Miscellanea
bbrown | July 14, 2010As a new blogger here at Book of Trogool I'd like to thank Dorothea for the opportunity to share in the discussion of evolving issues in technology, libraries, research, and scholarly communication.
I'm currently the Scholarly Communications and Library Grants Officer at Binghamton University, in upstate New York. I've been a librarian for some time (12 years now) and before that I was a chemist, with research experience in inorganic photochemistry, surface science reaction dynamics, and equine drug detection and quantification methods. While I did different experiments in each lab, each…
dsalo | July 13, 2010Oh, if I'd only had this picture for Zombie Day...
Credit for the photo to UK Serials Group. Credit for the alteration of the speech bubble (you can see the original slide here if you care to) to Steve Lawson.
Incidentally, I should have a postprint of an article based on this presentation up shortly. I'll leave word here when I get my act together and post it.
dsalo | April 13, 2010I'm just back from lunch, after giving my UKSG talk first thing this morning. Here are slides plus notes:
Who owns our work? (notes)
I'm aware that some of the notes are cut off owing to font size; I'll fix that as soon as I have a free minute. I also have slides only up, but this deck is a little more gnomic than some I've done, so I don't know how useful that'll be.
I'm having a wonderful time, and am very grateful to UKSG for the invitation (as well as their wonderful hospitality). You can follow the sessions via a cadre of brilliant livebloggers at UKSG's LiveSerials blog.
Next Monday I'…
dsalo | March 23, 2010This is my blog post for Ada Lovelace Day, on which we celebrate technical achievement by women. I'm writing it the day before, and setting it to post at midnight.
I hope someone is writing a biography of Henriette Avram. I will be first in line to buy it. I desperately want to know how she did what she did.
Her achievement is generally, and appropriately, recognized as a technical one: designer and implementer of the MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) format still in use in hundreds of thousands of libraries worldwide. If that had been all: dayenu, it would have been enough. For all its…
dsalo | March 11, 2010We have a guestblogger today! At my request, Peggy Schaeffer kindly sent me the following introduction to Dryad, which I reproduce as I received it (save for minor formatting details).
I will happily pass any questions in the comments on to Peggy for response.
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Dryad is a repository for data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolution, ecology, and related fields. It's not an institutional repository, or one focused on only a single type of data -- it's designed for the multitudes of data underlying published articles that would otherwise be scattered…
dsalo | March 9, 2010I interrupt your regularly-scheduled blog to ask for some help... comments closed on this post so that you'll comment where it'll do the most good.
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Apologies for duplication, and please forward/repost as appropriate...
We are working on comparing four digital-repository software packages (DSpace, ePrints, Fedora, and Zentity) in hopes of helping libraries and other institutions select the most appropriate software for their requirements. Read more about our project at
http://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/rep/.
We invite anyone who has recently embarked upon planning for a digital repository to…
dsalo | January 8, 2010Blogging is liable to be sparse next week, as I will be at Science Online 2010 to do a workshop about institutional repositories, and talk about libraries generally alongside the inestimable Stephanie Willen Brown.
Here are the slides for my half of the latter:
So you think you know libraries
I'm not doing slides for the workshop; it's a workshop and I want it to be hands-on and participant-driven. I expect we'll do some SHERPA/RoMEO trawling, some test uploads and metadata, some cold reads of publication agreements, things like that.
If you'll be there next week, please come say hi; I look…
dsalo | January 4, 2010I had the honor to participate in a futurist exercise by ALA's Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. The short essays they solicited have been placed online; they are well worth perusal. I wish the discussants at ALA's Midwinter gathering a pleasant and stimulating exchange.
With ALCTS's permission, I include my own entry here as well, as it is (at least in part) relevant to this blog's theme.
A distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman raised his hand politely after my talk. "Libraries," he said, in a grave and judicious voice, "are known and valued for their…
dsalo | November 11, 2009This is a pushmi-pullyu post. I need some help with an environmental scan, so I'll get us started and the rest of you smart folks can amplify my knowledge.
I want to understand what's going on where with data curation specifically at the institutional level (no NOAA, no ICPSR, none of that) Stateside. Grant-funded is fine, though I'm doubly curious about programs that have been weaned (or are weaning themselves) off the grant money. Here are the programs I know about offhand:
Institutional data curation: San Diego Supercomputer Center (right? I'm not entirely sure what they offer vis-a-vis…
dsalo | November 10, 2009So here's an interesting problem I ran into today. You have metadata in an XML file. You want to make the file self-describingly self-correcting, so you want to embed its checksum inside it. The problem is, you can't add the checksum to the XML file without changing the file's checksum!
