Inside ZSR
Here are a few notes from my first LITA National Forum: Subjective perceptions. From the opening keynote (an epistemological discussion of Wikipedia), a couple questions resonated with me – one in particular. How do we know how to resolve conflict when we don’t really agree on reality? Legitimate peripheral participation. “Through peripheral activities, novices become... more ›
In what was a quick two-day abbreviation of the ALA Annual conference (my first), the same observation kept recurring: there are a lot of librarians here. For every session I attended, there were more librarians than the chairs (and walls and floors) could accommodate. Erik’s Saturday morning cloud computing session was a case in point:... more ›
Asheville hosted a fantastic code4lib. Here are a few highlights: Tuesday’s keynote. Cathy Marshall (Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research) discussed the nature of living digitally, where, for many, loss is an acceptable means of culling collections, where benign neglect is the de facto stewardship technique. Galactic glitter glue with space debris. There was a proposal for... more ›
In addition to a nice blur of technologies and acronyms, here, in distilled form, are a few key ideas I gathered from code4lib 2009: libraries vs. museums of books (or how the ecosystem of information will become all electronic) a chair in a room, a catalog on the web (or how design requires context) linked... more ›
The eighth annual MERLOT Conference, held in Minneapolis, had much to offer. Under the banner of “Still Blazing the Trail and Meeting New Challenges in the Digital Age”, there were an impressive number of sessions (from 15 minute mini-sessions up to 2 hour workshops) shared among several different conference tracks. The library track, ‘Reinventing Libraries... more ›
Yesterday, I attended Edward Tufte‘s Presenting Data and Information, a one-day course on information design and display, in Raleigh. Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale University, is a master of data presentation and information display; his books – Beautiful evidence, Visual explanations, Envisioning information, and The Visual display of quantitative information – are impressive and... more ›
Some of today’s sessions included: Views from National Libraries and Archives. It is apparent that answers to the important questions of digital curation are still materializing. Brief session notes are available. Building Capabilities for Digital Curation Repositories. There was not an empty seat in this session on defining capabilities, capabilities which included standard concerns like... more ›
A long day of talking about digital production, preservation, maintenance, and sustainability. Some of the day’s sessions included: What do digital curators do and what do they need to know? Abstracts and brief notes on the research perspectives of this question are available in the DigCCurr wiki. Identifying digital curation services and functional requirements. The... more ›
Kevin here, in Chapel Hill for the next couple of days at DigCCurr 2007, an international symposium on digital curation. On the bus ride to tonight’s reception at Wilson Library, I spoke briefly with a librarian from the University of Kansas who described a freshman honors tutorial she teaches. Unrelated to digital curation, the course,... more ›