If you’re reading this, I may be preaching to the converted, but in the interests of invoking authority and experience (like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath) we can add this to a growing number of assertions to this effect. As previously mentioned, Peter Murray Rust’s views on the importance of blogging (and therefore of blog preservation), are worth repeating:

Blogs are evolving and being used for many valuable activities (here we highlight scholarship). Some bloggers spend hours or more on a popst. Bill Hooker has an incredible set of statistics about the cost of Open Access and Toll Access publications, page charges, etc. Normally that would get published in a journal no-one reads (I have even published in such – it was a huge effort and it’s got one citation. Not that I care about citations). So I tend to work out my half-baked ideas in public. Some people do their early science in the Open. Some are activists. Some review the current landscape, etc.

And in a similar vein, Heather Morrison, in her First Monday article Rethinking collections – Libraries and librarians in an open age describes her experience:

Many of my most important contributions to the debates surrounding open access, for example, are posted to the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, or to a listserv. These contributions may or may not be included in peer–reviewed literature at a later date.

If libraries focus solely on collecting peer–reviewed or formally published literature and not blogs and listservs, some of my best writings, and some of the ideas contained there and not expressed elsewhere, are likely to be lost.

I expect I’ll find many more opinions about this over the next few months, so this post will probably have a sequel. Back to Michael Nielsen, in the meantime, who also touches on the issue of collecting and preserving this valuable blog content:

It would be easy to build upon the open source WordPress platform [adding] important features [...] like reliable signing of posts, timestamping, human-readable URLs, and support for multiple post versions, with the ability to see (and cite) a full revision history. [...] Perhaps most importantly, blog posts could be made fully citable.

Encouraging words for this project. And WordPress-based plugin/theme solutions to many of Michael’s suggestions are already available in at least embryonic form – and they are GPL too. I’m looking forward to pulling some of them together into ArchivePress.

• JISC-PoWR » Blog Archive » ArchivePress: When One Size Doesn’t Fit All: JISC-PoWR has discussed many times h.. http://tinyurl.com/mm8xjv 25th June, 2009 31daysblog (Jan Olsen)
• @judell you run across http://archivepress.ulcc.ac.uk/ yet? I’ve heard you touch on the archiving of blog content in your podcasts 24th June, 2009 edsu (Ed Summers)
• AMERICAN WRITER UK: A New Project to Learn What it Takes to Archive Blog Content: ArchivePress is.. http://bit.ly/Xq1cm 24th June, 2009 UCMTSU (AMERICAN WRITER)
• UK: A New Project to Learn What it Takes to Archive Blog Content: ArchivePress is a blog-archiving project being.. http://u.mavrev.com/du0k 24th June, 2009 EveX1984 (NEGO_The_Real_Twitt)
• UK: A New Project to Learn What it Takes to Archive Blog Content: From a Web Site:
  ArchivePress is a blog-archiv.. http://tinyurl.com/nu99n8 24th June, 2009 infoboy (infoboy)
• Nieuwe webtip: ArchivePress http://tinyurl.com/ltgemx 24th June, 2009 archief20 (Archief 2.0)
• Blog archiving project launched: via @mopennock: Our ArchivePress website has been launched – see http://archivepress.ulcc.ac.uk/ 24th June, 2009 archivesnext (Kate T.)

We’ve also had some highly useful discussions about the project on the JISC-PoWR blog and at Peter Murray-Rust’s blog. Among the things I’ve learned from them is that:

• We have to continue to make our scope and use cases clear, particularly with regard to distinguishing our approach from crawling/spidering/harvesting. Creating local static copies of HTML renderings is the daddy of web archiving approaches, but our thesis is: TIMTOWTDI.
• We’re not alone in thinking that blogs merit being treated differently from ‘traditional’ websites, and that this (setting a blog to catch a blog) might be a worthwhile idea/approach. but there are bridges to cross, notably the comments-harvesting.
• Throughout academia – teaching, learning, research and administration – blogs are going from strength to strength. It would be a crime not to ensure they are preserved for future research.

July is the month when I get on with our first demonstrator, AP1, and record the process and the review the results. And IWMW2009 and Enduring Web at BL. And the JISCRI Projects startup meeting I’m sitting in right now.

Here’s one of the data tables (which I had to retype as HTML – Peter Murray Rust is right about PDFs and data):

Table 4. Preservation perceptions – general

		Strongly agree or agree	Neither agree or (sic) disagree	Strongly disagree or disagree
Should preserve	Personal blog	70.9%	23.8%	5.3%
	Every blog	35.8%	27.9%	36.3%
	Every comment	31.4%	31.9%	36.7%
	All online content	28.2%	22.3%	49.5%
Should not preserve	Some blogs	44.7%	27.7%	27.7%
	Some comments	48.4%	31.3%	20.2%
	Some online content	51.3%	24.9%	23.8%

The overall pattern seems a good vindication of  our own project approach, which will progressively move from capturing blog content (posts), to addressing comments and content, reflecting the scale of the bloggers’ own priorities.

It also seems a useful juncture in our project to throw open the question: which blogs should we preserve?

With over 5 million active blogs noted by Technorati, it seems daft to even start to enumerate them but in our field (libraries, archives, information science), several stand out, and it’s the very nature and importance of these that bolster the case for keeping them. I have in mind in particular Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog, but also blogs such as those of Peter Murray Rust, Brian Kelly, Lorcan Dempsey, Dorothea Salo, Jill Walker Rettberg – all ripe with contemporary accounts and robust views on matters of scholarly communication. But in every case, we have cause to wonder: will that information survive, will that link still work tomorrow?

What blogs (or types of blogs) do you think should be preserved, and why?

Yet, as we discovered in JISC-PoWR, few institutions have truly incorporated web archiving into their overall records and asset-management systems, let alone recognised the specific value of blog content (or even of using blogging to replace traditional approaches to reporting and minuting). Perhaps it just seems too complicated. For those that want to, the only tools that seem to be readily available are specialised tools – like Web Curator Tool and PANDAS – that utilise crawlers like Heritrix and HTTrack to copy websites by harvesting the HTML framework, and following hyperlinks to gather further embedded or linked content. The result might typically be a bunch of ARC/WARC files (a file format specifically designed to encapsulate the results of web crawls), containing snapshots of the browser-oriented rendering of web resources. For many web resources, especially static pages, this is sufficient. When it comes to blogs, though, the archived results seem a bit too static – as I noted in an earlier JISC-PoWR post.

Treating blogs only as web pages overlooks the fact that they are derived from rich, dynamic data sources, and are usually databases themselves. An archive of blogs should allow us to do exactly the same kind of selection as on a live blog: selecting posts by author, date, category, tag. And since a blog is structured data, isn’t the underlying data a more appropriate target for long-term preservation, rather than endless, often duplicate copies of just one particular view of that data?

So what if, instead, the archiving tool were a bit of software already in use, or at least widely used, supported and understood? And Open Source, naturally.

This is the premise behind ArchivePress, a new JISC-funded project being undertaken by ULCC and the British Library. It is a ‘proof-of-concept’ project to progressively explore the implications and possibilities of using newsfeeds and blogging software – WordPress, of course – to capture and archive blog content dynamically, as it happens. ArchivePress will demonstrate the use of feed-reading aggregation to populate the database automatically with posts, comments and embedded content. The result will be a working model of a WordPress installation, with extra plugins, which can be easily setup by any institution to harvest content from blogs they have an interest in. We’ll continue our association with UKOLN, who, along with Lincoln University and the Digital Curation Centre, have agreed to let us use some of their blogs in our development and testing.

In some respects there seems nothing terribly new to anyone already adept with blogs, newsfeeds and newsreaders – except that this appears to be the first attempt to exploit them to create accessible, managed collections of blog posts, with the potential to meet the more exacting requirements of archives and records management, such as reliability and authenticity. Even organisations that have a single mandated blog platform may wish to consider this approach to preserving their blog content. ArchivePress might also be of value to other blog-based activities, from local-history projects, to school and college blogs.

ArchivePress has its own website and blog, that will build a cumulative picture of its results and the issues it encounters over the next 6 months. It wouldn’t have been possible without JISC-PoWR, and we hope it will complement that work. Please check it out and add it to your feed reader. We have a great team who will be contributing, including Maureen Pennock (ex-UKOLN, now at British Library) and Ed Pinsent (UKWAC and JISC-PoWR) – and we even plan to squeeze some guest posts out of web preservation alumni. I’ll also be talking about ArchivePress at the Missing Links workshop at the British Library in July.

The plan described in the Project Proposal still seems essentially reasonable and achievable. The project will have three main iterations, each dealing with a different corpus of blogs and with different technical and functional issues.

In Phase One (AP-1), we will simply use FeedWordPress to gather the content from the three blogs of the Digital Curation Centre. This will allow us to examine the results and flag issues for the next phase. Initial guidance on installing and configuring the software will be prepared.

Phases AP-2 and AP-3. will address, respectively, the issues of harvesting comments associated with blog posts, and gathering embedded objects (images, etc). Both Lincoln University and UKOLN have provisionally agreed that we can harvest their various blog outputs as part of this process.

The starting point of the AP approach is the hypothesis that collecting the content of the newsfeeds from blogs may be sufficient for many likely requirements of blog archiving. This doesn’t mean necessarily that it is a fool-proof or instant solution, and the intention of the project is to determine, through practical investigation, how effective this approach is, what are its strengths and limitations.

We have a number of dissemination opportunities available. I am already confirmed as a speaker at The Enduring Web (BL, Tuesday 21st July), and at UKOLN’s IWMW 2009 (University of Essex, Tuesday 28th July). Other imminent opportunities include IWAW 2009 (at ECDL in Corfu, 30th Sept – 1st Oct), iPRES 2009 (San Francisco, Oct 5th – 6th) and IIPC at iPRES 2009 (Oct 7th). A proposal has already been submitted to iPRES. In addition, ULCC hopes to launch its AIDA digital preservation toolkit shortly, with a programme of DP events, and there may be scope to represent AP there.

This blog will be the central source of information about the project, and a place to publish our findings, and discuss what we are doing, how, and why. We hope to follow the successful model of the JISC-PoWR blog and encourage discussion from colleagues in the field, and maybe even some guest posts from eminent digital preservationists.

Maureen is going to focus her attention on user requirements and expectations, including legal, ethical and ownership issues, and the possible use cases, such as academic institutions, thematic collections, or local history projects: she will discuss her thoughts in another post. Ed will assess the relative merits of the AP approach and the web crawler approach of other web archiving endeavours, from the perspectives of both records-management and usability.

I will manage the WordPress configuration and customisation in the early phases, and expect to call on Rory’s help and advice for any advanced PHP development requirements. An environment is being set up on Google Code to support development work in due course.

My next tasks are to prepare the formal plan for our JISC Programme Manager, James Farnhill; and start configuring a WordPress installation for AP-1 – more on that in due course.

I took a smashing poster describing our work on Linnean Online and the SNEEP extensions for EPrints, and also spoke about these projects to the EPrints User Group sessions and had to endure the now inevitable Minute Madness. I was pleased to spot the SNEEP Comments plugin in use when Jessie Hey demonstrated EdShare, another of Southampton’s learning resource repository projects. It was also great to meet up again with Patrick McSweeney who has been tweaking SNEEP at Southampton, and discuss ways of keeping ongoing work on the plugins in sync. Regular readers may remember Patrick from OR08, and he cut an even more unforgettable figure this time.

The talk of the event seemed to be the relentless buzz around the unification of DSpace/Fedora Commons, engendering the new creation that is DuraSpace (and DuraCloud). This offers a lot of exciting possibilities that we’ll need to keep track of, though it won’t be the first repositories event that has offered us a surfeit of jam tomorrow… For now, for the curious, here’s the Duraspace FAQ.

By contrast, it’s slightly disappointing that, over the water, the EPrints user group seemed a tad under-subscribed. Features available in EPrints 3.1.x, and those imminent for 3.2, from cloud storage controllers and desktop folder visualisations to preservation support, promise quick wins for anyone wanting to push the repository model further: Les and the EPrints team waste no time in responding to the latest demands of the zeitgeist. All the same, informal discussions with users and non-users of EPrints suggested substantial resistance to its Perl-based core. Yet EPrints continues to push more configurability away from its Perl source: in the kind of repository-driven future oft foretold – from WordPress-type exensibility to modular service-oriented solutions – the underlying code base ought to become increasingly irrelevant as long as the package does what it says on the tin.

As usual it was great to meet some old friends, and lots of people for the first time. Memorably serendipitous (re-)discoveries included:

• Bibapp – “a Campus Research Gateway and Expert Finder”. There have been many attempts to integrate personalised, portfolio pages with repositories, and this looks like an effort worth investigating further, particularly as it claims to be repository neutral (and a good excuse to try out Ruby for real?).
• ParallelArchive – another variant on the repository model: “a personal scholarly workspace, a collaborative research environment, and a digital repository”. Run by Open Society Archives (OSA) at Central European University in Budapest – of particular interest to students of cold war and related issues
• E-Lis – still a superb multilingual collection of LIS resources, and undoubtedly the acid test of all EPrints internationalisation efforts
• MIT Open CourseWare – the mother of all OERs?
• The great Peter Sefton – great to meet him at last, at 6′ 7″, someone I can truly look up to. For a much more thorough account of the conference, see Pete’s Blog

I didn’t manage anything in the way of sightseeing, though the Aquarium seemed to be top of most locals’ list of recommendations, and we went there. Perhaps I should have made more of an effort to see the Civil War museum. For the visual record of OR09, content and context, you might like to see Jim Downing’s photos from the event, and the official photo OR09 set on Flickr.

Last Thursday’s Libraries Of The Future (LOTF) event at Oxford University has been well covered elsewhere, so I’ll just note a few key themes as I inferred them. LOTF is a JISC-sponsored campaign begun last year, and continued by means of online social networking (chez Ning) and a JISCInvolve blog, as well as F2F events like this.

If you’d nodded off for even only a couple of years, LOTF might well seem like the product of some post-information-meltdown future, with live Twitter streams projected behind the speakers, and the occasional glimpse of the parallel Second Life auditorium. All the same, one thing we didn’t see, in Real Life or Second Life, were shelves of books, or any books at all for that matter, apart from the JISC Collections catalogue on the registration desk. (By the way, if anyone knows of any shelf-for-shelf library reconstructions iSL, please send me a link.)

On change: Sarah Thomas astutely observed that change only looks fast if you are standing still: the only way to manage it is to be part of it. She proffered sound advice that the past and future – old ways and new ways – should not be set in opposition: we’ll achieve best results by understanding and integrating the best of traditional and innovative approaches to information management. Chris Batt compared the LOTF meeting with a 15th Century gathering of the Society of Scribes, discussing the emergence of “something big”. On that occasion, the “smart” ones, as Chris observed, bit the bullet and set about designing typefaces or investing in their own presses, leaving the rest to soldier on in an ever more marginalised business. This was a more original historical analogy than the usual hackneyed account of the Alexandrian library, though we didn’t escape the day without at least one mention of that. Peter Murray-Rust (“speaking in HTML, not powerpoint“) also had a compelling message: “If you are not aggessively trying to change the world, you will not end up with the Library of The Future.”

