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Printing a Book, Old School from Armin Vit on Vimeo.

via Machine Thinking

It has been a busy few weeks as I’ve been retooling for the summer here in Champaign. I won’t be taking any classes, but will be working various positions forty hours a week.

We had another great Metadata Roundtable today, where we continued the discussion of my paper for Topics in Knowledge Representation on Folio Metaphysics. Essentially I decided afterwards that the paper itself is merde (pardon my French), but that’s all good. There are several papers buried in the mess and tonight I set off and running exploring where I might go with it. I will be submitting a proposal for next year’s VRA conference about the whole-part relationships of “works” as they are represented in VRACore and related things.

I’m now hip-deep into OWL and Protege having completed a few tutorials. OWL seemed a little scary before, but the ah-ha moment came when I realized its exactly what we’ve been talking about all semester, including many of the formalisms I was trying to write about. At least I feel like I’ve got Tib by her tail and am feeling motivated to see where this takes me.

Now, back to Ontology Development 101….

This weekend I earned my second Master’s degree, this one in Library and Information Science. I came across Beautiful Ground today and it made me think about what a long strange trip it’s been to get here. I didn’t get to stand up and do my Academy Award speech, so here it goes.

Thanks to Ms. Tate, my 5th Grade teacher, for encouraging me to attend computer camp where I learned BASIC on a TRS-80.

Thanks to my parents, I could fill several blogs with the support they’ve given, but I’ve definitely earned back every cent they spent on my very own TRS-80.

Thanks to to Pat Stewart who taught me lots about the Apple ][ when I started working at my public library at the tender age of 15, making me the youngest digital librarian on the block at the time (OK, so I was just a lowly page then…)

Thanks to all my instructors and professors over the years. You, big guy. I can’t remember your name, but I’ve finally found a use for all the symbolic logic you taught me. Jackson Speilvogel gave me my first shot at teaching and at looking at problems in new and interesting ways. Carl Mitchum introduced me to the idea that technology was socially shaped (and shapable). Thanks to Lee Stout for teaching me about archives and spending all that time finding juicy bits for my thesis. Thanks to J. Ritchie Garrison for giving me the opportunity to start building online museum exhibits (P.S. I think Ritchie and Roy Tennant were separated at birth… ).

To Suji Gupta, who made me the SILS tech guinea pig, thanks! And thanks to Lou Rossignol for giving me a long leash to play with dBase III.

Thanks to Barbara Benson for letting me play a critical role in the development of interactive kiosks for Distinctively Delaware. All those late nights scanning really paid off.

The folks at HSP turned me into a one man tech support department which has proven extremely useful in getting myself out of jams and rescuing fellow panelists.

A special thanks to Liz Bishoff and Nancy Allen at CDP. Thanks for your stories of baby librarians, your leadership and teaching me how to pull this all together. Unfortunately you overdid the whole “you need a library degree” thing, now I’m sticking around for a PhD in the stuff.

Thanks to the whole MCN crew. I am always humbled by being part of such a great organization with such a long history of leadership in museum technology.

Thanks for the encouragement of all the faculty here at GSLIS. I want to know what you put in the water. Really. I’d say more, but it’s policy here to not comment on ongoing investigations.

Whew…the music is coming up and I haven’t even gotten to friends, drinking partners, acquaintances, or strangers in the night yet. Thanks to all of you!

I’ve been awarded a scholarship to attend the ALA Rare Books and Manuscript Preconference, August 20-23 in Austin, TX.

Congratulations to all the other scholarship winners! Looking forward to meeting all y’all in Austin.

If you’re coming to Austin or are an Austin-ite, give me a shout. I’m looking for recommendations for sites to see and music to hear.

With the launch of Musematic I can get back to writing about my ongoing adventures as an LIS student. There’s only a few more days left in the semester and I’m busy wrapping up final projects.

This morning I finished our group report that analyzed metadata workflows at our local public broadcasting station, WILL. The PBCore working group just released a draft schema that seems like it will be well suited to both WILL’s capabilities and the need to record information specific to the audio-visual content they create. But like other standards based on Dublin Core, it’s only part of the picture. I’m actually finding WILL’s metadata environment not all that different than some of the museums I’ve worked with – distributed metadata creation by curators/producers largely driven by their own needs, systems designed to do one thing well being leveraged to do something totally different. They have a good foundation to start with, and with a little guidance and planning can make significant improvements in their current workflows.

