Doomed?

I use this blog to promote technology within MPOW but this article annoyed me: MySpace, SecondLife, and Twitter Are Doomed. When I first read it, I came away with an impression of schadenfreude on the part of the author. I let the article sit for a couple of days and re-read it and am still annoyed by the tone.

Sure there are problems with Myspace, SecondLife, and Twitter. I’ve pretty much abandoned MySpace for Facebook because there is a growing librarian community there and I gain value from using it. Until I learned how to tweak my profile in MySpace, I was bombarded with messages from young women who wanted to be my friend and, by the way, please look at these photos of me. SecondLife is slow and kludgey but it has put me in contact with more people than would otherwise be possible. I’m not sure how I could have participated in a book discussion led by a British physics professor who was in Brazil and attended by people from around the world. Twitter? Well, I don’t get the appeal there either but it doesn’t bother me that it exists.

The author is quite correct in pointing out that there are problems with these social applications and that they may/will eventually disappear. I say, “So what.” All of the social networking applications are evolutionary steps. Some will work, some won’t. I believe that there are people looking at these applications and thinking, “OK, the concept is interesting but I bet I can make it better, faster, stronger and maybe I can combine the best elements of several into a new approach for social networking.” You have to have a foundation to build anything and the current crop of social networking applications are a foundation for future applications.

Sure the press hypes these applications but again, so what. Hype is what lets people know something exists. Hype is what might get a developer interested in looking for ways to improve on a concept or develop a new approach for these social networking applications. Look at what is happening in Facebook. It is becoming a platform where new third party applications are being built daily. You can add your Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader accounts, etc., effectively making Facebook the first application you want to open in the morning.

The author concludes, ironically – Till the next “Big Thing.” I say “Cool, I can’t wait to see what comes along.”

Java Tuning for VuFind

Had a few more notes on running VuFind.

Java Tuning

Something that is generally looked over when setting up a Java application is tuning Java. This can be a very daunting endeavor as you generally see tutorials that reference things like interpreting p-values and power analysis. However, if you’re just wanting to set an application up, this is a much larger investment of time and effort that is really needed. So, here are some things you probably want to do.

To set the Java ergonomics for server applications, you simple set a new environmental variable. For Tomcat, this is the CATALINA_OPTS. For development boxes, I tend to make these global variables, but as long as the user account that’s running VuFind’s Tomcat instance has CATALINA_OPTS defined, you’ll see the performance boost.

For those who can’t wait, this is what I set for my instance in a visualized instance of Ubuntu server (Feisty) that runs with 2 GB RAM and a dedicated dual-core x86_64 processor.

CATALINA_OPTS="-server -Xmx1024 -Xms1024 -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:+AggressiveOpts"

I don’t have any heuristics on the improvement, but it is a noticeable difference in both speed and processor utilization.

Without attempting to rehash the nitty-gritty of the ergonomics of the JVM, you’re bascially telling Java to act as a server, use a statically sized heap (the memory allocated for object storage), uses young-generation garbage collection (it divides garbage collection across processors), and turning on point release performance optimizations.

For more info on setting up the JVM to be “server-class”, check out the Java Tuning White Paper. While this paper specifically refers to the Java 5 platform, these same options will work if you’ve deployed under Java 6.

VuFind with Ubuntu

This is an old version. Please view the updated post at http://techview.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/vufind-06-on-ubuntu-710/

A beta release VuFind was recently released as an ILS replacement by Villinova. However, getting it to run properly on my virtualized server was a bit of an adventure. So, in order to spare others, here are some development notes for installing VuFind 0.5 on Ubuntu.

Most of this you can copy and past into a bash script (in fact, that’s where I put most of this stuff). As soon as I get a chance, I’m going to build an installer for this, but in the mean time:

Upgrade your distribution:

sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Install some needed base packages

sudo apt-get -y install subversion ssh build-essential sun-java5-jdk

You can use the sun-java6-jdk, just make sure to update the code further down that sets the JAVA_HOME variable.

