I’m a little behind getting the word out,  but here are links to a recent poster and presentation:

ALISE 2010:  Patchwork Prototyping a Collections Dashboard (poster)

iConference 2010: Cultural Heritage Information Dashboards

Stay tuned for more on Dashboards at Museums and the Web 2010:

• Workshop: Building and Evaluating Collection Dashboards (Piotr Adamczyk, Richard Urban, Michael Twidale).
• Demonstration: Design and Development of a Collection Dashboard.

Description Peddlers and Data.gov: Two Peas In a Pod
As you may have heard, the National Archives issued a press release today announcing the release of three data sets on Data.gov:

The first milestone of the Open Government Directive was met on January 22 with the release of new datasets on Data.gov. Each major government agency has uploaded at least three datasets in this initial action. The National Archives released the 2007–2009 Code of Federal Regulations and two datasets from its Archival Research Catalog. This is the first time this material is available as raw data in XML format.

Read more on The Secret Mirror

and ArchivesNext:

• NARA calls for public comments on how it can be more “open”
• NARA releases data sets on data.gov, including catalog data and organizational authority records

or Fred2.0

• NARA Archival Research Catalog – Compressed for Your Dowloading Pleasure
• Get the compressed and easily dowloadable data on Simon’s Fred2.0 iBiblio site. (Thanks to Simon and Mark for doing the heavy lifting here!)

Original ARC data is available at data.gov

Starting in January I will be teaching LIS310 Computing the in the Humanities at GSLIS. I’ve posted a draft of my syllabus and would welcome any feedback or comments from more seasoned instructors in this area.

It’s been a while since I’ve taught an undergraduate course, and I’m quite excited to see the diversity of students who have already enrolled in the course. I’ll be updating the draft syllabus as we go along to fill in some of the details (like exactly which activity I’m using for a particular week).

Thanks to all of you who have posted your digital humanities syllabuses to the web, They’ve been a useful guide as I’ve been revising this one. Thanks also to John Unsworth for sharing his earlier syllabus for this course on which this one is heavily based.

CALL FOR PAPERS — LIBRARY TRENDS

The editors of Library Trends are pleased to announce plans for a special issue titled “Involving Users in the Co-Construction of Digital Knowledge in Libraries, Archives, and Museums.”

This special issue will be guest edited by Drs. Paul F. Marty and Michelle M. Kazmer, College of Communication and Information, Florida State University, with Dr. Corinne Jorgensen (Florida State University), Katherine Burton Jones (Harvard Divinity School), and Richard J. Urban (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

DESCRIPTION

Many libraries, archives, and museums provide their users with social computing environments that include the ability to tag collections, annotate objects, and otherwise contribute their thoughts to the knowledge base of the institution. Information professionals and users have responded to the transition to a web 2.0 world of user-created content by developing open source tools to coordinate these activities and researching the best ways to involve users in the co-creation of digital knowledge.

This rapid influx of new technologies and new methods of interacting with users has come at a time when libraries, archives, and museums still struggle to share data across their own institutions, let alone between different types of institutions. Information professionals in libraries, archives, and museums had barely begun to make progress developing crosswalks and data interoperability standards when, as social computing became the norm on the web, providing the ability for users to manipulate data changed from a cool toy to a basic expectation. Moving forward — and keeping pace with user expectations — requires the coordination of many different users (in all their variety) as they contribute, participate, shape, and create all types of data in all types of contexts.

We need to consider what social computing really means for the future of libraries, archives, and museums, and think carefully about the future trends and long-term implications of involving users in the co-construction of knowledge online. It is important to have broad-based discussions about what happens when users are involved in shaping and directing and guiding the development of online libraries, archives, and museums and their information resources.

For this issue of Library Trends, therefore, we seek authors who can step back and think broadly about those issues that are raised when we bring users into the mix in various ways and at various points in the data/information/knowledge life-cycle. We are interested in receiving high-level theory pieces, supported by research data of course, but with a focus on the long-term trends involved and their implications for libraries, archives, and museums. In particular, we are looking for papers that explore the future trends and long-term implications of the many different ways in which information professionals in libraries, archives, and museums have, can, and should involve their users in the co-construction of digital knowledge based on their online collections.

Sample questions include, but are certainly not limited to:

• How are libraries, archives, and museums implementing user-contributed data / descriptions of artifacts, objects, or collections on their websites? What are the long-term implications of involving users in the co-description, co-cataloguing of digital knowledge?
• How are libraries, archives, and museums encouraging users to create online collections of personal favorites or similar items on their websites? What are the long-term implications of involving users in the co-creation, co-curation of digital knowledge?
• How are libraries, archives, and museums encouraging users to create / structure their own online environments, designing personalized websites or portals specifically suited to individual needs? What are the implications of involving users in the design and structuring of online interfaces for the development and presentation of digital knowledge?
• How is the education of library, archives, and museum practitioners (and in particular the increase in online and hybrid learning technologies) influencing the ways practitioners subsequently incorporate technology into their user service environments in libraries, archives, and museums?

