DigitalKoans

LITA has formed the Next Generation Catalog Interest Group. There is also an associated mailing list.

Here is an excerpt from the LITA-L announcement:

NGCIG gives LITA a discussion space devoted to developments in the library catalog, its nature and scope, and its interfaces. It provides a forum for presentations and sharing of innovation in catalogs and discussion of future directions. Collaborations with other LITA interest groups, such as in the areas of emerging technologies and open source software, will provide opportunities for programming.

Enthusiasm about new technologies is essential to innovation. There needs to be some fire in the belly of change agents or nothing ever changes. Moreover, the new is always more interesting than the old, which creaks with familiarity. Consequently, when an exciting new idea seizes the imagination of innovators and, later, early adopters (using Rogers’ diffusion of innovations jargon), it is only to be expected that the initial rush of enthusiasm can sometimes dim the cold eye of critical analysis.

Let’s pick on Library 2.0 to illustrate the point, and, in particular, librarian-contributed content instead of user-contributed content. It’s an idea that I find quite appealing, but let’s set that aside for the moment.

Overcoming the technical challenges involved, academic library X sets up on-demand blogs and wikis for staff as both outreach and internal communication tools. There is an initial frenzy of activity, and a number of blogs and wikis are established. Subject specialists start blogging. Perhaps the pace is reasonable for most to begin with, although some fall by the wayside quickly, but over time, with a few exceptions, the postings become more erratic and the time between postings increases. It is unclear whether target faculty read the blogs in any great numbers. Internal blogs follow a similar pattern. Some wikis, both internal and external, are quickly populated, but then become frozen by inactivity; others remain blank; others flourish because they serve a vital need.

Is this a story of success, failure, or the grey zone in between?

The point is this. Successful publishing in new media such as blogs and wikis requires that these tools serve a real purpose and that their contributors make a consistent, steady, and never-ending effort. It also requires that the intended audience understand and regularly use the tools and that, until these new communication channels are well-established, the library vigorously promote them because there is a real danger that, if you build it, they will not come.

Some staff will blog their hearts out irregardless of external reinforcement, but many will need to have their work acknowledged in some meaningful way, such as at evaluation, promotion, and tenure decision points. Easily understandable feedback about tool use, such as good blog-specific or wiki-specific log analysis, is important as well to give writers the sense that they are being read and to help them tailor their message to their audience.

On the user side, it does little good to say "Here’s my RSS feed" to a faculty member who doesn’t know what RSS is and could care less. Of course, some will be hip to RSS, but that may not be the majority. If the library wants RSS feeds to become part of a faculty member’s daily workflow, it is going to have to give that faculty member a good reason for it to be so, such as significant, identified RSS feed content in the faculty member’s field. Then, it is going to have to help the faculty member with the RSS transition by pointing out good RSS readers, providing tactful instruction, and offering ongoing assistance.

In spite of the feel-good glow of early success, it may be prudent not to declare victory too soon after making the leap into a major new technology. It’s a real accomplishment, but dealing with technical puzzles is often not the hardest part. The world of computers and code is a relatively ordered and predictable one; the world of humans is far more complex and unpredictable.

The real test of a new technology is in the long run: Is the innovation needed, viable, and sustainable? Major new technologies often require significant ongoing organizational commitments and a willingness to measure success and failure with objectivity and to take corrective action as required. For participative technologies such as Library 2.0 and institutional repositories, it requires motivating users as well as staff to make behavioral changes that persist long after the excitement of the new wears off.

In a two-year (2005-2007) joint project with Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek is developing an emulation system that will allow digital objects in outmoded formats to be utilized in their original form. Regarding the emulation approach, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek says:

Emulation is difficult, the main reason why it is not applied on a large scale. Developing an emulator is complex and time-consuming, especially because the emulated environment must appear authentic en must function accurately as well. When future users are interested in the contents of a file, migration remains the better option. When it is the authentic look and feel and functionality of a file they are after, emulation is worth the effort. This can be the case for PDF documents or websites. For multimedia applications, emulation is in fact the only suitable permanent access strategy.

J. R. van der en Wijngaarden Hoeven’s paper "Modular Emulation as a Long-Term Preservation Strategy for Digital Objects" provides a overview of the emulation approach.

In a related development, a message to padiforum-l on 11/17/06 by Remco Verdegem of the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands reported on a recent Emulation Expert Meeting, which issued a statement noting the following advantages of emulation for digital preservation purposes:

• It preserves and permits access to each digital artifact in its original form and format; it may be the only viable approach to preserving digital artifacts that have significant executable and/or interactive behavior.
• It can preserve digital artifacts of any form or format by saving the original software environments that were used to render those artifacts. A single emulator can preserve artifacts in a vast range of arbitrary formats without the need to understand those formats, and it can preserve huge corpuses without ever requiring conversion or any other processing of individual artifacts.
• It enables the future generation of surrogate versions of digital artifacts directly from their original forms, thereby avoiding the cumulative corruption that would result from generating each such future surrogate from the previous one.
• If all emulators are written to run on a stable, thoroughly-specified "emulation virtual machine" (EVM) platform and that virtual machine can be implemented on any future computer, then all emulators can be run indefinitely.

The Open Archives Initiative has announced its Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) initiative:

Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) will develop specifications that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting repositories. . . . its real importance lies in the potential for these distributed repositories and their contained objects to act as the foundation of a new digitally-based scholarly communication framework. Such a framework would permit fluid reuse, refactoring, and aggregation of scholarly digital objects and their constituent parts—including text, images, data, and software. This framework would include new forms of citation, allow the creation of virtual collections of objects regardless of their location, and facilitate new workflows that add value to scholarly objects by distributed registration, certification, peer review, and preservation services. Although scholarly communication is the motivating application, we imagine that the specifications developed by ORE may extend to other domains.

OAI-ORE is being funded my the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two-year period.

Presentations from the Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories meeting are a good source of further information about the thinking behind the initiative as is the "Pathways: Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories" preprint.

Real life (RL) is so 20th century. Virtual worlds are where it’s at. At least, that’s what readers of BusinessWeek’s recent "My Virtual Life" article by Robert D. Hof may quickly come to believe.

You may think that virtual worlds are just kids stuff. Tell that to Anshe Chung, who has made over $250,000 buying and renting virtual real estate in Linden Lab’s Second Life. Or, Chris Mead, whose Second Life couples avatars earn him a cool $90,000 per year. Or the roughly 170,000 Second Life users who spent about $5 million real dollars on virtual stuff in January 2006.

How about this? For all virtual worlds, IGE Ltd. estimates that users spend over $1 billion real dollars on virtual stuff last year.

While most users may be buying virtual clothes, land, and entertainment and other services, conventional companies are exploring how to use virtual worlds for training, meeting, and other purposes, plus trying to snag regular users’ interest with offerings such as Well’s Fargo’s Stagecoach Island.

For the library slant on Second Life, try the Second Life Library 2.0 blog and don’t miss the Alliance Second Life Library 2.0 introduction on 5/31/06 from 2:00 PM-3:30 PM. And don’t foget to browse the Second Life Library 2.0 image pool at Flickr.

Oh, brave new world that has such avatars in it!

Source: Hof, Robert D. "My Virtual Life." BusinessWeek, 1 May 2006, 72-82.

Microsoft will be releasing Windows Live Academic Search shortly (I was recently told Wednesday; the blog buzz is saying tomorrow).

As is typical with such software projects, the team is doing some last minute tweaking before release. So, I won’t try to describe the system in any detail at this point, except to say that it integrates access to published articles with e-prints and other open access materials, it provides a reference export capability, there’s a cool optional two-pane view (short bibliographic information on the left; full bibliographic information and abstract on the right), and it supports search "macros" (user-written search programs).

What I will say is this: Microsoft made a real effort to get significant, honest input from the librarian and publisher communities during the development process. I know, because, now that the nondisclosure agreement has been lifted, I can say that I was one of the librarians who provided such input on an unpaid basis. I was very impressed by how carefully the development team listened to what we had to say, how sharp and energetic they were, how they really got the Web 2.0 concept, and how deeply committed they were to creating the best product possible. Having read Microserfs, I had a very different mental picture of Microsoft than the reality I encountered.

Needless to say, there were lively exchanges of views between librarians and publishers when open access issues were touched upon. My impression is that the team listened to both sides and tried to find the happy middle ground.

When it’s released, Windows Live Academic Search won’t be the perfect answer to your open access search engine dreams (what system is?), and Microsoft knows that there are missing pieces. But I think it will give Google Scholar a run for its money. I, for one, heartily welcome it, and I think it’s a good base to build upon, especially if Microsoft continues to solicit and seriously consider candid feedback from the library and publisher communities (and it appears that it will).

The Wall Street Journal reports that customers lack enthusiasm for RFID credit cards due to privacy and fraud concerns. In fact, they are devising novel ways to disable RFID chips, including using hammers and microwave ovens to smash or fry them. FoeBud, a German digital rights group, sells a variety of devices to detect or disable the chips. Sensing a hot market, some companies have joined the bandwagon with new products (e.g., RFIDwasher) that do the job more safely than a microwave oven, which can be a fire hazard when used for RFID frying. For those who don’t want to tamper with their RFID cards, they can buy shielded wallets and passport cases from DIFRWEAR that block signals when closed.

