I’d be interested in hearing what others might think of this concept – I should note that there are tools available for writers that already have a ‘reduced-distraction’ feature, such as WriteRoom.

Oregon State University’s Library continues to impress with it’s web presence. This morning I discovered they are providing a mobile version of their web presence. Check out the announcement on their main web page and the very nice Mobile Libraries page they have put up – and if you have a mobile device, try out the mobile version.

(NOTE: One thing that is missing is a mobile search. Since Oregon State runs LibraryFind, and since LibraryFind has a mobile version, I anticipate that this might be added sometime in the near future)

First, I followed the steps on this page to get IDLE support (which I may or may not use, but I figured couldn’t hurt).

I then downloaded the latest official version from http://www.djangoproject.com/download/

and followed the instructions for installing from the tarball.

And that seemed to work. The tutorial works fine – I can create a new project and run a development web server. I can synchronize the database using SQLite3. However, when I try switching to MySQL, I get some nasty errors when running ‘python manage.py syncdb’. So, I found this page, which gives the precise steps needed to get python talking to MySQL correctly on Leopard.

After that, everything is apparently working! Not too horrible – just getting the MySQL connection working was a bit tricky, but otherwise, I’m now able to start working with Django.

As Marshall Breeding relates in his blog post, some will view this announcement with great applause, and others will be worried that OCLC may be moving into such a leveraged position within the library community that they will wield too much power and control. I happen to feel a bit of both; the timing is right for providing our traditional ILS functions as “Software as a Service” (SaaS) – this in essence is what OCLC is meaning when they talk about providing library management functions at the network level. OCLC and others should be moving in this direction, and it is to OCLC’s credit that they are indeed doing so. I will be interested to see how the current players in the ILS arena respond to OCLC’s intentions.

While I have many thoughts about the actual services OCLC proposes, the approach they are taking, and other bits related to technology (pun fully intended), I believe it is critical to come back to the issues surrounding OCLC’s proposed changes to its record use and transfer policy. There has already been much discussion and concern around the proposed changes; OCLC has slowed done the process of implementing what it originally proposed, and has now formed a review board to gather feedback as part of the process. My concern here is that this latest OCLC strategic announcement adds some very important context to how the proposed record use and transfer policy changes could affect the library community, and that a great deal of feedback has been provided to OCLC prior to this news. The prohibition in the latest record use policy on “commercial” transfer is broad and ill-defined; now that OCLC is extending its range of services into library management functions, the current records use / transfer policy could prohibit others from providing ILS functions that directly compete with OCLC’s offerings. If another company wants to provide network-level ILS functions, this could be interpreted as a commercial use of WorldCat records as per the new policy, as in essence a library would need to transfer their catalog records to that company’s network-level ILS services.

I am all for OCLC providing network-level services that support libraries, but I don’t believe it is in the library community’s best interests to relinquish control of our data to OCLC or any other single institution. We cannot afford an environment where our future is defined or controlled by a single entity. We need a robust technology ecosystem. To ensure a balanced playing field, we as a community need to not let OCLC dictate the policies of use of our catalog records; we need to let OCLC know that we believe it is our best interests for these records to be openly accessible and usable by all. And if OCLC decides to pursue a policy that does not reflect the wishes of the library community, then the library community should pursue appropriate legal actions if necessary to protect our interests and our data. While OCLC has been and continues to be a great steward of our records, these are not OCLC’s records, these are our records.

Clifford Lynch, the Executive Director of CNI, usually kicks things off with his views on technology and technology policy current events and trends. However, this time there was an opening plenary by David Rosenthal on digital preservation. I really enjoyed David’s talk, as he provided a good context to some important digital preservation work over the last 10-15 years, and though many of his conlcusions and opinions can be argued, I believe his main intent was to spark conversation and thinking, which I believe he did quite well. Usually when I hear someone speak about digital preservation, it is at a very technical, how-to level; David’s talk brought the level of conversation up a notch, at a level I felt bridged the philosophical and strategic with the hands-on pragmatic. One bit I found interesting about David’s talk is his promotion of open source software as a preservation strategy; while I agree that OSS can make preservation easier, I don’t know that OSS by itself guarantees the future ability to render or emulate a particular document format. However, again, David’s use of strong statements can be seen as a strategy for engaging a conversation about the topic, and more conversation at this level is needed.

A couple of sessions of note that I attended at this meeting. First, there was a very good session on Shared Leadership for Transforming Information Technology Organizations by representatives from the University of Minnesota. The University of Minnesota has engaged in a transformation process for supporting IT throughout the entire institution. The presenters, all from their central IT group (I am including their CIO’s office as part of central IT, though that may not be entirely accurate) talked about various aspects and challenges with their IT transformation process. UMN has something now called “The Common Good”, which are a group of centrally-supported services provided to the entire campus. In general, the services in the “Common Good” are mandated; in other words, if you are going to use email, and the Common Good provides the campus’ email service, your unit is mandated to use the email service in the common good (unless you go through a rigurous opt-out process that forces you to justify why you are opting out). By implementing the “Common Good”, UMN has been able to reduce overall IT spending from 6.55% of total expenditures in the institution to 6.39%. At the same time, individual units on campus reduced their IT expenditures from 4.14% to 3.6%. Overall, this has saved UMN $18 million a year. Another metric they stated was that units could show that for every dollar now spent on IT (via central services, I assume), they get two dollars worth of IT returned. I’d like to see some additional details about this last metric – if accurate, that’s a great measurement in support of their efforts. I would point you to their presentation, but unfortunately at this time it isn’t available from the CNI website.

The second session I would point out was on the Open Annotation Collaboration. This is an effort that is just getting underway – the intent is to explore how annotations can be standardized and work across scholarly systems. The project goals, specifically, are:

• To facilitate the emergence of a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections. To this end, interoperability specifications will be devised.
• To demonstrate through implementations an interoperable annotation environment enabled by the interoperability specifications in settings characterized by a variety of annotation client/server environments, content collections, and scholarly use cases.
• To seed widespread adoption by deploying robust, production-quality applications conformant with the interoperable annotation environment in ubiquitous and specialized services, tools, and content used by scholars — e.g.: Zotero, AXE, LORE, Co-Annotea, Pliny; JSTOR, AustLit, MONK.

Over the years, there have been a number of efforts that have looked at how to properly deal with digital annotations. This project is interesting because it appears that even the definition of annotation may be explored – for instance, when I think of an annotation, I think of some comment or note that is associated with a particular object. However, this effort is abstracting the idea of object to look at annotations of collections, compound objects, similar works, annotations of annotations, etc. In other words, they are in essance extending the definitional reach of the term. This approach is likely influenced by RDF and work on the OAI-ORE effort; my sense is that this particular project is in part a response to testing out the standards developed by OAI-ORE. As such (and even if I’m wrong on that), there should be some very interesting work produced through this research. The project website can be found at http://www.openannotation.org/.

Hopefully, the presentations from this CNI meeting will be made available soon on the CNI website, as there were a number of presentations I was unable to attend (one of the frustrations of the meeting having 8 concurrent tracks).

Links to audio / video / PDF’s can be found at http://jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/03/jiscconference09/programme.aspx.

Also, there was quite an active bit of tweeting during the conference – you can go back and read the tweets via #jisc09.

Amsterdam Sign

This week I attend the JISC International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop (This workshop was also sponsored by DRIVER and the SURF Foundation) The goal of the workshop was to identify shared agendas for action and coordination between major national and international stakeholders, for the purpose of developing an international federated network of repositories.

This was truly a workshop – the majority of the time was spent in breakout groups, working on specific issues in building out an international repository infrastructure. The four topics addressed by the breakout groups (one per group) were the concept of an international repository organization, repository “handshake”, repository citations, and repostiory identifier infrastructure.

Outside of the working groups reporting out, there were two talks – the opening keynote was given by Norbert Lossau of the DRIVER project, and the closing keynote by Clifford Lynch of CNI. Norbert kicked off the workshop by providing some history and context; he described some of the history and activities which led to the aims of the workshop. While much of his talk focused on work from DRIVER, his intent was to describe the general needs for building an international federated network of repositories.

After the opening keynote, the majority of the next two days was spent in the working groups. I participated mainly in the organization working group (I initially joined the handshake group, but after the first break switched over to the organization group). My take on the breakout groups was that it took most of the groups some time to get a proper focus on their activities (as is often the case with a new group of people coming together), but that in the end, each group was able to get some reasonable outcomes. The most difficult discussion probably occured with the organization group; the first day’s discussions extended to a variety of topics and opinions as to why there needs to be an organization, what an organization would do, who would be in the organization, etc. The second day the group facilitators had the group role-play different stakeholders (such as repository managers, funders, etc.) and address a set of questions about what each group might want out of an organization. I think this approach worked better; it may not have led to a concensus opinion on the what’s, why’s, and how’s of the organization, but it did provide some concrete data that will be useful as the efforts to create a governing organization move forward.

At the end of day 2, each of the four breakout groups reported out on their outcomes. I must admit, I was fairly tired at the end of nearly two days of intense workshop activity, and my notes on these outcomes are rather minimal. However, there should be a workshop report posted in the near future on the workshop website. My take from the outcomes was that the citation and identifiers groups made the most progress. I especially liked the diagram created by the identifiers group, which can be viewed on a (new-to-me) service called prezi.com.

The workshop wrapped up with a closing keynote by Clifford Lynch. As usual, Clifford did a very good job of summing up the outcomes of the two days, and providing his thoughts as to the near-future challenges with repository efforts. One thing we need to keep in mind, as we look towards the role of the repository within digital libraries, is that our repositories not only need enhance the provisioning of access to scholarly information to our users, but they also need to provision access to other services, repositories or otherwise. The repository is not an ends to itself, but it is a component of a larger infrastructure. Finally, while we are still understanding how institutionally we can best implement repositories, it is clear that repositories are key to the future of libraries.

One of the nice things about this meeting was that there was an active backchannel discussion via Twitter. You can see this discussion (and see what others thought) by clicking on this link.