Off the Shelf

my very own geek chart!!! This chart shows the last 30 days of your activity on a few of the most popular social websites (Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Lastfm and oh yes, Facebook). Get one of your very own here.


Tardissauce’s Geek Chart

This is a live chart, so check in (if for some reason you are insanely into exactly what online stuff I’m using at the moment for some unknown reason) as it will change all the time….

Have fun!!!

It’s my favorite and most well suited acronym and I apply the philosophy behind it to just about every project I encounter. It stands for: Redundant, Outdated and Trivial and it refers to content and information you’re just better off living without or not creating in the first place.

In order to really see something clearly you have to get rid of all the crud thats surrounding it. I (others included) call this simple method “getting rid of the R.O.T”.

Nothing is worse than finding the same digital asset in over a zillion places in one system, it devalues the original and is a headache to seek out and destroy all existing versions. For the next point, nothing makes information more irrelevant that when it is outdated. Outdated information can not be leveraged nor can you receive any ROI on it being available, the best thing to do is just get rid of it! Trivial content is just that, it’s trivial and unnecessary. For example if you have a system that can generate a particular file type on demand, let’s say it’s one that can generate a JPG from any type of supplied file be it a TIFF or a PSD or whatever you throw at it. Is it necessary to then also keep copies of JPGs versions of everything in your system as a “just in case”? Nope, no way! Get rid of it.

So, for every asset that makes its way across you desk you need to ask yourself, “is this R.O.T?” You will find that if you start approaching all your projects with “getting rid of the ROT” in your mind, you will start to clear away the cobwebs weighing down your system and overall make it more usable (and your life a bit easier) in the end.

Some folks have been after me for some time to write down my somewhat random kernels of “opinion” about MLIS programs, based on my line of work…

Overall, I believe MLIS programs are an important structural part of becoming a librarian or an archivist. That said, I do not believe that they are EVER a substitute for actual experience in the field and just because one has an MLIS, a librarian or archivist it does not make. The degree must be coupled with experience and knowledge. I will start also by stating that I got my MLIS after I had been working in my field for 6 years and my take will almost always be very different then that of most first-timers in the field. I will also state that some people I know REALLY enjoyed their LIS curriculum, however, I was not one of those people.

>I’m a bit biased on this one, but in order of importance for you east coasters I prefer my schools in this order: Rutgers, Palmer and then and only then Pratt (sorry folks, flame away). Much of this opinion is based on the “innovativeness” of the faculty. If you end up choosing Rutgers take Steve Dalinas class on Records Management, Information Visualization with Anselm Spoerri and Interface Design with Jacek Gwizdka. Jacek will make you read the book “The Design of Everyday Things” Don Norman is a genius - take my advice if you read one thing in LIS school, and you plan on heading into the world of IA and Knowledge Management please read this book!

>Don’t take everything the faculty teaches you for gospel. There are lots of innovative, house-shakers out there and they are usually NOT teaching. However, I really do wish more of them would! Don’t be fooled by their years of experience, some of them have just lost the magic.

>If you take away one idea in LIS school, it should be standards. Here especially its a good idea to not reinvent the wheel. Don’t make stuff up and if you find yourself in a place where you have to, research it to death (and I mean don’t just read LIS papers) and then use every bit of knowledge to formulate a well educated guess. Use experience and good judgment and keep it consistent.

>MLIS programs tend to be VERY library-centric. They don’t really sail into the world of Knowledge Management, ECM and DAM. They are also not very IT driven. This kind of stuff you are going to have to learn on your own and through REAL experience in the field, which means you will probably need to like it. My line of work requires a strength in IT as well as Information Architecture (incl. UX and design) and LIS programs don’t really meet the mark there yet. However, I will say that some do try. Univ. of North Carolina is probably the best at actually achieving the mark (watch these videos here: UNC LIS Video Series). My advice here if you want these skills start attending conferences, seminars and join these professional associations: AIIM, ASIS&T, IAI and anything about Knowledge Management you can get your hands on (big huge field, that I feel LIS disregards most of the time).

