The Book of Trogool
Archives for August, 2009
Tidbits, 14 August 2009
Posted by Dorothea Salo on August 14, 2009 I am furloughed today and going out of town, so here, have an early tidbits post. I won’t be at the iPRES 2009 conference, but I do recommend looking over the program; it gives a pretty good overview of what digital preservationists think about and study, and what keeps them awake at night. (Midwesterners: the…
Not turning up our noses
Posted by Dorothea Salo on August 12, 2009 I gave a talk for PALINET some little while ago about institutional repositories. The audience had been primed by the fantastic Peter Murray to think about looking after digital content as the “fourth great wave” of library work. (I wish that talk was online. It was absolutely brilliant.) But not everyone was entirely onboard with…
Community and archival
Posted by Dorothea Salo on August 11, 2009 FriendFeed, now due to be absorbed into the Borg the Facebook empire, allowed me to lurk on the fringes of the scientific community Cameron Neylon mentions in his post on the takeover. Insert all the usual clichés here: it was enormously valuable, I learned a lot, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.…
Unpacking “the cloud”
Posted by Dorothea Salo on August 8, 2009 I hear talk about “the cloud” as the solution to research data curation. Data will waft softly up into “the cloud,” and “the cloud” will look after it and give it back on demand, and there will be unicorns and rainbows and rainbow-colored unicorns, and?well, you get the idea. I think this is bosh. Balderdash.…
Equipment and data curation
Posted by Dorothea Salo on August 7, 2009 Monado of Science Notes commented on my irreplaceable-data post thusly: It sounds as if the best thing to do in the short term is not throw away the old equipment. And to use the old equipment to copy digital media to newer forms… for which no one ever gets a budget, right? It’s such a…
Sustainability
Posted by Dorothea Salo on August 6, 2009 Unconnected incidents are making me ponder questions of sustainability. I don’t have any answers, but I can at least unburden myself of some frustrations! I learned from a colleague that arXiv is looking for a new funding model, as Cornell is wearying of picking up the entire tab. Various options are on the table, and…
Help Louisville… and think about your data
Posted by Dorothea Salo on August 5, 2009 Yesterday the city of Louisville suffered a freak thunderstorm that dumped half a foot of rain in an hour and a quarter. Their library has been devastated, to the tune of a million-plus dollars in damage. As a proud member of The Library Society of the World (and I have the Cod of Ethics to…
A something about me
Posted by Dorothea Salo on August 2, 2009 I cringe. I’ve accepted an invitation to speak somewhere, and an email comes back asking me politely for a bio. Cringe. Every single time. It’s downright Pavlovian. I loathe, despise, abominate, and abhor writing professional bios. However. There’s a point to the exercise: situating myself in context, so that folk can decide whether I’m worth…