Digital Preservation and Curation

There were several interesting articles regarding digital preservation and curation recently.

From LOC's The Signal, Four Easy Tips for Preserving Your Digital Photographs simplifies steps to Identify, Decide, Organize and Make Copy. This truly is the easiest way for photographers to approach their preservation efforts, providing they also account for digital storage obsolescence.

Two charming blogs from the United Kingdom - one from the Gloucestershire Archives on preserving born digital items describes the process they developed involving their unique "SCAT (Scat is Curation And Trust) tool to 'package' digital deposits as 'GAip' files. GAip (Gloucestershire Archives Ingest Package) files are then stored in our dedicated digital archive along with their own unique 'fixity file,' which is a snapshot of the contents of the package and a way to verify that the contents have not changed during the storage period."

On The National Archives blog, Leicestershire's Folk Past in Pictures describes the learning curve in digital preservation projects, most notably with irreplacable glass-plate negatives. This piece contains some great examples of the subjects archived in the collection.

 

 

5 Things Thursday: #internetlibrarian, Apps, Social Media and Metadata

Here are 5 things, hopefully with just enough explanation to create intrigue. Not much time for more...

1. Have you heard of the Art Loss Register? It is the world's largest database of stolen art and could really help in this current case at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam.
2. From the conference #internetlibrarian, the Librarian in Black posts a marvelous guide to Sensible Library Website Development. My favorite quote "lack of information is at the root of all bad design decisions." Indeed.
3. Here are 50 Great Mobile Apps for Librarians. I like the selection criteria shared in this presentation (also from #internetlibrarian) and can safely say that I use a few (Indeed, Epicurious), but I am adding a reference app and a good dictionary to my smart phone immediately.
4. Nominate your favorite librarian for Library Journal's Movers & Shakers 2013. Enough said. Aren't I your favorite librarian?
5. Are you concerned about social media and photo metadata? Take this survey on Controlled Vocabulary.

BONUS: One of my favorite librarians, Meredith Farkas, blogged about getting out of your own story. Oddly, my therapist's advice on this just a few days ago was to become "more of a historian and less of a novelist."

Metadata Anyday:#taxoBC: Taxonomy Bootcamp Recap

Although I did not attend Taxonomy Bootcamp in Washington, DC last week, I learned a lot about it on Twitter by searching the hashtag #taxoBC.

One of the most useful related posts is by Heather Hedden, the undisputed expert on taxonomy. In her post Taxonomies for Multiple Kinds of Users, Heather talks about the underlying theme of the conference this year - that taxonomies serve diverse audiences whether in enterprise use, on public websites, for e-commerce or for indexing and retrieval.

"Not only may the same taxonomy be targeted at different users at once, but also different users over time."

Joseph Busch at Taxonomy Strategies presented a workshop on Metadata Interoperability and Findability. While there is a ton of information packed into this 60 slide presentation, I was most delighted to see extensive discussion of Dublin Core as well as some indexing rules or how to actually use a taxonomy to tag content. Naturally, there was some attention paid to who within an organization should tag assets and autotagging.

Theresa Putkey presented on the Guiding Others Through the Maze: Working With Stakeholders to Build a Taxonomy. Theresa has a talent for taking complex concepts and distilling the information into useful and digestible information. Here she covers the hows, whys, who (users) of a basic taxonomy from building a taxonomy to updates.

Lots of other great stuff happened at Taxonomy Bootcamp including talks from Samantha Starmer of REI, Gary Carlson of Gary Carlson Consulting and Seth Earley of Earley & Associates.

 

#InfoCampSEA: 5 Things (and More) from SPL Keynote

On Saturday at InfoCamp Seattle, we had the pleasure of listening to a keynote speech by the City Librarian of The Seattle Public Library, Marcellus Turner.

Turner has been in this position for over a year and hails from the Jefferson County Public Library in Colorado. You can read all about him here.