>I found my HIB (Human Information Behavior) classes to be filled with irrelevant papers designed to bore the user to sleep. They were generally completely off the mark, not very fresh and almost always spoke the obvious. Every now and again there was a kernel of something really interesting, but it was always padded within complete gibberish. I learned more about HCI and Human Information Behavior from reading Donald Norman, Edward Tufte and my Interface Design course. Want to know about humans and how they behave in regards to information? You should look to the field of advertising, design and management. User-experience designers can tell you more about how a user thinks than any reference librarian any day (flame away kids).

>Skip the cataloging class and take metadata. It’s just more relevant in today’s new technology driven information gorge-fest.

>Question everything. This goes for any type of educational journey. Always think things like “is there a better way?” or “is anyone doing anything differently?” and “what are some other takes on this same subject matter?”. Look outside the field of LIS for guidance and innovate thinking. Watch everything on this site: TED: Ideas Worth Spreading.

>To enable LIS school to catapult you into my line of work, you need to think innovative and try to always think outside the box. There are real bits of truth in the curriculum, but you have to find them. You have to be willing to do LOADS of self-teaching and exploration and you have to be passionate about technology and its impact on information.

>I also believe the MLIS degree in my line of work is only as good as what you couple it with. For example, I would take a candidate much more seriously if they had an MLIS AND an undergraduate degree that concentrated on technology and/or design. A BA in Literature is not going to give me the impression that the candidate has experience with technology and design (you need a good eye to tell one bad digital asset from the next). For example, I combined my MLIS with a BA in Museum Studies and an AA in Multimedia Programming and Design. That background, combined with grueling years working as a freelance graphic designer, gives me the perspective into the user that’s oh so necessary working in Digital Asset Management. It also gives me the ability to do QA on incoming assets and to assess a good product shot, from one thats lighted like crap. So when candidates come calling, look at their undergraduate academic work AND professional experience, don’t just stop at the MLIS.

>Last, get in and get out. The big world outside is where you will learn the most, start along this track as soon as possible.

There you have it. These are pretty much off the cuff and are my top essentials. I will probably think of more in the days to come. Good luck out there trailblazers.

Digital Asset Management and Institutional Repositories: Case Studies Addressing the Development and Implementation of Systems

Date: Monday, November 10th, 2008
Time: 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Place: NYU Kimmel Center
60 Washington Square South, Room 405, New York, NY 10012

You can find resources to my presentation posted below including my keynote deck as a PDF here which includes my offbeat speech notes. I will say that its probably not fascinating reading compared to actually attending one of my talks. My deck style is a bit unconventional, it’s heavy on imagery and short on text. I am a big fan of Edward Tufte and I take his minimal stance when it comes to creating PowerPoint presentations. In fact I even prefer Keynote over PowerPoint all together.

Here is a list of some of my go-to resources:

Metadata Working Group, boxesandarrows, AIIM: Infonomics Magazine, AIIM: Blog, KMWorld, 37 Signals: Signal vs. Noise Weblog, Digital Curation Center: Tools, XMP Open: The Idea Exchange, Adobe XMP, Adobe XMP: Developers Center, ReadWriteWeb

…for more links please follow me on Del.icio.us

Hope you enjoyed the presentation and feel free to send me any questions you may have.

So, this weekend I attended my first hacker conference, “The Last H.O.P.E (Hackers on Planet Earth)” sponsored by 2600 Magazine. Featured con speakers were: Steven Levy, Kevin Mitnick, Jello Biafra, Steve Rambam and Adam Savage of MythBusters fame. Some of the sessions I did attend included: “Evil Interfaces: Violating the User”, “A Hacker’s View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)”, “Hacking Democracy: An In Depth Analysis of the ES&S Voting Systems”, “One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer”, Wikipedia: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”, “YouTomb - A Free Culture Hack” and all the featured speakers (except I very sadly missed Steven Levy, I loved that iPod book!).

So what’s a librarian to make of all this? Well believe it or not, there is some common ground between the hacker community and us information science professionals. Chief among these are copyright (especially now with all the digitization occurring in libraries), The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), censorship, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) and the ever popular Wikipedia. There are more parallels between library science and hackers than you would ever think possible. We have similar concerns such as: accessibility of information, the sharing of information, collaboration and community outreach.