On the book: Sarah pointed out that, while the traditional book may still be alive and kicking, we cannot escape or deny the increasing reliance on digital resources, and a need for more and better digitisation projects and online finding aids. Chris picked up this theme, citing Susan Greenfield’s analysis of the information (r)evolution that is replacing “people of the book” with “screen people”: someone born at the start of the 21st Century may have little if any nostalgia for a paper book. (That said, I’m still inclined to think that the dedicated e-Book readers are a conceptual dead-end, except to the extent that they inform the evolution of laptops and other general purpose mobile devices.) From Santiago de la Mora we learned of the potential of Google Books to bring back to life “in-copyright-out-of-print” books.

On libraries and librarians: One particularly interesting observation was the extent to which digitisation breaks down the traditional boundaries between institutions: for example, by undertaking digitisation, a museum in effect is creating a ‘library’ of its digitised objects. Web technology makes it possible for almost any place to become a library, and it is erroneous to conceive of future libraries in terms of their bricks-and-mortar predecessors; libraries themselves must adapt their physical structures and the services they provide. In HE the library of the future will be at the heart of much greater integration across services, departments and institutions, and the trend towards OA research outputs and shared storage (e.g. UK Research Reserve ) is already clear.

On public knowledge: All the speakers expressed commitment to open public knowledge. Peter Murray-Rust cited endeavours like OpenStreetmap , NCBI PubChem, Sourceforge , inter alia, undermining the proprietary nature of data and information. However small, “each individual can do whatever they like on the web… don’t talk… do it!” Peter also aligned himself against Wikipedia’s detractors, and asked why universities aren’t actively helping Wikipedia. Robert Darnton drew audible gasps when he suggested that the best way to accelerate Open Access was for libraries to cancel their subscriptions to paid-for journals. Mining a similar vein, Chris Batt described the job of the “knowledge” (sic) sector as defining, mediating, managing and leading, in creating the public landscape of a Learning Society. The mission must be to remove all barriers to acccess: a universal right to knowledge and integration of knowledge into everyday life, empowering citizens to want to learn. That should involve the kind of creative approach we see in ventures like LibraryThing, rather than some of the more pedestrian public sector online efforts of the past.

I’d be inclined to echo the views on the CILIP blog, that the need for new information skills and literacy training – both of and by librarians – might have been addressed more directly. The nature of librarians of the future was raised by Chris Batt, and implicit in several comments through the course of the afternoon, but at the end of the day I felt we had dealt with many of the new information paradigms, but much less how “informaticians” are going to share that enormous dynamic richness with new and old generations.

And then it was off to the Bodleian Divinity School for a glass or three of Château JISC…

Much discussion of blog preservation focuses on how to preserve the blogness of blogs: how can we make a web archive store, manage and deliver preserved blogs in a way that is faithful to the original?

Since it is blogging applications that provide this stucture and behaviour (usually from simple database tables of Posts, Comments, Users, etc), perhaps we should consider making blogging software behave more like an archive. How difficult would that be? Do we need to hire a developer?

One interesting thing about WordPress is the number of uses its simple blog model has been put to. Under-the-hood it is based on a remarkably simple data base schema of about 10 tables and a suite of PHP scripts, functions and libraries that provide the interface to that data. Its huge user-base has contributed a wide variety of themes and additional functions. It can be turned into a Twitter-like microblog (P2 and Prologue) or a fully-fledged social network (WordPress MU, Buddypress).

Another possibility exploited by a 3rd-party plugin is that of using WordPress as an aggregating blog, collecting posts automatically via RSS from other blogs: this seems like a promising basis for starting to develop an archive of blogs, in a blog.

The plugin in question is called FeedWordPress. It uses the Links feature of WordPress as the basis of a list of feeds which it checks regularly, importing new content when it finds it, as Posts within WordPress.

I installed FeedWordPress a while ago on ULCC’s DA Blog, and set it up to import all of the ULCC-contributed posts to JISC-PoWR, i.e. those by Ed Pinsent, Kevin Ashley and myself. I did this because I felt that these contributions warrant being part of ULCC’s insitutional record of its activities, and that DA Blog was the best to place to address this, as things stand.

JISC-PoWR also runs on WordPress, therefore I knew that, thanks to WordPress’s REST-like interface and Cool URIs, it is easy not only to select an individual author’s posts (/author/kevinashley) but also the RSS feed thereof (/author/kevinashley/feed). This, for each of the three author accounts, was all I needed to start setting up FeedWordPress in DA Blog to take an automatic copy each time any of us contributed to JISC-PoWR.The “author” on the original post has been mapped to an author in DA Blog, so posts are automatically (and correctly) attributed. The import also preserves, in custom fields, a considerable amount of contextual information about the posts in their original location.

In many cases, I’ve kept the imported post private in DA Blog. “Introductory” posts for the JISC-PoWR project blog, for example: as editor of DA Blog, I didn’t feel we needed to trouble our readers there with them; nevertheless they are stored in the blog database, as part of “the record” of our activities.

This is, admittedly, a very small-scale test of this approach, but the kind of system I’ve described is unquestionably a rudimentary blog archive, that can be set up relatively easily using WordPress and FeedWordPress – no coding necessary. Content is then searchable, sortable, exportable (SQL, RSS, etc). (Note, by the way, what happens when you use the Search box on the JISC-PoWR blog copy in UKWAC: this won’t happen with this approach!)

For organisations with many staff blogging on diverse public platforms this would be one approach to ensuring that these activities are recorded and preserved. UKOLN, for example, manages its own blog farm, while Brian and Marieke have blogs at WordPress.com (as well as contributing to this one), and Paul Walk appears to manage his own blog and web space. This kind of arrangement is not uncommon, nor the problem of how an institution get a grasp on material in all these different locations (it’s been at the heart of many JISC-PoWR workshop discussions). A single, central, self-hosted, aggregating blog, automatically harvesting the news feeds of all these blogs, might be a low-cost, quick-start approach to securing data in The Cloud, and safeguarding the corporate memory.

There are more issues to address. What of comments or embedded images? Can it handle Twitter tweets as well as blog posts? Does it scale? What of look-and-feel, individual themes, etc? Now we start needing some more robust tests and decisions, maybe even a developer or two to build a dedicated suite of “ArchivePress” plugins. But thanks to the power and Open-ness of WordPress, and the endless creativity of its many users, we have a promising and viable short-term solution, and a compelling place to start further exploration.

Calls in the literature have advocated that blogs, as potentially valuable additions to the human record, are worthy of stewardship and long-term preservation. It’s hard to argue with this, in the light of recent widely publicised use of blogging by President Obama, the Number Ten Downing Street blog, the blogging and tweeting activities of certain celebrities, and so on. But of course anyone can have a blog (and it sometimes seems that almost everyone does). Blogs are phenomenally useful, and have a wide variety of applications: individual or corporate announcements and publications; time-stamped records of activities; public or private figures writing as themselves or pseudonymously; public and private journal and discussion spaces for students and a wide range of communities. A blog may well be just for Christmas (or any kind of project) no less than a traditional diary or journal. It is in essence, after all, just a sequential log (“blog” is merely a geeky contraction of “web log”). Blogging is therefore not so fundamentally alien: Captain Cook kept a log (and so will Captain Kirk). Rather than make it sound very technical and complicated, let’s start by taking some comfort in what’s familiar.

Should all blogs be preserved? Which blogs should be preserved? The DPE Briefing Paper highlights (as all good preservation advice must) the issue of selection. How do we decide which blogs to preserve? To start with, the remit of any archival body (national, municipal, corporate, specialist, etc.) is itself self-selecting. It’s unlikely any archivist at NARA, TNA or any other archive would ever have to begin their deliberations with “all blogs”. Of matters of authenticity and attribution, the nature of the archive undertaking the preservation will, equally, dictate whether knowing the true identity is essential or not. Common sense should prevail. Clearly for records of official activities, such as the Downing Street and Obama blogs, reliable provenance and authenticity are critical. On the other hand, satirical blogs by “Gordon Brown” or “Vladimir Putin“  are clearly not records of official activities, but they still may merit preservation as publications and/or as interesting artefacts: as with many fictional or satirical diaries or letters, the true identity of the author may or may not be material (Beachcomber, Henry Root, Primary Colors).

Is preservation of content, regardless of context, sufficient? This is one of the most significant questions raised by the briefing paper. Has the Web changed our expectations of context? Once a descriptive catalogue or historical account seemed sufficient to establish context. Digital media now tempt us into thinking that, for any object, we should automatically gather (a copy of)  everything linked-to, and perhaps everything that links to, and so on. We can leave a computer to follow the endlessly forking paths, and create a virtual machine environment that will always render the gather materials faithfully – all without any manual intervention. Will that provide context, or make the preserved content understandable? Can we do without expert researchers and information professionals to scope, select and provide commentary where necessary?

The inability to capture and preserve the design and features of the blog contradicts defining attributes of a blog. In fact it’s not impossible to capture and preserve many if not all of the design features of a blog. The JISC-PoWR blog has been harvested by UKWAC with most of its features intact (experiments at ULCC have suggested that, with a little care, WordPress blogs are particularly well-suited to harvesting). But in general, let’s accept (as the Blogbackuponline people do) the overriding significance of the textual content over and above the bells and whistles of the web presentation. If there is one particularly interesting feature of blogs, that does set them apart from conventional web content, it is that they are generally intended for delivery and consumption in two distinct formats: by HTML web page, and by RSS/Atom XML newsfeed. The newsfeed version is bare-bones hypertext stripped of all the styling, bells and whistles of the web version, and will be read in many contexts, from online newsreaders and aggregators, like Netvibes or Bloglines, to desktop clients, such as Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as on mobile phones, and by automatic syndication to other sites.

Blogs, including posts and comments, may be intentionally edited or deleted. Looked at in isolation, editability is a significant property of blogs in everyday use. But, as Chris Rusbridge observed , “editability, while vital for some kinds of re-use, is not essential for conveying the information essence of the objects”. Any preserved object we have only in the state it was when taken into archival custody (though we may also capture and preserve records of how it changed). Preservation schedules for blogs will need to decide how important this really is: when is it and when is it not important to preserve an edit that no one ever saw? (A transactional approach – only capturing page impressions users request – is one way to address this without excessive redundancy.) However, if anything, this volatiliy of blog content is a more serious issue for those citing an active blog (who may find their quotations no longer match): a copy in an archive ought to be fixed, and reliably citable. If anything, this would suggest that creating stable archives of valuable blogs for the record is essential.

James Currall rightly warned us against making an undue fetish of digital media, at the expense of the information (and entertainment) which they convey; arguably as dangerous is the fetishisation of specific manifestations of digital media. How different, really, are blogs from other publications or applications built on the Web platform? Blogs are essentially web pages and don’t exist in a void. The “problem” of hypertext links to possibly unstable objects in remote locations is the bête-noire of all efforts to tame the Web. “Not in archive” is, and will ever be, a familiar message to regular users of archive.org. But we can perhaps take heart that many archives of correspondence tend to be one-sided too.

Sometimes thinking about these things in the abstract is no substitute for actually doing them for real. Perhaps the best advice for anyone tasked with preserving blogs is, first of all, to try keeping one yourself for a few days or weeks. Then it only takes a few minutes to try out BlogBackupOnline; or check how your favourite blog is faring in the Internet Archive , the European Web Archive, or the UK Web Archive; or even download HTTrack or Wget and try harvesting something yourself.

Then it’s time to get Twittering…

This will be a six-month project with a double-edged purpose: to develop a SWORD plugin for Moodle, so that it can interact, platform independently, with common repository applications like EPrints and DSpace; and to explore and demonstrate the use of that plugin for managing Copyright Licensed materials in Moodle courses.

The issue of managing CLA materials for VLE courses was drawn to our attention on several occasions by colleagues from other institutions, and the superior bibliographic features of e-repositories seem to offer a promising approach to managing these objects effectively for tutors, students and library staff, while making them available within a VLE, in accordance with CLA terms and conditions.

CLASM will be developed by the same team that developed SNEEP, one of the first JISC Rapid Innovations projects, and we will also be working closely with ULCC’s E-learning team, responsible for our Moodle and Mahara service. This should be a particularly rewarding and fruitful collaboration, since there is huge potential to improve the integration between these three critical educational applications – repositories, VLEs and e-Portfolios.

You can find out more about Phil and James’s adventures in e-Learning at our recently revamped sister blog: El Blog.

Post scriptum, 18th March.

I also learned that, among the other successful bids to the JISC’s Information Environment/e-Research call, were: MERLIN, a text-mining initiative for Institutional Repositories, led by UCL Library; and PhilPapers,  a project led by the Institute of Philosophy, to extend the impressive Philosophy portal currently hosted by ANU. ULCC will be contributing, as partners, to both of these exciting projects.

I was asked to assist James with a demonstration of the Mahara e-Portfolio system. ULCC has been working extensively on personalisation tools for e-Learning, at the heart of which is developing the Personal Learning Plan modules for Moodle, and integrating it with Mahara.

I’ve been very impressed with Mahara since I started dabbling with it on the demo server set up by James Ballard of our Moodle team. Unlike some other e-Portfolio systems I’ve seen, it is intuitive, powerful and fun, and focuses on the task in hand of preparing and managing portfolios. Mahara e-Portfolios can incude not only static information from within Mahara and Moodle, but also external content and dynamic information from external RSS feeds, YouTube, and the like: it’s a very likeable Web Two-ish application that has lots of potential uses, from school and college projects to all manner of personal portfolio projects, such as CPD and Professional Accreditations.

Preservation and interoperability issues abound here too. ULCC’s e-Learning team is working with JISC CETIS on modules to transfer files and assignments from Moodle and Mahara, and ways of packaging up interoperable portfolio packages, in a SCORM/IMS kind of approach, for between Mahara and Pebblepad. Longer-term preservation however does not seem to feature in any discussions I’ve heard: should we be thinking about using repositories to manage and preserve portfolios (or snapshots of portfolios) over the long term, whether for compliance or historical interest? Could this be another job for JISC-PoWR?

In the Handbook we’ve tried to cover a huge, and sometimes controversial, area in as accessible a way as possible. The workshops, attended by both web-management and records-management professionals from HE institutions, brought  a wide range of concerns and issues to light. It’s been quite a job fitting it all in.

