My name is Leala Abbott. I'm a digital archivist, specializing in DAM systems, Information Management and Collaborative Software (Web2.0). In my spare time I run a community powered wiki called Soccer NYC which provides information to over 600 soccer players across NYC. If you want to know more visit my about me page.
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.
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!
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.
Bates, M. J. (1989). The design of browsing and berry-picking techniques for online search interface. Online Review, 13, 407-424.
“The human natural tendency in information seeking is to fallback on passive and sampling and selecting behaviors derived from millions of years of [evolution]” [1]
–Marcia J. Bates
Today, the relationship between information retrieval (IR) and its human counterpart is seen as both important and necessary in any realistic discussion of information-retrieval models. In “The design of browsing and berry-picking techniques for online search interface[s]”, Bates proposes a shift from the machine-like classic information retrieval model to a more organic, user focused retrieval model. In 1989, when Marcia Bates wrote her article on “Berrypicking…” a user-centered searching model was a revolutionary idea. Prior to the induction of Bates’ model, IR models were often systems-centered rather than user-centered. If one takes this user-centered concept and applies it on a wider scale it makes even more sense. Society in general has been moving toward creating computer models that function more like humans. Take, for example, the military computer WOPR in the 1983 film “Wargames”. In this film, the major character matches wits with a computer gone awry, this computer has been built to emulate human-like thought processes and therefore reacts in a more organic and changeable manner to the main characters (the users) actions. This is exactly the type of IR model that Bates suggested six years later with her “berrypicking” concept. Bates suggested a more organic, ongoing, transformative process of answering queries in response to the users input, rather than the rigid, linear process of the classic IR model.
The essay is divided into five sections: “Introduction”, “A Berrypicking model…”, “How and where users search for information…”, “Search capabilities for a berrypicking search interface” and the “Conclusion”. Most sections are accompanied by useful graphs and examples that help to relay the information that Bates is presenting to the reader. She is direct and to the point and uses very colloquial language that supports her purpose of IR being discussed not only in the realm of scientists, but also in the realm of library professionals. The largest portion of the essay is devoted to the explanation of “six methods of search” and how these search methods should be incorporated into information retrieval systems. They are used by Bates to illustrate how search patterns vary organically rather than strictly following a linear pattern. The six main search strategies that Bates discusses are: “footnote chasing” (looking to the footnotes of a paper for more sources), “citation searching” (looking for other papers that cite from the same source), “journal run” (methodical searching through each journal for the intended topic), “area scanning” (physically searching items/documents in the vicinity of the original document of interest), “subject searches” (scanning subject indexes for relevant material) and “author searching” (finding additional works by the author on the same topic). Bates also goes forward to state that these methods are not used singularly but often are used in conjunction with one another. Discussion of these types of search methods supports the main idea she presents in her article, that IR models should be more organic and less linear and that users generally do not find just one type of searching method sufficient to meet their information needs.
Essentially, the essay focuses on comparisons of her “berrypicking” search model against the traditional, linear IR model. Her model essentially differs from the traditional model by stating that “the nature of the query is an evolving one” and “the nature of the search process…follows a berrypicking pattern, instead of resulting in a single set” (p.6). Bates’ model proposed in 1989 is still very relevant to society in general and even more specifically to Library Science. Elements of the concepts introduced in Bates article are represented today in various internet and computer applications. For example, del.ici.ous (http://del.icio.us), a popular internet based application, attempts to link users with like interests together, therefore allowing the user to browse others users’ favorite links as a kind-of relational search method. In the library setting, Bates’ model helps put into context the types of searching capabilities that users might apply to any given IR system and thus helping developers build better systems. Bates’ concept of “berrypicking” also has strong and weak points; strong in the sense that it is malleable and can conform to different types of search methods in many different types of settings (internet, physical, electronic) and weak in the sense that it is a very difficult concept to apply systematically as its very nature is inconsistent. Overall, Bates presents us with a very though-provoking concept; many results of this can be seen in various IR systems today. In the end, Bates leaves us with something to think about. How can we, as library science professionals, provide our users with the most interactive and organic searching methods available?
[1] Moreville, P. (2005). Ambient Findability. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. (p.61)
http://www.sachagreif.com/- I really appreciate the subtle colors that allow the header to pop and the black text seems soothing against the pale brown background. The page is also divided into upper and lower levels, with the lower level having a design relationship with the top nav bar. The font choices are perfect and the section headers are clearly distinguishable from the body content.
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/ - This one is busy done properly. That is, the busyness does not detract from the navigation or layout of the page. The paper textures throughout the design give the page a three dimensional quality. The date tabs before each entry make it very easy to navigate and quickly see where each new entry begins. The body text is not my favorite use of a serif as I prefer a cleaner san-serif for body text. However it does fit in well with the overall design.
http://www.blogwhatdesign.com/index.php - This Blog employs a retro feel and I am always a sucker for this particular color palette. If you are a design firm you better hope that your website is also well designed. The site is a bit too busy for my taste. I would aim to thin it down, however I do feel it does mirror its predecessor the busy vintage ad that it is trying to immolate. The content is a bit cluttered; just take a look at the “services” page. In light of this setback the other main pages, “FAQ”, “Blog” and “Portfolio” are much more in tune with clean design. The main navigation bar is straightforward and easy to use.
http://www.sauromotel.com/ - This one is just plain cute! It’s little low on front page content, giving the user nothing to really cling onto until they click one of the links. However in doing so, the site is clean and nicely laid out, easy to navigate and simple to explore.
I’ve also found that Real Estate and Fashion/clothing websites tend to be the most experimental. Yes, some of these employ my abhorred “splash screen” but they are very graphic heavy and justify the use of the element. Here are a few and some other odds and ends I’ve picked up along the way:
http://www.prospectdenim.com/ - Denim company that shows what flash can do. This page allows for users to customize the music which adds to the overall experience.
http://www.learnlakenona.com/ - Oh man, I love this one. It is so user responsive, that I could just spend hours moving my mouse back and forth over each section. The map is suburb and the color combinations lovely. Navigation is somewhat easy once the user gets used to how responsive the webpage is to mouse movements.
http://www.meomi.com/ - This site is the epitome of cute, asian inspired design. This site employs the use of sound for feedback as the user explores the main page.
http://www.prahba.com/en/home.htm - Ahh the beauty of Flash! However, the site is tough to navigate and probably not the best usability site ever, but it sure does look great!
Personally, in my opinion, the best design for a town website ever:
I am a digital archivist with over 8 years of experience in information management, specializing in digital repositories, DAM systems and collaborate software.
As a digital archivist, I ingest, assess and manage digital files (i.e. images and photographs) and paper records using digital asset and collection management systems. My work includes traditional archives activities such as finding aids, collection processing, assessment, accessions, storage and handling. I am a Metadata specialist for digital arts and photography, working with taxonomies, controlled vocabularies and current metadata schemas (i.e. Dublin Core).
As an information manager, I’m passionate about creating working environments that apply current technologies to business operations and practices. I work closely with staff and create digital workflows, organizational methods and records management policies. I am an ardent supporter of incorporating Web 2.0 technologies in organizations to foster productivity and creativity. I help people gain control of information overload and connect to the information they need.
Environments: Museum Archives, Academic Archives, Institutional Archives, Cultural Institutions, Design Studios, Photography Studios, Private Libraries and Small Offices.
Specialties:
Digital files, Paper records, Photographs, Digital asset management (DAM), Web 2.0, Information design, Usability, Knowledge Management and Workflow creation