Hackers get a bad rap. I always had a soft-spot for them, even the nasty ones, as they show great ability to think outside the box and open up previously closed discussions on security and our rights. At the con there were no phones stolen, no re-wiring of the hotel elevators, no malicious hacking, or anything of the like. At the end of the 3-day con I was not surprised to hear this, from the session I had attended and the people I met, I learned a lot about hackers and their community. Hacking from a positive prospective brings attention to topics that definitely need more discussion, RFIDs and electronic voting for instance. Their act of exposing security flaws becomes shared knowledge within the community. They bring to light the shortcomings of processes and systems we depend upon, making way for improvements. Today, many hackers have jobs where they keep our precious data safe by testing systems, exposing vulnerabilities, looking for back-doors and ways to compromise the system, resulting in systems that keep our data safe.

So what can the hacker world bring to the library community? One thing that came clear to me during my attendance at the con was that hackers love to share their knowledge of technology with others. Hackers create community spaces fittingly called “Hacker-spaces” and lots of cities across the world have them, you just may not know it. Visit Hackerspaces.org to find one near you. Many of the attendees to the session I attended on “hacker-spaces” brought up questions such as “I run a hacker-space, how can I get more involved with the community?”. “How can we sell ourselves to schools and institutions as safe places for kids to learn about technology?”. Technology presented the wrong way can be boring, for instance “…so now open your Excel spreadsheet” to quote from one of the talks. However, if you present it properly it can be much more interesting. If libraries or schools are looking to spice up their community learning programs, they could do no better than to get into contact with some of the folks running “hacker-spaces” in their communities and set up an exciting series of technology talks.

There are some very cool projects that speakers at the conference are working on that are great resources for librarians. Take for example Virgil Griffiths “Wikiscanner”. In non-technical short, this tool lists anonymous Wikipedia entries and shows you who’s editing them, what corporations are involved and their page edit histories. Check out some of the great stuff this tool has uncovered and read Virgil’s FAQ. In his talk Virgil also discussed other interesting Wikipedia centric projects such as: Coloring text by Trustworthiness by the UCSC wikilab. In which “The reputation of authors is computed from content evolution: authors who provide lasting contributions gain reputation, while authors whose contributions are reverted in short order lose reputation. Thus, the reputation system provides an incentive towards constructive behavior.” The other fun project is “YouTomb” co-developed by brainaics from Harvard and MIT as part of the MIT Free Culture student organization. In short it “tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation” creating patterns of information that can be used to gauge current copyright practices and trends.

What can librarians do for hackers? We have lots of knowledge that we could share including, our research abilities, our knowledge of government and corporate organizational processes and our ability to organize information. Lots of projects involved the gathering and recording of data and/or data-mining. Who knows metadata standards and controlled vocabularies better than librarians?

So if you’re a forward thinking librarian or digital archivist out there, support the hacker community and spread the word about its projects. The library and information science community needs to know about great tools like the “Wikiscanner” and “YouTomb” and many others on the horizon and one of the best ways of doing that is to become more involved in the hacker community. I’m not encouraging random “friending” of hackers, but rather encouraging information science professionals to start paying attention to the hacker community especially its projects and conferences. Hackers and their curiosity of all things mechanical, social, technological brings important issues into the public venue and we as librarians are often on the same fightin’ side. They know where the lines are drawn, because they take chances walking really, really close and some times even stepping over them. I take their approach that you can learn much more by breaking something open than you can by just sitting there and watching it work. This thinking “outside the box”, initiates creativity, change and results in a better, safer, more informative world for us all.

To read a more journalistic review of the H.O.P.E conference, here’s a recent Cnet article “HOPE Conference Highlights Everyday Hacking”.

Cnet or rather Elinor Mills, was nice enough to take my picture watching the coffin go by, at the conference as well.

Here are some fantastic shots of the con from alice_zero.

http://wakoopa.com/

What a fun little app! Total invasion of private software time…however, very, very interesting.

Below is a embeddable widget from the site listing all the software I am currently running on my PC. Wow! Pretty scary when you think about it. Right now I am just trying to understand the benefits of something like this, or rather the social software benefits of this. Here are some of my initial thoughts.

