#1 keynoter: Cathy Marshall:

A web page weighs 80 micrograms?

15 years ago (New Yorker article): well, anyone can have a web page, although most of them are commercial enterprises.  All you need is to digitize your stuff.  Born digital (pictures), even in TIFF were low resolution.

Today 4.3 billion personal photos on Flickr alone.

Cathy Marshall:  guilty of “feral ethnography” (studying what others do)

Benign neglect:  de facto archiving/collection policy?  Is Facebook millenials’ scrapbook?  Should it be?  Whose job is it to “remember”?

Digital stuff accumulates at a faster rate than physical space (out of sight & easier to “neglect”?)  CS view:  how is this a problem?  Storage is getting cheaper, why not just keep everything?

Why keep everything? Difficult to predict an items future worth (true also for physical items as well); deleting is hard, thankless work; filtering and searching allows locating things easily. (easier to keep than to cull)

Losing stuff becomes a means of culling collections (realizing afterwards that losing the stuff wasn’t such a big deal after all).

Attitude that “I don’t really need this stuff, but it’s nice to be able to keep it around.”

It’s easier to lose things than to maintain them.  The more things are used, the more it’s likely to be preserved.

No single reservation technology will win the battle for saving your stuff, but people put/save stuff all over the place (flickr, youtube, blogs, facebook..)

People lose stuff for non technology reasons (don’t understand EULA’s, lost passwords, die, etc.)  For scholars, key vulnerability is changing organizations (more so than technology failures).

Digital originals vs. reference copies:  highest fidelity (e.g., photos) is the one closest to the source (local computer).  Remote service, e.g., flickr, has the metadata, though, which becomes important for locating, filtering (save everything).  Where are the tools for gathering the metadata and finding the copies with the metadata?

Searching for tomorrow: Re-encountering techniques?  But some encounters are with stuff that was supposed to disappear.

Bottom efforts taking place (personal & small orgs); new institutions showing up to digitize collections.  New opportunistic uses of massed data.

Power of benign neglect vs. power of forgetting: some things you want to make sure are gone.  How sure are you that you really want to forget (data)?

Cloud computing talks:

Cloud4lib.

Coolest glue in the galaxy?  Is it even possible to have a centralized repository of development activities, especially among disparate libraries?

What is the base level, policy, that needs to exist in order to make it all work? (what exactly is the glue)  What is sticky enough to create critical mass?  Base services:  repository, metadata

Breakout session: brainstorming to figure out oversight & governance.  I see “possible” but not “probably” here.

Linked Library Data Cloud:

From Tim Berners-Lee:  bottom line:  make stuff discoverable

Concept of triples in RDF:  Subject, Predicate, Object.

Linking by assertion, using central index (e.g. id.loc.gov), which is linked data.  But how to make bib data RDF:  LCCN.  Resources (linked, verified data as URI’s).

If you have an LCCN in your MARC record, you already have what you need for Linked Data.  If you know what the LCCN, you can grab all the linked stuff and make it part of your data.

OCLC’s virtual information authority file:  another source for linked data.

No standard data model, but more linkages to resources are outside the library domain:  how to get them? And what about sustainability and preservation?  If a goes away, what do you do?

Do it Yourself Cloud Computing (with R and Apache)

How to use data and data analysis in libraries.

1.  What is The Cloud?  Replacement for the desktop: globally accessible

2. What is R? Free and Open Source, SAS, SPSS, Stata. Software that supports data analysis and visualization.  It has a console!  Eventually a gui port? Cons:  learning curve, problems with very large datasets.  Pros:  de facto standard, huge user community, extensivle.

3.  What is Rapache?  R + Apache? Apache module developed at Vanderbilt.  Puts instance of R in each apache process, similarly to PHP.  You can embed R script in web pages.

4.  Relevance to libraries – keep the slide! keep the slide!

Public Datasets in the Cloud

IaaS (Infrastructure as a service

Paas (Platform as a service)

Saas (Software as a service)

In this case, raw data, that can be used elsewhere, not what can be downloaded from a web site

Demo:  Public datasets in the cloud (in this case, from Amazon ec2): get data from/onto remote site, retrieve via ssh

Using Google fusion tables:  you can comment, slice, dice.  You can embed the data from google fusion onto a web site.

7+ Ways to improve library UIs with OCLC web services

“7 really easy ways to improve your web services”

Crosslisting print and electronic materials: use WorldCart Search API to check/add link to main record

Link to libraries nearby that have a book that is out (mashup query by oclc number and zip code)

Providing journal TOCs: use xISSN to see if a feed of recent article TOC is available, embed a link to open a dialog with items from the cat to the UI.

Peer review indicators:  use data from xIssn to add peer review info to (appropriate) screens

Providing info about the author: use Identities and Wikipedia API to insert author info into a dialog box within UI

Providing links to free full text:  use xOCLCNum to check for free full text scanning projects like Open Content Alliance and HathiTrust and link to full text where available.