Even as the project progressed, we became aware of new developments in thinking about how to approach the special issues of managing web resources, including everybody’s favourite new fast automatic Web 2.0 applications. We saw the publication of Steve Bailey’s Records Management 2.0 book, TNA’s Web Continuity project, and further web archiving developments at UKWAC. We’ve even heard it whispered in some quarters that approaches to preservation may need a more profound reassessment in the context of the Web and the Cloud. Many of these issues were recorded on the PoWR blog, and we tried to reflect as much of this in the Handbook as possible.

Another recent JISC publication, The Digital Preservation Policies Study by Charles Beagrie Ltd, published at the same time, is complementary in many ways, and reassured us that many of the conclusions we groped towards in the Handbook were not so wide of the mark! Like PoWR, the  Digital Preservation Policies Study identified the necessity of high-level policy engagement as the sine qua non of effective digital preservation.

Digital preservation solutions are undoubtedly partly technical, and the tools being created will enhance digital longevity, but these solutions are also equally dependent on organisational issues. It is important to remember that digital preservation relies on the interaction between the digital preservation environment and wider organisational objectives and procedural issues. These could be financial and staffing issues, collection management, legal obligations, auditing requirements, and other strategies and policies. In this respect, recognition by organisational divisions that digital data is important and key to the successful running of an organisation is crucial.

The Digital Preservation Policies Study, p.11

Among the other recommendations the Study shares with PoWR include:

• Analysis of existing policies and strategies, and how our work can support them even if said polices don’t explicitly refer to preservation or digital assets
• Taking a phased approach – nothing happens all at once. (PoWR recommends pilot projects and working with supportive departments.)
• Careful scoping of preservation requirements. (With regard to web resources, PoWR suggests not everything, not every version, and not forever.)
• Identifying if and where existing systems will do the job
• Consideration of lifecycle, publication, and retention schedules.

The Charles Beagrie survey is a very concise and accessible contribution to the field, and we hope the PoWR Handbook, with its specific focus on established and emerging Web issues, and attention to the detailed and everyday concerns of our many contributors and correspondents, will be similarly useful. We also hope that the work of PoWR will continue in some form, on the blog and perhaps in the form of new projects and workshops, to fill in the gaps we left, and deal with the constantly emerging Web developments. Anyone for PoWR 2.0?

This event serendipitously precedes the DPC/DCC/JISC/RSP workshop on repository preservation, up the road in Euston on Friday 12th: expect to see a few familiar faces cropping up at both events!

On a related note, check out also  Les Carr’s recent blog post, The Value That Repositories Add, which includes a fascinating presentation (intended for the SPARC conference in Baltimore) demonstrating the many ways that repository software can potentially add value for its users – statistics, bibliographies, personalisation, mailing lists, news feeds, and all sorts of Web 2.0 mashupery. As Les points out, not all repositories provide all these facilities, but all are possible with the current generation of repository software, and only a little bit of extra technical wizardry. Our own resident Eprints wizard is busy working on some of them even as I write…

Interesting to see the promotional posters pinned round the site. “I want to have computers and laptops everywhere,” says one Pupil Client, whatever one of them is. No doubt Playstations and Ipods too!

I’m not sure what the marketing jargonese “Pupil Client” adds to the case, though: I was never a “client” at school, and nor will Kolya be when his turn comes. But, marketing-induced cynicism aside, it’s quite moving to think of the youthful aspirations that this new environment needs to fulfil, from its steel and glass skeleton to its flesh and blood staff.

Well, not all Santas. From last year’s jolly CRB “Yuletide Quiz” we learn:

Job Role: Father Christmas (the real one)
Eligible? NO
Reasoning: The self-employed cannot apply for a CRB check. Father Christmas is technically self-employed!

Job Role: Father Christmas (Santa’s Grotto)
Eligible? YES
Reasoning: The level of check will depend upon if he is left unsupervised or in “sole charge” of the children and “Santa’s little helpers”.

Good to know then that at least the real Santa is not subject to the ignominy of a criminal records check. Presumably his near-namesake Satan – also very much the self-employed, entrepreneurial type – would also be exempt, which is good to know.

I can’t help feeling uneasy, though, about the CRB’s use of the word “Eligible”. It used to imply something nice or worthy: an elgible bachelor, eligible for promotion, etc. It doesn’t somehow seem the right word for finding yourself in the unenviable position of having to have your past turned over by nit-picking government bottom inspectors, credit agencies and their ilk, in order to earn a few bob for Xmas.

These mistranslation errors seem to be quite common in Wales. They are always going to be more likely in bilingual environments where the two languages are so very different: it’s hard to imagine errors of such magnitude on an English/German, French/Spanish or Polish/Russian sign.

Of the others mentioned in the BBC article my favourite has to be the road sign for pedestrians in Cardiff that reads ‘Look Right’ in English, but ‘Look Left’ in Welsh. I wonder who was trying to get who killed?

“Do not attempt to travel by taxi whilst suffering from the plague.”

Editor: According to the Technorati survey “Self expression and sharing expertise are the top reasons for blogging, followed by networking”. What do you think is your main purpose?
DA Blog: I like to think of myself as more of a professional than a corporate blog. I don’t blog for its own sake: I could post more. But everyone here has work to do, so it’s most expedient to use the blog to support those things, using the public blog as a record of our more public activities – hopefully ones that others will find interesting. You could think of me as a public branch of our collective, prosthetic memory, if that helps.

Ed.: Do you think you should include more personal opinions in your posts?
DAB: I’m not averse to spontaneous outbursts of powerful feeling, or constructive discussions, but I’ll leave it to other blogs to court controversy. My recent posts about the demise of the National Archives of Ireland, and about the implications of Web 2.0 for archives caused some of the biggest spikes in my readership. But my bread-and-butter is still rooted in what ULCC Digital Archives staff are up to. Timely reports about popular events in our field (OR08, IPRES) are always popular with fellow professionals, keen to read online reports about the events they’ve just attended (or, increasingly, are still sitting in).

Ed.: Are there things you’d like to blog about but don’t?
DAB: Of course. I have to be aware of the sensitivities of some of my customers, partners, employers. No one wants to end up being sacked for blogging. I work in an HE environment, and there are many fascinating things going on in teaching and research that don’t always have a preservation angle, so I tend not to include them: perhaps I should.

Ed.: Do you consider yourself a part of the active blogosphere?
DAB: I haven’t actively pursued trackbacks, SOE, or anything like that, but Technorati currently rates me with an authority of 15 – down from 19 a couple of months ago, but well within the top 10% of the 5 million blogs in the Technorati survey.

Ed.: According to State of the Blogosphere 2008, the majority of corporate and professional bloggers have seen a positive impact as a result of their blog and half are better known in their industry. What impact have you experienced – positive or negative?
DAB: One of the most valuable benefits of running DA Blog has been a tangible sense that I am participating in an online community in digital archives and preservation – a professional social network and community of practice. I’ve been especially pleased to receive informative and valued comments from experts at DCC, DPC, UKOLN and the JISC.

Ed.: Have you linked up with other blogs?
DAB: It’s been great to spot and follow trackbacks to other blogs. Not just high profile blogs in my field – Dave Mattison, Lorcan Dempsey, Chris Rusbridge, etc. – but other less prominent blogs I might never have come across otherwise, for example:

• personal-professional blogs (Alans notes and thoughts on digital preservation, Kiara King’s Web Watching For Archivists),
• experiments in aggregating archival news (arch.i.vi.us, archivesandidenties)
• archive/library blogs from beyond the UK:
  • from USA (Kate Theimer’s ArchivesNext, Jill Hurst-Wahl’s Digitization 101),
  • from Canada (Toronto ACA Student Chapter )
  • from Spain (Associació d’Arxivers de Catalunya)
  • from France (Marlène’s Corner and Figoblog, “a blog about the Internet, the Biblioteconomy, and fig jam”)
  • possibly even some Japanese trackbacks, but I couldn’t be sure
• blogs relating to our customers’ work, such as the William Morris Society blog.

Ed.: Have you picked up any good tips for other blogs and bloggers?
DAB: A professional blog like me just lets posts flow naturally from what people are really doing, and their desire to communicate that to others in an interesting way. Don’t make extra work for yourself: if you try to come up with something witty and insightful every day, the blog will become a burden, and eventually join the millions of others abandoned in cyberspace.

Ed.: What are your plans for the future?
DAB: I hope I can carry on doing what I am doing. Last month I had nearly 1500 views – or whatever it is that WordPress.com Blog Stats counts – which is my highest total to date, nearly 8 times as many as back in January. Perhaps I’ll get a lick of paint in coming months, and an upgrade to WordPress 2.7. I might add some new features – it’s been fascinating watching the Feedjit stats- but nothing too flash (does anyone really like those screenshots that popup when your mouse hovers over a link?) Personally I find the DA Feed very useful – there might be something more clever we could do there, with OPML for example.

Ed.: Thank you very much for your time.
DAB: The pleasure’s all mine. See you next year.

The JISC Digitisation Programme has made a wide variety of valuable resources digitally accessible, including:

• British Newspapers (1620-1900)
• Newsfilm Online
• First World War Poetry
• Newspaper Cartoons
• Welsh Periodicals
• Pre Raphaelite drawings
• East London Theatre Archive

More information about these, and other projects, is available on the JISC Digitisation web page.

The project will review the preservation plans and processes of the sixteen projects funded under Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation Programme, and identify any medium or long-term access risks to the digitised content. It will also produce recommendations – for individual projects and for JISC as a whole – for processes and strategies to mitigate the risks, and case studies which would be helpful to the broader community.

This is an exciting opportunity for us to apply and extend the experience we have gained working on a range of projects in the field, including the European Visual Archive Market-validation Project (EVAMP) and risk assessments for the recently launched Newsfilm Online project. We will shortly be creating an online home to for the project collaboration and development, and will use DA Blog and the DigiPresSurvey Blog (on JISCInvolve) to keep you updated.

AH, WILHELM! How can life simultaneously and at the same time be so deliciously exhilarating and yet so perplexing? Why is my life such a trial?

Consider but this instance alone, about which I intend forthwith to enlighten you, and, as you at least are well-acquainted with the superfluously circumlocutory nature of my discourse, you will be able to savour in some small wise the essence of my dilemma . . .

For, how can I possibly select but two or three flavours from the myriad of different gelati which at any one time a typical gelataio may spread in temptation before my bewildered eyes? I cannot say: is it possible for me to select but a very few gusti and be content? How can I not have remorse for those that I have perforce eschewed — and thus hasten my greedy consumption, in order to be able to select and devour all over again?

And yet, dear friend, were this my only problem then, Ah! how happy should I then be with my life and lot. Che sciagura indeed, then, that this is not the case — for be warned, Wilhelm, that it is not merely a matter of which flavours to choose, but (and of equal import) in what combination.

For, no matter how individually flavoursome these ambrosial ices might be, three bland and mild tastes can hope to sate or to stimulate neither palate nor soul; while the juxtaposition of but two overly powerful gusti will engender such violent contention as was never beheld even by the light of Apollo’s golden rays beneath the walls of sacred Ilium!

No, dear friend — it is better by far that the three flavours should perfectly counterpoint and complement each other in the variety of their effect: for was it not indeed in such a combination that mighty Agamemnon, proud Achilles and artful Odysseus avenged fair Helen’s abduction?

Ah, Wilhelm — life to me has become such a trial; where should I be without my Homer . . . ?

[Und so weiter.]

You’ve got to love the Great Court at the British Museum.

There will be quite a few changes from the current beta version. Many of these are the result of Professor Katharine Ellis’s extensive advocacy and consultation, among both the musical research community, who will be the system’s users, and among the repositories community, at events like the JISC Rights workshop, and the Repository Fringe in Edinburgh. Others have been made possible as a result of the experience we’ve gained on other Eprints projects, like Linnean Online, Their Past Your Future and SNEEP.

As you can see from the screenshot, we’ve freshened up the overall look, and Rory has had considerable success with the embedded Flash player, which is going to make both video and audio content in PRIMO far more usable and accessible than the present, download-oriented system.

There are more changes and enhancements and a snag list as long as your arm, but we’re confident that when PRIMO gets its full and final launch in January, it will be a major improvement. There is also exciting new content currently being reviewed by the Committee, that will showcase the potential value of PRIMO to its community, and, we hope, encourage other musical researchers to contribute their own research-in-practice.

On September 9th I travelled with Ruth Vyse, the University Archivist, and John Ralph, ULCC’s Computing Services manager, to Glasgow to attend DRH98, the third annual conference on Digital Resources in the Humanities. The conference was hosted by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute at Glasgow University, and ran from Thursday 10th to Saturday 12th September. The conference focused on the use of digital technology to preserve our cultural heritage, and as such featured a wide variety of presentations about work going on in, and on behalf of, schools and colleges, museums and libraries, publishers and research organisations, mainly in the fields of the Arts and Social Sciences.

We were particularly interested to learn about developments in cataloguing data collections and providing access to computerized catalogues, and to hear what approaches and standards were being used in other large data storage systems.

A number of presentations were given by the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), including a reception to launch their new web site on the Thursday evening. Of particular interest were the presentation of the recent AHDS report, Creating and Preserving Digital Collections, and presentations on the work of the History Data Service and the UK Data Archive at Essex University.

Also of interest was a TV film, Into the Future: On the Presentation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age, made for the US Public Broadcasting Service by Terry Saunders. It succinctly presented many important issues surrounding the preservation of digital data (but, perhaps invevitably, it was less forthcoming with answers to the problems). In one example, the film explained showed how the condition of magnetic tapes containing data from NASA’s Viking Mars Lander missions of the 70s and 80s had deteriorated to the point where many were unreadable. In the following discussion, Neal Beagrie from AHDS emphasised that the fragility of computer media, and the speed of technological change made early intervention essential for the preservation of digital records. Our work with the PRO and government departments has made the NDAD project team all too well aware of this issue.

It was encouraging to note that a number of well-supported standards and effective techniques are emerging for digital archives: in some cases this means that multiple catalogues on diverse systems can be searched with a single query. Most presentations concerned systems that were accessible, completely or in part, via the World Wide Web, indicating that the Web has quickly become a preferred medium of access to such resources. An ever growing array of digital resources, including databases, text, images, audio and video, is readily accessible by users at every level, from school-children to statisticians: the challenge for designers of such systems is to provide access tools and methods appropriate to their target audience.

Although NDAD did not make a presentation at DRH98, reference was made to other work that NDAD staff have been directly involved in, including Project Earl (networking UK public libraries) and the British Library’s Electronic Beowulf, which Charles Henry of Rice University spoke warmly of in his capstone lecture The Fire In Grendel’s Eye. We hope to make a presentation on aspects of the NDAD system at next year’s conference, DRH99, which will be hosted by King’s College London.

