Everyone
Directory of repository-related blogs
The JISC-funded Repositories Support Project has developed quite a nice list of repository-related blogs (and other RSS feeds). Worth taking a look and suggesting additional feeds if they are missing. They provide an OPML file which means that eve...
The right time for outsourcing
Paul Walk has an interesting post, “Did Google just make me look like an idiot?”, questioning whether the time is right for universities to start outsourcing services in a Web 2.0, SaaS kind of way. As Paul notes, this was very much the focus for ...
Hype curves
I saw a post on Techcrunch about a hype curve for emerging technologies. I won’t reproduce the curve here as I am not sure about the legality of posting it. However, if you go over to techcrunch you can see the curve. I was very surprised to...
Three panel sessions at the Chilbo summer fair
In a way, I wish I was part of Chilbo - part of me is dead envious cos it looks like a fun community.As part of their summer fair there are three interesting looking panel sessions coming up - the first tonight. I'm guessing that they will all be ...
CISTI jobs: Collection Librarian
Collection Librarian Ottawa - Ontario LS-3 These are two (2) continuing positions. Your Challenge The Collection Librarian negotiates license agreements and renewals for electronic collections; analyses collection data; evaluates and selects new m...
Monologue or Dialogue
As part of the Learning 2.0 programme at Imperial College, all those taking part have been asked to setup a blog, and use this to reflect on each week’s activities. I’ve setup RSS feeds for all the blogs setup as...
The importance of non-literals to linked data
I'm less involved in Dublin Core metadata discussions than I used to be but a brief exchange on one of the DC lists caught my eye and reminded me how confusing the concepts underpinning metadata on the Web can be. The exchange started with a...
Social media and the emerging technology hype curve
I've noticed two behavioural changes in myself over the last while... Firstly, I'm trying to do less work at home outside of normal office hours. Yes, this blog post indicates I'm not being totally successful at this - written on a Saturday ...
What Web 2.0 teaches us...
Preface: I've had this post on the back-burner for a while, worried that it might cause offense to various colleagues/friends/readers. It's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek and humorous but like most such things, from my perspective a...
Student part-time work offered: controlling the VC's avatar
A nice quote in yesterday's Times Higher by John Coyne, VC at the University of Derby, in an article about transliteracy:"While I was on the walkabout in Second Life, I bumped into another avatar (online persona) and it was one of my lecturers. He...
Preserving virtual worlds
The BBC have a short article about digital preservation entitled, Writing the history of virtual worlds. Virtual worlds and other gaming environments, being highly dynamic in nature, bring with them special considerations in terms of long te...
Identity, gender and death
We make money not art has an interesting piece about the work of Marc Owens, including a description of a RL virtual transgender suit and an facility known as Second Death which will terminate your avatar after a random amount of time in-world (te...
Incorrect behaviour?
Interesting post on the OpenHabitat blog (OpenHabitat is a JISC-Funded project) discussing an in-world meeting that went "wrong" and the coping strategies that attendees adopted to cope with the "wrongness".The tentative conclusion is that in-worl...
No tweets by SMS in the UK
Twitter is no longer delivering tweets by outbound SMS in the UK. This doesn't bother me, since I've never wanted to clutter my mobile phone with the kind of noise one generally gets on Twitter (don't get me wrong - I like the noise, I just ...
Ofcom UK Communications Market Review 2008: Interactive Key Points
Ofcom's Market Review for 2008 has been released, with a new interactive view of the key points being made available separately allowing people to leave comments against each of the key points (though none appear to have been made at the time of w...
Gov 2.0 and the rise of Wordpress
It was interesting to learn today fromRhodri Marsden’s Cyberclinic Blog that the Number 10 website now favours Wordpress over a previous Microsoft ASP system. I’ve been an admirer of Wordpress for a while now. I think we first looked a...
BRUM ReJiG
We funded the one year BRUM project back in 2006 as part of our programme of small-scale information literacy projects. I've just noticed that the project has secured another tranche of funding, this time from an internal source at the Unive...
Metadata and microformats
<shamelessPlug>I happened to notice earlier on (OK, I admit it... I was checking at the time) that my Does metadata matter? slidecast has been featured on the Slideshare homepage.</shamelessPlug> In doing do, I also spotted a sim...
Digital literacy anyone?
The Information Literacy Section of IFLA has announced the winner of a competition to design an "information literacy" logo.The aim of creating this Logo is to make communication easier between those who carry out information literacy projects, t...
ISKO 2008 update
The conference has been interesting. The papers have been a real mixture of the highly theoretical and abstract and those which are more pragmatic and based on solving problems. The session which included the presentation on the Names project was ...
Vacancies at ULCC
ULCC is currently looking to fill two vacancies that may be of interest to DA Blog readers. The first vacancy is for an Archives Assistant here in the Digital Archives Department, supporting the activities of many of the internal and external pres...
Remembering Allen Smith
Allen Smith, Associate Dean and Professor in the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, died Saturday, August 2, 2008. Allen (always Allen or Mr. Smith, never Professor Smith) was my favorite professor in library schoo...
He vuelto/I’m back!
I spoke at the International conference on archives organised by the Sociedad para el desarollo cientifico de la archivistica s.c. (SEDCA) and supported by the International Council on Archives (ICA). It took place in the Sheraton hotel in the his...
gender and fan culture
It's odd to pull up your blogs in the morning and see your own name, you introducing yourself, at the top of the list.Gender and Fan Culture, Round 16, Part One: Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee, over at Henry Jenkins' place.The generosity of Henry f...