I’ve created a second prototype for a virtual gallery in Second Life based on Roman collections at the Spurlock Museum’s and with the help of David MacCaullay’s City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction. I decided to pass on some of the more complex scripting required to create a more interactive gallery for the moment. Just like building a real exhibit, building in a virtual world also takes careful planning and development of a good script. It was outside the scope of the assignment to go that far, but I did find a good example in the Pot Healer Adventure. PHA is a Myst-like puzzle game built inside of SL that could be a model for a museum artifact based adventure. I haven’t been able to find out too much about its development, but it uses some fairly complex scripting that would require a good programmer (or more time than I had to become a good Lindenscripter) to pull it off. But it demonstrates that it is possible to do in SL. I also started a “Museums in Second Life” group, if you’re a SL citizen you can look it up under Find->Groups.

Stay tuned for the update on my Knowledge Representation paper that explores part-whole relationships in museum artifact descriptions.

At the November Museum Computer Network conference, several of us were discussing how few museum related blogs we were able to find. At the board meeting we resolved to help correct this dirth of museum blogging by creating one focused on museum technology issues. This proved to be a great opportunity to collaborate with the American Association of Museums Media and Technology Committee. Over the past few months a group from both organizations has been working to get the blog off the ground.

Now, without further adieu, MCN and AAM M&T are pleased to announce the birth of (drumroll please!):

Musematic

At Museumatic you will find rants and raves on the latest trends in the world of museum informatics and technology. An intrepid cast of experts from the Museum Computer Network and AAM’s Media & Technology Committee share their insights, observations and tricks of the trade.

Enjoy!

IMLS Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries

IMLS has released the results of its 2004 survey that followed-up on an earlier report in 2001. The new report shows that museums and libraries continue to increase their use of computing technologies to achieve their missions. Just as in 2001, libraries continue to lead the way in adopting technologies to achieve their goals.

I miss the side-by-side comparison charts of key finds from the 2001 survey. IMLS may have good reasons for this, but I’m of the opinion that a graph is worth a thousand words. I’d also be interested in taking the data and slicing it in different ways, e.g. an across-the-board comparison of small museums and public libraries, since they are often serving the same communities.

One of the most surprising – yet not so surprising – key findings is that many of the institutions who are engaging in digitization have no policies in place to guide their work. Nor do many of these institutions conduct evaluations of the work that they do. This is un/surprising because a) staff time for digitization remains one of the biggest challenges b) a lack of staff time to do digitization suggests a lack of time to do planning c) a lack of planning means making ad-hoc decisions or decisions that are not strategic and do not reinforce each other, leading to a lack of staff time for digitization..planning…and the cycle starts all over again.

The lack of policies, best practices and quality guidelines will impact us when we reach the digital preservation hurdle. It will be interesting to see how much of a hindrance this becomes in the next decade. In some ways we’ve already seen it from the creation of automated museum catalogs – the difficulties and expense of migrating to new systems, the difficulty in preparing records for public access via the Internet, etc. can be traced back to a similar needs (lack of time, lack of staff, lack of money, lack of policies) over the last 10-15 years. The disconnect between goals and activities seems pretty striking. The primary goal listed among museums (survey says…48%) was to “preserve materials of importance or value,” yet this goal appears to be undermined by the lack of policies governing digitization standards, quality control, plans for migration, etc.

As a former historian, I’m still intrigued about how we’ve arrived at these results. What are the choices we’ve made along the way that produce the numbers we see. Is there anything we can learn from those choices that will influence our future direction?

Through the synergies between my Museum Informatics and Metadata courses I’ve had the chance to look over several metadata standards such as VRA Core and the soon-to-appear CDWA Lite schema.

While the VRA and the Getty should be congratulated on their efforts, I do see a problem with extending these schemas beyond the art community and into general historical museums. Each of these schemas allow objects to be identified by their creators, but I haven’t seen a schema that allows one to identify the “owner” of an artifact. Often artifacts in historical collections are not significant by themselves, but from the aura they attain because a historical figure owned them.
There is some mention of “ownership” in the CiDOC CRM, however it seems aimed at tracking legal ownership. I suppose one could consider the transfer of an object from the creator to the “owner” a legal transer does take place. Chaining this all the way to the present would allow scholars using the resource to see an artifacts provenance.