His speech included 5 challenges for libraries in general and then 5 solutions that SPL will employ to better meet user needs.

First, the 5 challenges:

1. More segmented user groups ranging in technical savvy from the digital unaware to adapters to natives
2. Change by process takes time
3. Libraries have an image problem
4. Libraries can be internally focused with solutions rather than externally focused
5. Libraries are inflexible physical structures meant to house materials

How does The Seattle Public Library system hope to address some of these challenges?

1. Increased hours
2. Better collections
3. Improved discoverability online
4. More community events
5. Focus on technology, the culture and history of Seattle, and the physical spaces

Mr. Turner's speech was inspiring and thoughtful. I was fortunate to work on a project in the Central Library Special Collections when I was a student and SPL is a wonderful resource in a community that values libraries.

#InfoCampSEA: What is VRM?

I attended a session at InfoCamp Seattle on Sunday that kind of blew my mind. Initially, I thought I was too simple to grasp the concepts being bandied about, but then when concrete examples came to light, I totally got it.

Stuart Maxwell, IA and UE consultant presented on VRM - Vendor Relationship Management. The basic premise is control of all your data. Instead of a billion websites owning parts and parcels of you, a central repository stores your data and you decide what to reveal and to whom.

The website for the project itself offers a clearer explanation - Project VRM at Harvard. And, I am told, reading The Cluetrain Manifesto and especially The Intention Economy by Doc Searls is imperative to understanding.

I did get a few salient points from Stuart's presentation, however. First off, wouldn't it be great to only have to fill out or update online forms or registrations once not on every site you use? Also, wouldn't it be nice if Nordstrom or Amazon, your preferred providers knew your tastes, but LL Bean from whom you only order a gift once a year for someone else did not keep bombarding you with sidebar ads for flannel shirts? VRM could make this real.

More importantly, concepts inherent to VRM could simplify the good old TOC or TOS - who reads these anyway? The site Terms of Service Didn't Read is all about unifying terms and explaining them in easy to digest ways.

VRM could play an integral role in helping consumers control everything from health records to financial information to online profiles. It could change the world of e-commerce and create a lot of opportunity for information professionals.

Stuart has some other interesting stuff on his blog The Machine That Goes Ping.

#InfoCampSEA: Technical Content Strategy and Taxonomy

I was fortunate to attend two sessions at InfoCamp on technical content strategy and taxonomy.

The first was led by Bram Wessel, Experience Strategist and Principal at Factor and Gary Carlson, taxonomist extraordinaire and Principal at Gary Carlson Consulting. Bram and Gary have teamed up on a number of recent projects which seems a really organic fit.

You can check out a PDF of the presentation here, but one of the things I really got out of it was that Bram and Gary work together on design projects because "the whole martini has to taste good."

Meaning that the components that they term Technical Content Strategy - Taxonomy, Metadata, Search, Systems Integration and Performance Optimization all have to work together to provide the most effective user experience.

I was especially thrilled to be reminded of the value of personas when developing requirements. I think as I am enmeshed in the day to day of the DAM system I manage, I forget that I can easily explain personas to our client and make headway in having a better decision making tool for system changes on metadata fields and taxonomy.

Gary gave another presentation on Sunday at InfoCamp on Avoiding the Autobiographical Taxonomy. Link to PPT is here under Taxonomy Bootcamp 2011. He starts with an example of John Cusack in the film High Fidelity talking about organizing his personal record collection not alphabetically nor chronologically, but autobiographically.

Essentially, this means that if you are designing a taxonomy for a website, design it for the end users not for yourself nor even for the company or organization who owns the site.

Both presentations reminded me of the importance of evaluating search logs to promote and add terms, not making assumptions, providing user education and adding value.

If you're lucky enough to be in Washington, DC at Taxonomy Bootcamp 2012, you can check out Gary Carlson's presentation there right now.