• discover new software via your contacts
• see what other people are doing
• see how you spend your time

Also from a software development/use standpoint, there is lots of usage statistics that can be harvested. For example they have this quote on the website: “Did you know communicating is the second biggest activity on the computer? We do. Wakoopa knows software”

http://www.thefoundbin.com/

Ok, being someone who has loved and lost and loved again, I love the idea of this website. However the only way for it to be truly useful is to have a VERY wide user base. I tried doing a few random searches, but nothing came up. However, I still really appreciate the idea behind this website and would love to see it grow and become more widely used. A good way to possibly start to widen that user base would be to work directly with the chamber of commerce in different cities across the globe and encourage them to incorporate the use of this tool into their own lost-n-found system structures. A few media spots wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Here’s to hoping that some people are reunited with their favorite things.

Ok, so I’ve decided to get on the last.fm boat. Why do you ask did it take me so long? Well, when I started using it again I remembered why. Simply, I don’t think I like it. I am a big fan of the Pandora project and prefer that to almost any online music application. However, I was intrigued by last.fm’s use of social integration (tagging, comments, groups, wiki) and, well, there is a widget I can use with my Wordpress blog.

As a new user last.fm frustrates me, I get lost within the framework and cannot find my way back to for example “my favorites”. I “heart” songs and I can’t find where to locate them again, other than the strange “playlist” feature. Furthermore the playlist feature is not a list of “my favorites” but rather a list of “some” songs I was able to add to yet another type of list. I consider myself a very savvy Web 2.0 user and if I am having a problem navigating this puppy, I can only imagine whats happening with other folks.

Lets start at the begging with a simple “tasks and scenarios”>

I am going to search for my favorite artist, in this case its “The Fall“. After searching I am taken to a page (seen below) where I can read about the artist, see how many times it’s been “scrobbled” (will get to that later) and listen to the song “Idiot Joy Showland”. First, I would like to “favorite” this artist, however I can’t seem to do that. Frustrating and I’m not interesting in recommending them to a friend right now.

Also, this is not my favorite “Fall” song, so I want to select a different song. My favorite song “Spoilt Victorian Child” is way down the list. Once selected I receive an error that “this track is not available”, however I can add it to my playlist. This is kind of confusing, but I do it anyway. I realize that I must pick a song that has a play button icon next to it, if I am ever going to hear anything. As I look down, because I don’t like the four songs that are listed, I realize that my big long list of songs is now gone! Where did it go? Do I now have to use the back button?

Dear me, I had to use the back button! I decide to pick from the four songs that last.fm has suggested I play, this however does not take me to another screen like my other selections did, which is nice. I soon realize that the “visit profile” is how I can get back to the band page after making a song selection to the main page again. This is a very ambiguous feature as “visit profile” could have meant “my” profile. I looks as though last.fm was taking the Facebook approach and by simply showing me a picture of my band and the “view profile” link, I would automatically understand that to mean the artists profile. Oh, ok…

Since last.fm is either not offering me the songs I like or only live versions of songs I like, I decide to go back to the main last.fm page (seen below) and re-start my experience. It is here that I find my “recently loved”. However, again, this feature is not expandable and I can’t figure out how to get to the big list of my “loved” songs. I love looking at what I love, I think most people do or the feature would not exist. I’ve also now found two things that interest me the “scrobble” application and a link that was rather hidden called “play last.fm radio”. Ohhh, now I might be getting somewhere.

After selecting “play last.fm radio and typing in another one of my favorite “The Wedding Present”. However, I am taken to a page (seen below) with the “Wedding Present” cutely sitting on a rock wall, but no “Wedding Present”. Instead I get the Charlatans, great band, I even have some of their records, but this is NOT the “Wedding Present”. I get that last.fm is assessing my taste in the “Wedding Present” and playing other similar artists for me, however, this is really not what I was looking for…and there is no “back” icon, so I guess I am stuck listening to what they throw at me. There is also no way for me to access the playlist and see what’s already been played.

Where is the about page? or the FAQ page? I see HELP, but I don’t feel like I really need “HELP”, I would like a long description of what the service is and what they offer, how to use it etc. I think “HELP” is ambiguous and I think just like men won’t pull over to ask directions most people don’t click HELP.

I am not happy and I am now pretty frustrated with too many links, too many tabbed pages, and not enough results for my input. I think now I am going to go now an install the “scrobble” feature and hope it gets better. More on this in Pt. 2, coming soon!