The conference organisation was superb, and delegates were impressed with the facilities of the Gilmorehill Centre and the ancient University of Glasgow. The Welcome Reception took place in the University’s Hunterian Museum, amongst impressive relics of Scotland’s past, including Roman milestones and the death mask of Bonnie Prince Charlie. On the final night, a civic reception by the Lord Provost of Glasgow was followed by a meal of traditional Scottish fare (Scotch broth, haggis and salmon) and ceilidh, all in the magnificent surroundings of the city’s Kelvingrove Museum . In our few spare moments we also took the opportunity to visit the Hunterian Art Gallery, with its reconstruction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s house and large collection of Whistler paintings, and enjoyed the chance to travel on the “clockwork orange”, Glasgow’s underground railway. In all aspects of the Conference, the Glasgow organising committee set a very high standard: King’s College unbdoubtedly has a hard act to follow.

Apart from the inevitable LOVE, eyes, heart and time feature strongly. Might need to redo and remove the thees, thous and thys from Shakespeare’s text, since I think the algorithm has stripped “you” from the Beatles’ text. No “yeahs” or “yellow submarines”, obviously, in Shakespeare’s lyrics!

Shakespeare's Sonnets Word Cloud

Beatles Lyrics Word Cloud

One interesting fact we learned is the huge rates paid to these translators, such was the importance of the project They sound like the David Beckhams of their day, earning 500 gold dinars a month – the equivalent of $240000 or more. Either they worked hideously long hours, or they were getting considerably more than £100 per 1000 words!

Strangely enough I suddenly remembered the authors’ offer of a complimentary copy as I was on my way to work this morning. And, lo and behold, there it was waiting for me on my desk.

Needless to say a book we can’t recommend more highly to all you visual graphic types!

I’ve been an admirer of WordPress for a while now. I think we first looked at it circa 2004, for an internal news management system, when we needed an alternative to falling foul of Movable Type’s new licensing arrangements. (I think MT’s now reverted to free licensing, but their paid-for interim probably did WordPress a huge favour.)

Since then, I’ve used it successfully for DA Blog and several personal projects – not just for blogging, but also as a lightweight CMS. We’ve also seen the rise of WordPress.com, Edublogs, and, closer to home, JISC Involve. It’s favoured by many web illuminati, such as Brian Kelly and Jill Walker. WordPress is definitely on a roll.

As for Number 10, it certainly looks fresher than of old. Earlier news entries have all been imported – not always flawlessly. The earliest entry I can find is from 17th Feb 2000 (about 3 years before the first widely available version of WordPress) – and it’s not “Hello World”. I imagine there is somewhere behind it all a bigger news machine than the usual WordPress Admin interface – but, of course things like that are easy enough to integrate.

With JISC-PoWR in mind, and discussions about web archiving and continuity, it’s interesting to note that, as a result of the switchover, some versions of the Number 10 website in the Internet Archive are now well and truly broken, stylewise at least. Versions collected in The National Archives’ UK Web Archive seem to have fared better. Some of these seem to be based on Internet Archive material, others are part of the European Archive collection: not having looked for a while, I have to say it’s not quite clear where TNA’s UK Government Web Archive ends and the European Archive content begins. Also, a tad confusingly the “Prime Minister’s Office” website seems to be archived as both pm.gov.uk and number10.gov.uk. (The former now resolves to the latter, which may be a small step for Web Continuity.)

It will be interesting to see if the WordPress switch improves the quality of the website in its ongoing archived form, and general preservability (at least, once they sort out a raft of validation errors). Although it’s not without pitfalls for the unwary, I recently found it fairly easy to create an offline snapshot of a WordPress site (complete with valid HTML and CSS too).

I wonder whether The White House or The Kremlin will be next to embrace the WordPress way?

The first vacancy is for an Archives Assistant here in the Digital Archives Department, supporting the activities of many of the internal and external preservation projects we are working on, including the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD), which we run for The National Archives, the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP), and web-archiving activities for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). For full details see the job description on the ULCC website.

The second vacancy is for a UNIX Systems Administrator in our Infrastructure Department, with experience of (among other things) Apache, Tomcat, Java, Oracle, MySQL and LDAP. We expect that the successful candidate’s responsibilities will include helping us with current and future heritage projects, such as systems for the British Library and the Linnean Society, as well as managing packages like DSpace and Eprints. For full details see the job description on the ULCC website.

If you are interested, or know anyone who might be, please pass this message on!

To warm up my brain before the afternoon’s PoWR workshop on preserving web resources, I sampled James Currall’s enjoyable discussion of web archiving, and also a talk on Institutional Repositories by Stephanie Taylor of UKOLN and RRT.

In The Tangled Web is but a Fleeting Dream … but then again…, James Currall covered the essentials of web archiving in a clear and engaging way, drawing comparisons between the survival of WWI soldiers’ diaries, and the blogs of present-day servicemen in Iraq. Another example given was the trials and tribulations of the website for the Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit: outsourced, host ceased trading, domain name lapsed, original website content dependent on outdated Coldfusion and Access environment. Thankfully a remote-harvested, static HTML image of the site does survive.

Why have there not been more conspicuous successes in web archiving in the past two decades? Partly because it can be difficult to decide exactly whether and when a website should be treated as an authentic (and authenticable) record, a publication channel, or a publication itself – among other things. Partly because there are always waves of innovation continually washing up more interesting things to do. Partly because archiving is a policy issue, yet is generally addressed as purely a techn(olog)ical problem (where it is addressed at all).

It was reassuring, as ever, to hear it said again that there is not one single tool that addresses all possible web preservation issues (behaviour, dynamic content, scripts, versioning, emerging standards, etc.); that depending on the Internet Archive is at best a partial and risky solution; and that “whatever you do is likely to be imperfect”.

James put the chamber’s electronic voting systems to entertaining and informative use with a number of snap votes: would, for example, present-day soldiers’ blogs still be available in 90 years’ time? Of course I could confidently vote ‘yes’, knowing that the publication of the JISC PoWR handbook is barely months away! Other ad hoc vox pops revealed that the audience was about as familiar with OAIS as with the Book of Ezra.

James is director of the Espida Project, and this was a timely reminder that we must consider the relevance of that project’s work on assessing and controlling costs to the guidance we’re assembling for the forthcoming PoWR handbook. James and I share what must be a fairly unusual distinction of citing Thomas Carlyle in support of our cause in recent presentations. Unlike James, however, I don’t bear such an uncanny likeness to the great man.

Stephanie Taylor’s talk, Institutional Repositories: Asset or Obstacle?, gave us a brief history of the Insitutional Repository, and a well-paced explanation of the value and purpose of IRs – rather more substantial, thankfully, than my Bluffer’s Guide To IRs last year. I was initially intrigued that her presentation might be leading to the conclusions that IRs are “obstacles”, but I quickly realised the alarmist title was rhetorical in nature. The talk was, among other things, an engaging appeal to the better nature of web managers and other techies to appreciate the value of, and issues faced by librarians.

In fact, the emergence of repositories, and the recognition of their place among institutional information systems, is a watershed in the evolution of electronic resources. Leaving it to researchers and teachers to manage what they create – variously on websites, blogs, Google Docs, thumb drive, or what you will – is no more sensible now than it ever was, if we want to ensure that they are consistently managed and accessible, let alone think about their preservation over the longer term.

There are many ways to approach it, none the only right and proper way. You may add extra value to it, through your choice of software or implementation (in-house or outsourced), or by using Web-Two-Oh-ish features and services. Institutional Repositories are only “one of many small conversations going on in different ways in different mediums”, but the need for an institution to manage valuable academic outputs in an orderly way is unarguable.

However one tweet that flew over the Twitosphere during the afternoon suggests that there may be more to do in assessing the pros and cons of different approaches – particularly the merits or otherwise of Google’s omnipresent panaceas. Mike Ellis commented: “I’ve never been clear why it is that institutions would trust a repository vendor more than someone like Google….?”

I won’t write up the JISC-PoWR workshop – the results of that will be on the JISC-PoWR blog - except to say that Marieke succinctly summarised the many web preservation issues we’ve accumulated, while Brian found effective waysto draw out issues and concerns around the growing range of Web 2.0 applications finding favour among staff and students at our institutions; and we were pleased that both Stephanie and James were able to contribute to the discussion.

And then it was off to the Aberdeen City Art Gallery for a glass of wine or three and some inspirational art….

As usual, a JISC gathering is a great opportunity to meet others working in the field – plenty of familiar faces and some new ones. JISC-sponsored innovations move on at a head-spinning pace in all the areas we are directly or indirectly involved in, from digital preservation and archives to repositories and e-learning. With JISC-PoWR in mind, I was especially interested to meet our former ULCC/RSC colleague Sarah Sherman, who is now working on the APT-STAIRS project, investigating the use of Google Docs for students, teachers and researchers. Definitely a preservation angle here, that I hope we’ll be able to follow up.

Plenty about the conference, and more, on the JIF08 blog; if contemporaneous twittering is your bag, check out twemes.com/jif08.

The proprietary nature of RAW formats (an emerging OpenRAW standard notwithstanding) and the relative newness on the block of JPEG 2000 would both tend to bolster the longstanding preference for TIFF, but as Chris’s posts make clear, each preservation project should nevertheless weigh the options based on its own requirements and resources.

If in doubt, the “keep everything” approach is attractive, as ever, but – in spite of the old mantras about ever-cheaper filestore – the implications for storage space and management are potentially very costly once one enters the world of Terabytes and Petabytes. In one example, Sean Martin of BL concludes that

probably only a small amount of additional value is created for the additional expense approaching £200K. This leads to the question “if we had £200K on what would we spend it?” and probably the answer is “not in this way”.

The posts contain many interesting examples of costings, based on the experience of BL, SDSC and others. I won’t even attempt to summarise (Chris’s summary of) them here, but I hope that this post will still be available for me to consult next time I have to dabble in the murky science of DP costings.

In some instances, the case for preserving the RAW image may nevertheless be compelling. One can imagine that the risk of missing a new planet or virus (or identifying a non-existent one), or other potential infelicities in scientific and medical imaging, is not worth contemplating. By contrast, it’s hard to see what value might be added to a collection like the Linnean Society’s by keeping raw camera data alongside the TIFFs, and more than doubling the amount of storage capacity required.

It’s for making decisions like this that the intellectual exercise of identifying significant properties and the needs of all stakeholders – creators, curators and users – seems particularly essential.

The Web Continuity Project arises from a request by Jack Straw, as leader of the House of Commons in 2007, that government departments ensure continued access to online documents. Further research revealed that:

• Government departments are increasingly citing URLs in answer to Parliamentary Questions
• 60% of links in Hansard to UK government websites for the period 1997 to 2006 are now broken
• Departments vary considerably: for one, every link works; for another every link is broken. (TNA’s own website is not immune!)

Among the objectives if the Web Continuity Project are to ensure that:

• All links work in perpetuity
• No cited information is lost through deletion
• Information is preserved long-term, even if the Web is no longer the dominant publishing medium it is today

Its outputs will include:

• Guidance on creation and use of XML Sitemaps
• A website component (for MS IIS and Apache) that will redirect users to the Web archive if a link is no longer active but is in the archive
• Guidance to government webmasters on best practice for website design and maintenance for archiving purposes

We can see that the approach and aims of the Web Continuity Project are particularly pertinent to our deliberations. Its aims are to address both “persistence” and “preservation” in a way that is seamless and robust: in many ways, “continuity” seems a very apposite concept with which to address the particular nature of web resources (though I doubt we’d want to swap our nice acronym, PoWR, for CoWR!).

Many of the issues facing departmental web and information managers are likely to have analogues in HE and FE institutions, so the opportunity to share in research and expertise emanating from the National Archives and the British Library, among others, is an exciting one. We will be following the WCP closely over the coming months.

Starting, naturally, with digital preservation: this is defined as a “series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary” (Digital Preservation Coalition, 2002). It’s best to consider the scope of digital preservation as much broader than digital archiving, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Because, in computing generally, “archiving” is the process of backup and offline storage of data, the term “digital preservation” helps avoid confusion when referring to the broader issues of managing digital materials and information in and about them.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is a consortium of many leading institutions working in the field, including The British Library and The National Archives. Its online handbook contains much excellent information (though its online format could be improved), and includes a useful glossary.

A third term, digital curation, has recently gained prominence. This places greater emphasis on the activities required to maintain the integrity of digital collections over time, and keep them usable. It promotes a pro-active approach to managing digital resources and the use of technological solutions, like web services, to address the problems that technology itself has created. It also paves the way for the emergence of “digital curators”, continually monitoring collections and intevening when necessary – a role analogous to their non-digital counterparts. The best source of information about digital curation is the Digital Curation Centre, based at Edinburgh University.

In the next part we’ll look at some of the key concepts in digital preservation, including migration, emulation, and life-cycle models for digital objects. This will help us identify some of the things we should be considering when trying to preserve web resources.

You don’t need to hear any more about me and SNEEP, but the other presentations offered interesting insights into work with Institutional and Learning Object repositories, thesauruses – and even a bit of Web 2.0 mashup.

Peter Kilcoyne from Worcester College of Technology demonstrated their JISC-funded Mr Cute project. This has developed a Moodle extension which considerably extends the functionality of the VLE as a repository of IMS Learning Object packages (hence the acronym: Moodle Repository Create Upload Tag Embed). Tangentially interesting (in the light of recent discussions chez nous) was seeing the way Peter’s institution has embedded Moodle in Sharepoint: a fiendishly simple but elegant way to make an open-source web app work more-or-less seamlessly with enterprise and admin systems (reminds me also we should revisit our plan to embed MediaWiki in Eprints). We also learned from Peter that Moodle now has an estimated 60% share of the VLE market in FE (according to a recent ILT Champions survey by Rob Englebright): a useful statistic to know.

Roger Greenhaigh from Harper Adams University College described the National Rural Knowledge Exchange, a resource centre for specialists in agriculture and related matters. With laudable aims of brokering joint projects, consultancy, events, reviews, bespoke training, lab and field trials, visiting speakers, graduate placements, etc., the system has nevertheless had to address a real need for simplicity in order to be of use to much of its target community. Roger described how a huge range of taxonomies was researched – from DEFRA to Dewey to business directories – in order to arrive at the best ways of arranging and classifying the information.

National Rural makes extensive and effective use of many powerful Web 2.0 tools, including RSS/Atom feeds, Google Maps and Flickr. It also tries, where possible, to shortcut established publishing cycles and schedules. The speed with which government organisations, in particular, release information, is not always conducive to timely dissemination: “what’s hot in pigs”, or up-to-the-minute information about avian flu, can’t wait weeks or months for DEFRA’s web publishing process to release it. This enlightened approach seems very reminiscent of the approach of mySociety and IdealGovernment that I described elsewhere.

I was pleased Michael Emly’s presentation reminded me about MIDESS, which was a wide-ranging and ambitious project researching many aspects of repository implementation. Of particular interest to us (in the light of PRIMO and TPYF) is its work on multimedia repositories and IPR issues.

