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.

Following on my earlier post, here is the final version of my “work in progress” poster.   I thought the session tonght went quite well, with interest from a number of different directions.  As a “work in progress” I’d still welcome comments and feedback on what’s presented here.

At the moment the connection between grounded theory approaches and ontologies seems strongest when discussing coding proceedures.  What I’m less sure about at this point is whether making ontologies helps build better theories about your data.   The one thing that makes me think this still might be processing is actually the CIDOC-CRM.   The more familiar with it that I became, the more I gained new insights about cultural heritage documentation.   I am hopeful that refinements on these approaches might lead to additional new ideas.

I’m in  Denver this week attending the Association of Library and Information Science Educators iCreate Conference 2009.

Tuesday will be a busy day as I’m participating in the WISE workshop panel:

Stepping out of CMS: Student Communication Technologies Beyond the Course Management System
Panel Presentation and Discussion of effective practices for instructor/student, student/student, and student/instructor communication strategies outside the context of the online course management system, as well as with the wider community of LIS professionals, alumni and prospective students.

and I’ll be presenting a “work in progress” poster:

Blended Methods for Ontology Development

Ontologies represent an important backbone for knowledge representation on the emerging Semantic Web. As a formal specification of concepts within a domain, developing an ontology requires translating the knowledge of domain experts into the classes, properties and relationships used by machine-processable languages such as RDF and OWL. Current ontology development practices owe much to knowledge and software engingeering processes, however the methods for capturing the knowledge of domain experts reamins under-theorized. While “mixed” qualitative and quantitative methods have received extensive discussion in the literature, less attention has been paid to blending the kinds of formal methods used in ontology development and qualitative methods used elsewhere in LIS research. The resulting “knowledge acquisition bottleneck” has lead some ontology developers to turn towards mining large textual datasets for base concepts using natural language processing techniques. While these tools are improving, automated population of an ontology still requires intervention and evaluation by domain experts - particularly in areas where textual sources present conflicting or incomplete representations of a domain.

Lee (2000) has identified the lack of agreement on concepts of “collections” among LIS professionals and their users - exactly the kind of domain that challenges automated techniques. The research discussed here is working towards an ontology for cultural heritage “collections” as identifiable entities that are more than the sum of their parts. As part of the work in progress, this poster explores how qualitative approaches, such as Glaser & Strauss’ Grounded Theory, can be used to inform the development of such an ontology.

Of course this “work in progress” abstract was written a few months ago and after digging into this topic a little deeper the focus of my poster has shifted just a bit.   What you’ll see tomorrow (I’ll post the final version here) focuses more on the similarities between Strauss & Corbin’s open/axial coding process and ontology development.  As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve backed away from developing an ontology for its own sake and the revisions to the poster reflect my current thinking about how ontologies could inform traditional QDA approaches.  Along these lines, the poster also explores the possibility of  using the CIDOC-CRM (or any existing ontology) as start-list of qualitative coding concepts.

Stay tuned for Twitter updates!

I’ve never been much for New Year’s resolutions - I tend to leave my existential crisis for my birthday in February.   I also wasn’t enrolled in any classes in the Fall 2008 semester, so I don’t have an end-of-semester report on my courses to offer you.   What I had been hoping to tell you was that the dissertation proposal was behind me and that I was moving onto the dissertation itself.   I’d always had some reservations whether Fall 2008 was a realistic target, and circumstances have proved those hunches were correct. Expect to see something in the Spring 2009 term.

I’ve  decided to take a step back from the collection ontology development that I talked about earlier.  While I still feel that this would be a do-able project, I’m not so sure it would have a broad impact as a solo project (thanks to some helpful advice from colleagues).  Instead, I’m hoping that my research can inform conversations about collections within existing forums and standards groups.

The funny thing about blogging your way to a dissertation is that the path ahead is not always obvious.  So probably you’ll see less direct discussion here about the proposal - until it’s done. I’m particularly keen on looking more closely at the kind of scholarly communication taking place in LIS, museum studies and digital humanities blogs finding a place for Inherent Vice in those conversations - rather than being something of a monologue of what I’m up to (twitter seems to do a better job at that anyway).

Although I can’t say that 2008 was a terrible year, I’m glad its behind me and am looking forward to moving ahead in 2009.