P.S. As I am signing off lastfm, as if it knows I’m leaving in frustration, tries to win me back by playing one of my favorite Stone Roses songs “Made of Stone”. I really want to use this web app! I want to share this wonderful song with you guys, with a handy little link. However, I guess that will have to wait!

This was recently posted to the Museum Securities Network Mailing-list re-posted from the Times Online UK, so I’ve decided to post it yet again for you guys to read:

Secrets of the crystal skulls are lost in the mists of forgery

With Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull about to erupt across our cinema screens, attention has once again been directed towards the real crystal skulls that have intrigued scholars for years. Some are tiny, only an inch or so high, while others, like the Aztec skull in the British Museum, are lifesized and often anatomically detailed.

Contrary to the belief held by many New Age devotees, something that will doubtless be enhanced by this summer’s movie, none of the skulls appears to be ancient. Research by Dr Jane Walsh, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, has shown that not only were modern tools used to shape them, but also many extant specimens can be traced back to the same Victorian fraudster.

Reporting on her 16 years of research in the American journal Archaeology, Walsh notes that not a single crystalskull in a museum collection comes from a documented excavation, and they have little stylistic or technical relation with any genuine pre-Columbian depictions of skulls, which are an important motif in Mesoamerican iconography.

The first crystal skulls made their appearance in the early 1860s: they are small, usually not more than one and a half inches high, and the first to be documented seems to be the one in the British Museum, with others appearing in Paris and Mexico City over the next decade or so. This first generation of skulls is drilled from top to bottom, and may have been made from genuine pre-Hispanic crystal beads, which are known from archaeological contexts in Mexico; some may have been made as a memento mori, carved for the European market, with no intention to deceive.

The Paris crystal skulls came from Eugne Boban, who ran antiquities shops in Mexico City and then in Paris in the 1870s, and who produced the first of a second generation of skulls, lifesize and unperforated. Failing to sell it in Paris or Mexico, where it was denounced as a fake, Boban set up shop in New York in 1886 and sold the skull at auction.

Tiffany and Co bought it for $950 but a decade later sold it to the British Museum for the same amount. It became known as the Aztec crystalskull until modern workmanship was detected in the 1960s. Walsh, who recently examined it with an electron microscope, considers it to be a 19th-century European invention carved with modern lapidary’s equipment.

What Walsh calls a third generation of crystal skulls surfaced in the 1930s. Sidney Burney, a London art dealer, purchased a life-sized skull almost identical to the British Museum’s, but with a separate jawbone. The two were compared in the journal Man in 1936, and then a few years later Burney sold his specimen to Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, author of Land of Wonder and Fear, Battles with Giant Fish and similar works high in adventure and short on veracity.Although Mitchell-Hedges never said where he got the skull of doom - in his 1959 autobiography Danger My Ally, he portentously claims that he must not reveal its source - as soon as his daughter Anna inherited it, it acquired a spurious Maya provenance that has clung to it for the past 50 years. She claimed to have found it at the site of Lubaantun in southern Belize and her story remained baseless until her death last year at the age of 100.

When I worked at Lubaantun in 1970, she wrote to me asking why I had not mentioned the skull in my reports, and built up a cottage industry taking it round US cities to display on a pay-per-view basis in rented hotel rooms. On the one occasion when I met her - and the skull - she claimed that the two metal-drilled holes under the jaw, to hold the artefact firmly in its box, had been there when she found it in the 1920s.

A considerable New Age literature, fuelled by a skullie cult, has built up around the Burney Mitchell-Hedges skull and may well have inspired part of the new Indiana Jones movie. Walsh calls it a veritable copy of the British Museum skull, with stylistic and technical flourishes that only an accomplished faker would devise. The skulls are too good to be true, she says. Pre-Columbian lapidaries used stone, bone and wooden tools with abrasive sand-crystal skulls are much too perfectly carved and highly polished to be believed.

One puzzle remains: where did Eugne Boban get the relatively flawless blocks of rock crystal? Modern sources include Brazil and California, and Qing Dynasty China also produced large crystal artefacts. Until recently the undesirablility of drilling samples from the frangible crystal for analysis had precluded further source characterisation, but the advent of non-invasive Raman spectroscopy using portable machines may soon strip the last layer of mystery from this tale of skulduggery.

This is a series of lectures and interviews at UNC-Chapel Hill on topics related to information and library science and the use of information in learning and research.

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