MIDESS also experimented with using METS and OAI-PMH as metadata transmission standards: interesting to hear their conclusion that METS is too flexible to be readily usable. I’m reminded of our work with EAD, a format in which it is very easy to create metadata, but not so easy to reliably interpret others’ uses of it, unless an explicit subset is identified: MIDESS similarly concluded that there is a need for more work on application profiles. Michael also highlighted the issue that current platforms are lacking functionality for multimedia: how can we get that functionality built in?

John Robertson briefly told us about HILT , the High-Level Thesaurus project, unifying many classification schemes. A quick look at one of the HILT demo sites suggests it might be very useful, if ontology is your bag. Creating and maintaining such unions and cross-walks is not for the faint-hearted.

After my SNEEP spiel, Phil Barker explained how JORUM is now moving to a model of open access and deposit.

The closing discussion and questions and comments passim were all very constructive and thought-provoking, particularly regarding the differing expectations of repositories for Learning Objects and Scholarly Works. How real – for example – are the benefits of sharing LOs through an OAI-PMH type service? Sharing Learning Objects/Resources, it was convincingly suggested, is still likely to be hampered by a “why should I?” attitude, by fear of criticism, and by the commercially competitive environment in which many teaching institutions operate. Nevertheless, sharing aside, it’s clear that institutions need better control and management of their learning resources , and for this reason a repository-based approach – whether exo like JORUM or an IR, or intra like MR CUTE – is likely to be essential.

Finally it was a pleasure to meet other colleagues in the field, particularly Shirley Yearwood-Jackman from Liverpool University, who showed me their very nice looking Research Archive (using Eprints). They might be interested in SNEEP Comments too, though Shirley felt her contributors might like more control over which users or groups of users can comment. Although we’re close to having to button up SNEEP 1.0, Rory might have some bright ideas (he usually does).

Does this mean that OAI-PMH is a standard that’s had its day? Some commentators have gleefully rejoiced in the possible demise of the standard. However the discussion on Paul Walk’s blog is more balanced, lucid and informative, and covers well the many areas where OAI-PMH is more and less valuable. We shouldn’t forget that Google Sitemaps and OAI-PMH were created for different purposes, though both use XML, and inevitably there is potential overlap in their application.

NDAD has an OAI-PMH interface: I don’t know whether this has ever been of any use to anyone. NDAD’s holdings are markedly different from the majority of Open Access repositories running Eprints or DSpace (see ROAR for a full list).

Interesting what other things you learn too – for example, courtesy of a comment on Lorcan Dempsey’s blog, that “[t]here’s been an unofficial Google Sitemap hack for DSpace for half of forever. The funny thing was when its use was recommended to keep Google crawlers from crashing DSpace installs.” We have a running battle with Google crawlers triggering errors on our DSpace server, so this might be worth knowing when we start our next cycle of maintenance and upgrade.

A propos of how this affects Eprints, Tim Brody points out on Eprints-Tech:

You don’t need to change anything.

Sitemaps can be used to expose hard to find Web pages or to improve indexing by focusing the crawler at particular parts of the site. The EPrints 3 Web interface has already been designed with Google in mind and is fully compatible with their normal crawler without the need for sitemaps. That doesn’t preclude the addition of a sitemap to EPrints but it seems unnecessary at the moment.

(EPrints 3 has some Google-requested additions, EPrints 2 has much the same crawler-friendly interface)

One interesting aspect of this event is Google’s approach to the change:

In order to move forward with even better coverage of your websites, we have decided to support only the standard XML Sitemap format by May 2008. We are in the process of notifying sites using OAI-PMH to alert them of the change.

An interesting contrast to the more cavalier approach of Microsoft in its recent MS Office 2003 format debacle.

“And, oh, how they danced, the little children of Stonehenge, beneath the haunted moon, for fear that daybreak might come too soon.”

I don’t think I could begin to do justice in a few words to the wide-ranging debate at the JISC/BL/DPC Workshop on Significant Properties at the British Library on Monday: I’d rather leave it to others to analyse the significant outcomes in more detail, or to further discussions like the one started by Chris Rusbridge (our cucumber-cool chairman on the day) on the DCC Blog. Suffice it to say there was a sack of food for thought in all the presentations, and lots of opportunities to wonder “now why didn’t I think of that?”

I think the most enjoyable presentation was that of Cal Lee from UNC Chapel Hill, who managed to lift us with a few laughs about his work – with Microsoft Word file format specifications – just as we were beginning to flag at the end of a long day of considering many things from many angles. The Moving Images study also looks like it may have useful information for our deliberations on standards and formats for PRIMO. If I wasn’t so taken with the presentation on E-learning objects, that was chiefly because I gave it – a mind-bending task to give our account of not only Learning Objects but also Significant Properties in 15 mins. But the slides look nice on the DPC website. (All credit to Ed for the excellent diagrams.)

Neil Grindley and the rest of the JISC/DPC/BL organisers did well to run it so smoothly and facilitate the discussion, and it was a rare opportunity to catch Andrew Wilson on a flying visit to this hemisphere and hear his first hand account of NAA’s approaches and models. I can’t remember if I’ve been to the British Library Conference Centre before or not, but it is certainly an impressive space, and with super-slick AV facilities.

The conference was organised with gusto by Les Carr and the Southampton team, who kept things moving at a rapid pace, seemingly unphased by any of the inevitable challenges of staging an event like this for over 300 people. Encouragingly, as well as the usual crowd from western Europe and anglophone countries, other countries represented this time included Serbia, Ukraine and Sri Lanka.

One interesting innovation was using Crowdvine to create an online community of delgates, which proved very simple and effective. And of course there’s an Eprints repository of all the conference papers and proceedings.

My own presentation came in a plenary session on Tuesday morning which was a bit like a rerun of our Web 2.0 Pow-Wow in December. Ian Mulvany was there to talk about Connotea’s latest ideas (David Kane from Waterford Institute of Technology was on the bill too, but was unable to come); Daniel Alexander Smith effused about Rich Tags. In a few spare minutes at the end, Patrick McSweeney, one of Les’s 3rd year undergraduates, impressed everyone hugely with a spontaneous demonstration of a Flash-based Cover Flow visualiser he is developing for Eprints.

Sandwiched between Ian and Daniel, I shared my thirty-minute thoughts on the history of annotations, from Linnaeus and Carlyle, to Flickr and SNEEP. If you’d been there you would probably have seen something like this, and your notes might look a bit like this (unless you preferred to Twitter like this).

From the encouraging feedback I got afterwards, it looks like quite a few Eprints repositories, running or planned, will be interested in one or more of our SNEEP plugins – including our bonus “Easter Egg” Notes (private comments) feature, which Rory has already been working on, since it so inevitably falls out of developing the main Comments plugin. Hope also that Rory and I can touch base soon with Tim and Sebastien at Soton, and get their feedback on the Comments alpha.

There are too many other things I could report (all the usual themes, such as sustainability and interoperability, are well covered in the programme) but I’ll limit myself to some random things that caught my eye:

• Dave Millard’s refreshingly clear grasp of the issues around managing Learning Objects in his paper Towards an Open Repository of Teaching Resources.
• Licia Calvi’s expert usabilty evaluation of repository interfaces, that found them wanting in several critical areas.
• Julie Allinson’s poster for York’s Digital Library that sets a new standard for eye-catching OAIS advocacy.

OR09 will be in Atlanta.

I got fed up forgetting to make a note of some of the useful and interesting posts on Venetia's fridge, so here's a photo for future reference. Not quite sharp enough but maybe next time I’ll get closer. Could people please write bigger too, thanks.

It occurred to me that the blog is the perfect place to invite any passing readers to suggest other key readings, so if you know of any other recent, authoritative work in file formats, please leave a link in the comments box below.

Seems there have been attempts before to revive the market:

• http://www.chatsworthroade5.co.uk/
• http://www.myhackney.co.uk/hackney/arts-chatsworth-festival.htm

Good luck to it I say. If they need a matryoshka stall, we’ll be there.

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Now playing: Natacha Atlas – Iskanderia (Atlas Zamalek)
via FoxyTunes

I was pleased I decided to take LF out for his constitutional this morning, miserable weather notwithstanding. First I saw this unusually adorned house in Rushmore, presumably the Easter Bunny’s place, maybe he’d thrown a big carrot cake party last night?

Then, a little further on, by the junction with Elderfield, I met one of them old fellas, you know, the ones with hats. I wonder if I’ll start wearing a trilby when I’m a grandad? Both my grandads were adept at hat wearing – James Nicholas never went out without one.

“Lovely day,” I said, without I hope too much of the obligatory English irony… a typical phatic opening in these climes. “That’s how every day is,” he said with a grin that was slightly eerie. This was a bit too optimistic for me. “Some days are wetter than others,” I said, sticking to my downbeat guns. He glanced up gingerly at the big wet sky, and, after a brief pause, said, “True.”

I was pleased we had achieved a compromise so quickly and easily. In another part of the world such a difference of opinion could have been the Sarajevo spark leading to generations of internecine feuding.

And yet perhaps he was right after all, I thought as I walked on. Maybe every day is lovely. True I was cold and wet, but what is a little dampness compared with the delights of having our lovely little fellow to push around – and fast asleep to boot; and I had just listened to all ten minutes of Metronomic Underground on the Ipod during my stroll round the park.

Then I walked on to Chatsworth Road, along by the scene of Friday’s shooting – all cleared away now. Chatsworth Road will never be the Thames at Datchet, but it has its own charms.

And when I finally reached shelter and hot coffee, on Venetia’s Ipod: I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in…

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Now playing: Stereolab – Metronomic Underground
via FoxyTunes

At first I thought it was Venetia’s – an unlikely venue for a bit of ultra-violence – but then realised it was the next corner down, by Dunlace I think.

Surprisingly few rubber-necks around to ask what it was all about, so I kept walking. At the corner of Blurton, a couple of coppers I think I recognised from the SNT. They wouldn’t tell me much, except that someone had been assaulted. Were they badly hurt, I asked? You could say that, one of them said, with the hint of a wink: so I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a fatality on our hands. Was it gang stuff, or passers-by, I asked. Put it this way, the policeman said, I don’t think they were innocent bystanders.

I figured that was as much as I needed to know and mooched on home. Wish I’d got a picture now.

I wondered if I’d find out about it online, but no such luck, Hackney Gazette’s a waste of time as usual. Did hit on some local blogs, like the Clapton Pond Blog and will follow them up. But still no news on tonight’s Showdown at the Chatsworth Coral.

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Now playing: Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse – Encore
via FoxyTunes

We’ve completed functional specifications for the Comments, Bookmarking and Tagging plugins. These describe the minimum functionality we expect from the plugins, and provide a meaningful benchmark to test the finished products against. As usual I’d welcome any comments and suggestions, either here or on the Wiki discussion pages.

Also, the Interim Report on the project has been signed off by Andy at JISC. We’re expecting that the project will overrun its original completion date by about 4-6 weeks, which means that we probably won’t have a finished product ready in time for OR08. Mind you I’ve seen enough projects not-quite launched at conferences (no names!) to think this is probably not exceptional.

Oh, and a bit of messing around with the Gimp finally yielded a logo I can live with.

To Westminster yesterday for the Gov 2.0 event organised by OII and POST, held at Portcullis House. (I’d love to have taken my own photos to include, but everywhere I turned there were “No photography” signs, and you know how I hate to break rules.)

The event was in two parts: on reflection I could happily have skipped the first session, in which several erudite professors raked over the well-trodden ashes of government IT disasters. All a bit superficial, really, and little, if anything, that wasn’t just as true 10 or 20 years ago, or that you won’t hear about on any decent project management course. But some of it may still have been news to the Whitehall and BCS elite present.

What I came for really was the second-half, chaired by the charming Earl of Erroll, and which seemed to be where the real meat of “Gov 2.0″ lay.

Jerry Fishenden from Microsoft UK kicked off, describing a typically Microsoft vision of Web 2.0 – that is to say, one that reinterprets the zeitgeist to ensure there’s a shrinkwrapped Microsoft solution to meet the needs of even the most befuddled IT director. In this version of the brave new world, Google doesn’t even get a mention, and we must unreeducate ourselves to say “Internet” not “Web”: presumably Tim O’Reilly’s seminal definition of Web 2.0 – “the Web as platform” – is literatura non grata in the MS empire.

Beginning with an inspirational quote from W. H. Gates III, the presentation went on to illustrate how a young offender might come to a bad end as a result of falling through the cracks between the disjoint systems of education, social, health and justice authorities. If only (Jerry insinuated) they’d had Microsoft’s vision of Internet joinedupness, that poor soul might have been saved. I winced when I saw this, and was glad, later, when one audience member, working in this sensitive area, rightly took him to task.

The best was kept for last: William Heath from IdealGovernment.com, and Tom Steinberg from mySociety.org each in their own way delivered compelling indictments of many of the approaches (laborious systems architecture and project management, inviolable specifications, long and expensive development cycles) venerated in the first session.

William Heath whirled away in a delightfully impassioned exposé of the problems with the traditional approach and the systems it has given us. Government IT systems (and their operators) seem to revel in “a culture of assertive non-listening and spin” leading us up the garden path to the point where “the computer says ‘no’” and officials can wash their hands of the problem. In essence, no one seems to care, listen or ask what we (customers, patients, taxpayers) actually want. Notwithstanding all that painstaking planning with PRINCE, OGC Gateway, and everything that went before, government has failed to lay the foundations of trust in its technological competence, not least in relation to data security.

Meanwhile real people with real needs struggle to get the right information at the right time, and feel as if they have to wring it out of government systems and literature. They have to become ad hoc, amateur experts in the regulations and systems they need to sort out their own lives and the lives of their families – which makes you wonder what we are paying officials for. Can there be anyone who’s wrestled with health, welfare, education, tax or any other government system – online or off – who doesn’t recognise the scenario?

Tom Steinberg went further still: “stop building big projects”, and on the evidence of his own successful projects (mysociety.org, theyworkforyou.com, writetothem.com, fixmystreet.com, planningalerts.com) – some independent, others sponsored by government departments for a tiny fraction of what, say, ID cards are going to cost us – it was hard to argue. Tom also developed the No 10 petition system.

You’ll clearly find Tom in the bazaar, developing rapidly and agilely, while others are laboriously designing their expensive cathedrals. Tom’s philosophy is “just go and do it”, and the best way to do it: see what’s already there, and harness existing functionality effectively (fixmystreet.com, for example, simply uses email to send reports to your local council). Small pieces loosely joined, and all that.

