On September 9th I travelled with Ruth Vyse, the University Archivist, and John Ralph, ULCC’s Computing Services manager, to Glasgow to attend DRH98, the third annual conference on Digital Resources in the Humanities. The conference was hosted by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute at Glasgow University, and ran from Thursday 10th to Saturday 12th September. The conference focused on the use of digital technology to preserve our cultural heritage, and as such featured a wide variety of presentations about work going on in, and on behalf of, schools and colleges, museums and libraries, publishers and research organisations, mainly in the fields of the Arts and Social Sciences.

We were particularly interested to learn about developments in cataloguing data collections and providing access to computerized catalogues, and to hear what approaches and standards were being used in other large data storage systems.

A number of presentations were given by the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), including a reception to launch their new web site on the Thursday evening. Of particular interest were the presentation of the recent AHDS report, Creating and Preserving Digital Collections, and presentations on the work of the History Data Service and the UK Data Archive at Essex University.

Also of interest was a TV film, Into the Future: On the Presentation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age, made for the US Public Broadcasting Service by Terry Saunders. It succinctly presented many important issues surrounding the preservation of digital data (but, perhaps invevitably, it was less forthcoming with answers to the problems). In one example, the film explained showed how the condition of magnetic tapes containing data from NASA’s Viking Mars Lander missions of the 70s and 80s had deteriorated to the point where many were unreadable. In the following discussion, Neal Beagrie from AHDS emphasised that the fragility of computer media, and the speed of technological change made early intervention essential for the preservation of digital records. Our work with the PRO and government departments has made the NDAD project team all too well aware of this issue.

It was encouraging to note that a number of well-supported standards and effective techniques are emerging for digital archives: in some cases this means that multiple catalogues on diverse systems can be searched with a single query. Most presentations concerned systems that were accessible, completely or in part, via the World Wide Web, indicating that the Web has quickly become a preferred medium of access to such resources. An ever growing array of digital resources, including databases, text, images, audio and video, is readily accessible by users at every level, from school-children to statisticians: the challenge for designers of such systems is to provide access tools and methods appropriate to their target audience.

Although NDAD did not make a presentation at DRH98, reference was made to other work that NDAD staff have been directly involved in, including Project Earl (networking UK public libraries) and the British Library’s Electronic Beowulf, which Charles Henry of Rice University spoke warmly of in his capstone lecture The Fire In Grendel’s Eye. We hope to make a presentation on aspects of the NDAD system at next year’s conference, DRH99, which will be hosted by King’s College London.

The conference organisation was superb, and delegates were impressed with the facilities of the Gilmorehill Centre and the ancient University of Glasgow. The Welcome Reception took place in the University’s Hunterian Museum, amongst impressive relics of Scotland’s past, including Roman milestones and the death mask of Bonnie Prince Charlie. On the final night, a civic reception by the Lord Provost of Glasgow was followed by a meal of traditional Scottish fare (Scotch broth, haggis and salmon) and ceilidh, all in the magnificent surroundings of the city’s Kelvingrove Museum . In our few spare moments we also took the opportunity to visit the Hunterian Art Gallery, with its reconstruction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s house and large collection of Whistler paintings, and enjoyed the chance to travel on the “clockwork orange”, Glasgow’s underground railway. In all aspects of the Conference, the Glasgow organising committee set a very high standard: King’s College unbdoubtedly has a hard act to follow.

DSUG can be a slightly tense affair, since it must address the expectations of both technical and non-technical staff engaged with repositories. Interesting as I found Federico Meschini’s demonstration of managing the DSpace code base using Eclipse and Maven, I think many librarians attending found this “basic” tutorial beyond them. The slightly aspirational tendencies of several discussions can also be a little frustrating. It’s interesting to know what’s planned for version 1.6 and 2.0 of DSpace, but since 1.5 has yet to be released, this can seem like pie in the sky.

Stefania had asked me to contribute a short presentation on SAS-Space for a session of case-studies of DSpace instances. The brief case-study I presented was rather less than earth-shattering, and my plans to show a little more of it than the front page were scuppered by the FAO firewall. But there’s only so much you can say in 10 minutes: I hope I was at least competent. What seemed to provoke the most interest, in later discussion with other delegates, was the fact that we haven’t restricted repository content to peer-reviewed articles, theses, and dissertations. This probably never seemed at all surprising to me, after so many years of association with a dataset archive. Things like the Masefield bibliography, London Book Trades database and 19th Century Francophone Music Criticism transcriptions are equally valuable scholarly works, in my opinion, and worthy of preserving and publishing in an Institutional Repository.

Interest was also expressed in the idea of using a wiki to manage the documentation associated with the SAS-Space Repository – policy, user guide, and such like. I’m not sure I didn’t borrow the idea from another IR, but, all the same, it still seems like a good idea to me! (Down with websites and CMS!) What I’d most like to do is integrate the wiki content a bit better with the DSpace pages/templates. I’ve been unsure how this might easily be done, but now I’ve seen Manakin…

Scott Philips’s demonstration of Manakin was particularly interesting to me, as Manakin uses an XML/XSLT approach to rendering repository metadata that has a lot of similarities to the approach I developed a few years ago for generating NDAD catalogues (albeit with a Perl backend, where Manakin, of course, uses Java).