Next, install and configure Apache2 to use mod_rewrite

sudo apt-get -y install apache2
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Currently, the subversion repository doesn’t have all the files to run Tomcat, so you need to grab both


svn co https://vufind.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vufind /usr/local/vufind
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/vufind/VUFind-0.5.tgz?use_mirror=osdn
tar -zxvf VUFind-0.5.tgz
cd VUFind-0.5
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/vufind/solr
sudo mv solr /usr/local/vufind


Next, change the permissions on the cache and compile folders

chown www-data:www-data /usr/local/vufind/web/interface/compile
chown www-data:www-data /usr/local/vufind/web/interface/cache

Install and configure MySQL

sudo apt-get -y install mysql-server
mysqladmin -u root create vufind

Install and configure PHP 5 and the required libraries

sudo apt-get -y install php5 php-pear php5-ldap php5-mysql php5-xsl php5-pspell aspell aspell-en

Note, this doesn’t include the PDO_OCI library for dealing with Oracle. You’ll need to grab that one if you need it.

Install YAZ (updated 8/1/07)

sudo apt-get -y install yaz

Build YAZ from the source files

wget http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/yaz/yaz-3.0.8.tar.gz
tar -zxvf yaz-3.0.8.tar.gz
cd yaz-3.0.8
./configure
make
sudo make install


There’s an issue with the default version of PEAR installed with PHP on Ubuntu and you’ll need to upgrade this…

sudo pear upgrade PEAR

You may also want to edit the install script that’s included in the package to read

mv Smarty-2.6.18/libs* $PHPDIR/Smarty

You’ll need to set up Apache and MySQL still…

In /etc/apach2/apache2.conf add the following lines:


Alias /vufind /use/local/vufind/web


<Directory /use/local/vufind/web/>
AllowOverride ALL
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>


and reload

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Now set up your JAVA_HOME environmental variable. Since this is a global (at least for me), I put it in /etc/environment

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun"

Note, if you just the sun-java6-jdk, be sure to change the above line to

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun"

You can run source on this file to pick up the variable, but because you’ll probably sudo in a development environment, it’s probably easier just to reboot the system.

Lastly, set up MySQL data tables


mysql -u root
GRANT ALL ON vufind.* TO vufind@localhost IDENTIFIED BY "secretPassword";
quit

mysql -u vufind -p vufind < mysql.sql

This is a change from the provided documentation as it creates a new user (so you’re not running the database as root). Also, you’ll want to be sure to change the default root password of nothing to something other than that.

Now, if everything has gone nicely, you should be able to run the Solr server now. You do have to be in the /usr/local/vufind directory in order for this to start properly.


cd /usr/local/vufind
./solr/tomcat/bin/startup.sh


Make sure everything is running now. Check out your systems at

http://your.ip.address:8080/solr/admin
http://your.ip.address/vufind

Lastly, a small change in running the yaz-marcdump from the example. The utillity will be happier with

yaz-marcdump -f MARC-8 -t UTF-8 -X marcFile.mrc > catalog.xml

if you’ve installed the debian package. If you’ve installed from the source, use the example code

yaz-marcdump -f MARC-8 -t UTF-8 -o marcxml records.marc > catalog.xml

Hopefully this will save some folks some hunting…

Facebook

Today’s Third Thursday Tech Talk (t⁴) showcased facebook.com and our library’s contribution SwemTools. I embedded the Facebook Presentation, but most of the links are below:

Video:

Fred Stutzman’s Our Lives, Our Facebooks – given at one of Google’s TechTalks

Facebook Groups for Librarians

• Library 2.0 Interest Group
• Librarians and Facebook
• Libraries and Librarians
• American Library Association Members
• NextGen Librarians
• Digital Reference in Facebook

And of course, SwemTools.

If you’ve got comments about SwemTools specifically, please post them on the application page.