Does any of this have any bearing on us and our projects? I think it does. Tom is an advocate of intelligent reuse and repurposing of data, and his pièce de resistance was a demonstration of mySociety’s latest work on Travel-time maps, which merges house price information (from Land Registry, I assume) with transport information (from TfL’s Journey Planner) and overlays it on a map of London (from OpenStreetMap.org). Using a simple graphic tool, you can quickly see how long your journey to work’s going to take, depending on where you can afford to live, and vice versa.

As with Gapminder, this kind of visualisation is a really exciting, immediate, and meaningful application of statistical and geographical data. Wouldn’t it be great if we could see TNA promoting the reuse of NDAD datasets in a similar way? Why is it always Magna Carta and the Domesday Book that get the sexy expos? Mapping/GIS data and apps are getting cheaper, and NDAD’s many geographical datasets could take on a new life if we could at last give them the map-based interface they’ve always lacked.

So, if you’ve read this far: can you suggest any datasets in NDAD and/or UKDA that, separately or together, might reveal some interesting trends, or look good on a map or graph? Could info in Schools’ Census and Crime Statistics, for example, tell us something new when plotted together, or on a map? Suggestions in the Comments box below, please!

Lethal
Vertical
Tactical
Cruel
True
Total
Dangerous
Basic
Fatal
Maximum
Deep
Extreme
Active
Permanent
Desert
Last
Raw
Final
Double
Dark
Quantum
Deadly

Weapon
Limit
Assault
Justice
Stakes
Lies
Recall
Intent
Liaison
Instinct
Attraction
Impact
Threat
Indemnity
Traffic
Vacation
Thunder
Obsession
Submission
Element
Beauty
Resort
Conflict
Angels
Attack
Sport
Hostage

(If I can remember enough Javascript, I’ll add a randomiser one day.)

Ben, John, Chris, David, Joss, Ian, Sebastien, Les, Nina, Steve and Tim discussing the social side of repositories.

After lunch we had fascinating demos of, and discussions around, Southampton’s Rich Tags/mSpace, Nature’s Connotea, and our own progress to-date on SNEEP. Rory’s presentation was impressively clear and confident, given that we hadn’t actually prepared anything, and had to hijack Ian Mulvany’s laptop (thanks Ian). Having missed a chance to see it in action in Bristol, it was great to see a live demo of RichTags, which is a very impressive visualisation tool (the sort of thing that, like Gapminder, can totally change one’s ideas about data and metadata – check out the mSpace movies).

Trying to take in all permutations and implications of Web 2.0 is to risk an overload of total perspective vortex magnitude, so I’ll mostly restrict the rest of my thoughts to SNEEP’s and my own interests, and look forward to reading elsewhere how others interpreted the conversation. (There’s a section at the Eprints Wiki.)

It seems to me that one of the most important things we can achieve is to maximise the degree to which Eprints is susceptible to Social Networking. That may be in an “exo” way – (Rich Tags, Del.icio.us, CiteULike, Connotea, etc.) or from within the repository, a la SNEEP. But I’m reassured that, even within its modest scope, SNEEP has a part to play (and isn’t likely to be superseded by anything in EPrints 3.1). How it’s, in the end, used, remains to be seen. Web 2.0 Social Networking is what-you-make-of-it: some things fly, some flutter, others sink without trace (so long Eduspaces!), nevertheless it’s amazing what can be achieved with a few RSS or Atom feeds.

Apropos Bookmarking – as we’ve seen, it has many behaviours in common with Eprints search results. Good advice from Chris on reusing the Saved Search export functionality.

Commenting: Joss was right about the need to put on a little more style. Rory’s promised to embed plenty of CSS hooks, and it might be worth having a less skeletal default, based on standard Eprints livery.

Tagging implementation has some overlap with the Bookmarking, as Rory has already identified. We should also ensure if possible that SNEEP tags play nicely with Rich Tags (or at least are no more than an XSLT template away). Rory’s posted elsewhere his ideas on tagging: worth noting also that WordPress 2.3 seems to have a competent implementation of tagging (you’re looking at it!)

Of the other discussions, I’m particularly keen to follow up David Millard’s work on Learning Object repositories, with both my other projects and my E-learning studies in mind.

But I still haven’t got to the bottom of why some Web 2.0 sites grab me (Del.icio.us, LibraryThing, CiteULike…) and others don’t (BlueDot, Connotea). Not that Connotea’s not impressive: perhaps it is simply, as Ian Mulvany explained, that the strength of its “community” has a strong affinity with Nature’s readership – other SN sites are stronger in social sciences and humanities. Ian also confirmed that Connotea does not support the “save personal copy” feature, in the way CiteULike does: this is a deal-breaker for me, as I’ve found it invaluable to have quick and easy access to my MSc reading list from anywhere – work, home, laptop, desktop. In fact anything that didn’t make it to my CiteULike bookmarks probably didn’t get read!

The agenda is flexible. This is an informal event, but it would help if anyone wishing to come could notify Richard Davis or Les Carr . A list of expected attendess is being maintained here: http://tinyurl.com/36sc9r

We’re extremely grateful to the London Knowledge Labs (Institute of Education/Birkbeck) for letting us use their excellent facilities in Holborn for this event.

EPrints Web 2.0 Pow-wow

December 13th 2007, 10:30 – 17:30
London

Agenda

Before lunch:

• Who we are, what projects we represent.
• What do we understand by “Web 2.0″?
• What do we want Web 2.0 to do for our repositories?
• What progress have we made so far?

Lunch arrangements TBC.

After lunch:

• A look at EPrints:
• What’s the easiest way to achieve our goals
• Overlaps between our projects & activities
• Co-ordinating activities and sharing outcomes

Followed by a chance to network further at a nearby hostelry.

Location

London Knowledge Labs
23-29 Emerald Street
London WC1N 3QS
http://www.lkl.ac.uk

LKL travel info: http://tinyurl.com/ywmsvc

Contact

Richard Davis, ULCC
r.davis@ulcc.ac.uk 020 7692 1350

Les Carr, Southampton University
lac@soton.ac.uk

This shop is just for Christmas.

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Now playing: Alan Parsons Project – Light of the World
via FoxyTunes

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Now playing: The Cramps – Don’t Eat Stuff Off The Sidewalk
via FoxyTunes

Someone had a bit of trouble with their hill start.

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Now playing: The Stairs – Weed Bus
via FoxyTunes

A roberty kind of Scrabble problem down the Eclipse with Miles.

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Now playing: Yo La Tengo – Cast a Shadow
via FoxyTunes

The words of the great Victorian poet, Walter Gabriel, about his first visit to Chatsworth Road….

And here it is, Your Village:

At the Society’s headquarters in Piccadilly, Julia Hoare, Linnean Society’s Project Manager for the extensive digitisation project, delivered a consummate and well-received demonstration to a colloquium of orchid specialists. This event is being treated as a “soft launch”, and feedback is being sought from this small community initially, before the system gets a full public launch in December.

The system uses Eprints to manage access to the objects and their metadata. The Herbarium can be browsed according to Linnaeus’s own binomial, Latin system, or searched across all the supplied metadata fields, including genus, species, collector and location.

Eprints takes care of searching and arrangment, as well as user registration and management. A commercial image viewing system, FSI Viewer/Erez, has been used to provide a high-definition zoom function for viewing the images.

Rory has added two features to Eprints to meet the Linnean Society’s requirements: a plugin for bookmarking objects, and another for registered users to add comments. We will be further developing these as part of the JISC-funded SNEEP project, and ultimately release them as open source extensions for Eprints.

Other collections from the Linnean Society will follow and be added to the repository. These include shells, insects and fish, as well as letters and portraits in the Society’s possession. The eventual size of the online archive is estimated to be several (check) Terabytes.

Debate at the launch ranged over many issues. The submission workflow in particular is something that some potential contributors are concerned about, and we expect this can be simplified and streamlined. However, the two areas that add the greatest complexity to the process – the mechanical and performing rights requirements pf MCPS/PRS, and the PRIMO peer-review process – may not yield to much more simplification.

The repository is now in a pilot phase, with 6 selected submissions. It will be further developed in time for a beta version next Spring (April/May, realistically). In the meantime will continue to develop documentation and identify improvements on the project pages of the PRIMO wiki.

DSUG can be a slightly tense affair, since it must address the expectations of both technical and non-technical staff engaged with repositories. Interesting as I found Federico Meschini’s demonstration of managing the DSpace code base using Eclipse and Maven, I think many librarians attending found this “basic” tutorial beyond them. The slightly aspirational tendencies of several discussions can also be a little frustrating. It’s interesting to know what’s planned for version 1.6 and 2.0 of DSpace, but since 1.5 has yet to be released, this can seem like pie in the sky.

Stefania had asked me to contribute a short presentation on SAS-Space for a session of case-studies of DSpace instances. The brief case-study I presented was rather less than earth-shattering, and my plans to show a little more of it than the front page were scuppered by the FAO firewall. But there’s only so much you can say in 10 minutes: I hope I was at least competent. What seemed to provoke the most interest, in later discussion with other delegates, was the fact that we haven’t restricted repository content to peer-reviewed articles, theses, and dissertations. This probably never seemed at all surprising to me, after so many years of association with a dataset archive. Things like the Masefield bibliography, London Book Trades database and 19th Century Francophone Music Criticism transcriptions are equally valuable scholarly works, in my opinion, and worthy of preserving and publishing in an Institutional Repository.

Interest was also expressed in the idea of using a wiki to manage the documentation associated with the SAS-Space Repository – policy, user guide, and such like. I’m not sure I didn’t borrow the idea from another IR, but, all the same, it still seems like a good idea to me! (Down with websites and CMS!) What I’d most like to do is integrate the wiki content a bit better with the DSpace pages/templates. I’ve been unsure how this might easily be done, but now I’ve seen Manakin…

Scott Philips’s demonstration of Manakin was particularly interesting to me, as Manakin uses an XML/XSLT approach to rendering repository metadata that has a lot of similarities to the approach I developed a few years ago for generating NDAD catalogues (albeit with a Perl backend, where Manakin, of course, uses Java).

Manakin offers a three-tier abstraction model:

• Aspect Tier: This is the Java/Cocoon backend that assembles a METS-based XML document from the repository database.
• Theme Tier: XSLT is used to transform the raw XML into an XHTML document
• Style Tier: CSS styles the XHTML document

This means that no intervention in the Java source is necessary for any modifications that can be addressed in the Theme or Style tiers. For example, adding the logo of the institution to which the item belongs to the Search Results view can be achieved by adding some simple templates to the default XSLT templates. The Texas Digital Library is running entirely with a Manakin-based UI, and very nice it is too.

One other particularly interesting presentation and discussion I hope to follow up is Federico Meschini’s work on unifying a DSpace repository with a Learning Object repository. This involves establishing mappings between Dublin Core and LOM metadata schemas – something that may be of interest to us for work the ongoing SPELOS report.

I was also interested to find out more about CASPUR, with which Federico and the conference organisers are associated: it is what remains of the consortium that operated supercomputers for the Italian academic sector. Sound familiar?

I enjoyed the chance to chat to Robert Tansley, one of the people behind both Eprints and Dspace, who’s obviously a very sharp and clever guy. Rob’s now moved from MIT to Google, where he’s working on hush-hush research projects, but continues with DSpace/Google Scholar-related work as part of his side projects. We both agreed that, thanks in part to work on DSpace, Eprints, and their ilk, and the many standards and developments they embody and build on, the technical problems of managing and preserving most common types of digital documents seem largely solved. Rob talked of his interest in new approaches to visualising data, relationships and the like (notable Gapminder)and seemed genuinely interested when I suggested that the NDAD dataset archive might contain some material worth experimenting on. I’ll be dropping him a line, and a link, in the near future.

There were plenty of opportunities to chat informally with other repository users and developers, during lunch and the Google-sponsored evening reception, and at the conference dinner. At �150 for the whole conference package, it’s hard to imagine better value: Imma, Paola, Stefania and others did a fantastic job. The organisers also designated a unique tag, dspacerome2007, for sharing online resources from the course, including photos in Flickr and links in del.icio.us (just as we had done for photos of the Bergen meeting last year). And I’d barely even touched down when I found I’d been blogged in Italian…

DSUG can be a slightly tense affair, since it must address the expectations of both technical and non-technical staff engaged with repositories. Interesting as I found Federico Meschini’s demonstration of managing the DSpace code base using Eclipse and Maven, I think many librarians attending found this “basic” tutorial beyond them. The slightly aspirational tendencies of several discussions can also be a little frustrating. It’s interesting to know what’s planned for version 1.6 and 2.0 of DSpace, but since 1.5 has yet to be released, this can seem like pie in the sky.

Stefania Arabito (University of Trieste) had asked me to contribute a short presentation on SAS-Space for a session of case-studies of DSpace instances. The brief paper I presented was rather less than earth-shattering, and my plans to show a little more of it than the front page were scuppered by the FAO firewall. But there’s only so much you can say in 10 minutes: I hope I was at least competent. What seemed to provoke the most interest, in later discussion with other delegates, was the fact that we haven’t restricted repository content to peer-reviewed articles, theses, and dissertations. This probably never seemed at all surprising to me, after so many years of association with a dataset archive. Things like the Masefield bibliography, London Book Trades database and 19th Century Francophone Music Criticism transcriptions are equally valuable scholarly works, in my opinion, and worthy of preservation and publishing in an Institutional Repository.

Interest was also expressed in the idea of using a wiki to manage the documentation associated with the SAS-Space Repository – policy, user guide, and such like. I’m not sure I didn’t borrow the idea from another IR, but, all the same, it still seems like a good idea to me. What I’d most like to do is integrate the wiki content a bit better with the DSpace pages/templates. I’ve been unsure how to do this, but now I’ve seen Manakin…

Scott Philips’s demonstration of Manakin was particularly interesting to me, as Manakin uses an XML/XSLT approach to rendering repository metadata that has a lot of similarities to the approach I developed a few years ago for generating NDAD catalogues (albeit with a Perl backend, where Manakin, of course, uses Java).

Manakin offers a three-tier abstraction model:

• Aspect Tier: This is the Java/Cocoon backend that assembles a METS-based XML document from the repository database.
• Theme Tier: XSLT is used to transform the raw XML into an XHTML document
• Style Tier: CSS styles the XHTML document

This means that no intervention in the Java source is necessary for any modifications that can be addressed in the Theme or Style tiers. For example, adding the logo of the institution to which the item belongs to the Search Results view can be achieved by adding some simple templates to the default XSLT templates. The Texas Digital Library is running entirely with a Manakin-based UI, and very nice it is too.

One other particularly interesting presentation and discussion I hope to follow up is Federico Meschini’s work on unifying a DSpace repository with a Learning Object repository. This involves establishing mappings between Dublin Core and LOM metadata schemas – something that may be of interest to us for work the ongoing SPELOS report.