Add similar items? (without the current one also listed)

Creating a m-catalog: put all our holdings in worldcat and build a mobile site using the worldcat search api

In preparing for Software Freedom Day (September 19, more details in this post), my dad and I began evaluating the stash of donated computers he has (he’s waiting on a call from the local Computers for Kids program donee), and installing Ubuntu on them to be demo machines.  As we began installing Ubuntu, we hit a snag:  Ubuntu 9.04 will not install on pre-2000 computers.  Version 8.10 wouldn’t install either.  There were only three, and one of them was only 366 MHz, but I figured I’d give it a try anyway since they each had at least 256 MB of RAM.

I have a friend with a warehouse full of computers that he donates to another giveaway program.  He gets donations, like my dad, evaluates them, categorizes the parts, etc, and puts together systems with Windows XP on them (from TechSoup).    He told me last year he isn’t accepting any more computers with less than 1.0 GHz processors, because current software has too many problems with slower computers.

Well, yeah, you can get software to run on the older machines (see some previous posts), but increasingly, it’s a question of why?  I did it for the challenge.  But for machines going to others to use, why make it a challenge for them (unless, of course, they want that)?  For the Ubuntu folks, anything older than 2000 just isn’t worth the effort anymore.  For my warehouse friend, 1 GHz is the cutoff (which is post 2000).

On one hand, culling the older ones makes it easier for us.  On the other, my conscience cringes at adding to the number of computers and parts to be recycled (and the decidedly un-green effect most of those recycling shops have).  But that’s the reality: software installation and maintenance on dinosaur machines is a beast few are willing to wrangle with.

September 19 this year!  Unfortunately, the date, selected by an international committee, is also on Rosh Hoshanna.  I think groups in some areas have changed the date for their events

In another unfortunate turn of events (or not, depending on your point of view), I had to pass my role as organizer for our local event to others in the Palm Beach Linux User Group.  The good news is they’re doing a better job of it!  The local Software Freedom Day event in Palm Beach County this year will be at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.  If you’re reading this and you’re from the south Florida area  contact Bill Hall (pbclug at comcast + dot + net) or me (leave a comment below).  They’re looking for presenters, people who want to help set up, share, or just spread the word!

See the page at Software Freedom Day for more details! http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/northamerica/FL/palmbeachcounty

See you there!

We sorted a lot of stuff that day. A lot of people unloaded a lot of electronics.  About a third of it went to recycling (there is a recycling station near us that takes electronics).  We built three awesome systems, and the rest was divvied up among whoever wanted it.  Most of it ended up in my Mom’s garage.  She had been ecstatic as we hauled things out of her garage that morning.  We brought back about 2 to 3 times as much as we took.

She only said, “That’s going to be gone when the guests arrive (for Christmas)?”  We nodded solemnly.

The next day and over the next couple weekends, my Dad and I tested parts, sorted the box of RAM chips a friend donated to the cause, and put together another 6 working systems.  He got pretty good at installing Linux on them.  We used LinuxMint until we got down to the really low resource systems (Pentium II’s).  We put 20+GB hard drives on those, upped the RAM as much as we could (usually 256+MB), and put MacPup on them.  They were beautiful.

My brother arrived for Christmas, and during one of my days off, we put together another 4 systems, all with MacPup on them.  Unfortunately, my brother couldn’t get the case back on the last system, so it’s still waiting for me.   After Christmas, my dad took them all to a local school, to eventually be given to students and families in need.  The teacher in charge of it had never heard of Linux and was eager to see it and learn more about it.  My dad, of course, was eager to tell her about it.  It sounds like another Linux fan has been born.

My mom is happier:  the garage only has as much computer parts in it now as it did before the Frankenfest. My dad collected a few more computers, waiting for the next call from the local school.  One of them is a laptop.  He installed Ubuntu on it and showed it off to me.  We decided to upgrade the RAM to 1GB and put Ubuntu 8.04 on it instead of the older version he had.  He spends as much time on it now, learning about Ubuntu, as he does on his Mac.  He is so happy with it he decided to put Ubuntu on another machine to give to a 90 year old friend in need of a computer.  So I helped him customize it to make it easier for his friend, and to strip out all the things that a novice is better off not messing around with.

I’m thinking Linux advocates should consider Frankenfests: get the cast off machines, put together working systems with Linux on them, and give them away!  If you have an idea of who it’s going to, you can customize it to be as full or as stripped as it needs to be.  I think most people will be like my dad, and become fans, too!

It’s one of the things I’ve been doing recently.  They have been posted on TheTechStatic:

Sam’s Teach Yourself WPF in 24 Hours (looks good, especially if you want to get into .NET programming)

Make Projects:  Small Form Factor PC’s (this one is dangerous – I want to put everything aside and start working on cool hardware projects)

13 Interesting Online Applications for Seniors (They’re not all really applications, but it’s a good book – especially for Seniors who are already computer savvy)

Ubuntu Kung Fu (I really like this one.  It’s not for the total newbie, but is really useful)

SQL in a Nutshell (very handy if you do any programming with databases)

Web Security Testing Cookbook (Good resource if you already know what you’re doing)