Out of the box software

I've been looking at open source software lately, and I like what I'm looking at. I haven't migrated to Linux yet, but I'm replacing many of the expensive brand names with better OS software. GIMP isn't instinctive, but neither is Photoshop.
Open Office is much better than the built-in boobytraps of MS Office, and I'm in love with Google Docs - not for all purposes, but great for collaboration and easy transfers while traveling.
So now I'm looking at content management systems and thinking of wikis as documents and teaching platforms as well as "wikipedia" clones. Maybe just starting as a supplement to Blackboard, since I get paid to use that, but also as an alternative for people who are having issues with firewalls. That seems to happen once a year, at least!
I'll let you know what the results are, let me know your favorites.

Shaking things up at MAC

I'm back from Lovely Louisville and the Midwest Archives Conference. It was a good conference, if a little shaky - yes, we felt the second midwest earthquake in the middle of a session. And no, it wasn't ours, on disaster recovery, and we had to spend Friday apologizing for mis-cuing the special effects.

We had a good response on our workshop on co-operative disaster recovery, and we hope to take it on the road and online, so feel free to give us feedback! And feel free to contact us if you're interested in a session where you are. Have powerpoint and manuals, will travel.

Thanks to all of you who gave us such a warm welcome back in the old stamping grounds - no, I haven't lost all my Kentuckisms yet!

Taxing our patience

As I work on my taxes and look at the piles and piles of forms, I had a thought.

There are boxes to donate a dollar to a political party - no big surprise. Why can't we have a box to donate a dollar to: a library? PBS? NEH? A national college scholarship fund?

These are all non-political non-sectarian good things, right? The public good? And ignored by the present administration.

So let's start a movement. Let's let people make a difference in a positive way!

Workshop at Midwest Archives Council in April

If you're going to be at MAC this spring, come to the "Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Disaster Planning" workshop on Saturday. I'll be presenting with long-time collaborator BettyLyn Parker, and we'll cover local and regional co-operatives, as well as larger options, such as state level and FEMA programs.

There will be tons of handouts, so don't worry about taking notes. Just open your mind and think about things that archivists don't usually think about - like cost effectiveness and return on investment. Believe me, you won't convince beancounters to rescue your collection if you don't know how to count beans, and where they are!

If you haven't been to MAC, it's the best archival conference in the country - not on a high-price coast, friendly, and with many useful sessions - and all at a bargain price.

If you don't come to the workshop, look at nametags and say hi!

The catalog isn't broken. Really.

The catalog isn't broken. Really. It finds just what you type in the search box.

And that's the problem.

Try searching for a book on typography. According to LCSH, it doesn't exist, even though designers and publishers use it every day. Who (except librarians) would search for Type and type-founding. or | Graphic design (Typography) ? And why would Hersey's Hiroshima show up in the results? I'm confused, and I'm a librarian.

The catalog works. What doesn't work is the search.

The thesauri are so outdated that they might as well be chiseled in stone. Who searches for a term that's 30 years outdated?

The thesauri assume too much. You go to the catalog to find out about something, you shouldn't have to know about it before you search. Why even go to the catalog when you have to Google it first?

Worldcat on Google make it easier to find, but not more accessible. You still have to know the secret code. Sure, breaking the facets makes it better, but still not good, or especially usable. Search for Princeton in the default search box, and the second result is The essential Jung.

Huh? I'm still confused.

So why don't we change the terms? It ain't easy. There's no simple way to update the terms, and when they do get updated, they're usually outdated again. It's not LC's fault, it's not OCLC's fault, it's the whole system. The whole 20th century we-use-one-letter-codes-because-it-saves-a-byte system.

So what's the answer? Tagging, which is fun and helps you find your stuff, but doesn't help anyone else find your stuff? Another thesaurus? Hierarchy? Or dumping it all out and unstructuring it, mixing in the tag clouds, and sorting it with a Page-rank type ranking?

I don't know, but if you do, email me and we'll look for capital, because the demand is out there, and if libraries don't fix it soon, people will get used to going elsewhere.

They could come back, texting is just the old IRC abbreviations resurrected, it could happen. And they could fall in love with telnet and Wordstar, too. But I'm not betting on it.