Manakin offers a three-tier abstraction model:

• Aspect Tier: This is the Java/Cocoon backend that assembles a METS-based XML document from the repository database.
• Theme Tier: XSLT is used to transform the raw XML into an XHTML document
• Style Tier: CSS styles the XHTML document

This means that no intervention in the Java source is necessary for any modifications that can be addressed in the Theme or Style tiers. For example, adding the logo of the institution to which the item belongs to the Search Results view can be achieved by adding some simple templates to the default XSLT templates. The Texas Digital Library is running entirely with a Manakin-based UI, and very nice it is too.

One other particularly interesting presentation and discussion I hope to follow up is Federico Meschini’s work on unifying a DSpace repository with a Learning Object repository. This involves establishing mappings between Dublin Core and LOM metadata schemas – something that may be of interest to us for work the ongoing SPELOS report.

I was also interested to find out more about CASPUR, with which Federico and the conference organisers are associated: it is what remains of the consortium that operated supercomputers for the Italian academic sector. Sound familiar?

I enjoyed the chance to chat to Robert Tansley, one of the people behind both Eprints and Dspace, who’s obviously a very sharp and clever guy. Rob’s now moved from MIT to Google, where he’s working on hush-hush research projects, but continues with DSpace/Google Scholar-related work as part of his side projects. We both agreed that, thanks in part to work on DSpace, Eprints, and their ilk, and the many standards and developments they embody and build on, the technical problems of managing and preserving most common types of digital documents seem largely solved. Rob talked of his interest in new approaches to visualising data, relationships and the like (notable Gapminder)and seemed genuinely interested when I suggested that the NDAD dataset archive might contain some material worth experimenting on. I’ll be dropping him a line, and a link, in the near future.

There were plenty of opportunities to chat informally with other repository users and developers, during lunch and the Google-sponsored evening reception, and at the conference dinner. At �150 for the whole conference package, it’s hard to imagine better value: Imma, Paola, Stefania and others did a fantastic job. The organisers also designated a unique tag, dspacerome2007, for sharing online resources from the course, including photos in Flickr and links in del.icio.us (just as we had done for photos of the Bergen meeting last year). And I’d barely even touched down when I found I’d been blogged in Italian…

I followed up a link to his blog at and about CETIS http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/sam/2006/09/14/fitting-ldap-to-wordpress-mu/. Since he has set up both Mediawiki and Wordpress for CETIS he could be a useful person to know!

I followed on from Zoe’s demonstration of SAS-Space. Also presenting during our session was Ed King from BL, who had a fascinating account of the 19th Century newspaper digitisation project, soon to go live. Will try to find links.

1. Put things away carefully. Check them thoroughly and clean them up, if necessary, before filing them in a sensible place, in a sensible order.
2. Look at them once in a while. Take them out, dust them off, love them, understand them. If they are a bit tatty, repair them. If they are fading, make a copy. Then put them away again, carefully.

I think that’s the sum of what I’ve learned in 10 years in the Prez Biz: the best way to ensure anything is properly preserved is to follow the Two Commandments. Even a decade of high faluting deep thought about the special problems of managing digital data over the long term, hasn’t produced any results that don’t essentially boil down to one or both of the commandments.

So, next time you lose something, or find it broken, ask yourself if you’ve followed these two simple rules!

Wow, a pictorial history of mousetraps. Evidently, disappointingly, it wasn’t anything like the Little Nipper that Hamlet had in mind: maybe something more like these “humane” basket type traps.

I was pleased, in my little web digression on the subject, to discover the ongoing online wikified version of Samuel Pepys’ diary, and learn that the great man himself, 346 years ago this very week, “bought two mouse traps of Thomas Pepys“.

The Pepys diary project is ongoing, with entries added on the corresponding date. You can even subscribe to the RSS feed to keep bang up-to-date with latest news 343 years ago!

One thing I didn’t manage to do in time was follow up my idea to try including citations automatically and dynamically from Del.icio.us and Cite-U-Like, using the copy of RSS2HTML that I’ve got installed here. I haven’t cracked it completely, not well enough to completely meet the citation format requirements, but below is an example of what we can do, using an Inline Frame (Iframe) which links to an instance of RSS2HTML, and dynamically transforms the RSS feeds into HTML

Unfortunately, unlike TiddlyWiki, Wordpress doesn’t seem to have an issue with more than one Iframe in a post, so here are separate links to output examples from Del.icio.us and Cite-U-Like.

[Wed Dec 06 19:28:50 2006]

Why have Country settings in my profile changed from “UK” to “Cote d’Ivoire”?

We updated our country list and broke down the UK into individual countries. You can now select “England” or whatever country you prefer under the Edit My Profile option. Sorry for the confusion and the inconvenience. Please let me know if you have any further issues or concerns.

Thanks for contacting Facebook

Thanks. Surprised not to be notified by some means, other than reading my profile, and finding out I’ve moved to Africa! Surprised also you chose this way to break the country (UK) up. In international applications, I find the widely-accepted standard is usually UK as top level – as in National TLDs, ISO 3166. Country-of-UK can easily be expressed as a defined region, analagous with US state. I’m English, though my descent is also Welsh and Irish. I work at a London university, and study a distance course at Edinburgh University. Until some decison is taken in any part of the UK to change it, UK works for me.

Cheers

PS. See from a quick search that the Cote D’Ivoire population has swelled enormously at Faceboo.