DukeMobile and Digital Collections at the Duke TechExpo, October 12 October 12, 2009
Posted by wsexton in : Uncategorized , add a commentCNI Spring Task Force Meeting – April 6-7, 2009 April 9, 2009
Posted by David Kennedy in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farI attended the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis, April 6-7, 2009. Below are some takeaways that I found noteworthy, especially as they relate to repositories.
Keynote Address – David Rosenthal, Chief Scientist, LOCKSS, Stanford University: David challenged some of the prevailing thought on digital preservation regarding format obsolescence. He stated that incompatibility is not inevitable, rather that “creating incompatibility = reinventing the wheel”. He argued that format obsolescence never happens. He backed this up with evidence from the last few decades. The moral of the story: If we go ahead and just collect the bits, we will be fine. A rather freeing thought, given that the perceived complexities often make digital preservation a non-starter.
JPEG2000 is a viable alternative: Ryan Chute, from Los Alamos National Library, demonstrated the Djatoka (pronounced jay-too-kay), which is an open source JPEG2000 image server, built with the Kakadu software library. The Djatoka server now has two client implementations (IIP implementation at the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Open Layers at UNC). Conceivably, JPEG2000 could be used as both a presentation format and as a preservation format (lossless compression around 2:1 and visually lossless compression around 10:1 from tiffs). Demonstration looked very sharp, will need to pay attention to how it performs in production environments. Discussed with Ryan the plans for integration with Fedora, and there are a few implementation paths to evaluate.
Preservation services in the clouds, Duraspace: Sandy Payette and Michele Kimpton discussed the joint venture between Fedora Commons and Dspace Foundation. Duraspace will be a service (eventually a set of services) as well as open source software. The initial use case will allow for a preservation based service in the cloud. They have identified a few sites that they will be piloting these services with. By Q1 2010, they expect to have extensions available for Fedora and Dspace to plug into these cloud services. I asked about a scenario where we might store preservation copies in the cloud and store derivatives locally, and have Fedora and Akubra broker the data to the right store; they said this is a scenario they are planning for.
Cool Book Digitization Workflow at Northwestern: I attended a presentation by Claire Stewart and Steve DiDomenico from Northwestern on their web-based book digitization workflow, codename “crabcake”. They are digitizing books and ingesting into Fedora. Their Fedora implementation is similar to ours with an atomistic content model and use of METS for structural metadata. Very clean set of workflow tools. The most impressive part of their presentation is their GUI for manipulating the METS structure for a book digital object. This interface is built heavily with Ext JS. Their project is grant funded, and they will be releasing as open source in the summer. From what I can tell, installation of their tools may require some adoption of their local practices, at the very least, their interpretation of METS. Regarding their digitization/QC process, they have a lot of throughput, they push things into Fedora with very little human intervention and fix later, in essence getting things online with very little impediment.
Trident project report: I gave an update on the Trident project. The presentation was well attended, and the project was well received. There was good discussion around the metadata application profile, its possible extension to different metadata schemas, and general use cases for the Editor. There was a general validation that our project continues to head in the right direction.
My Own Frank Brown April 5, 2009
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One tends to remember making major life-changing decisions on April Fool’s Day. So I can tell you that it was April 1, 1995 when I decided to get a master’s degree in Information or Library Science. Even now, I sometimes wonder, is this whole thing just a cosmic joke? Is some unseen trickster entity laughing at my feeble attempts to manufacture order where none can exist? Probably. But I may never know.
The most dangerous 16 months of my life began on that day. I had just missed the deadline for the next academic year, and would have to wait for the application period to roll around again. Meanwhile, I was living in Chapel Hill/Carrboro and working as a cook in various restaurants. Many opportunities for mischief would materialize. At one point, a housemate had just about convinced me to head for Alaska to work the salmon boats. It was that kind of a year. I was engaged in the most extravagant of all human behaviors, marking time.
Two things saved me from a career of wading through fish guts: the guitar and the library. It wasn’t the first time that I relied on the guitar to get me through a shaky patch, and it would not be the last. Not that I was ever very good at it — having a tin ear kind of limits a person’s musical potential — but looking at a year of waiting to fill out an application, I decided to do something I’d always wanted to do. I would learn to play fingerstyle.