What's my wishlist? The new system should be flexible, capable of near-real-time (or at least within a year) updatable, allow uncontrolled terms as well as controlled vocabularies, and allow relationships (similar to, related term).

Like RDF.

Like the semantic web. Just a corner of it. Just for now.

Please?

Civil disobedience

I've followed the progress of the Copyright Wars with great interest. Kahle vs Eldred, Gonzales, etc etc, which has gone to the Supreme Court, and the quieter resistance of Google Books.

Kahle is the man behind the Internet Archive and a partner in the OCA. He started archiving the internet in 1996. For the young people out there, in 1996, less than 1% of the population used the net. AOL was a big player, Google was still two years down the road. And Kahle started saving those few early web pages.

Without Kahle, there would be no record of the online world in those formative days. The lifespan of a webpages is the same as fruitflies,we hear; two years is geologic ages in web years. So Kahle is the hero of our age, he is, in effect, the man with the fire extinguisher at the Library of Alexandria. He's fighting for the right to save our cultural heritage from the copyright sharks.

Kahe is doing it in the legal arena, without much success. He has some high profile partners here, too, like the Library of Congress. So Kahle is taking the polite path - if you object, and can prove it's your intellectual property, he'll take it down from the IA.

That's the same path that the Google guys are taking - if we scan your book, and you object, we'll take it down. And while there have been some challenges, no one has stopped them.

So in their quiet way, they have stopped Mickey Mouse from stopping progress. The endless extensions of copyright terms has made lawbreakers out of many of us, without our knowledge (which is not a legal excuse). The purpose of copyright law is twofold, according to the Constitution - to protect the rights of the creator for a limited term, and to end that term to foster progress. Current law reverses that intent.

So here's to three guys who have taken the path of most resistance, who have stood up for the rights of people everywhere to know their history.

On mass digitization

I love reading about the perils of mass digitization. The same things that were said about the OPAC, computers in general, and (a little before my time), the printing press.

What will technology bring? It's too new! Too untried! And most of all - what will happen to my job?

What brought this on? A recent tirade I heard about Google cutting the librarian out of the process. They're doing everything! There's no librarian doing the selection!

It does seem that there were many librarians in the selection process, over the course of many years. These huge academic libraries didn't build themselves. While not everything may be as useful as when it was selected, it may well be useful in a different way.

What's missing is the intermediation - the librarian as middleman. There's something lost here, mostly in the cataloging process - but cataloging as we know it is broken. Of course, tagging isn't all that healthy itself, but at least it doesn't rely on antiquated vocabularies and concepts. The semantic web may still be in our future; I'm looking forward to Google (or the next guys) distilling it al into a giant thesaurus.

It may be the fruits of reading way too much science fiction in my youth, but what's wrong with all the books being online? People complained about Project Gutenburg (maybe) having inaccurate keyboarding, now they have the page image (with the stray thumb). Now they complain about the thumb - the same people who study typos in old texts to determine the pagination and foliation of rare editions.

Mistakes have their uses, too.

I'll be the first person to agree that a full text search of Othello doesn't tell you it's about jealousy. On the other hand, Shakespeare didn't call Hamlet the Melancholy Dane, we stuck that label on him. Is he really the Schizo dane, or the Teenage Dane, or the Ironic Dane?

So let us not stick our labels on for eternity. This is a new age of scholarship, where you don't have to have a Columbia ID to see the actual text, where the ivory tower casts a fainter shadow, and and fresh eyes are welcome.

Yeh, we were going to do all this ourselves. Eventually, when we had the time and the money.

We still can, when we have the time and the money, and do it our way.

right.

So stop kvetching and let's do what we do best - intellectual access. It's what we've always done, in theory, at least. We help people find information.

We have a few million books to work on, plus the whole web. That should keep us busy for a while. So we might have to do things differently. Well, we don't type catalog cards anymore, and we got over it (at least, most of us).

Meanwhile, no censors, no closed stacks, no geographic limits (though there are still economic ones).

So what's so bad about Google Books? It's a gift! Open it up and enjoy!