Off the Shelf

Here’s a list of questions that people frequently email me regarding folks in my line of work (digital asset and content management):

1. About me and the Rutgers MLIS program: Since I had already been working in the field for 6 years (digital archives and digital asset management) when I entered the program, my advisor let me take whatever classes I wanted. He told me to get in and then get out. I honestly can’t even remember what classes I took. Since I was in the process of transitioning from non-profit digital archives work back to advertising (corporate knowledge management) work, much of the curriculum was either a repeat of what I had been practicing in the field or I took the course just to get the credits. I do recall taking metadata, records management, interface design, information visualization and a class on web 2.0 (which was pretty funny). The North Carolina program is probably the most innovative for the kind of work I do now, or at least the most applicable.

2. Certification for Archivists: There is a lot of argument in the field right now about certification and are you “really” an archivist if you aren’t certified. This is one of the reasons I am happy I don’t work in that field anymore, more emphasis on academic credentials than if you can “really” do the job or not.

3. Program Innovation: I think as far as innovation goes, it was in comparison to the other two programs (Pratt & NYU/Palmer). Mainly, because the RU program has a course in information visualization and interface design as well as trying to get people exposed to web 2.0 (can’t believe there are people that by this time aren’t). However, I haven’t checked either programs in some time so they may have added some new courses.

4. LIS Program Overall: I didn’t like that I felt as though I was on “Library Island” the whole time. The program is short sighted in that the main focus is on working in a library and only draws from the world of libraries. Even though the information science field is so much broader than that, you can do almost anything with this degree!

5. Human Information Behavior Coursework: I detested the curriculum for the course, I am not a big fan of papers that really say nothing at all or when they do have an important point to make its buried in a bunch of “academic speak”. I also felt as though it was a bunch of librarians practicing “armchair psychology”. I’m sorry, but I really can’t respect someone who did their undergraduate work in English Literature who thinks they can now discuss at length the psychology of human beings in their search for information. It was very unfortunate that the curriculum only drew from the world of libraries and they never pulled from, or exposed the students to, the worlds of: usability, user experience design, advertising, information architecture, business analytics. I firmly believe that a user experience designer knows more about human behavior in relationship to information than any librarian any day. All the papers weren’t horrific, however they just seemed like old approaches and not very fresh. I think they should rename the class to “Library Science Classics” and then we would be getting somewhere useful. Who doesn’t like the classics?

6. Q. What do I do now?: A. Now I work in creative technology, more specifically digital asset or content management, which is a combination of lots of skills learned in the field. I do sometimes come into contact with archives when I do consulting work it’s usually about software choices (digital asset management applications), standards (metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies) and digitization best practices. The MLIS program really just gave me the slip of paper to move forward. The only thing I can suggest is you find a really talented archivist to work under for some time, who is involved in a digitization program.

7. Q. How does a digital arts/design background mesh with digital archives?: A. For how digital archives overlaps with digital media backgrounds just have a look at this and it will become clearer: http://dpbestflow.org/. Doesn’t this all seem so familiar? As digital media folks we already posses the knowledge on how to get archives from point A to point B when it comes to digitizing their collections. Many of the skills you need are skills we used everyday in our digital design work:

* Knowledge of file formats, applications (graphic design and web design), copyrights, management of digital materials (related to content management), how to scan and use digital cameras, color management, just to name a few.
* Also, if you did design you have a pretty good understanding of the importance of description, keywords, tags etc as you had to search online photography/image/art databases to locate specific assets that fit your needs. For example “boy with umbrella”. So you have a good idea what people look for and how they search.
* The stuff that people like us need to pickup is all the archives specific stuff, such as dealing with online collections, digital asset management (which if you work in media today you’ve been in contact with regularly).
* We also need to know taxonomies and metadata schemas like the back of our hands.
* Combine that with some solid programming skills, which if you did website design you can easily pickup EAD, XML and other information management specific syntax’s.
* The other biggie, which is harder for more creative folks to pickup, is information architecture and semantic web stuff. These skills help us to choose good, flexible and forward thinking applications as well as innovative ways to manage digital collections and their associated information.

8. Q. I have no digital/technology background work what classes can I take to do what you do?: A. I love this question [scarcasm]. A good place (don’t take this the wrong way) to start is to look up (wikipedia, google etc) common terms that appear such as “content management” “digital asset management” etc and learn more about them and their many facets. Unfortunately, there aren’t just some classes you can take or some applications you can learn, there are a zillion! Also, all this is dependent on factors such as the chosen work environment (non-profit, corporate, educational etc) and even those differ individually. Another factor is the type and amount of data/information you are to manage and a zillion other things that align to form the scope of the work. Oh and don’t forget the years of experience that you will need doing each any every one of these individual facets (see Q&A #9) in order to be a proficient Digital Asset or Content Manager.

9. Q. What kind of experience do I need to do what you do?: A. Its essential to have several years experience doing digital delivery: website development, application development, digital imaging etc. to pursue work in this area. I have 6 years of experience as both a web and graphic designer. I also have an 8 year background touching on all the little bits and pieces that make for a good digital asset or content manager: traditional archives work (collections processing), digitization best practices, digital imaging, metadata, taxonomy development, digital and content management systems, UX, IA, data analytics and HCI. Some of these which obviously overlap and came from experience in the design world.

10. Q. Can you tell me some good resources for information about being a digital asset manager/digital archivist?: You can always check out my delicious links to see all the various topics that I keep track of and read up on daily: My Delicious Links or stuff I follow on Google Reader . There are also a few good DAM blogs: Another DAM Blog and Digital Asset Management. Its a pretty HUGE profession with lots of little nooks and crannies to explore and specialize in.

Tags:   archives · archivists · education · experience · information_science · MLIS · RutgersNo Comments.

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.

Tags:   archives · DAM · digitization · LISNo Comments.

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.

Tags:   archives · DAM · speeches · standards2 Comments

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.

Tags:   accessibility · computers · copyright · DCMA · FOIA · hackers · information · LIS · NARA · security · technology · tools5 Comments