Non-Commercial Audiobooks

This posts is supporting material for the July 13, 2007 joint Williamsburg Regional Library/Swem Library presentation, “Heard a Good Book Lately?”

There are non-commercial sources for digital audio materials that provide engaging and enjoyable listening experiences even if they somewhat lack the professional production values you get from sources such as Recorded Books or Audible. Links to websites featuring free audio material is at the end of this post.

A very big advantage to the sources of audio material I will be discussing is that DRM is not an issue. Yet. It is entirely possible that Congress will mandate that protection for podcaster that don’t want protection. Podcasting is based on open standards such as mp3 and RSS and podcasters are happy about that now. Here the authors have elected to give free access to their work or the work is in the public domain. Revenue comes from donations and/or advertisements.

One of the non-commercial sources of audio content are podcasts. Right now I’d say that the fiction market is dominated by science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery/crime stories. Much of this audio fiction is original content. In fact, all of the podcast-only novels that I know of are original. If these are not mainstream writers, what is the quality? Personally, I think that it is excellent. There are mainstream writers on whom I gave up years ago – the ones whose works are all over B&M, Borders, Books-a-Million,etc. I’m finding podcast only novels to be fresh and entertaining. I would also say that the audio quality is pretty good considering that the authors are sometimes recording in a closet in their house.

These works may also offered under a Creative Commons license (e.g. noncommercial, no derivatives, attribution). This means that a library could create a library of these materials by physically burning a CD or setting up a web site from which users could download the content. Check the terms of service first.

Podcasts are particularly interesting in that they are poised to change the model for publishing. Up to now, an author would write his/her book, find an agent who shops the book around to publishers. If accepted, the publisher takes care of production and promotion and, eventually, the book is published and librarians read about it in PW, Kirkus, LJ.

This new model can best be described through an example. Scott Sigler writes in the science fiction/horror genres and he makes his work available through free, serialized podcasts. A couple of years ago, Earthcore was published by a small press, Dragon Moon Press, after it was first podcast. Earthcore got 10,000 listeners which isn’t too shabby. Earthcore is also acknowledged as the first podcast only novel. In spite of this showing, Scott was having a problem finding an agent and publishers willing to take on his work.

Jump ahead to 2007 and Dragon Moon Press is publishing Ancestor, another podcast only novel. Dragon Moon has zero dollars for promotion but Scott has a very large fan/listener base. Also, there is an amazing amount of support in the podcaster community. Scott asked his listeners if they would help him make a statement about the value of podcasting by purchasing Ancestor on Amazon at noon on the day it became available, April 1. Other podcasters supported Scott in this project and included promotions in their podcasts. At noon on April 1, I was one of those fans who pressed the buy button on Amazon and helped push Ancestor to #7 in Amazon’s science fiction list and #3 on the horror list. This was done without reviews in the NY Times or a mention in Publishers Weekly; it was the listeners who only knew about Ancestor from podcasts that put it high on Amazon’s lists. Subsequently, Scott got a three book deal from Crown Books and film rights have been purchased for another book, Infested (originally heard as Infection).

Matt Wallace’s The Failed Cities Monologues is another example of switching mediums. It was first a serialized podcast novel and now the film rights have been purchased. Matt Wallace will be making the film adaptation himself.

It is becoming clear that content can be given away and still make money. Also, an informal network of fiercely loyal podcast listeners can do a remarkable job getting the word out about a work. It will be interesting to see if any mainstream authors move in this direction. It is also a mistake to assume that these writers, writing outside the mainstream publishing world, are amateurs. They are producing high quality stories.

Personal aside here: I am not a big sports fan and I would rather watch curling or a professional bass fishing tournament than football. Scott Sigler’s last podcast novel was The Rookie, a story about pro football set 700 years in the future. I started listening to it and was immediately pulled into the story. I still don’t like football but I can appreciate a good story and characters I care about. If Scott can get me to listen to a story about football and long for more, he is a very good writer.