Thanks to everyone who provided some thoughtful comments on my last post about cultural heritage collections.  I’m still moving in the direction of defining my own universe of what I will consider as “cultural heritage” collections - but it may also mean that I have to craft a my own name for it.

But before I move on, I wanted to poke a little at an alternative to “cultural heritage” that has also been floated as a collective term for the kinds of institutions that I’m interested in — memory institutions.

Lorcan Dempsey described memory institutions as:

Archives, libraries and museums are memory institutions: they organise the European cultural and intellectual record. Their collections contain the memory of peoples, communities, institutions and individuals, the scientific and cultural heritage, and the products throughout time of our imagination, craft and learning. They join us to our ancestors and are our legacy to future generations. They are used by the child, the scholar, and the citizen, by the business person, the tourist and the learner. These in turn are creating the heritage of the future. Memory institutions contribute directly and indirectly to prosperity through support for learning, commerce, tourism, and personal fulfilment.

In the paper linked above, Dempsey doesn’t provide any sources for his ideas about memory institutions - I’m guessing that it may have been inspired by the discussions in scholarly communities about history, memory and culture and the emergence in the U.S. of digital projects like American Memory (followed by a series of state-level “memory” projects).  Like “cultural heritage” there are few clearly stated definitions for “memory institutions.” Birger Hjørland identifies “memory institution” as a metaphor for many kinds of institutions that create collections of materials, particularly cultural heritage materials.   Both Dempsey and Hjørland suggest that the need for such a term is driven by an increasing focus on digital materials that is jostling traditional institutional definitions.

Like cultural heritage,  memory institution has been picked up by lots of other authors without much fuss about what it could or should mean.  I’m haven’t seen any obvious difference yet when one term is used over the other - or if they are even equivalent terms (or if a cultural heritage institution is a kind of memory institution, or vice versa).  Dempsey says that having the right word is a sign of maturity - the concurrent use of LAM, ALM, “cultural heritage” and “memory institutions” suggests that the community’s ideas about convergence are still fluid.

Culture vs. Memory

On my post about cultural heritage,  Jo and Shawn pointed out the dangers of trying to pin down definitions of culture - the deep scholarship that’s considered  that question; the socially bound understandings of culture, etc. etc. Talking about “memory institutions” might seem like a safe way to avoid these pitfalls, but it comes with a whole host of other problems.   As a metaphor “memory” conjures up our personal experience with memory - it’s what’s in our head, it maybe short or long-term, you might have a better memory than me (highly possible).  What is harder to understand is how memory works on a  collective level.  (see also Hjørland on “exosomatic memory“).  We all carry some trace of individual memories that somehow add up to a larger schema that’s shared by other people - or at least would be recognized by other people as a shared memory.

The problems of understanding individual memory and collective memory seem to map nicely on top of the item-level metadata/collection-level metadata issues we’re exploring in the CIMR research group. Just as collective memory is more than just the sum of all our individual memories, collections are more than just the sum of all the items contained in them.  These distinctions could also be helpful when looking at the difference between collections created by an individual - say the Gardener Collection - verses those created by an institution (e.g. the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) or more broadly by a community of practice (a library, archive or museum).

Institutions vs. Collections

Since my last post, I’ve also been thinking about how to abstract away from collections as defined by their institutional/professional home - don’t library collections share some of the same essential features of archival collections when viewed though an archival lens? (or maybe that’s the question - what features do they share?) While there are many references to cultural heritage collections, there seem to be fewer mentions of memory collections - it’s almost always memory institutions.  (although, I admit, it is difficult to cut through the “American Memory Collection” noise in a organic Google search - relying on Google Scholar for this assertion).  Maybe it is a little easier for us to anthropomorphize an institution over a collection, whereas it is easier to see “cultural heritage” as a kind of collection as well as a kind of institution.

One thing this exploration hasn’t done is move me any closer to being able to point to a clearly understood domain.  Like cultural heritage, the domain of memory institutions also is fairly wide open for interpretation.  Perhaps by combining some of charateristics of entities identified as “cultural heritage” with those identified as “memory” a clearer picture will emerge.  But the way still seems clear to move ahead with defining a domain of my choosing (or as people are encouraging me to do, something more like a subset of that larger domain).