As libraries begin to embrace RFID technology, these concerns from the credit card sector may be worth watching, and it may give them pause.

Source: Warren, Susan. "Why Some People Put These Credit Cards in the Microwave." The Wall Street Journal, 10 April, 2006, A1, A16.

Now you can store a 20-second video that can be viewed on a cell phone in a colored bar code the size of a postage stamp. Or, if the cell phone is connected to the Internet, use the bar code to launch a URL. The user snaps a picture of the bar code to utilize it. Content Idea of Asia invested this new bar code technology, which can store 600 KB, and plans to offer it later this year.

Source: Hall, Kenji. "The Bar Code Learns Some Snazzy New Tricks." BusinessWeek, 3 April 2006, 113.

Dr. Gary William Flake, Microsoft technical fellow, gave a compelling and lively presentation at SearchChamps V4 entitled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity."

Flake’s "Internet Singularity," is "the idea that a deeper and tighter coupling between the online and offline worlds will accelerate science, business, society, and self-actualization."

His PowerPoint presentation is text heavy enough that you should be able to follow his argument fairly well. (Ironically, he had apparently received some friendly criticism from colleagues about the very wordiness of the PowerPoint that allows it to stand alone.)

I’m not going to try to recap his presentation here. Rather, I urge you to read it, and I’ll discuss a missing factor from his model that may, to some extent, act as a brake on the type of synergistic technical progress that he envisions.

That factor is the equally accelerating growth of what Lawrence Lessig calls the "permission culture," which is "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past."

Lessig discusses this topic with exceptional clarity in his book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (HTML, PDF, or printed book; Lessig’s book in under an Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 License).

Lessig is a Stanford law professor, but Free Culture is not a dry legal treatise about copyright law. Rather, it is a carefully argued, highly readable, and impassioned plea that society needs to reexamine the radical shift that has occurred in legal thinking about the mission and nature of copyright since the late 19th century, especially since there are other societal factors that heighten the effect of this shift.

Lessig describes the current copyright situation as follows:

For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

How did we get here? Lessig traces the following major changes:

In 1790, the law looked like this:

	PUBLISH	TRANSFORM
Commercial	©	Free
Noncommercial	Free	Free

The act of publishing a map, chart, and book was regulated by copyright law. Nothing else was. Transformations were free. And as copyright attached only with registration, and only those who intended to benefit commercially would register, copying through publishing of noncommercial work was also free.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the law had changed to this:

	PUBLISH	TRANSFORM
Commercial	©	©
Noncommercial	Free	Free

Derivative works were now regulated by copyright law—if published, which again, given the economics of publishing at the time, means if offered commercially. But noncommercial publishing and transformation were still essentially free.

In 1909 the law changed to regulate copies, not publishing, and after this change, the scope of the law was tied to technology. As the technology of copying became more prevalent, the reach of the law expanded. Thus by 1975, as photocopying machines became more common, we could say the law began to look like this:

	PUBLISH	TRANSFORM
Commercial	©	©
Noncommercial	©/Free	Free

The law was interpreted to reach noncommercial copying through, say, copy machines, but still much of copying outside of the commercial market remained free. But the consequence of the emergence of digital technologies, especially in the context of a digital network, means that the law now looks like this:

	PUBLISH	TRANSFORM
Commercial	©	©
Noncommercial	©	©

Lessig points out one of the ironies of copyright law’s development during the last few decades: the entertainment industries that have been the driving force behind moving the law from the permissive to permission side of the spectrum benefited from looser regulation in their infancies:

If "piracy" means using value from someone else’s creative property without permission from that creator—as it is increasingly described today—then every industry affected by copyright today is the product and beneficiary of a certain kind of piracy. Film, records, radio, cable TV. . . . The list is long and could well be expanded. Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Every generation—until now.

Returning to Flake’s model, what will the effect of a permission culture be on innovation? Lessig says:

This wildly punitive system of regulation will systematically stifle creativity and innovation. It will protect some industries and some creators, but it will harm industry and creativity generally. Free market and free culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an overregulated-regulated market.

New knowledge typically builds on old knowledge, new content on old content. "Democratization of content" works if the content is completely new, if it builds on content that is in the public domain or under a Creative Commons (or similar) license, or if fair use can be invoked without it being stopped by DRM or lawsuits. If not, copyright permissions granted or withheld may determine if a digital "Rip, Mix, Burn" (or as some say "Rip, Mix, Learn") meme lives or dies and the full transformational potential of digital media are realized or not.

If you are concerned about the growing restrictions that copyright law imposes on society, I highly recommend that you read Free Culture.