Deena Stryker Photographs of Cuba April 2, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : Announcements, Uncategorized , add a comment
We’re very excited to announce the Deena Stryker Photographs digital collection. It includes approximately 1,850 photographs shot in Cuba between 1963 and 1964, processed by Alberto Korda on the island. The collection features photographs of Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro, as well as other major figures in the Cuban Revolution, including Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Celia Sánchez, and René Vallejo. In addition to images of key members of the Castro government at work and relaxing, the collection documents everyday life in Havana and in rural Cuba, focusing on farms, development projects, and schools.
LAUNC-CH Presentation March 9, 2009
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Does this still fit? February 5, 2009
Posted by Thomas Crichlow in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so far
Ever go to a shoe store, try on a pair of shoes and think, “Wow, these are great”? Ever wear those same shoes around town for a bit and realize that they are actually too tight?
After wearing them for a year or so, we’ve decided that the Digital Collections home page and individual collection home pages are just too tight — we want to squeeze more great stuff into the current designs than they will comfortably hold.
The challenge?
We want the standard introductory text, contact information, navigation, copyright and usage info as before — but we want so much more:
- Cooliris galleries
- YouTube videos
- Term clouds
- RSS feeds of recent comments (oh, wait, we don’t have a commenting system)
- RSS feeds of other stuff (since we don’t have a commenting system)
- Interactive widgets (Simile Timeline anyone?)
- Mashups (Data, meet Google maps. Google maps, meet data.)
Yes, we have Web 2.0 on the brain. Maybe this will pass. Until then, we will re-think a variety of pages with greater content flexibility in mind.
Stay tuned…
YouTube video highlights documentary photos from early Soviet Russia December 16, 2008
Posted by Thomas Crichlow in : Uncategorized , add a comment
Duke University Libraries has posted a video highlighting photographs from one of our newer digital collections, Americans in the Land of Lenin: Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia, 1919-1930
Watch the video on YouTube
(length: 2:44)
Special thanks to Joaquin Bueno and Eric Zitser for their work on the video.
Prequel to Sidney Gamble December 4, 2008
Posted by Thomas Crichlow in : Uncategorized , add a comment
We recently posted a slideshow providing sample images highlighting what the Sidney Gamble Photograph collection looked like before we turned it into a digital collection.
The slideshow is included on a page (About the Photographs and the Project) that provides background information describing how the collection came to Duke.
CHANGELOG, 2008 Oct. 24 October 24, 2008
Posted by wsexton in : Uncategorized , 3commentsWe posted a major build of the digital collections site today. 
The focus of the build was a set of five new collections; I know Jill intends to publicize them here, so instead of the prolix titles I’ll deploy their “collectionID” values: blake, esr, songsheets, strong and vica. In addition, we returned the asl collection to the internet after a rather lengthy, post-Texis hiatus. Since we focused on these great collections for this build, there are relatively few upgrades to the system to report, but I’ll list them here. (more…)
Taking the blog for another spin October 14, 2008
Posted by Thomas Crichlow in : Uncategorized , add a comment
Since we are on a roll with team member introductions, I’ll take the blog for a spin and introduce myself.
I’m Thomas Crichlow, a Digital Projects Consultant/Web Designer at Duke University Libraries. I’ve worked with various portions of the Libraries’ websites since October 2005 and with the new Digital Collections system since October 2007.
My contributions to the Digital Collections Implementation Team are focused on the contextual pages that provide some of the background information related to each digital collection. I meet with the collection sponsors and help them develop and present their content.
Overall, the team has worked hard to create a common look and feel for our Digital Collections system while preserving the unique identity of each collection.
My favorite activities have been creating collection icons (how hard can it be to convey a collection’s identity in 60×60 pixels?) and creating slide shows on collection home pages highlighting compelling images (kudos to Joaquin Bueno for his contributions to slideshows).
Working with such great colleagues makes the job much easier and very enjoyable.