I was also interested to find out more about CASPUR, with which Federico and the conference organisers are associated: it is what remains of the consortium that operated supercomputers for the Italian academic sector. Sound familiar?
I enjoyed the chance to chat to Robert Tansley, one of the people behind both Eprints and Dspace, who’s obviously a very sharp and clever guy. Rob’s now moved from MIT to Google, where he’s working on hush-hush research projects, but continues with DSpace/Google Scholar-related work as part of his side projects. We both agreed that, thanks in part to work on DSpace, Eprints, and their ilk, and the many standards and developments they embody and build on, the technical problems of managing and preserving most common types of digital documents seem largely solved. Rob talked of his interest in new approaches to visualising data, relationships and the like (notable Gapminder)and seemed genuinely interested when I suggested that the NDAD dataset archive might contain some material worth experimenting on. I’ll be dropping him a line, and a link, in the near future.

There were plenty of opportunities to chat informally with other repository users and developers, during lunch and the Google-sponsored evening reception, and at the conference dinner. At €150 for the whole conference package, it’s hard to imagine better value: Imma, Paola, Stefania and others did a fantastic job. The organisers also designated a unique tag, dspacerome2007, for sharing online resources from the course, including photos in Flickr and links in del.icio.us (just as we had done for photos of the Bergen meeting last year). And I’d barely even touched down when I found I’d been blogged in Italian…

Photos by Graham Triggs and others on Flickr

I followed up a link to his blog at and about CETIS http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/sam/2006/09/14/fitting-ldap-to-wordpress-mu/. Since he has set up both Mediawiki and WordPress for CETIS he could be a useful person to know!

I followed on from Zoe’s demonstration of SAS-Space. Also presenting during our session was Ed King from BL, who had a fascinating account of the 19th Century newspaper digitisation project, soon to go live. Will try to find links.

Thanks Gareth for alerting us to the Guardian story of Burton’s chic (sic) T-shirt with its trendy design proclaiming “Очистим Русь от всех нерусских!”. The store’s buyers were told that this translated loosely as “Be proud of Russia”.

Sometimes, of course, loose translations aren’t good enough. A better translation might be: “Let’s cleanse Russia of all non-Russians”.

If you want one alas it’s too late: they’ve been withdrawn from sale. Burton’s buyers will spend the weekend writing out 100 times: “My hovercraft is full of eels”.

I haven’t captured the images for them all as they’re pretty dull specimens (for one thing the “Broadway” acetate labels aren’t as special as the “Savile Row” labels), but you can see them for a limited time here.

Every now and again, though, somewhere in the blogiverse, a post, or a discussion arising from a post, does seem to make it all worthwhile, and an example of one such discussion is below.

It’s from the Sydney Morning Herald, and began with a post about Bob Geldof’s 2006 concert in Milan, which was called off after only 45 people turned up to a 12000 seater venue.

The conversation initially sticks close to its subject, but before long a personal battle ensues between “onanist”, “Les Miserable” and “Uncle Pervy”. The debate manages to convey a convincingly Australian flavour – culturally sophisticated one minute, abusive and menacing the next. It also demonstrates quite effectively why online netiquette recommends extreme caution when criticising someone else’s spelling – if only because, in doing so, you will almost inevitably commit an even worse orthographical blunder yourself.

Here is the last part of the discussion, copied verbatim from the Sydney Morning Herald website.

Schadenfreude is an ugly spectacle,
bloggers. Why do we like to pillory self-righteous do-gooders? What are
the alternatives to them – the hugely apathetic masses, or at the other
extreme, terrorists and criminals, that’s who.

Get off St Bob and Bono’s backs. It’s
very hard sustaining a career in entertainment over 30 years. Geldoff
is having a go, and he is passionate about the things he believes in,
which at the minimum do no harm to others and might possibly do some
good. How many of us can say that?

Posted by: onanist at July 25, 2006
5:27 PM

What’s the point of pilloring the apathetic masses ?? They don’t
give a
fig.
Pillory a criminal/terrorist and you end up getting run over by a bus
in the shower.
Too dangerouus.
Self-righteous do-gooders are a much softer target; resume firing…

Posted by: fiskers at July 25, 2006 5:40 PM

Especially when they’re as up themselves as “Sir” Bob Gelding. I
reckon
he topped Hutchence, by the way. Not many people know this but INXS
were about to release a cover of “I don’t like f**king Mondays” when
poor old Mick bought the farm.

Posted by: les miserable at July 25, 2006 8:15 PM

I suppose Fiskers is right – any appeal to principle on a blog
like
this is a waste of finger effort. Blogs such as this are for the bored
to respond to the under-employed about the boring for meagre mutual
gratification. Actually, rarely mutual, usually solitary. There is no
principle involved, very little point and certainly no meaningful
wisdom or understanding is ever imparted. All in all a worthwhile
exercise and probably typical of the zeitgeist.

Posted by: onanist at July 25, 2006 9:04 PM

“Onanist” means “wanker” does it not?

Posted by: les miserable at July 26, 2006 3:04 AM

Did you swallow a German psychology textbook…

Posted by: fiskers at July 26, 2006 8:44 AM

I remember reading somewhere that the Irish govt gives huge tax
breaks
to Irish artists who make it big in the world.

As far as I know, Bono lives on some tax free haven of an island
and
doesn’t pay tax in Ireland, so where’s the benefit to his home
country’s coffers? And he preaches about giving to the needy. Pfuuhhh!

As for Geldof, how on earth does he make any money anyway? Surely
the
royalties from his one hit wonder couldn’t be supporting him so well?

Posted by: Killer Bees at July 26, 2006 10:31 AM

No, fisker, I just read Freud while sitting in the shade. Freud
-in-shade, geddit. Oh, and Les miserables, well observed, great
contribution.

Posted by: onanist at July 26, 2006 12:43 PM

Champagne comedy, Sheisskopf…

Posted by: von fiskers at July 26, 2006 2:00 PM

That’s “Miserable”. Get it right. I’m related to Les Patterson,
the
Cultural Attaché. Geddit wanker?

Posted by: les miserable at July 26, 2006 3:10 PM

That’s Scheissekopf, mit e, you dummkopf…………..

Posted by: Onkel Pervy at July 26, 2006 4:24 PM

Les, perhaps that should be mirable, not miserable, as in c’est un
mirable that the wonders of modern technology allow you & me such
easy communication of such little consequence. And fiskers, are you
being free with deutch abuse just because I misplaced your ‘s’? If so,
beware of launching an ill-advised attack operation Barbarossa style.

Posted by: onanist at July 26, 2006 8:02 PM

I presume you mean “miracle” Mr Wanker. Never heard of “mirable”.
But
you’re right about “little consequence” – don’t know why I bother
really.

Posted by: les miserable at July 27, 2006 3:09 AM

Les – no, I meant ‘mirable’ as in ‘quel mirable’. From the online
dictionary: ‘Mi´ra`ble
a. 1. Wonderful; admirable.’

“don’t know why I bother” – I couldn’t tell that you did.

Posted by: onanist at July 27, 2006 1:44 PM

Neither do we really, ever thought of using your shining dome as a
chock for an 18 wheeler????

Posted by: Uncle Pervy at July 27, 2006 3:36 PM

No but I’d consider using it to do a Zidane on you, you moron.
(Pervy
is still pissed off that I barred him from my blog for inappropriate
comments)

Posted by: Les Miserable at July 27, 2006 6:18 PM

No I’m not, I couldn’t give a toss about your blog.

If I wanted to come back I’d grovel accordingly or at least go to
another PC and plaster your, sleep inducing electronic gallery of
buffoonery, with links to “inappropriate web sites”.

You middle aged windbag.

Posted by: Uncle Pervy at July 28, 2006 7:57 AM

Well now viewers…that’s a funny thing isn’t it. Moron here is in
his
mid-forties and delights in making disgusting comments about teenage
girls. But I don’t suppose Radar will run this. Good thing too. Just
encourages him. The poor, sad lonely little pervert with no life and a
damaged date.

Posted by: Les Miserable at July 28, 2006 3:30 PM

I learned my trade from you Malkie, you twisted little oaf.

Your main problem is, I got their before you!!!

And make that 50 years old thanks.

PS: the date’s getting better, but not quickly enough for me.

Posted by: Uncle Pervy at July 28, 2006 4:12 PM

(Whispering so everyone but Malkie can hear)

Don’t be too concerned by Malkie’s outburst folks, people who grew
up
at “THAT” end of The Peninsular always tend to be a bit hysterical.

Just humour him and he’ll settle down soon enough.

Posted by: Uncle Pervy at July 28, 2006 4:50 PM

If you were a local (as you claim) you’d know it’s spelt
“peninsula”,
moron.

Posted by: Les Miserable at July 28, 2006 6:01 PM

Got the ‘insular’ part right though.

Posted by: Blondie at July 31, 2006 2:25 PM

You spotted my deliberate error Malkie, well done.

I will send you your prize, an autographed CD of Smokey Dawson’s
and
Kamahl’s “Inspired Duets, Live at Mona Vale RSL”.

Posted by: Uncle Pervy at July 31, 2006 3:18 PM

Here’s a shovel – see if you can dig yourself an even deeper hole.
And
flick the correspondence lessons in comedy – they aren’t working -
you’re about as funny as a fart in a Fanta bottle.

Posted by: Les Miserable at July 31, 2006 7:16 PM

Sorry Mal, I’ve heard it referred to as the Peninsular too. Same
as
with the Shire – the Insular Penisular…

Posted by: actonb at August 1, 2006 9:34 AM

Yeah so there, stick that in your escargot shell and smoke
it…………. NYAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: Uncle Pervy at August 1, 2006 12:24 PM

Nic, I presume you mean “peninsular” not “PENISULAR”.

You may have heard it referred to as the “peninsular” but that
doesn’t
make it right, does it? I note that Hutchinson’s online dictionary says
that “peninsula” is the noun and “peninsular” is the adjective.
But…you know…like…whatever. Let’s just settle on “PENISULAR”. As
in “Uncle Pervy comes from the Penisular”.

Posted by: Les Miserable at August 1, 2006 4:15 PM

Works for me Les!!

In fact I was constantly being complimented along those lines,
everyone
used to tell me “Pervy, you have the biggest dick on the Peninsula”.

No wait, that’s not what they said, I remember now, it was “Pervy,
you
are the biggest dick on the Pen…”.

Hang on…………THAT’S NOT A COMPLIMENT!!!

Posted by: Uncle Pervy at August 2, 2006 8:32 AM

Finally…the sun shines through his freckle.

Posted by: Les Miserable at August 2, 2006 3:47 PM

I’ve known that for years Les, though it must be a disappointment
for
you to have to admit that sun doesn’t shine out of yours.

Posted by: Uncle Pervy at August 2, 2006 4:24 PM

ROFL not…now back to our programme…did you know Bob Geldof has
only
an honorary knighthood from the Queen? And as he’s not a citizen of a
Commonwealth realm he’s precluded from using the title ‘Sir’.
And…and…”I don’t like effing Mondays” wasn’t the Boomtown Rats
first #1 Hit – “Rat Pack” was.

Posted by: Les Miserable at August 2, 2006 8:15 PM

And so what’s this we have here? R6015, Let ‘Em In by Wings, on Apple?!

It’s an Irish mispressing – nothing more to it than that, alas – just a tiny glimpse of what might have been. Someone’s flogging it on Ebay right now, and surely going to do rather nicely out of it (Record Collector have, elsewhere, claimed it’s one of McCartney’s rarest singles).

Seems a shame Jacob’s Ladder didn’t do better, back in the Autumn of 1970: as I’ve commented elsewhere, there was a lot of spritual stuff going down, from Spirit In The Sky to Let It Be to Hare Krishna – to name but a few. Jacob’s Ladder is a very fine bit of punchy soul. However, for me, the standout track on Doris’s Apple album is still her thundering version of Buffalo Springfield’s Special Care: interesting to see how, playing the song live in 1974, Stephen Stills sticks closer to Doris’s rendition, than the slower and more bluesy original on Last Time Around.

Not much in it for me, language wise, as I continue to plough that rut between knowing the basics and being able to say anything very sophisticated or useful (or grammatically correct). But a really nice example of samizdat pedagogy riding the technological zeitgeist: the tone is considered and authoritative, and strikes just the right friendly note.

But my Mum’s long struggles with Russian language are on a much grander scale: I’ll definitely be recommending Spoonful to her, just as soon as she gets broadband. (Mum, sort out broadband, please!)

Subject: Elpub2007 Open for Registration
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:15:31 +0000
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

Registration is now open for the 11th International Conference on Electronic Publishing, hosted by the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, 13-15 June 2007.

I was quite excited for a moment, there, by the prospect of El Pub 2007 – my first thought was that it must be a beer festival in Spain.

1. Put things away carefully. Check them thoroughly and clean them up, if necessary, before filing them in a sensible place, in a sensible order.
2. Look at them once in a while. Take them out, dust them off, love them, understand them. If they are a bit tatty, repair them. If they are fading, make a copy. Then put them away again, carefully.

I think that’s the sum of what I’ve learned in 10 years in the Prez Biz: the best way to ensure anything is properly preserved is to follow the Two Commandments. Even a decade of high faluting deep thought about the special problems of managing digital data over the long term, hasn’t produced any results that don’t essentially boil down to one or both of the commandments.

So, next time you lose something, or find it broken, ask yourself if you’ve followed these two simple rules!

Wow, a pictorial history of mousetraps. Evidently, disappointingly, it wasn’t anything like the Little Nipper that Hamlet had in mind: maybe something more like these “humane” basket type traps.

I was pleased, in my little web digression on the subject, to discover the ongoing online wikified version of Samuel Pepys’ diary, and learn that the great man himself, 346 years ago this very week, “bought two mouse traps of Thomas Pepys“.

The Pepys diary project is ongoing, with entries added on the corresponding date. You can even subscribe to the RSS feed to keep bang up-to-date with latest news 343 years ago!

One thing I didn’t manage to do in time was follow up my idea to try including citations automatically and dynamically from Del.icio.us and Cite-U-Like, using the copy of RSS2HTML that I’ve got installed here. I haven’t cracked it completely, not well enough to completely meet the citation format requirements, but below is an example of what we can do, using an Inline Frame (Iframe) which links to an instance of RSS2HTML, and dynamically transforms the RSS feeds into HTML

Unfortunately, unlike TiddlyWiki, WordPress doesn’t seem to have an issue with more than one Iframe in a post, so here are separate links to output examples from Del.icio.us and Cite-U-Like.

[Wed Dec 06 19:28:50 2006]

Why have Country settings in my profile changed from “UK” to “Cote d’Ivoire”?

We updated our country list and broke down the UK into individual countries. You can now select “England” or whatever country you prefer under the Edit My Profile option. Sorry for the confusion and the inconvenience. Please let me know if you have any further issues or concerns.

