Happy New Year...

From the NYPL vintage holiday postcard digital collection.

5 Things Thursday: The Future, Open Source and the Smell of the Library

5 things to round out a successful 2011 with almost 10K blog hits. Thanks, readers!

1. Want to read about supporting open source tools for digital preservation?
2. Would you like to add presets/templates using the Adobe Metadata panel?
3. Read about how UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) is digitizing everything.
4. Do you like the smell of a real library? A perfumer has captured that special scent.
5. Does the NYT think the future of computing will include genetic data storage?

 

BONUS: 34 Photoshop tutorials...

Metadata Monday: Permanent Metadata Rejoice!

Although I have written about the Embedded Metadata Manifesto previously a few months ago, a recent CNET piece talks about permanent metadata here.

In it they restate that the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) in London, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) have banded together to take the issue of data persistence one step further by proposing that permanent metadata be applied to images, text, audio and video files.

The piece raises important questions such as when cameras, mobile phones and other devices evolve to include more and more specific information embedded into files that they create, what are the ramifications of having identifying information included in every single digital file?

The manifesto is at present just a document but raises an important discussion about the sort of information being stored within metadata, and that your content-creation devices are probably capturing more data than you think.

Happy Holidays from Mod Librarian!

IMDB listing for White Christmas.

5 Things Thursday: Self Archiving, Spaghetti Sauce and a Diet

Here are five things to ring in the holidays:

1. Why asking for self archiving shouldn't be scary.
2. What is the spaghetti sauce moment for your library?
3. Google + now preserves copyright metadata.
4. Do you need to go on an information diet?
5. Want to read librarian online poll results?

Metadata Monday: Virtualization and Orchestration

There is a post on ZDNet by Dana Gardner that is getting a lot of social media action. Here is the summary:

 Metadata-driven data virtualization and improved orchestration can help provide the inclusion and scale to accomplish far better data management. Such access then leads to improved integration of all information into an approachable resource for actionable business activities.

Indeed, this post is chock full of enterprise metadata catch phrases and terms ranging from those that are comprehensible like unstructured data and GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) to those that require some thinking like holistic data set and actionable data.

The panel of experts featured bring up some excellent points, however. One of my favorites is from Noel Yuhanna of Forrester Research "Obviously, you can’t boil the ocean, but I think you want to start with some data which becomes more valuable, and this comes back to the point that you talked about as the right data. Start with the right data and look at those data points that are being shared and consumed by many users, business users, and that’s going to be valuable for the business itself."

The over-arching theme is that data is being created and consumed at breakneck speeds. Organizations are dealing with many disparate systems, user groups, contributors, stakeholders and levels of data quality. Virtualization and orchestration is about distilling, integrating and using the best data efficiently.

 

More Book Gift Ideas

In case you are still doing holiday shopping, books are always a great gift. Here is a great guide from my favorite design blog Design Sponge.

The Design Sponge team has impeccable taste and the books featured in this guide are unique and lovely. From  Vogue: The Covers to Pantone: The 20th Century in Color, this list offers something for everyone.

Mushrooms, department stores, Laura Ingalls Wilder and the guy who built a toaster from scratch instead of buying one at Target, this list is as fun to read as the books featured. Happy holidays!

5 Things Thursday: Lightroom, UX, DAM, and Librarians

Here are more than five things to consider.

1. A plug in for complex file renaming in Lightroom.
2. Why aren't information schools integrating UX education into LIS programs?
3. Don't you just love citation generators for research?
4. Are librarians turning into digital asset managers?
5. Need an amazing job resource list for LIS listings?

 

BONUS: PACA Rogue Website List of Photo Copyright Infringments

Metadata Monday: Automated Controlled Vocabularies?

This blog has previously discussed automated metadata creation and while I do believe that we still need humans to evaluate the subjective, utilizing tools to streamline workflow is always a benefit in the resource deprived information industry.

SKOSsy is a SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) which generates thesauri dynamically in English and German using DBPedia , an independent project to extract structured data from Wikipedia.  SKOSsy produces ‘seed’ thesauri to provide a solid headstart in a thesaurus project, generating the data in mere minutes. Even with refinement, enrichment and a little editing, employing SKOSsy can save significant time.

For more about the possibilities, see this post from the Semantic Web Company.

 

Books to Read or Gift

Here is The New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2011. I personally think it was a good year for fiction with some of my favorites including The Barbarian Nurseries, The Buddha in the Attic, Ten Thousand Saints, and This Beautifiul Life.

Also listed are notable non fiction which are often great choices for holiday gift time. Blood, Bones and Butter or Moby Duck might make nice gifts as well as art history tomes on Caravaggio or Van Gogh.

 

5 Things Thursday: iPhone Apps, QR Codes, Search

Here are five things for this week:

1. What are the Library Scenester's favorite iPhone apps?
2. Do students even know how to use QR codes?
3. Want to learn more about Google's search algorithms?
4. What should you do if you mess up at work?
5. Try out this Image Operations Metadata Tool.

BONUS: Little Printer will produce a custom mini newspaper so you can stop reading on your phone.

Metadata Monday: Free Your Metadata

Want to know how to clean up and reconcile your metadata? Check out this site from the Free Your Metadata team. Free Your Metadata is a scientific collaboration between Multimedia Lab (ELIS — Ghent University / IBBT) and MasTIC (Université Libre de Bruxelles).

The clean up process employs Google Refine and there is a screencast demonstrating its use with example data from the Powerhouse Museum.

The goal of the reconciliation step is to connect collection-specific vocabulary to a controlled vocabulary like the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).

Ultimately, the goal of squeaky clean metadata is interoperability, to prepare data for the Linked Data Cloud. Free your metadata!

 

UPDIG: Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines

I really dig the guidelines featured on the UPDIG site.

The UPDIG guidelines aim to clarify issues affecting accurate reproduction and management of digital images. These guidelines were created to establish photographic standards and practices for photographers, designers, printers, and image distributors. The guidelines cover Digital Asset Management, Color Profiling, Metadata, and Photography Workflow.

The most useful sections for me are on file naming, digital image workflow and a rich resource on metadata. Each set of guidelines is customized to a particular audience as well.

Thanks to David Riecks, a contributing editor to the UPDIG project, for pointing this site out.

5 Things Thursday: Is It Really December?

Here are five things to ponder as you wonder where 2011 went.

1. Why should publishers start acting like libraries are their friends?
2. Does digital asset management belong on a server or in the cloud?
3. Are you a librarian seeking inspirational words of wisdom?
4. Check out the DAM Learning Center.
5. Would you like to visualize digital collections using Viewshare?