CNI workshop on Author Identities
The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) convened a workshop in Washington, D.C. yesterday entitled ‘Authors, Identity Management and the Scholarly Communication System’. Attendees included publishers, university repository-builde...
Links for 2008-06-13 [del.icio.us]
Manageability - A Pattern Language for Loose Coupling Useful for the recent discussions on restful job farming. RDF JSON Specification - n² wiki We're looking at something similar here.
Microsoft get Creative
Microsoft recently (quietly) announced a Creative Commons plugin for Office 2007 that enables you to add a Creative Commons license to your documents (Word, Excel and Powerpoint). I installed this yesterday, but only got around to having a look at...
Focussing on Social Computing
The TFPL blog has an interesting post on some comments from a focus group on Social Computing (and it's use in the workplace) To draw out some specific comments/points: The Civil Service code for online participation Example of the reduction...
ORE and Atom
At the end of last week, Herbert Van de Sompel posted an important proposal to the OAI ORE Google Group, suggesting significant changes in the way ORE Resource Maps are represented using Atom. The proposal has two key components: To...
DC-HTML profile becomes DCMI Recommendation
DCMI announced today that the document Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements has become a DCMI Recommendation. This document is an HTML meta data profile, in the sense that term is used in the HTML specification....
next generation open library system
I'm so used to bookmarking stuff into my FriendFeed these days I have to remind myself my blog is also a communications vehicle... I'd be remiss in not posting about this major SOA & libraries initiative. The Open Library Environment...
Next Digital Preservation Training Programme, London, October 2008
I am pleased to announce that the date and venue for the next Digital Preservation Training Programme have been confirmed for 20th-22nd October 2008, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The cost is £500. This price does not inclu...
AtomPub Video Tutorial
From Joe Gregorio of Google, a short video introduction to the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023): Which, following Tim Bray's exhortation, I shall henceforth refer to only as "AtomPub".
Vapour Linked Data Validator
Spotted via an announcement to the W3C Linked Open Data mailing list, Vapour is a validation/checking service for "linked data", produced by the research team at the CTIC Foundation (Center for the Development of Information and Communication Tech...
Significant Properties Workshop @ BL
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 outcom...
Two new Linked Data sources
There were a couple of interesting announcements in the world of linked data last week. The first came from Matthew Shorter of the BBC with the announcement of the public beta of their music artists pages. The site pulls in...
Feed me Seymour
This week the Learning 2.0 at Imperial course is looking at RSS One of the activities is to subscribe to 10 or more feeds on Bloglines or Google Reader, but as I've got loads of feeds in my reader already...
A surfeit of usernames
I note that several participants in the Learning 2.0 programme at Imperial have mentioned that dealing with all the additional accounts they are creating as they take part in the course (so far, MSN/Windows Live, Wordpress, Wetpaint, Bloglines or ...
Watching paint dry
I've been on holiday for a week, and so missed the 'wiki' week of the Learning 2.0 programme at Imperial. I'm playing catchup now, and have setup a page in the Wetpaint wiki that has been setup for the course...
ICA Congress (Part 2)
So back from the ICA annual Congress held in Kuala Lumpur. So many things to tell you about. The local press picked up on the event and it seemed to be stirring up a few stories… The Malaysian government had just renewed its search for evide...
OpenID and usability
Hot on the heels of my own post about the unsatisfactory nature of usability within Shibboleth-based federations, Mike Ellis has a nice post about the usability problems with OpenID. Overall, I pretty much agree with where Mike is coming from on t...
citizen science: camera in space
Some amazing images from a $1000 consumer camera sent 30+ km up into space on a sounding balloon as part of a Oklahoma State University project. (Can't show the images here as they are all rights reserved.) Check out Pentax...
Unleashing the Tribe
A final quickie before I go on leave for a week... I just wanted to highlight Ewan Macintosh's keynote, Unleashing the Tribe, on the final day of the Institutional Web Managers Workshop (for which we were a sponsor), which is now available online....
SEO and digital libraries
Lorcan Dempsey, SEO is part of our business, picks up on a post by John Wilkin, Our hidden digital libraries, concerning our collective inability to expose digital library content to search engines like Google effectively. This is something I've t...
Bye, bye Athens... hello UK Federation
It's a big day today for federated access management in UK academia with "nearly 500 institutions and organisations [completing] the transition to a new open standard SAML compliant access management system and the UK Access Management Federation"...
Cory Doctorow on open licences
The Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast from Wednesday this week contains a brief but interesting interview with Cory Doctorow (about 21 minutes into the podcast if you want to jump straight to it). In it he talks about his 3 key reasons for adop...
Stop the Web, I want to get off...
I used to be happy with Facebook and Twitter and regularly updated my statuses in both... for a while at least! Then Facebook got a bit stale, started suffering application spam, and I sensed people moving on. I still use it, but only really...
F-ALT
Anyone planning on attending ALT-C in Leeds this September might be interested in the F-ALT fringe event which includes various "WTF?" sessions on e-portfolios, learning objects, Second Life and eduPunk (though the organisers appear to be open to ...
Links for 2008-07-31 [del.icio.us]
Open Access Repositories - Ways to snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory Peter Millington on mistakes not to make...
