a hosted collection feature which does just that, albeit with a few limitations. In the past, when libraries purchased collections of digital images, they had to host them themselves in their own digital asset management systems. Now, when we want to license a set of images from a company like Archivision, they just "flip a switch" and the collection shows up in our ARTstor account. We can also upload our own collection of images into ARTstor at certain intervals (which will need to be increased to really use ARTstor to provide our image services to faculty).
ARTstor is a great example of the advantages of "moving to the network level." It's platform that's being continually improved and a collection of resources that's being constantly expanded. One of the cool things about it is that it groups together different images of the same work of art--sort of a FRBRization of images.
Our experience with both ARTstor and MDID really shows that building isolated, institution focused collections just doesn't make sense. In this networked world, our local assets need to co-mingle with those on the network and become part of that greater whole. I suppose this is also the idea with the WorldCat.org platform and its various permutations. To invest heavily in our local library catalog database and its search platform bears some similarity to investing in MDID.
Now, I'm not saying ARTstor couldn't go further. I've always thought that they should "mobilize" their content by syndicating thumbnails of their content in search engines. And then there's the matter of the academic Flickr.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
virtual bookshelves, shared bibliographies
L.D. has some commentary today on Google's patent application for a virtual bookshelf, covered in the SEO By the Sea blog.
In the last few years we really have seen quite a few online applications emerge for organizing "intellectual resources", be they websites, articles, books, etc. On the Web 2.0 end of things, del.icio.us comes to mind as well as LibraryThing . On the academic side, there's Zotero and Connotea, and CiteULike, among others.
Our Environmental Studies program here at Lewis & Clark is really trying to develop interdisciplinary student research. Part of the vision is, over the years, to develop a collection of research resources and data that students can draw and build upon as they do their research. Some of these resources would be primary, that is work generated by the students, and some would be secondary.
So far they've been using Moodle's out-of-the box build your own database feature to put this shared collection together. This presentation, from NITLE's Scholarly Collaboration workshop at Pomona last January, explains the system.
But they're looking to move to something different, something more flexible and social with tagging capabilities, but also with some ability to add structure to metadata. The problem is, most of the above mentioned apps are geared towards personal collections, not group collections. Some have a group feature or a sharing feature, but none really support a robust collaborative bibliography feature. For example, RefWorks supports publishing bibliographies to a shared campus wide web page, but its a really primitive feature.
My read is that it could really be useful to develop software that supports creating fairly sophisticated shared bibiliographies. Such software could offer multiple ways to organize resources, including concept maps and perhaps various other visual approaches. Integration with library resource management systems like link resolvers and catalogs would be key as well as integration with the personal bibliography software. This kind of software could enable an academic department, a group of scholars, or a whole college or university to collaborate more across disciplines and enable student research that better acknowledges and builds on research that was done before. If it was done right, it could be a really attractive resource for students as they do research and find themselves curious about what others have done.
In the last few years we really have seen quite a few online applications emerge for organizing "intellectual resources", be they websites, articles, books, etc. On the Web 2.0 end of things, del.icio.us comes to mind as well as LibraryThing . On the academic side, there's Zotero and Connotea, and CiteULike, among others.
Our Environmental Studies program here at Lewis & Clark is really trying to develop interdisciplinary student research. Part of the vision is, over the years, to develop a collection of research resources and data that students can draw and build upon as they do their research. Some of these resources would be primary, that is work generated by the students, and some would be secondary.
So far they've been using Moodle's out-of-the box build your own database feature to put this shared collection together. This presentation, from NITLE's Scholarly Collaboration workshop at Pomona last January, explains the system.
But they're looking to move to something different, something more flexible and social with tagging capabilities, but also with some ability to add structure to metadata. The problem is, most of the above mentioned apps are geared towards personal collections, not group collections. Some have a group feature or a sharing feature, but none really support a robust collaborative bibliography feature. For example, RefWorks supports publishing bibliographies to a shared campus wide web page, but its a really primitive feature.