The other source for audiobooks are works that are in the public domain, classic literature if you will. Librivox and The Gutenberg Audio Project (see links below) are two main sources in this area. The quality of the narration varies a great deal. Also, you might find that the reader may be different from chapter to the next; some listeners might find this distracting. Nevertheless, if you have a digital media player that you want to load up for a trip so your kid can take care of the summer reading requirements while you are driving, you can’t beat the convenience of these audiobooks.

It would be interesting to see if podcasts and the classic literature could be used to supplement library collections. It would be fairly easy to

Sources of audio books and News and Information on Podcasts and Podcasting:

Audio Addicts. News about and links to interesting audio.

Audiobook Podcast Collection. Freely available cultural media. Nice selection of audiobooks.

Audiobooks For Free. A nice selection of audio from a wide variety of genres.

Dead White Males. Podcasts about literature. Here you will find discussion about works such as Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native.

Digital Podcast. Excellent directory of podcasts. click on the Books link on the left and you will go to a pages of sources for literary podcasts. Take a look at The Public Domain Podcast where you will find Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, short stories by O. Henry, and a lot more.

The Geek reads Holmes. The Geek serializes serializes Sherlock Holmes stories in 10 to 20 minute episodes.

Gutenberg: The Audio Books Project. The audio version of Project Gutenberg. Both human read and computer read works are available. Long title list of works in public domain. Works with Audio Books for Free and Librivox.

Libravox.Don’t confuse with Librivox. Libravox is a directory of audiobooks, not all of which are free.

Librivox. Nice selection of public domain works. Overlap with Gutenberg. Narration quality varies greatly.

Openculture audio podcast collection.  Includes some Librivox titles.

Podcast Pickle. A website forum for the podcast community. You might find links to podcast novels here.

Podcast Shuffle. A podcast directory supporting the podcast community. There are directories for audio books and books.

Podcast 411. Information on podcasts, podcasters, and podcasting.

PodcastAlley. Another information site about all things podcasting.

Podcasting News. News about podcasting. Has a nice search feature that lets you search in a detailed list of categories.

Podiobooks. Extensive list of podiobooks to which you can subscribe. iTunes compatible. One of my favorite sites.

PodShow. A social media community. Audio, video, podcasts, music.

Story Spieler Podcast. 189 works by authors such as J.M. Barrie and Jack London.

Uvula Audio Homepage. Books, stories, family suitable.

The Library As Text Part III: Or The Finest Possible Communication Apparatus in Public Life

Part 1/2

“But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers.” (Brecht, p616, The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication () in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook first published in 1932).

The heart wants what the heart wants. Woody Allen

Back to the title of this series: The Library As text. This is not a completely original characterization of the library, in fact it was suggested before in an interesting article by John Budd (“An Epistemological Foundation for Library and Information Science,” Library Quarterly, 65:3, 295-318). The article jives quite well with the “wrought manifesto” vibe I’m going for here, in that it calls for the Library and Information Science (LIS) community to consider engaging in a more intellectually textured way of looking at what we do, moving away from our positivistic roots and adopting a more playful, perhaps meaningful, approach in the direction hermeneutics and phenomenology (pick up a reader on Heidegger, Gadamer or Ricoeur and you’ll catch his drift).

Photo-sharing

UPDATE: Additional links

flickrvision – real time view of images uploaded to Flickr. The location is where the image was uploaded from.

Examples of embedding images from a photo-sharing site. It includes two sizes of a Google slide show, and three versions of a Flickr badge.

Some Observations About Photo-sharing

I provide a sample of links to discussions about on-line photo-sharing below, and you can see that it has been well covered in the blogosphere. Why am I contributing to the discussion now? Simply, we haven’t discussed it here and the primary purpose of this blog is to present applications that could be of use in our library.