Is there an XML verification tool not subject to this particular tail-chase? I don't know of one offhand.
dsalo | October 20, 2009I have intentionally steered Book of Trogool away from open access. I still believe in it; I still work for it. Toward the waning days of Caveat Lector, however, it became clear that I was shedding more heat than light on the subject, so I made a conscious decision not to repeat that mistake here.
This is, however, Open Access Week. I would feel rather churlish about ignoring that, especially since I was speaking yesterday for the occasion. What I'll do, then, is try to set a radical example I wish others in the open-access movement would follow: I'm going to celebrate a librarian.
Her name…
dsalo | October 5, 2009I am back from Access and feeling wonderful… and wonderfully exhausted.
Data and its care and feeding were the dominant themes at the conference. I strongly recommend reading the session summaries at Pete Zimmerman's blog. It's hard to pick star sessions out of so very many good ones, but the Leggott, Hartman/Phillips, Turkel, and Sadler presentations assuredly will repay attention.
I hate to say it, but blogging may continue to suffer somewhat. I have a Web 2.0 talk this Friday, a Wisconsin Library Association talk on the 21st, and I'll be doing a remote presentation for Open Access Week…
dsalo | October 2, 2009There's quite a bit going on at Access 2009 that's data-related in one way or another. Delegate Pete Zimmerman is taking excellent notes at his blog. The Twitter hashtag is #access2009pei.
I'm up right after lunch. There may or may not be a live video stream; if not, there will be canned video later. In the meantime, check out the communal Lego table in real-time!
I know I'm behind on answering comments. I'll try to catch up sometime today… but not until after my talk.
dsalo | September 24, 2009I know I said I'd be neglecting the place for a bit… but I still feel bad about that!
Here's what I've been working on. I'm afraid this is sort of the Cliff's Notes version, but at least it looks pretty?
Grab a bucket! It's raining data!
If you're coming to Access 2009 next week, you'll see the full version, which should make a bit more sense.
dsalo | September 11, 2009I wanted to call attention to this event at Harvard, which will be webcast live next Friday at 12:15 Central.
The difficulties in combining data and information from distributed sources, the multi-disciplinary nature of research and collaboration, and the need to move to present researchers with tooling that enable them to express what they want to do rather than how to do it highlight the need for an ecosystem of Semantic Computing technologies. Such technologies will further facilitate information sharing and discovery, will enable reasoning over information, and will allow us to start…
dsalo | September 9, 2009I see this confusion so often it seems worth addressing.
If you scan a page of text, what you have is a picture. A computer sees it not as letters, numbers, and punctuation—but as pixels, bits of light and shade and color, just like the pixels in your favorite family photo on Flickr.
You can't search for, extract, highlight, or cut-and-paste such "text." It doesn't matter whether you embed the picture in a PDF; you still can't search it. Ceci n'est pas une texte!
Compare this to creating a PDF from a word-processing or page-layout document. The computer already thinks of the text in these…
dsalo | August 27, 2009Steve Lawson and the LSW are three-fifths of the way to the goal of $5000 for the flood-ravaged Louisville Free Public Library by September 1.
The last two-fifths are the hard part. If you can help, please do.
Comment here or send me email (dorothea.salo at gmail) to let me know you've donated, and I'll do a random-number drawing for a PLoS travel mug and a size-large, never-worn PLoS One t-shirt.
Thanks.
dsalo | August 5, 2009Yesterday 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 prove it!), I ask anyone who is able to throw a few bucks their way. I trust Steve Lawson to do as he says he'll do.
The library's data center and systems office were on its ground floor. If you watch Greg Schwartz's Twitterstream you can keep up with the recovery efforts. For my purposes, though, I want…
dsalo | July 27, 2009There's a string of "day in the life" librarian posts happening, so I thought I'd throw one in. Today wasn't a typical day, I suppose… but I don't really have typical days, especially these days.
6:00-ish am: Wake up, kick the cat off the bed accidentally, get out of bed.
6:20 am: Dressed and etceteraed, sit down with laptop to check out the daily news and a few webcomics. (What? It's my routine. It works for me.)
6:50 am: Feed cats before they kill each other. Or me.
6:55 am: Pick up bag and leave house to walk to work.
7:28-ish am: Arrive at work. Show early-admission pass. Trundle up the…