IMPORTANT DATES

• Optional Abstract: December 1, 2009 (see below)
• Submission Deadline: March 1, 2010
• Review Decisions: May 15, 2010 (all submissions will be peer-reviewed)
• Final Versions Due: July 15, 2010
• Publication: Early 2011

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

All submissions should be emailed directly to Paul Marty at marty@fsu.edu or Michelle Kazmer at mkazmer@fsu.edu.

For formatting instructions, please see the Library Trends Author Guidelines available here:
http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/guidelines.html

If you wish, you may submit an optional abstract (by email to Paul Marty at marty [at] fsu.edu or Michelle Kazmer at mkazmer [at] fsu.edu) for feedback by December 1, 2009.

A PDF version of this CFP is available.

More information about Library Trends

Every time I’ve moved into new living quarters in Chambana I’ve done a little bit of digging around to find out the history of my  house. (see Battle Creek Sanitarium) The dust from the move has finally settled enough for me to do some poking around.

309 W. Vine

Recently, the University of Illinois Library digitized a large number of the best resources I used the last time I did this – the Champaign city and county directories.  These, combined with the Champaign County Historical Archives online database, give a nice picture of the early history of our new place wihtout me having to leave the house. I’ll flesh this out a little more when I have a chance to go and read some of the referenced news clippings at UFL. .

Owners

• 1904-1912: future resident Emery (aka Emory) A. Nelson works at University as a janitor. Resides in various locations on Clark St. in Champaign with wife Catherine (after 1908)
• 1912: property not listed, but it is the year that the first resident got married.
• 1914-1916: George W. Snyder (Lora M. – nee Lane); Snyder & Collord Shoes
  Snyder & Collord was located at 312 Hickory. C. (where the patio for J Gould is currently)
• 1918: Emery A. Nelson (Kathyrn); Carpenter & Vernon Alldridge (Mary); Chauffeur for Chester & O’Bryne Transfer Co. (63 Chester St.) [C&O also listed under "horse shoers"]
  
  

  from Champaign County Directory (1923)

• 1925: E.A. Nelson (Katherine);  Carpenter Robesons & Jesse J. Collins (Minnie); trucker IC (Illinois Central?) [the Nelsons must have been taking in boarders, as the names of other couples changes through the years]
• 1927: E.A. Nelson (Kath);  clk (clerk?) F.K. Robeson & Glenn Padgett (Mary);  driver Model Laundry
  

  from Johnson's Champaign-Urbana Directory (1927)

  

  from Johnson's Champaign-Urbana Directory (1927)

• 1930: Raymond and Blanche Nelson reside at 108 S. Poplar St. in Urbana, IL [not sure about the relation between R.B. Nelson and E.A. Nelson]
• 1931: Lora Snyder (nee Lane) dies. March 4, 1931 [She was a city nurse.]
• 1935: Emory A. Nelson; sales Robesons; Ray. B. Nelson (Blanche); switchman Illinois Central & Lawrence L. Weatherford (Gladys); sign painter.  [this is the last year that Emory/Emery Nelson is listed.  Katherine isn't listed in this entry]
• 1936: Ray B. Nelson (Blanche); switchman Illinois Central (IC) & Dale N. Dilley (Ruth); driver Eisner Grocery [Eisners is listed under Wholesale Groceries and was located at 202-204 S. Market St. C.]
• 1938: Ray B. Nelson (Blanche);  breakman  [RBN is listed as the owner]
• 1940: Ray B. Nelson (Blanche);  switchman & Ray B. Nelson Jr.;  clerk
• 1941: Emery A. Nelson deceased Feb. 1941  (born December 6, 1856)
• 1944: R.B. Nelson Jr. served in Patton’s “Ghost” Corps
• 1950: Raymond B. Nelson (Blanche);  delivery man Courier
• 1955: R.B. Nelson deceased (born May 30, 1888)
• 1972: Blanche Cleavland Nelson deceased March 13, 1972 (Woodlawn Cemtery)

The online trail ends here…

Earlier this year I tried to start a “365″ project on Flickr. The basic idea is that you take a new photo every day and contribute it to a pool. I”ve been a dismal failure at this so far this year, even after trying to re-start my project by begining a “Then and Now” project based on the Champaign-Urbana Historic Built Environment collection.