There are billions of images stored in on-line photo-sharing services. As of now, as I type this sentence, PhotoBucket has 2.85 billion images and Yahoo Photos also has over two billion images. Photo-sharing services range from the simple “here they are, come look at them, and maybe buy some prints” to services that have sophisticated searching, secret algorithms to create subject clusters and most interesting rankings based on viewer habits, the capability to assign levels of permission for the use of images, send images to other services such as blogs, and organize images in ways meaningful to the creator.

I mentioned Yahoo Photos in the last paragraph. Yahoo also owns Flickr and recently announced that Yahoo Photos is being phased out in favor of Flickr. Flickr had only 500 million images but has been growing faster than Yahoo Photos. Yahoo is taking an interesting approach to their existing Photos accounts. With one touch, the photos of Yahoo members can be moved to a Flickr account. Yahoo will help those who choose to not to take the Flickr option to move their images to another service, such as PhotoBucket. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Flickr has restrictions on the number of images that can be displayed in an free account and restricts the number of images that can be uploaded per month. Yahoo Photos didn’t have that restriction.

In other industry changes, MySpace just bought PhotoBucket. PhotoBucket is the main supplier of photos to MySpace.

Basic accounts are free so it is easy to test drive before you commit. You could also maintain several accounts. Perhaps you want one account just to share photos with family and friends and another where you keep all your photos.

Which Photo-sharing service do I like?

There are three services that stand out for me: Flickr, Zooomr, and Picasa. Flickr is owned by Yahoo. Zooomr appeared in 2006 and is looked by industry pundits as a serious rival to Flickr. I believe the founder was 17 at the time. Picasa is owned by Google and thus fits into their suite of services available with a single login. Picasa also has a desktop client that allows you to organize and modify images which you can selectively upload.

In terms of number of web features, Flikr is first, then Zooomr, then Picasa. Of the three, only Zooomr doesn’t have a print purchase service. All three have free and pro accounts. Zooomr has nifty approach with pro accounts: You can get a free pro account if you are a blogger. I started a pro account with Flickr but I’m watching Zooomr.

What’s Interesting About Photo-sharing

People like to look at pictures. People want to share photos with friends and family. People might wonder if other people will like their photographs. OK, granted, these by themselves are not all that interesting. What about making connections? I have several photographs take when I was stationed in Viet Nam. Someone searched on my unit designation and found my photos. He gave me information about what happened to my unit after I left. This is part of what intrigues me about photo-sharing, the added value that on-line photo-sharing can bring to an image. This value is twofold. First, people can add tags, comments, notes, locations on maps to their work and, in some cases the work of others – metadata. Second, the photo-sharing site can take all the information provided by people about an image, mix in what they can determine about how users interact with images and other users, and develop ways of ranking and clustering images. The end result is that access to the image is not static but dynamic and made much more accessible. Flickr is the only service that I know of that takes metadata and combines it with user behaviors to produce a feature that guides a person to other images they may like.

Consider tagging, a concept librarians are trying to come to terms with – people providing their own descriptive terms for an item and not using a controlled vocabulary. A lot of photo-sharing services allow the owner to tag an image. Flickr allows a member to grant permission to tag to friends, family, or everyone. When everyone can tag, you get interesting interpretations of a work. For example, let’s say I post a photograph of my cat and I tag it “cat.” Someone else might view the photograph and notice the cat’s whiskers and add the “whisker” tag. Is the cat asleep? On its back? Is there a marking on the nose? All of these are legitimate descriptors from someone’s point of view. Access to this image has been greatly extended. Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing makes a similar point about tagging books. Bridgit Jones’s Diary is tagged with the non-LCSH term “Chic Lit.” That term is used by other people for other titles. Searching for the tag Chic Lit” will get the user a bibliography of book in this user defined genre. Tim has interesting things to say about tagging. Take a look at When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing and Percent who tag. It will be interesting to seeif/when tagging makes the jump to traditional library services, such as the catalog.

Flickr is the standout service for librarians. I believe this is true because Flickr adds the most value to an image and provides the most access points to an image.

We want to find ways to direct people to our services. Is Flicker a means to that end?