My read is that it could really be useful to develop software that supports creating fairly sophisticated shared bibiliographies. Such software could offer multiple ways to organize resources, including concept maps and perhaps various other visual approaches. Integration with library resource management systems like link resolvers and catalogs would be key as well as integration with the personal bibliography software. This kind of software could enable an academic department, a group of scholars, or a whole college or university to collaborate more across disciplines and enable student research that better acknowledges and builds on research that was done before. If it was done right, it could be a really attractive resource for students as they do research and find themselves curious about what others have done.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
crowdsourcing and history
This piece in the Boston Globe about digital approaches to history really gets across the point that doing digital humanities is about more than just digitizing the printed word. I think it can be hard for scholars to get that, as Dan Cohen has pointed out.
It emphasizes projects like the 9/11 Archive and Flickr Commons as ways that crowdsourcing can contribute to primary material that historians have to work with.
It emphasizes projects like the 9/11 Archive and Flickr Commons as ways that crowdsourcing can contribute to primary material that historians have to work with.
Cohen sees the potential for partnerships between the lone professional historian and crowds of helpers, particularly as the quantity of historical material increases. It's possible, for example, for a historian of Colonial America to read every document written by the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (though such a task would still be time-consuming). It's altogether another thing for a historian of modern America to tackle the vast output of the Bush White House. "One person can't read it," explains Cohen, "but a hundred or thousand could read individual documents and tag them with keywords."The title of the piece, "everyone's a historian now" is a little deceptive, perhaps to provoke a reaction. At the end of the article, the importance of the professional historian is reaffirmed.
Having the crowd on your side is a good thing at certain stages of the research and publication process," says Cohen. "But at other times, historians will still want to be by themselves, sitting at their computer screen, using their own words to knit things together and make sense of the past."As someone who did some graduate work in history awhile back, I always enjoy reading Dan Cohen's take on digital humanities.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
trail run 2.0
This past weekend, I did the Mac Forest 50K, an ultramarathon that winds its way through trails in a very hilly research forest managed by Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR. It was my 2nd 50K.
It's a pretty hard run and finishing it has been my goal for awhile. The funny thing is that for many of the serious ultra types around me, this was just a throw-away run, their equivilant of a 10K for a typical marathon runner. They are all gearing up to do 100 milers like the Western States.
One thing I love about Oregon is that people are so hardcore about their recreation.
After I got done, got home and had a good meal and a couple beers, it wasn't long before I was searching the web for traces of the run: blog posts, photos, race results. Its funny how quickly that stuff appears, and how it can be hard to find at first.
I got a few pointers to photos on Picasa from a Yahoo Groups running group I'm on. Searching Google Blog Search also yielded a few posts. But there was no easy way to really watch the social web response to this event unfold.
Having a common tag to use to refer to the event could have helped. I've been noticing a trend toward that at conferences recently. It would be cool if there was some way to easily transmit that tag to social software from the event web site. And it would be nice if the race website could display the latest commentary on the race from the social web, probably in a somewhat moderated way.
Running results are also a good semantic web application candidate. If you'd like to see your results across races done by different organizations a kind of centralized database or merged set of databases could be useful.
Monday, May 5, 2008
how could Google help search in academic libraries?
John Wilkin has an interesting post about various ways Google Scholar could add functionality that would help academic library patrons get to the specialized databases provided by academic libraries. Interestingly, he brings Anurag Acharya, the guy who created Google Scholar, in on the discussion. The ideas generally have to do with learning about the user's needs and then pointing them to the more specialized resources. The post really addresses the problem of metasearch, that is, finding a way to give users a simple, single search box and get them from there to some of the richer, more powerful databases produced for academic research.
But what about once a library patron is in a research database like MLA Bibliography, Historical Abstracts, or Psychinfo? Many of these resources are fairly primitive when it comes to the search functionality and content that they cover. Often you get to search the citations, abstracts, sometimes the fulltext of academic articles. Sure, sometimes more is less, but typically, they don't cover the increasing amount of scholarly material that is out there on the open web. They also certainly don't offer the fulltext of books.