Thanks for contacting Facebook

Thanks. Surprised not to be notified by some means, other than reading my profile, and finding out I’ve moved to Africa! Surprised also you chose this way to break the country (UK) up. In international applications, I find the widely-accepted standard is usually UK as top level – as in National TLDs, ISO 3166. Country-of-UK can easily be expressed as a defined region, analagous with US state. I’m English, though my descent is also Welsh and Irish. I work at a London university, and study a distance course at Edinburgh University. Until some decison is taken in any part of the UK to change it, UK works for me.

Cheers

PS. See from a quick search that the Cote D’Ivoire population has swelled enormously at Faceboo.

The legend of Mahir continues at ikissyou.org/ (currently looking pretty much as it did when he started). Borat has taken the basic idea to new technical heights at Myspace, with extensive use of YouTube. But who came first? Borat, or Mahir? Mahir, or Borat? (Now I’m starting to sound like our other Millenial TV favourite, Banzai!)

Is there any great point in the neverending quest for didfirstery? In a globally connected world – one that is, moreover, increasingly, cumulatively and automatically archived – we may have to rethink ideas about originality, across space and time. How many great achievements, starting with fire, were legitimately invented or discovered independently in different parts of the globe, in different epochs. Some even died out and were revived (like glass-making in Britain in the Dark Ages).

How different would it have been, if The Blog of Prometheus, or www.rome.it/careers/glassmaking, had survived? But does it really matter – morally, at least, whether Leibniz or Newton invented calculus? “Multiple connections and successful response status codes are what matter now,” says Billy The Cyborg, and I think he’s probably onto something.

As usual, Wikipedia takes the fun out of everything (in fact, Wikipedia’s not much fun all round), so you might as well go there for the full story, including a convincing account of the chronology of the Mahir vs Borat controversy. Then go and watch the Borat trailers at Apple. Nice!

There may have been a bit of confusion with Dear Angie over time, since I moved it from Blogger.com to here. Though all of the posts were successfully imported, I’m sure the place is littered with broken links. I also regret the loss of the earlier design, when DA moved into Relocution, and might do something about that, over time. Meanwhile here is the original Dear Angie logo (based on the scans sent by Han Schomaker).

The celebrated library at Alexandria in Egypt contained the greatest collection of literature in the ancient world. Founded at the end of the 4th Century B.C., it had the objective of collecting in one place a copy of every important Greek text ever written. Ever since, a compulsion to compile just such a comprehensive collection of literature has been a feature of every major civilized culture: the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque Nationale, all were founded with similar aims, and now maintain massive collections of books and journals.

The scale of such undertakings, even in times when comparatively few written works were produced, was vast: writ large in these endeavours are exactly the problems of storage, retrieval and security which modern data processing managers wrestle with. The history of the Alexandrian Library itself offers one of the earliest object lessons in the importance of following effective data security procedures: Plutarch records that in 47 B.C. part of the library caught fire, and many books were lost forever that might otherwise have survived.

Like their present-day counterparts, scholars and philologists through the ages have embraced new technological developments which appear to facilitate their Sisyphian task. In the early Christian era the codex, the bound book format which we are familiar with, superseded papyrus and parchment rolls, offering more effective storage and ease of access; in the 8th Century, minuscule cursive letter forms (using small characters, rather than just capitals) were perfected for both Latin and Greek alphabets, bringing further benefits of compression and speed of copying; and, of course, with the introduction of printing five centuries later, publishing on a truly industrial scale became possible, with massive implications for every aspect of communication.

The role computers can play in this area has expanded considerably in recent years . The use of computerised catalogues and indexes of existing collections has improved their accessibility, while, for publishers, digitisation has virtually eliminated the need for type to be physically set by hand. But now that fast, cheap random access storage space is available to every level of application, it is clear that machines can effectively and efficiently store not only information about books and journals, but entire texts as well: written works may be published and read by thousands, without using a single sheet of paper or drop of ink. It seems likely that these developments will prove to be an important milestone in the history of the “written” word.

With the digitisation of historical, literary and scientific texts, scholarly chores such as indexing and cross-referencing can be left to a computer, not to mention the chore of following all those cross-references. Huge texts can be scanned almost instantly for a particular phrase. Once a text has been digitised the phenomenal processing power of the computer can be let loose on it. To the studies of literature and history have come new approaches of quantitative textual analysis, where the attribution of a work or a date to a particular author may be substantiated by the analysis of the frequency and distribution of key words, phrases, or unusual spelling. For example, in 1992 a computer running a neural network program was trained to distinguish accurately between plays by Shakespeare and his contemporary John Fletcher that it had never seen before. The significance of this is that it may assist Shakespeare scholars in correctly attributing sections of the plays (The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII) on which the two men collaborated in 1613.[note]

It’s not by magic, of course, that texts come to be digitised. Although much that is produced now (this essay being no exception) is committed directly to computer, what went before was not. Now commercial interests – software houses like Microsoft, or traditional publishers like Oxford University Press – are committed to producung works old and new in an electronic form. But before them, one major electronic source of public domain literature has been Project Gutenberg. The project’s aim is to create a quality archive of platform independent electronic source texts. Volunteers have typed in many millions of words, including classic novels, poems, historical and scientific works, and optical character recognition (OCR) technology is increasingly used. It may seem a rather luddite enterprise, nevertheless it is important work. The texts produced may be made available for downloading via the Internet, or collected on CD-ROM. And, once entered, they need never be re-entered, re-typed, or re-set.

There is one further way in which computerisation can improve the effective use of textual material. Project Gutenberg’s texts are still largely in what its director, Professor Hart, refers to as “plain vanilla” ASCII text. Hypertext is electronic text which contains links to other texts, or reference points within the same text; and the following of these links is handled by the computer . “By creating computer linkages from the citations of an article to the corresponding source documents, users would be able to navigate through a body of related literature online simply by following the ‘electronic footnotes.’” [note] It is widely used for on-line reference texts, dictionaries and encyclopaedias on CD-ROM etc. Most significantly, a hypertext model is the basis for the World-Wide Web, originally implemented using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and intended for distributing the literature of high-energy physics to researchers. Its application to other disciplines was encouraged, in particular by making the standards open, and few were slow to exploit its possibilities: in the Web we can presently see “a precursor of the networked environment that will permeate libraries in the future.” [note]

The storage and transmission of texts by electronic means is changing the way we use and approach them. They can be available from a single point of access anywhere in the world; the computer can take over the tedium of storing and retrieving the things we want to read or study. Where hypertext is exploited, the machine tirelessly performs the roles of librarian and page-turner. New developments may necessitate the removal of the data to other storage media, but this can be completely automated, minimising the opportunity for human error to play its traditional role in the copying process.

It seems unlikely that the proliferation of electronic texts will ever completely eradicate the urge to keep that hard copy “just in case”. It is hard to believe that there will ever not be a place for books in the world of the student or casual reader: there’s still a long way to go to make a device like Apple’s Newton as attractive – or cheap – as a paperback book. Yet now that so many words, not to mention sounds and pictures, are readily available in digitised form, the idea of such an encyclopædic electronic book as, say, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is less strange and wonderful than it was twenty years ago.

Notes

1. See Robert Matthews and Tom Merriam, “A bard by any other name”, New Scientist, 22 Jan 1994, pp. 23-27.
2. Jeff Barry, “The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and the World-Wide Web: Raising ASCII Text to a New Level of Usability.”, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, no. 5 (1994), 5-64.
3. Barry, op. cit.

Look at that gig list! It was damned unfair that I was living in Warwick or London most of that time. Still, I managed to catch a few great gigs there. Most memorable, The Pixies in August 1990 – positively nuclear, so many people were crammed in that tiny hall! When we got out, we looked longingly at the cool water of the river…

Worst gig: possibly Juliana “I find myself endlessly fascinating” Hatfield’s first solo outing after the Blake Babies. She was either having a bad hair day, or trying to prove how horrible she could sound if she tried.

Can’t see that Chipper gig listed, though! ;p

But, of course isn’t this, www.relocution.com, a kind of e-portfolio? Extremely flexible, portable and free. I’ve got a bit fruity with it, of course, and some bits are still broken, particularly those brought across from earlier experiments in Blogger and previous installations of WordPress. But mostly it hangs together – it’s useful to me, and broadly reflects what I’ve been up to, at least those bits there seems no harm in making public.

I just really like WordPress. You don’t have to do complicated stuff – I created a test blog at WordPress.com and it seems pretty good. Picked a theme that supports Widgets, and can have all sorts of drag-and-drop fun moving things around in the side bar. Support for Pages is also good, so all in all it seems that for an organic portfolio, that can grow and evolve with you, WordPress has much more promise than Elgg.net on the one hand, or Blogger on the other.

If Relocutiont’s to be an eportfolio and curriculum vitae, and some sort of chronicle of how-we-got-here, it’s probably about time I included in it some of those earlier attempts at Personal Web Sites. Much is long gone, scattered across servers, hard disks, CDs and floppies over the years. But thanks to the Internet Archive I have tracked down a couple of things that it’s interesting to see again. It just shows how hard it was to make a personal web page that was genuinely useful or interesting, either to others or to oneself, before Blogging and Web2.0 took off. Most of the graphics have gone, and colours and backgrounds, and comparatively few of the links work, but something survives. “Look on my works ye mighty…!”

• Somewhere in Archive.Org there is a small relic of a web page Steve and I created when we first signed up with Cityscape, circa 1996. It’s rubbish, of course – just because one can make a web page, doesn’t mean you should. But, for better or worse, it was a start.
• www.ulcc.ac.uk/~cziarmd – This is the sort of thing I managed on my ULCC web space, circa 1998. I think this must have been a second incarnation, as my epitaph for Kevin Coomber doesn’t seem to be there. This changed again circa 2000, to something even more basic.
• www.wendy.org.uk/diablo – When ULCC changed the way it ran personal staff web pages, circa 2002, the page got this makeover. All pretty pointless, really, but a few fun bits still hanging around, like the Love And Rockets strip I scanned. And the wedding photos, if you can find them. (You don’t need to go yet to the Archive – the Wendy site is still running at ULCC.)
• Most interesting of all, to me, to find, is L Plus Plus, an online Latin course, complete with interactive Javascript exercises, that was part of my MSc project at Birkbeck. Again, it’s unfortunate that the graphics don’t survive, but it looks like I’ve some good, ready-made material to use as I experiment with WebCT, Moodle, etc.

Pam

Gareth suggested replying: “Does it have apple in? If so, I think it may be
mine.”

It won a prize: €300 from the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF2006) Poetry Competition, sponsored by the Andrea von Braun Stiftung in Munich, 2006. In other words, a panel of German scientists was very impressed with this poem in English. Wirklich wunderbar!

I’m not going to print it here. Follow this link to it, gentle reader, if you dare. One word of warning before you go there:

C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre poésie!

Today, I see that in his Open Access News, Peter Suber has blogged an interesting article, viz A checklist for evaluating open source digital library software, Online Information Review, 30, 4 (2006), pp. 360-379. I’d like to read this because it’s right up my street at the moment, and it behoves me to know the latest considered thinking on such matters.

Following the link leads me to the website of Emerald, a leading English language publisher of academic and professional literature in the fields of management, library services and engineering. This offers me several options: I can purchase the article (or journal?) for £13 + postage + VAT. Bollocks to that; I can request “my librarian” – whoever that might be – to get me a copy; I can login to (presumably) the Emerald system; or I can login as an “Athens User”.

Are you with me so far?

Well, I happen to know that Athens is something to do with University libraries, so I go to the website of the University of London Library, of which I happen to be a member. I scuttle round their journal-related pages trying to take it all in, but no searching or skimming leads me to the Online Information Reivew, and I eventually conclude that I’ve wasted enough time, and choose the “contact us” form instead. That was a couple of hours ago.

I’m also a member of Edinburgh University library – only newly enrolled, and not done any RTFM of their system guidance, but thought I’d take a look there. There’s a clear link there to Electronic Journals, and an entry for Online Information Review is not hard to find.

Only, this time, I find a link to Swetswise, and again I’m presented with login options that don’t mean much to me. I half-heartedly try my Edinburgh login in various fields, without success. Can I login first to the Edinburgh Library website? I find a link at the bottom, then it asks me for a “Barcode” – is that anything to do with the Student ID that is my login for other Edinburgh University systems I’ve encountered so far? Who knows.

But, at least it reminds me I can for sure login to Edinburgh’s MyEd portal (which I’ve said nice things about elsewhere). Maybe, once logged in, I’ll have seamless access to the Library, and thence to Swetswise/Athens/Emerald, or whatever it is will get me to the journal and article I’m looking for. If not – I’ve really got other things to be doing.

Well, hooray for MyEd! The good news is that, once logged in, I’m quickly back at the Library, and follow a link to Library resources. This flashes a slightly ominous message, “We are contacting the University Authorisation service to check whether you are authorised to access Athens resources.”, but evidently I am, and I quickly find myself somewhere in Swetswise where I can actually see a list of all the editions of this journal.

The bad news is that, though previous editions of this journal are there, the latest, in which this article appears, isn’t. Maybe tomorrow?

So, on my travels I’ve been through half-a-dozen different websites – each time a different UI, different layout, different terminology, different shot-in-the-dark. Intuitive it ain’t, but I suppose the moral is: use the portal – login and stay logged in, and then you’ll hopefully be untroubled by having to know what an Athens login is, or whether you have to pay someone £15, or wait hours or days for a librarian to get back to you.

I know better now. But, after all this palaver, I can only endorse Peter Suber’s appeal to researchers to provide open access
to your articles about open access. Then it might just have been one click away from the page where Peter blogged it.

Two things are required to remember for a tryst, rendezvous or appointment. It is necessary to specify (a) time, and (b) place. Let me make my meaning clear. I want to avoid all ambiguity. Suppose I tell some girl or other that I will meet her at 8.30 p.m., thus specifying (a) but not (b). What happens? She turns up promptly enough at, say, the house where Dean Swift was born in Hoey’s Court. But in the meantime I am waiting patiently in the Bull Ring, Wexford, listlessly inhaling fag after fag. Result: we fail to meet and letters of passionate recrimination are on their way in the next post.

Now let us turn from that and take the opposite case. I tell the lady to meet me outside the picture house in Skerries. Please note that in this case we are ignoring (a). She turns up at 1.18 p.m., waits for an hour and flounces off in a huff. I, however, (connoisseur of clichés that I am) put in that odd thing – an appearance – at 4.35 p.m. Again I produce the box of fags and embark on another of my lengthy incinerations. People passing say: I wonder who your man is waiting for. Your man has been standing there for an hour. Your man is up to something, that’s a certainty.

See my point? The appointment is again broken, simply because we neglected to provide for both (a) and (b). Next time your girl fails to turn up, ask yourself whether you have followed the simple rule I have outlined.

Flann O’Brien