Value Added to Images Through On-Line Photo-Sharing: a Flick-centric Look

I will indicate which service does not have a feature by using -F, -Z, and -P for Flickr, Zooomr, and Picasa.

• Share images on-line
  • Public, private, to selected groups such as friends and family
• allow users to define what the image means to them through tagging
• add a comment to an image
• add notes to areas of an image (-P)
• mark image as a favorite (-P limited to members, not individual images)
• be alerted when new images are added
• make the images available to other services such as blogs
• place an image on a map (geo tagging)
• advanced searching capabilities (-Z, -P)
• dynamically generate tag clusters(-Z, -P)
• dynamically determine how interesting an image might be to viewers (-Z, -P)
• Create groups (-Z, -P)
• Place image on map
• Create slide shows (-Z)
  • Picasa provides code for embedding flash slideshow
  • Flickr doesn’t officially support embedding slideshows on other sites
• Assign Creative Commons license to an image (-P)
  • Flickr has a search filter to limit search results to images with a CC license

Discussion About Photo Sharing

• Newbie’s Guide to Flickr
• Why is Flickr Afraid of Zoomr
• 2007 Photo Sharing Services Reviews
• Photobucket vs. flickr in Alexa and Technorati
• Online Photo-Sharing Services
• The Flickr Gunners
• Web Photo Sharing Site Faceoff

Discussions about Flickr in Libraries

• Libraries and Flickr – South Carolina State Library
• Flickr Tutorials – S.C. Libraries
• Applications of Flickr in Libraries - look half way down the page – Information Wants to be Free
• Flickr Tagging, and the F-Word – Librarian.net
  
• Flickr & Libraries – Librarian in Black
  
• Flickr for Academic Libraries – Library 2.0
  
• Using Flickr @ Reading Public Library – Library Techtonics
  
• Finding Focus on Flickr -Library Techtonics
• Tagging on Flickr and del.icio.us – Library Techtonics
  
• Meet our staff … and Flickr – Connect with the Campus Library
  
• Flickr and Libraries – Moving at the Speed of Creativity
  
• Ten More Reasons to Use Flickr in Your Libraries (updated) – Tame the Web
  
• Steal This Idea: Flickr for Libraries – Tame the Web
• Why Flickr is so Great for Libraries – The Shifted Librarian
• Flickr is the Web Photo Tool Preferred by Superheroes and Libraries – The Tao of Law Librarianship
• The hazards of letting people use your Flickr photo – Travelin’ Librarian
• Get Flickr-tastic – WebJunction
• Social Networking, Flickr, and MMOGs – Five Weeks to a Social Library
• Flickr + Library = Scary, Scary, Scary

Examples of Flickr in Libraries

• Swem Library Tag in Flickr
• Special Collections Research Center’s photos
• Georgia State University
• 365 Library Days Project
• MA Libraries
• Dublin Cities Public Libraries photos
• Libraries of The Claremont Colleges’ Photos
• zsrlibrary’s photos
• Libraries with Flickr Accounts
• Lansing Celebrity READ Posters
• Library Book Cards
• American Libraries Flickr Page
• Libraries that use Flickr
• University of Delaware Library
• University of Winnipeg Library Virtual Tour
• University of Winnipeg Library Slide Show on Flickr
• Santa Rosa Junior College

Photo Sharing Sites – A sampling

• Flick
• Zooomr – free pro account for bloggers
  
• Picasa (desktop organizer also available)
• BubbleShare – no tagging, sharing only
• Care 2 connect
• dotPhoto
• Faces
• Fotki
• MyPhotoAlbum
• Photobucket
• PhotoSite
• Shutterfly
• Webshots
• Zoto – fee only, 29.95
• SmugMug -fee only, 39.95
• Pixagogo – fee only, 50.00

The Library as Text: Part 2 (transition)

