Poster of Metadata Standards (PDF)

Fascinating video describing how the NY Times graphics department works.

Extremely rewarding slide presentation by a Google UX researcher.

Main takeaways for me:

• “Make no mistake about this. Everyone in this room will need to learn how to design social features on websites. Whether you like it or not.” (biggest surprise from our recent usability study is the repeated call for “personalization” of our services)
• Social networks are not only about “friends”
• Strong ties = typically 4 people you care about the most (range: 2-6)
• Weak ties = 150 people max.
• Temporary ties = librarians, instructors, etc. (a connection which is highly influenced by trust)
• People generally have 4-6 groups of less than 10 people based upon various life stages (college, a particular class, family, a community) which probably don’t overlap much, if at all.
• People make decisions based on their interactions with the above groupings. In other words: networked critical thinking

Decapod is an interesting project with partners from Germany, Canada, and Anarbor, MI and funded through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

From the site:

The solution will address these problem areas:

1. Allow the camera based capture of bound material by using computer vision techniques to produce flat, clean page images equivalent to those produced from a flat bed scanner.
2. Remove the need for extensive operator intervention in the capture process by detecting scan problems and allowing the operator to rectify the scan immediately.
3. Reduce user intervention in the conversion process by using advanced document understanding techniques to remove almost all intervention, and by reducing the remainder to very simple “1-click” operations.
4. PDF/A outputs will be visually faithful to the original, searchable, and widely usable.
5. Allow the output to be viewable on mobile devices that support PDF reflow.
6. Remove the need for deep software, hardware or digitization skills by integrating all software components into a turnkey end-to-end solution.
7. Remove capital cost barriers by using consumer grade cameras.

Tito Sierra has a very interesting presentation on building library web apps, gave recently for the JHU Libraries Assembly. Lots of good references cited.

Sierra, T. (forthcoming). “Opportunities for Mobile Enhanced Library Services and Collections”, Johns Hopkins University Libraries Assembly 2010, Baltimore, MD, May 21, 2010. [ppt]

via NCSU DLI

Here are the slides from my recent presentation at the 2010 Northwest Archivists conference in April. This tells of the technical and “mindset” decisions we made for our 2009 digitization project at the National Archives. Great experience in Seattle, I’m glad I attended.

I’ve been waiting for someone to make the case for faceted browse and search for what seems like forever. I’m thrilled to find this article (via Stephen Francoeur) explaining the concept for super-charging breadcrumbs using facets.

What makes Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb (IFB) different
[...] I believe Integrated Finding Breadcrumb design is more intuitive and resourceful than other faceted breadcrumb solutions due to the following key design recommendations made based on several years of designing and researching finding interfaces:

1. Combine hierarchical Location & Attribute breadcrumbs
2. Use Change instead of Set-Remove-Set
3. Automatically retain relevant query information
4. Label breadcrumb aspects
5. Make it clear how to start a new search
6. Allow direct keyword manipulation.

The MetaArchive Cooperative has released a Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation:

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways.

CNET has a good run-down of free and fee-based file sharing services:

There are now a handful of free and paid services that make it easy to host these gigantic files and send them to a friend, family member, or business associate.

Very cool do it yourself project from Instructables.com: