The Quantum Archivist

… and your enemies closer. Whether this comes from the Godfather, or Napoleon, or an Ancient Chinese philosopher, it may explain what a fervent believer in open source like me is doing giving a presentation at an ILS vendor’s user group meeting here Chicago.

Image from Wikipedia

Like most academic libraries, we use a combination of tools, applications, and resources to collect and deliver our content. In the past few years, we have made an explicit choice to move toward open source software solutions, at least for our presentation layer.

Why did we do this? There are a number of reasons most of them philosophical and operational rather than economical. Although open source is free (like a puppy), there are many costs associated with development and maintenance. I don’t think the economic argument has a lot of value in terms of decision making, since anything big costs a lot of money. Big products from vendors and big software development projects seem to me to be in the same ballpark cost-wise.

I’m not going to go deeply into the whole argument here, and it is possible to argue any of these points. But my opinion is that given a certain level of technical expertise (that not everyone has or can get) I think the advantage of open source is the ability to be nimble in the face of new demands and serve your user base in much more focused way than vendor solutions can offer. The downside of course is that you have to maintain it all yourself and there is no easy phone call to customer support that you can make to say “just fix it please!”

Which brings me back to Chicago, physically and intellectually. I am part of a panel with two colleagues from our library to talk about harvesting and aggregating metadata–including primary source metadata–into a presentation layer that is usable and useful for researchers.

We will of course talk about the vendor-supplied option that we currently use to harvest and aggregate book and primary source metadata, but I’m going to go another step beyond that to talk about the value of standards-based data exchange and demonstrate not only the vendor-based model, but a few open source based applications that we have developed here at the library because my point is that data aggregation is a matter of policy and practice, not applications.

What I am saying is that aggregated metadata can be used in a variety of ways to support discovery, and that open source applications based on standards that can be re-used and re-purposed for different audiences can go a long way toward serving the needs of our local audiences in ways that “one-size-fits-all” vendor products don’t seem to be doing.

We’ll see what sort of reception this gets in a room full of people who presumably (at least in my mind) are here to hear about the latest product from their vendor and why they should buy it.

This doesn’t have anything specifically to do with the Webwise conference I’m attending, but it does relate to the basic idea of this blog, that as we change, the way we connect people to primary content should change as well.

At my first Webwise (and the second one overall), I was very pleased to find in my conference bag the conference notebook that had each of the powerpoint presentations printed with notetaking space to the side of each slide and to find at each table place a pad of paper and a pen for me to use to take notes. I dutifully, and frantically took notes in the notebook and  fretted that I was missing something. My “tweets” consisted of handwritten notes in the margins of my notepad passed on only as far as my arm could reach.

This year, at Webwise #11, the conference bag (they still give out one) had the notebook, but no pad or pen. We communicate via twitter, today’s meet and other means with everyone in the room as well as people all over the world who are interested in the proceedings.

I frantically take notes and fret that I’m missing something, except that now I’m missing something from a lot bigger pool of ideas. Nevertheless, I prefer the new paradigm. Through this technology I’ve met, both in person and virtually, a group of people who share my interests and dreams, and we continue to build our networks of information and collaboration. This was the goal of Webwise 10 years ago and it continues to be fulfilled as we grow with our profession and technology.

The 2010 edition of the IMLS WebWise conference kicks off tomorrow in Denver with two pre-conferences. I’ve been the steward for the half-day workshop called “Digital Repositories Uncovered” run by Sarah Shreeves, Coordinator of IDEALS at UIUC, and Jessica Colati, Director of the Alliance Digital Repository here in Colorado (and yes, we are related). As I mentioned in a previous post, Sarah and Jessica have what I think is a difficult job of selling people something they need but don’t think they want. But that is only one part of the story. Managing digital repositories means more than just convincing content owners that they want to deposit. It involves understanding copyright and fair use, intellectual property law, hardware and server specifications, software applications, and how to talk to programmers. If digital repository managers were soccer players, they would be center midfielders, able to direct the flow of the game, and understand and coordinate how all the parts work.

The half-day workshop covers a range of issues repository managers have to face (I’ve seen the previews) but most importantly, I think the workshop helps repository mangers think about who they are, and their central role in the collection, management, preservation and use of digital content.

I’m attending and speaking at a small conference for members of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries called “Digital Repositories, Data Curation, and the Cloud.” The Keynote speaker in the preconference today was Thorny Staples, the “godfather” of Fedora and currently Director of Community Strategy and Alliances and Fedora Project at DuraSpace. In this morning’s talk, Thorny introduced the idea of “durability” as being different from, and preferable to, the idea of simple preservation. As I understand it, durability differs from preservation in that while preservation seeks to maintain the existence of a digital object in a way that enables it to be accessed, durability preserves not only the existence but the meaning or context of the content in a verifiable way.

This strikes me as being absolutely obvious, now that it has been pointed out. The record of humanity now takes place on the web. How do we maintain the connections that are made between and among objects that are combined and recombined in 2.0 tools  even when those objects do not live in the same place, and the tools that are used to create those connections are themselves ephemeral?

The scholarly record, and by the same token the historical record, relies on citations to stable resources that provide verification for the assumptions or assertions made in an argument. How do we verify and persist, i.e. make “durable,” the context of a digital object in all of its contexts? Once we let the object out of a controlled environment that enforces context, how can context be maintained?

These are the kinds of questions that we might address when thinking about durability rather than just preservation.

For all of you who might be interested in coming to Denver, you’ll have a perfect opportunity to mix business and pleasure. The IMLS’s Web Wise conference is coming to Denver on March 3-5, 2010. The University of Denver’s Penrose Library is the main sponsor of the event, along with the Denver Art Museum.

Every year the IMLS brings together practitioners and thinkers from all areas of cultural heritage digitization in a small group of usually no more than 300 or so for two days of presentations, discussion, and networking.

My part in the conference, beyond being the PI on the cooperative agreement with the IMLS is to start a new project called “Digital Pioneers.”  We will be attempting to document the history of cultural heritage digitization in the words of those who were present at the creation.

Although there were glimmerings of pre-history reaching as far back as the 1960s, the great age of experimentation lasted roughly from 1994 though 2005. It was not until the early 1990s that as Clifford Lynch says “programmatic funding and community creation… legitimized digital libraries.”   By 2005, Lynch notes, funding and support for “…the construction of prototype systems [was] at an end…” and “the novelty of constructing digital libraries as a research end in itself [had] run its course.” (Dlib Magazine, July, 2005)

By 2005,digitization had become a discipline with standards, practices, protocols, organizations and governance. It moved beyond the mere creation of content to focus on topics like preservation, data curation, sustainability, large-scale aggregation, information exchange, and cyberinfrastructure.

More to come on Digital Pioneers. Hope to see you in Denver.