“Information storage and retrieval by means of data banks and computers are far more than technical devices. They constitute little less than a new way of organizing human knowledge and the relations of present inquiry to past work. All taxonomies are, in essence, philosophical. Any library system, whether by size or Dewey, enacts a formalized vision of how the world is put together, of what are the optimal sight-lines between the human mind and phenomenological totality.” George Steiner, “After The Book.” in Disch, R. (1973). The Future of Literacy. 154-155

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street-corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. “ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

I wanted to put up a provisional/transitional post, as I continue with the “library as text” idea. I mentioned FRBR and intimacy (in the same sentence no less!) in my last post, and I’m getting there, but for now, I’m bringing in Steiner and Camus for backup here as I continue to probe around the philosophical underpinnings of the “library,” explore the apparent pragmatism of library work, and to put forth an idea that will inform the rest: Practice is never more than an extension of theory.  For humorous foreshadowing, I also came across an image collage type thing (above) that I created to accompany a talk I once gave at a faculty research luncheon a couple years back, which I entitled, “Finding Another Way Down: Detraditionalization, Privatization and the Problem of Boundaries,” which was my first introduction to the psychological hazards and risks that accompany an intemperate and vulnerable exposure of my GenX roots, when, in the format of a “scholarly” presentation that, I naively thought, put forth a radically new philosophy of librarianship, I began speculating that meaning, not information, is the librarian’s gig, all the while trying to synthesize a new analysis of library and information science, in a pastiche, rock-star wannabe multimedia overload, through the works/ideas of Adorno, George Jefferson, Gramsci, Camus, Weber, T.S. Eliot, Fat Albert, Heidegger, Dewey (Melville and John), Brian Eno, David Bowie, Brecht, De Tocqueville, and Marshall McLuhan, to name just a few! Aahh, young, idealist librarian without a library. I can probably find the presentation, if anyone is interested. Even if it is easy to dismiss this serialized “essay” as a philosophical train-wreck, which I am always prepared to do myself, at the very least, it is the continuation of a wrought manifesto of sorts, an invitation to explore and expand library work in an imaginative direction, expose librarianship as fundamentally pre-occupied with creating milieu that provoke, awaken, refine and support the authorial intentions of “users,” and to fluently move in directions that are as expansive as the human mind, and as perilous as the human heart. More to come on FRBR and intimacy, I promise.

Library of / Library As Text – Part 1

Myron Tuman in Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age (1993) asks a provocative and interesting question: “Is it possible for the ascendancy of hypertext to do anything but push literacy in the direction of information management?” (78). Since I’m coming from a particular professional “place,” (academic librarianship) which I often characterize as a cultural practice that, historically, has been devoted to establishing and tweaking curatorial roles in relationship to texts, but also coming from a place where I’m attempting to manage and direct a multimedia production space as an experientially significant library service, I find questions like Tuman’s stir up deeper waters that submerge, maybe even drown, contemporary professional debates about scholarly communication, the nature of authorship, the economics of publishing, and the broadening notions of what constitutes a text and what it means to be literate. Tuman’s interesting book was published at a time when all sorts of challenges to the traditional “book” were ramped up, most particularly the event-driven phenomena of playful textual interaction and navigation metaphorically characterized as “hypertext.” Although some of Tuman’s (and others) remarks seem, on the surface, a tad dismissive, what’s clear is that the ascendancy of “hypertext” (or perhaps we can insert another anything 2.0 here) challenged deeply entrenched and romanticized notions of authorship and signaled the need to articulate a more expansive notion of “author” in order for one to characterize the writing of “hypertext” (or any interactive, technology dependent learning event) as more than just an exercise in “information management.” And while the professional literature of library and information studies abounds with discussions that attempt to understand, dismiss or promote the vocational challenges posed by and captured in such extravagant metaphors as the information society or postindustrial society, students arrive each year, less interested in the reading of books in the library and more interested in reading (and writing) their own texts.

