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.
Lorcan uses concentration and diffusion to define two distinct Web 2.0 practices. I find the distinction very useful. Of course, this is not an either or; a service can be both concentrated (like Flickr) and open to the spectrum of diffuse tools (like RSS at Flickr). Does this mean that WorldCat is a Web 2.0 concentration of librarian effort well ahead of its time?
Slate has a somewhat disappointing photo essay about library spaces in the age of Google. The pictures are wonderful and a nice selection of old and new approaches. The essay is slim and does not dig deep at all. Maybe we will get more out of this Library Spaces: Future Needs event on Friday.
I’ve become a fan of YouTube, even following the whole LG15 controversy. Yeah, I know. Still, every once in a while I run across something worth smiling about. Here’s one from Weird Al that you should all watch: a commentary on copyright. Very sweet.
OK, one more note about re-imagines what an online conversation can be. I am stunned at what Tim and his team have accomplished in less than one year, and the kind of creativity behind the new Talk feature is a great example of the dynamic ideas inspired by really thinking about how to serve a community.
Mary has been working on an Open Source Religious Education site idea. I don’t know that conversations had been part of the idea, but if we were to implement them, I think the Talk model could be very exciting.
Yesterday I got a chance to check in on LibraryThing for the first time in a few months. I was impressed with how much progress the site has made, not only in terms of users (over 60,000) and content (almost 5M records), but also in terms of services. There is now a way to collapse editions of titles together (a kind of communal FRBR), to sign up for an organization account (in case you want to catalog your school library with LT), to query LT via web services APIs (like the thingTitle), to join groups (like librarians who use LT). LT started out as a very simple proposition (we’ll keep your list of books and allow you to share that list with other users of LT) focussed on attracting a community. It attracted the community, and continues to. Now it is learning from that community in order to understand what it should become.
I feel that we too often feel we have to specify a service, understand all the functional requirements, survey the community, get it right the first time. This leads to the “if we build it will they come”. The “it” becomes really big, and the “coming” becomes really important. What if we built just enough to get them to start coming? If we fail, “they” don’t show up, we try something else. If “they” come, we wait for them to demand services, to tell us what should come next, to help us understand the functional requirements. We build for the community that grows. More of an “if they come then we build it model,” or as a colleague put it today, a “dream of fields.”
I have no idea if LT really evolved this way, I’d love to know. But it sure feels like it has. I think we need to learn to evolve library systems in similarly iterative ways. I fear we will miss the boat otherwise.
Dharma and Beth have published an article about Documenting Internet2 in RLG DigiNews. I spent quite a bit of effort on this project last year and found web crawling for content much more reasonable an approach than I’d expected. This year we are giving Archive-It (from the Internet Archive and RLG) a go for similar crawling. The article is an effective summary of the project.
I just saw a really neat little demo of U Rochester’s Libraries Staff Web. It turns out they’ve implemented their whole staff web as a Xerox Docushare site. This enables not only sharing completed documents, but also sharing the editorial and creation side of documents (something you can’t really see without logging in). I was particularly struck by the image sharing this system made possible.
