Lorcan has a useful post about the Powerhouse Museum experience with Flickr Commons to date. Seb Chan there writes that their 400 images have been viewed 39,685 times in the 71 days they have been up (actually, most have been up for considerably less than the full 71 days, since the museum is loading them 50 at a time). This works out to about 1.40 views per image per day. [Update: See Seb’s correction in comments, actually about 3.5 views per image per day.]

Meanwhile I worked out last month that during our MDL Social Side of Reflections project the MDL Reflections database got about 0.18 views per image per day. Flickr is producing over 7 times the number of views that our Reflections system provides.

It is also interesting to note that Seb finds only 1% of the Flickr hits are due to search. 75% is from inside Flickr, the rest from direct references and web links. That 75% number is remarkable, and might be an indicator of the community that Flickr builds.

Also pertinent to the MDL discussion:

Tonnes of tags have been added and they have been of a quality that we’ve not experienced in our other tagging projects. I am firmly of the belief that the quality is a result of the Flickr environment (lets call it ‘culture’) and its userbase.

And:

Some notable interaction highlights include… user tagging of image content (the copious use of notes to identify features)… addition of extra information in the comments field… discussion of possible image locations like this long demolished pub in the Rocks. I like this one especially because the discussion takes place over at Yahoo Answers. This also happens within Flickr as in this example from Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains.

We need to mainstream our image content. It belongs on sites like Flickr.

The IMLS project the MHS has undertaken with George Mason is bearing some very nice fruit: Omeka. I have yet to try the software, but I am encouraged by the packaging. Good license, nice use of CSS on the websites. Interesting set of showcases. Nice developer conversation and documentation. It looks like this may be a nice alternative for folks setting up digital collections, and maybe an interesting project to contribute to.

Lorcan points to a UK report on the status and future of integrated library systems. A bit wordy, the report does gather together some useful information and observations. Examples below the fold.
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Some wonderful images and perhaps an example for the MDL.

Brian Dettmer digs into books revealing what lies beneath the covers. These amazing “book autopsies” remind me of the dream I once had that a medical scanner might be used to scan all the pages of a book without opening it up. Brian reveals sculpture and beauty inside the work. Click on the image for more.

In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the cover of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.

By the way, Brian himself credits these three galleries with exhibiting his work, but I could only find images at the last of these.

I’m so proud of the MIT Libraries. Today in LJAN I read that a yearlong effort to get the Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE) to drop their DRM plan has succeeded. Coming on the tail of the OCW/Elsevier announcement it is clear that MIT is really making a name for itself as a defender of openness. I can’t say I’m surprised by that, knowing a bit about MIT’s culture, but I am so very pleased.

Also commendable is the persistence the MIT Libraries displayed with the SAE matter and the involvement of faculty.

“We interested a couple of our faculty in the cause who are Fellows of the SAE,” [MIT librarian Tracy] Gabridge explained. “One in particular talked with colleagues at other universities and ultimately presented his objections to DRM at an SAE Publications Board Meeting last April at their national conference.”

One step at a time, marvelous work MIT!

I should return to this post by Lorcan before I go too much further along the road of working on the DLF website. Though this post does not directly relate to the challenges the DLF faces on its site, I’m sure the UCD document referenced would spark healthy thoughts. A quick scan reminds me of my white paper to Ann when she arrived at MIT in the mid-90’s suggesting that we make “the web” a real “library” of the MIT Libraries, with a “head” and shared staff. That idea didn’t fly, but I still think it would have been a good organizing principle for our web presence.

I use Apple’s iWork suite in my work and am glad to be long rid of MS Office. However, as a librarian and someone who has worked in digital archiving for years, I’ve been concerned about the fact that Apple’s Pages and Numbers and Keynote are using formats unlikely to stand the test of time. I tend to save a lot of PDF versions of these documents, because at least PDF has been fairly robust over the past 10 years.

Today I noticed that if I instruct iWork apps to include a preview for QuickLook when saving, they put a PDF and JPEG version of the document in question right into the “package” that is the native file format. In other words, in the future I’ll be able to open the directory that is a Pages file, inside that find a QuickLook directory, and inside that find a Preview.pdf that is readable by anything that reads PDF documents. Fantastic! Now my iWork apps can automatically save a robustly readable version of themselves right into their native file format.

Caveat: The Preview.pdf seems to be saved at 50% size. I’m not sure why this is, since a PDF is resolution independent and can easily be viewed at full resolution. This makes using the auto saved PDF’s a bit awkward (but I think still fine for my personal archival purposes).

Bottom line: I would recommend turning on the “include preview by default” choice in the preferences of all iWork apps. This does increase the size of the documents, but it makes it much more likely you will be able to view them again in ten or twenty years.

Some pretty amazing news out of MIT last week: Elsevier and MIT’s OpenCourseWare have inked a deal to allow OCW to access a certain portion of Elsevier content under a Creative Commons license. Though I can’t find a reference to the specific CC license agreed to, David Wiley seems to think it is a By-NC-SA license, which would allow anyone who gets this material from OCW to use it and share it non-commercially. Bravo to MIT and Elsevier for finding common ground that allows broader use of such important content. I can’t help wondering if the open content movement is not putting real pressure on companies like Elsevier to work harder to allow their content to be used fully in the academic community.

Thinking about searching with Google’s Custom Search Engine today led me to realize that it would be very helpful if search engines like this allowed more flexibility in how results were presented.

In the case I was considering today, it would be cool if I could do a regular spidery harvest of content, index it as usual, but then present the results in a different way. An example: items harvested from the MDL-SSR (such as this) should be able to point back at a different page (such as this) and include a link to a related graphic (such as this). This could be accomplished either by leaving “meta” hints behind in the HTML header of the to document retrieved or by writing a transform procedure to munge one set of URLs harvested into a different form for display and linking.

I wonder if anyone has done this. This is quite different from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) approach of harvesting only structured metadata. It could maybe be built into the Heretrix project or a related indexing tool.