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.

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.

I had no idea of the worlds that would open up on making the decision to put down the pick and start using the fingers of my right hand. Within a few months my little rented upstairs room would roar with the blazing chops of the Reverend Gary Davis; I picked up the knowing smile that only comes from devoted listening to Blind Willie McTell’s ultra-cool voice and peerless 12-string technique; and my sense of the relationship between heaven and earth would realign under Blind Willie Johnson’s pocketknife slide.

But as mentioned, my ear of tin limited my own approach to playing. A text-oriented person like myself goes for the books first, and so I did what I, as a serial dilettante, always do in the developing stages of a new interest. I went to the library and checked out stacks of books.

The books that I pulled from the shelves of Davis Library at UNC included the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. It’s a seven-volume set but numbers 2-through-5 were what weighed down my backpack: “Folk ballads from North Carolina,” “Folk songs from North Carolina,” “The music of the ballads,” and “The music of the songs.” I was on the hunt for simple, elemental, meaningful melodies to pluck on guitar, and then backfill with syncopation and harmony. My repertoire, such as it was, derived from any number of books whose titles and authors I could no longer tell you, but I developed a particular intimacy with the Frank Brown books.

Frank Clyde Brown was an English professor and administrator at Duke. He oversaw the construction of the Durham campus and founded the NC Folklore Society. A contemporary of John Lomax, he engaged in a similar kind of ballad-hunting, but focused on the state of North Carolina. Following his death, Duke University Press assembled his collection into the seven-volume monograph published between 1952 and 1964.

During that year-and-a-third of waiting, I worked up arrangements for probably a dozen tunes from the collection. I really only play two anymore: “The Hamlet Wreck” (#290 from the ballads) and “Cold Cold Mountains” (#277 in the songs). The former relates to the devastating wreck of an excursion train carrying the congregation of Durham’s St. Joseph’s A.M.E. church to Charlotte. The latter song is a minor-key piece resembling “Wayfaring Stranger” that I worked up in drop-D tuning.

To make an already long story a bit shorter, once I got to grad school, the multitude of assignments pulled me away from guitar. But I always wanted to do something with the FCBCNCF books. A decade later, working at Duke, we built a digital collection around the construction of the campus that featured Frank Brown prominently, but ignored his role as folklorist. Then last year, when we were looking for books to send to UNC-Chapel Hill for digitization by their Scribe scanner there, I had a ready suggestion. Not too long ago, the books appeared in the Internet Archive.

One of the privileges of my job lies in contributing to the development of other people’s ideas and research interests, but in this case I have my own personal connection and history with the material. I think there’s more we can do with the 314 ballads and 340 songs that appear in volumes 2 through 5, but at the moment I’m just glad to see the books online and available to inspire anyone who needs to mark a little time before grad school.

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…

Watch the video on YouTube
(length: 2:44)

Special thanks to Joaquin Bueno and Eric Zitser for their work on the video.

The slideshow is included on a page (About the Photographs and the Project) that provides background information describing how the collection came to Duke.

Clickable metadata display: One of the requests that we received from staff and patrons was to display metadata fields as hyperlinks to enable follow-up searches.  You can see an example in this record, where the Place, Province and Country fields all link to search results for those values.  We still haven’t implemented this feature consistently across all the collections and metadata fields.  As I’ll probably say again as long as I continue to blog about our homemade “Tripod” system, the XSL stylesheets that govern display are the most complex part of the publication process, and collection-level customization plays a big part in that complexity.  An example of where the feature would be useful is this item, where the Source and Subject fields could both benefit.  We’ll continue to work on this issue, however, and implement it more consistently over the coming weeks.

Full text indexing and display: We now index and display the text of items that have TEI documents corresponding to their METS records.  This feature was necessary for the songsheets collection (see example here).

Film-strip browsing: Not sure what to call this one, but Sean Aery developed a feature for our page turner that shows the thumbnail of the current page sandwiched between the preceding and next pages.  See here for an example.

Gamble place names updates: The place names metadata for the Gamble collection got a massage, and the detailed display now matches place and province to one another (example).  We also added a record for the “Pilgrimage to Miao Feng Shan” video.

More term clouds: We love ‘em; now on the home pages for esr and songsheets.

More or less frequent words: Finally, we experimented with a feature for songsheets that assigns sixteen “tags” to each item drawn from the full text of that item.  Eight of the tags are pulled from the top of the stack of terms occurring five or more times in the collection; eight from the bottom.  I may post about this feature at greater length in the future.  I’m not sure that it’s useful, but it does seem like kind of an interesting way to go clicking about the collection.  Follow the link to “Stonewall Jackon’s Way” above for an example.

My personal thanks to all the collection sponsors and everyone on the implementation team.  I’ll just add in closing that it’s exciting to see the site grow, and to show off the great diversity of collections at Duke.

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.