Where might “the library” fit into a discussion of texts and of textuality? It’s clear that as a repository of texts, the modern academic library is a place where the reader and text intersect, but it is also a place where readers intersect, but it should also be a place where the texts themselves are encouraged and expected to interact with each other. These “conversations” are made possible by evolving (I hope) conventions of “bibliographic” control and description (metadata) that in their own right, I’d like to suggest, generate “texts” or new and intentional textual genres for our users. Although a university’s research library plays an often unquestioned (and, at times, uncritical) role in the preservation and access to a university’s institutional and cultural record, more interesting to consider is how the cluster of activities that situate librarianship as a cultural practice devoted to hypertextualizing or intertextualizing the entire bibliographic universe can be appreciated for and identified by their non-neutral and generative contributions to the discussion of what constitutes a text and thus what might constitute literacy. (Troy Davis)

Part II: FRBR: Intentionality and Intimacy in a Universe of Entities…

Searching Images: A Follow-up to my Creative Commons Experience

I recently posted about the Lost in Light project and how they transferred my family’s 8mm movies to DVD. I agreed to the CC license but I also want to make the films useful so I have been going through them and describing the scenes. For those who get past this paragraph, I will bore you with more details about the home movies. Right now I would like to discuss how I am approaching this project and the resources I am using. This sort of analysis is a good demonstration of the power of the Internet. Consider also that I am working with 50+ year old films and trying identify locations, events, and people. So far, I have spent quite a few hours on the first 18 minutes of one DVD. I now have a much greater appreciation of the photo analysis work done by our intelligence agencies. I don’t see how the sort of work I’m doing could be accomplished without the Internet.

Web resources I’m using

• Google Web Search. Doing a web search generally leads me first to Wikipedia but I also locate other sites; most of which are travel related.
• Wikipedia. A lot of the film is from Africa and many of the place names have changed. Wikipedia has been a great source for cross referencing old to new place names.
• Google Image Search. This has been really helpful when I am trying to nail a specific location. It is also helping me develop skill in analyzing images. The scene in a photograph and the same scene in the film are more often than not seen from a different orientation, angle, and perspective. It is challenging to find out a common element. What I find on the Internet is considerably more recent than the movies and imagination is needed to compensate for the changes in building, vegetation, etc.
• WikiMapia. I may use Google Earth later. Wikimapia didn’t require installing anything on the computer. My father shot some of the film from an aircraft and I’ve had a difficult time locating aerial shots on the Internet. One recent segment I was working with was taken from the air, over a city, in what looked like an approach to an airport. There were two features that stand out and I want to know what they are. More about this below.
• YouTube. I haven’t actually used this resource yet but plan to. I am also thinking of posting some film segments on YouTube to see if anyone can assist with identification.

In addition to the web resources, I have my father’s flight records so I know where the plane was and when.
Here is an example of how I used some of the resources I described above. There is a segment of film where the aircraft is flying above a city and passing over what appears to be a park of some sort and a large geometric feature covering a lot of ground that I couldn’t immediately figure out. Following this segment, the scene shifted to the ground in Madrid, Spain. I used Google web search to look for parks in Madrid and was pretty sure I had found the Estanque del Retiro (an artificial boating lake) in the Parque del Retiro but all the views were ground level. I assumed that the scenes from the air were taken when the plane was on approach to the airport so I went to WikiMedia and searched Madrid Spain. The Parque del Retiro is in about the center of town and as I zoomed in, there it was. I had the DVD in the player and WikiMedia on the laptop and I was able to trace the flight path as they flew over the park. Obviously geographic features changed but many of the buildings had the same shape and it wasn’t difficult to orient. Assuming that the aircraft wasn’t going to make any sudden turns, I advanced the DVD and WikiMedia and quickly found the second feature which is the largest cemetery in Europe, Cementerio de la Almudena. Here are comparison shots from the DVD and WikiMapia

Cementerio de la Almudena from DVD

Cementerio de la Almudena from Wikimapia

Estanque del Retiro from DVD

Estanque del Retiro fromWikimapia