The Champaign-Urbana Historic Built Environment Photograph Collection offers a selection from the holdings of the Champaign County Historical Archives, which was established as a department of The Urbana Free Library in 1956. Among its holdings of books, manuscripts, and maps, the archives has preserved over 50,000 photographs of local people and locations. This collection provides a sampling of the rich visual history of Champaign-Urbana’s historic built environment in the 19th and 20th century, including images of residential, commercial, governmental, educational, medical, and religious structures, and thus reflects the notion that historic buildings serve as an entryway into the community’s collective memory.

The Champaign-Urbana Historic Built Environment Photograph Collection is a joint project of the Champaign County Historical Archives at Urbana Free Library and the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This was as far as I got on this project:

One thing that was becoming clear is that I needed some easier way to locate the next historic building for me to shoot. Since I was trying to replicate the view in the original photo I’d also need to be able to see it. Champaign has yet to be blessed with 3G, so it was painfully slow to browse to the ContentDM site and try to search for something, scroll through a list, etc. etc. The CUHBE collection DOES include the address of the site when know, but the address has been broken up into two separate fields, neither of which appear in the short display. There had to be an easier way to get to these records.

Piotr was able to build a Pipe that parsed the OAI_DC output from ContentDM (more coming soon from him on this) into various PIPE formats. This was a good step forward, but I still couldn’t see the addresses of the historic buildings. By adding a string builder module to the Piotr’s pipe, I now get the name of the building along with it’s address. Now, what I’d really like to do is put these locations on a map, but the location builder doesn’t seem to like the addresses in here – I’m sure with a little more poking I can get it to work, stay tuned!

Champaign Urbana Historic Built Environment Pipe

Another cross-posting from the IMLS DCC Project Blog

I recently attended the Museums & the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis, IN. Prof. Mike Twidale and I were there to do a live patchwork prototyping demo of the IMLS DCC Collection Dashboard concept. We had a great crowd of attendees in our booth who provided us with lots of great ideas for next steps (more on that, and a similar demo we did at HASTAC III later). But I also participated in several “unconference” conversations about the semantic web and open/linked data.

At the moment, information from the IMLS DCC is only available via the website and via our OAI-PMH data providers (one for collection-level records, and another for item-level records). While these are great for sharing records between repositories, they don’t necessarily make the information that we have accessible to cool web services like Yahoo! Pipes. Mia Ridge, at the Science Museum in London (and keeper of the Museum API wiki) issued a challenge for us to DO ONE THING before April was over. So here’s my attempt at DOING ONE THING with IMLS DCC. (and is admittedly just a baby step).

One of the services I learned about at MW2009 is Dapper, a tool that will screenscrape HTML pages to produce various kinds of output that you can share with APIs (application program interfaces). Dapper fits nicely within our Patchwork Prototyping toolbox, as it lets us play with some IMLS DCC data in ways that we couldn’t before and without having to actually build an IMLS DCC API first. One of the desirables that came up in both our MW2009 and HASTAC demonstrations was being able to see IMLS DCC collections on a map. So here we go…

First I screenscraped the list of IMLS DCC Collections By Title page. Dapper then allowed me to create:

• an RSS feed
• an Atom feed and
• a JSON feed

I took the Atom feed and passed it to the location extractor in Yahoo! Pipes to generate a map.

This is just a first baby step towards building other widgets for a collections dashboard! It needs some work (only a certain number of collections will appear on the map at any one time – you need to browse through the list to see more collections), but the idea behind the DO ONE THING challenge was to take some simple steps to build momentum.

A special thanks to colleague Piotr Adamczyck and his MuseumPipes blog for inspiration!

this is a re-post of a new series of discussions that will be taking place on the IMLS DCC Project Blog.  If you’d like to comment, please see the original post.

Patchwork Prototyping a Collection Dashboard

The IMLS Digital Collections and Content Interface research group is kicking off a new line of inquiry this week that will explore how we might build a “Collections Dashboard” for the DCC.

The Problem

According to user studies that we’ve conducted, users rarely find the full-text collection descriptions that we provide very helpful. The long screens of text scare them away and don’t really help them find what they are looking for. In the current iteration of the interface, if I stumble across an interesting item, it can be difficult to even find your way back to a collection-level description. The problem here seems to be that the notion of how and why collection-level descriptions are created is based on an old model that looks like this:

A Traditional Path to Items

But increasingly, the way we find things – particularly in online environments looks more like this:

A Digital Path to Items

Nina Simon takes this notion one step futher, by suggesting that we increasingly come at things indirectly through our social network.