If Google (or another big search vendor) offered a platform that database vendors could mount their systems on, those vendors could make so much better products. Services available to the vendor could include:
I suspect that it wouldn't be worth it to Google to design a product for the library research sector. This would need to be an infrastructure product that could span proprietary search needs of multiple industries.
When we got a Search Appliance here at Lewis & Clark, I have to admit, I was kind of disappointed playing around with the admin interface, that you couldn't easily mix in parts of Google's web index with your own proprietary stuff. Guess this is sort of what I'm asking for here.
Scirus is sort of a development in this direction, that is a hybrid of the research database and search engine. Another sort-of-related idea: Dan Cohen has called for Google Books to open up its APIs for scholarly inquiry.
Some folks will no doubt be horrified that I'm suggesting putting more of our eggs in Google's basket. But the idea really is about bringing web scale infrastructure to the service of more specialized, niche needs. Not giving ourselves over to Google, but rather using their data and software as a platform on which to accomplish bigger things.
But what about once a library patron is in a research database like MLA Bibliography, Historical Abstracts, or Psychinfo? Many of these resources are fairly primitive when it comes to the search functionality and content that they cover. Often you get to search the citations, abstracts, sometimes the fulltext of academic articles. Sure, sometimes more is less, but typically, they don't cover the increasing amount of scholarly material that is out there on the open web. They also certainly don't offer the fulltext of books.
If Google (or another big search vendor) offered a platform that database vendors could mount their systems on, those vendors could make so much better products. Services available to the vendor could include:
- access to Google search software
- ability to create an continually updated index of portions of the web alongside proprietary data
- ability to provide advanced search functionality and data analysis specific to the needs of a particular discipline
- access to Google Books index
I suspect that it wouldn't be worth it to Google to design a product for the library research sector. This would need to be an infrastructure product that could span proprietary search needs of multiple industries.
When we got a Search Appliance here at Lewis & Clark, I have to admit, I was kind of disappointed playing around with the admin interface, that you couldn't easily mix in parts of Google's web index with your own proprietary stuff. Guess this is sort of what I'm asking for here.
Scirus is sort of a development in this direction, that is a hybrid of the research database and search engine. Another sort-of-related idea: Dan Cohen has called for Google Books to open up its APIs for scholarly inquiry.
Some folks will no doubt be horrified that I'm suggesting putting more of our eggs in Google's basket. But the idea really is about bringing web scale infrastructure to the service of more specialized, niche needs. Not giving ourselves over to Google, but rather using their data and software as a platform on which to accomplish bigger things.
Friday, May 2, 2008
architecture images in academia: moving into the cloud
The Society of Architectual Historians just received a Mellon grant to build "a dynamic online library of architectural and landscape images for research and teaching."
One thing that's notable in the description of the project is that it aspires to move visual resource collections away from building separate collections at each institution (as has been the case with slides, and initially with digital images) to collaborative creation of a shared collection:
One thing that's notable in the description of the project is that it aspires to move visual resource collections away from building separate collections at each institution (as has been the case with slides, and initially with digital images) to collaborative creation of a shared collection:
It is the expectation that SAH AVRN will change the way Visual Resources and Art/Architecture Librarians at those institutions conduct their work. Instead of developing separate, independent collections of architectural images for each institution, librarians will contribute images and metadata to SAH AVRN, a shared resource that will be widely available. Initially images will be contributed to SAH AVRN by scholars at the same three institutions who have agreed to share thousands of their own images that were taken for research and pedagogical purposes.Another intriguing aspect of the proposal is its mention of the development of new technology that will allow the contribution of images by front line people.
Building upon the existing ARTstor platform for storage, retrieval, viewing and presentation of images, ARTstor is going to develop two new tools to be used in conjunction with SAH AVRN. The first is a tool that will enable scholars, practitioners, librarians and others to contribute images to the shared resource of SAH AVRN. The second set of tools will be a content management system that will enable sophisticated processing and management of those images.Is this the 'academic Flickr' that we've been waiting for?
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