One of our examples was this gown owned by Martha Washington. While it may be a good exemplar of 18th Century costume, it’s significance is closely tied to its owner. This information probably gets dumped into descriptions rather than being tagged seperately.

A quick scan of Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) doesn’t seem to offer any suggestions on the best way to include this type of information in a record.

Another challenge to providing a common metadata format for museums as a whole.

I spent the weekend at a Text Encoding Initative (TEI) workshop. I’m wondering if the modular nature of TEI might also be useful to adopt for cultural heritage information. Each community who uses TEI has the ability to create customizations for their type of markup, but it’s all built on a common chassis. I can already see the interoperability issues present in this approach, but at least it constrains things from being too hetrogenous.

(A quick aside – if you ever have a chance to attend a TEI workshop given by Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman I’d strongly recommend it. They are excellent and entertaining presenters!)

In the library community there’s often talk about the Patriot Act and its conflicts with their core values of free access to information. While the arguments about the ‘decency’ of past museum exhibits aren’t directly related to Homeland Security, you have to wonder if the porno cops will be showing up next at the National Gallery of Art.

There are issues however related to the broader idea of making cultural heritage available. I understand that the USGS has removed locations of archeological sites from new maps in order to protect them. What are our responsibilities if we digitize older materials that reveal these locations and might be misused by looters, black marketeers, etc. What if we receive a cease and desist order from Homeland Security because those historic photos of a dam being built could be a security threat? Do we have a firm enough grasp on what our values are to respond appropriately?

Via BoingBoing

County Homeland Security Officers Try To Police Porn, Fail
Mo “Here’s a story in today’s Washington Post about two Montgomery County Homeland Security officers who try to police porn at a public library. After one patron is targeted and asked to step outside, the librarian resists. The police are called and the only ones ushered outside are the failed porn cops. I hope the librarian gets the librarian-of-the-month award for standing up for free speech and privacy.”

Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Homeland Security.” The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

It’s sad to see what happens when you give some people a tin badge and a cap. Link

I spent some time last week reviewing various metadata formats for the Metadata in Theory and Practice course. It occured to me that discussions about metadata priveledge text over other ways we might provide metadata for cultural heritage artifacts.

Often museums create records that describe physical artifacts and attach an identification image to those records. In some ways this ID image is serving as a form of visual description, just as the textual metadata does.

Some of this bias may be due to the fact that the tools we have for analyzing images do not have a sufficient level of visual literacy to be able to extract meaning from the images. Image formats also differ from text, because they are essentially a long uninterrupted string of bits. In “Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing,” Coombs, et al. mention ancient practices of scriptio continua in which there is no whitespace in the text, just a continuous string of characters. In essence, this is what we have for images today, proably even less so since the right reader can make pretty good guesses about what the words are in a scriptio continua.

For text we moved from presentational markup to descriptive markup to solve some of the problems in encoding meaning in texts. I’m now wondering what would a similar system look like for creating meaning out of the undifferentiated bits in an image. Web services like Flickr are allowing users to crudely “tag” portions of an image with text (I assume using outside textual metadata). I’m not familiar enough with the bits under the hood for common image formats to tell whether it would ever be possible to markup portions of the image the way one does with text. Medical and astronomic imaging might provide some hints, but generally they start with a set of data that gets represented visually.

Within METS one can specify an of a visual image, but I need to look more closely about how the coordinates of the area are represented. Could it be possible to export a vector map from Photoshop into a METS record that would allow me to associate textual metadata with just a portion of an image?

Imaged-based searching also seems like an area to explore, although like simple text indexing that matches character strings, it appears focused on colors and shapes – not the “meaning” of those color and shapes. Some form of image markup (possibly still relying on text) could serve the same purpose that descriptive markup provides for literary texts. Importanly image markup could provide the contexts that make shapes and colors meaningful.

While I haven’t seen anything clearly state this, there do seem to be assumptions in practice that suggest that images are metadata in certain contexts. How can we refine and explicitly state this practice?

References:
“Markup Systems and The Future of Scholarly Text Processing.” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 30, no. 11 James H. Coombs, Allen Renear, and Steven J. DeRose (1987).