In both of the latter cases a user may lack any understanding of institutional or collection context and may be left wondering just where they’ve ended up. As an aggregation of other people’s metadata, trying to orient the user of an item towards these context can be even more difficult. At present the IMLS DCC contains records from more than 500 collections, 240 different repositories for a total of more than 900,000 item-level metadata records. Simply flattening this out into a large blob of item-level metadata separates items from their contexts. (even Google has its page rank that organizes what appears at the top of your results list according to their place in the networked world).

For certain kinds of users, this kind of context isn’t really what they are interested in. They’ll be happy to find an item and move on to their next search. But for the students and scholars that are our primary focus in this part of the grant, context can be a very important part of their research process. A recent study of scholars who use physical object collection, conducted by the UK’s Research Information Network (RIN), illustrates the problem nicely. Collection-level descriptions, such as those offered by the Cornucopia project, offered insufficient information to meet the scholars needs. But interestingly, this same set of scholars said that item-level descriptions lacked information about contexts that make these items meaningful and valuable for their research. How can we restore that sense of both item-level granularity, while maintaining the rich contexts that these items come from?

A Solution

One of the main goals of the current phase of the IMLS DCC project (and particularly for the Collection-Item Metadata Relationships research group) has been to take advantage of collection-level and item-level metadata when used together as mutually supportive forms of description. For the interface group, we’ve been asking ourselves what this might mean in light of our usability studies that suggest the long textual descriptions scare people off.

What if we could provide users of the system a quick, easy way to get a 10,000 foot view of a collection? From this vantage point, individual items fall back to reveal the larger contours of a collection landscape. What are the high points? Where are there gaps? Does this look like a promising place to dig deeper for the kinds of items that will answer my research questions? What kind of landscape does this item come from? Will this collection lead me to find other things like it?

When we visit a physical collection all these kinds of information contexts come for free. We know that we’re under the dome of the Library of Congress or foraging in a tightly packed storeroom at the Early American Museum. I can walk down the ranges of my library and count off how many shelves the E 302 Collected Works of American Statesmen takes up. I can gauge how much work it will be to browse through 6 linear feet of archival materials or 600. I know it would take me days, if not weeks to tour the Louvre, but only a few hours to visit my university gallery. In our digital collections it can be hard to tell how vast, how diverse or how cohesive any one collection might be – let alone an aggregation of more than 500.

In order to do this we’ve borrowed the idea of “information dashboards” that are commonly found in enterprise settings where executives need a high-level overview of underlying processes (see Stephen Few’s book Information Dashboard Design. The Indianapolis Museum of Art was the first to apply this idea in a cultural heritage setting, but like its fore-bearers the IMA dashboard focuses on some of the dynamic processes at work in a museum setting. For the IMLS DCC Collection Dashboard, we’d like to extend this metaphor to represent the key features of a collection in a visualization that is quick and easy to understand.

Prof. Mike Twidale and I have setup a temporary demonstration space here where our evolving prototypes will be posted. Watch this blog space for more information and for opportunities to participate virtually in the design. We would particularly like feedback and comments from scholars who use historical collections about what high-level collection features are most useful for assessing a collections value for your research.

You are also invited to participate at the following upcoming conference venues:

• Museums & the Web – April 18 – Indianapolis, IN
• HASTAC III – April 21 – Univeristy of Illinois, Urbana, IL

Next Post: I’ll talk about the “patchwork prototyping” method we’re using to attack this problem.

Ooops….after the iSchools 2009 conference, I updated a page on my website that contained my poster “Modelling CDWA Lite as an OWL-DL Ontology” but never posted anything here at Inherent Vice.  You can also download the full poster from the IDEALS repository.

I’ve also just posted the beta version of the OWL file on my website as well. I do this with some trepidation, since this is probably the first full OWL model that I’ve created from top to bottom. As I note in the paper, the current structure of the CDWA Lite XML schema forces ontology developers to make some choices about how certain parts of the schema are modelled in an ontology.

This was a useful learning exercise, but I’m not sure if I will take this particular OWL model forward. I had intentionally avoided using the CIDOC-CRM and the improvements suggested by the MuseumDAT project. CDWA and CDWA Lite have enough of a toehold here in the United States and had impacted other influential standards such as the VRACore and Cataloging Cultural Objects. I felt that it deserved a fair shake to stand on its own. But some of the problems I encountered in trying to create an OWL model suggest that modeling CDWA using CRM would be a worthwhile next step.

If you’re working on a similar project I would be interested in hearing from you and would appreciate any comments or feedback on the ontology itself.

OAI-PMH Cheatsheet

Originally uploaded by Musebrarian

I only use OAI-PMH on occasion, which usually means I’ve forgotten the specifics of verbs, etc. and have to go look it up again. I created to hang over my desk as a quick reference.