#InfoCampSEA: Technical Content Strategy and Taxonomy

I am always a fan of Bram Wessel and Gary Carlson. Bram is an Experience Strategist with

#InfoCampSEA: How to Identify Flaws in Navigation

I attended InfoCamp Seattle this past weekend and was quite impressed by many of the presentations. I will post articles about the ones I attended all week long.

On Saturday, I attended a session by information architect Patrick Mishina on how to identify flaws in navigation structures. I learned quite a few things from his work on the University of Washington Burke Museum site (which is currently being redesigned as a result of his efforts).

Identifying flaws is particularly important not only when designing and building a website, but also when evaluating the user experience at any point. Since websites are often constructed in a phased build, some flaws may not be readily apparent to all users or administrators.

Accurately identifying flaws can help project managers to scope changes and updates and to justify improvements in the first place.

Here are 5 things to look for when assessing navigation:

1. Redundancy (multiple links to the same place)
2. Recursive loops (links that lead nowhere or back to the same place)
3. Information Silos (links that allow no method of return to the original site)
4. Broken Links (links that result in error messages)
5. "Dirty Magnets" (links that promise to lead to something, but leads somewhere else)

In addition, Patrick has a really useful blog with posts about taxonomy, mobile applications, ecosystems and many other interesting topics. Check it out!  

 

 

 

#InfoCampSEA: You Say Tomato, I Say Aardvark

I presented to an enthusiastic audience at InfoCamp Seattle this morning hoping to raise some questions regarding the tension between authority and vocabulary control and user tagging or crowd sourcing.

The tagging exercise worked awesomely to dovetail with some real examples.

Here is the Slideshare link to the resources.

http://slideshare.net/TracyGuza/info-camp-2012wolfet-14405654

Let me know if you have questions. Success!

5 Things Thursday: Unfound Art, Filenaming, Auto-tag or Crowdsource?

Here are five fabulous fall things:

1. Why are museum collections invisible on the web? Echoes my sentiments about the importance of discoverability. If museums take the time and trouble to set up digital collections, they need to ensure that they tag and promote appropriately for maximum impact.
2. Why are filenames important? First and foremost, as a unique identifier, but beyond that a filename can contain some relevant information. Read this to learn how to tailor filenames as another strategy to asset management.
3. From my favorite Henrik de Gyor: Should I Auto-tag or Crowdsource my Metadata? Explains tagging and auto-tagging as well as crowdsourcing and micro-tasking. Does any of it replace humans entirely? No, but it can be a valuable method of assistance when digital assets outpace their digital asset managers when employed cleverly.
4. Find out more about why digital asset management is important for academic institutions. With so many users, assets, marketing media and the like, university webmasters would be beholden to a centralized repository of up-to-date information, logos and brand assets.
5. Always an interesting read - the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. Help define levels of digital preservation, submit proposals for upcoming conferences, learn about the preservation of video games and more.

BONUS: Did you love you tangerine iBook or Lisa? Remembering our Digital Past with Computer Historian David Greelish.

5 Things Thursday: Nimble Metadata, Paradata, and the Decline of Reference

Here are five things for this crisp autumn week:

1. Learn about the data triplets in relation to research and surveys. Apparently, paradata refers to the way data was collected - for example, the amount of time it takes a survey participant to answer a question.
2. How can you make your content more nimble with metadata? From HTML meta tags to sneaking Dublin Core into your code, this article is a helpful primer on what matters in making your content more flexible and findable.
3. Interested in an open-source solution for cultural heritage institutions? Check out Delving - a growing set of tools for metadata mapping, harvesting, storage and retrieval, and a web-interface for managing and publishing data for online use.
4. From the records management community, a really basic and helpful article on how metadata works. These folks rely a lot on folder structure which is covered as well as rudimentary information on making sure files have classification, keywords, etc.
5. Is reference out of fashion? This post talks about the decline of reference. Frankly, I took an entire semester on reference and I don't even feel that we scratched the surface so to have it fall by the wayside seems a bad move in library school circles.