You see it all the time. It’s peppered throughout the RLG Silos of the LAMs report…all over the IMLS materials…on other digitization project websites….and I’m certainly using it all the time. But rarely do you see a definition to go along with it. In fact I’ve tried a few times in the past to try to pin down just what “cultural heritage” covers. It always seemed a little dangerous to use it without having a good definition to point to. Apparently I’m not the only person who’s been unsuccessful at trying to nail the cultural heritage jelly to the wall.

To me “cultural heritage” often feels like a euphemism for something else that we really want to say - like “LAMs”. “Libraries, archives and museums” gets boringly repetitive after you’ve used it a few times in your report or grant application. Besides,  in this age of supposed “convergence” a better collective noun to refer to these things might be “cultural heritage institutions.”

UNESCO Cultural Heritage

Whenever faced with a challenge like this, I often find it helpful to run to government bodies because they often are obligated to be specific about what they are talking about.  This is particularly true whenever international treaties and laws are involved - and even more so when money is involved. So one way to view a definition of “cultural heritage” is through its legal definitions. UNESCO has a description of cultural heritage on its website, although the page I’m linking to seems out of date. This page reminds us that “cultural heritage” is not easily defined because it’s been a moving target with an evolving set of definitions over time. The Getty Research Institute has a nice list of cultural heritage policy documents, many of which describe the legal definitions of “cultural heritage” at different points in history.

A more recent version (at least according to the timestamp in the footer) of the UNESCO Culture pages introduces a more recent trend towards dividing “cultural heritage’ into a few categories:

• Intangible Heritage includes folk customs, folklore and orally transmitted traditions that may not have a physical instantiation.
• Movable Heritage and museums includes the kinds of things we normally think about as part of “collections” - archaeological artifacts, paintings, architectural elements,decorative arts, etc., etc.
• World Heritage appears to be things that are not “movable” such as monumental architecture and sites which are bound to their location.

“Cultural Heritage” in the U.S.

Closer to home, I first stopped in at IMLS to see whether they have any definitions. True to their mandate they don’t define cultural heritage institutions, but instead talk in terms of libraries and museums as “stewards of cultural heritage.” The Museum Services Act goes on to specify cultural, historical, natural and scientific heritage is what museums are responsible for. (the libraries have focused on more abstract definitions of services and the outcomes that they hope will come from funding them).

Rachel Frick at IMLS pointed me towards the definition used by North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online (NC-ECHO):

Any cultural institution (library, archive, museum, historic site, or organization), which maintains a permanent, non-living collection of unique materials held for research and/or exhibit purposes and open for the use of the public will be surveyed. Denominational/associational collections will be surveyed, but individual church collections will not. Art museums will be surveyed but galleries will not. Zoos, arboreta, and parks will not be surveyed, unless as a part of their mission, they hold collections described above.

The Canadians are also generally very good at this, especial in the heritage sector.  From the Canadian Heritage Information Network, I ended up at the legislation empowering the Department of Canadian Culture. This unfortunately wasn’t much help, since its covers a very broad swath of “cultural” things - from battlefields to performing arts to libraries, archives and museums.

“Cultural Heritage” and Ontology Development

So what? The definition of “cultural heritage” is squishy. Squishy is good right? That may be true, but at this stage in preparing my dissertation proposal I need to nail some of these things down. I think this is particularly important if my overall goal is to develop a domain ontology for “cultural heritage” collections.  I’ll be asking for trouble if I do so without first clearly identifying what my “domain” is.  Identifying the domain will also inform me about what kinds of data sources I will use for developing a new framework.

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) also starts out by defining its intended scope by stating:

The term cultural heritage collections is intended to cover all types of material collected and displayed by museums and related institutions, as defined by ICOM. This includes collections, sites and monuments relating to natural history, ethnography, archaeology, historic monuments, as well as collections of fine and applied arts. The exchange of relevant information with libraries and archives, and the harmonisation of the CIDOC CRM with their models, fall within the CIDOC CRM’s intended scope.

This is of course a good start if you are just talking about museums - what I hope to accomplish here is more of what appears in the last lines of this statement - harmonization among different institutions who are “stewards of cultural heritage.” This seems like an approach that might better achieve “convergence” instead of trying to simply map between the library domain, the archives domain, and the museum domain.

In the end, the lack of any explicit common definitions makes me believe that I’ll need to specify one of my own that provides clear boundaries of what is in and what is out of scope for this project.