David Rosenthal has a detailed and useful analysis of the value of open format specifications for preservation:

If we plot the quality achieved by a newly created renderer for a format against the cost of creating it we will get an S curve. A certain amount of money is needed to get to a barely functional renderer. Beyond that, quality increases rapidly at first but after a while the law of diminishing returns sets in. Getting from 99% to 99.9% is very expensive; the cost of getting to 100% is infinite. … It seems clear that preserving the specification for a format is unlikely to have any practical impact on the preservation of documents in that format. If, during the currency of the format, it acquires an open source renderer there is no significant risk of ever ending up without a functional renderer. The need for a new one to be created from the specification is extremely unlikely ever to arise. If that unlikely event ever happened, it is hard to believe that resources on the scale needed to do the job would be available. And in the unlikely event that they were, it is unreasonable to believe that the combination of the preserved specification and the available resources would be enough to create a renderer that would satisfy those who reject Open Office because of minor rendering flaws.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Clearly, formats with open source renderers are, for all practical purposes, immune from format obsolescence. …

[emphasis mine]

—

Addendum:

Chris Rusbridge makes some good points and offers a summary of the DCC email thread

Found via the Washington University DLS blog, here’s an article from the NYT on the challenges faced by the National Archives when it comes to the massive data dump the Bush administration is about to unload.

The archives invoked its emergency plan to deal with problems in transferring two types of electronic files: a huge collection of digital photographs and the “records management system,” which provides an index to most of the textual records generated by Mr. Bush and his staff members in the last eight years. … If the electronic records of the Bush White House total 100 terabytes of information, as archives officials estimate, that would be about 50 times the volume of electronic records left behind by the Clinton White House in 2001 and some five times the contents of all 20 million catalogued books in the Library of Congress … [the] agency was expecting to receive 20 to 24 terabytes of e-mail alone from the Bush White House.

That’s an incredible amount of material for the archives to ingest. Since the administration, the Vice President’s office in particular, is not providing details on the types of materials being provided, what this amounts to is the National Archives trying to implement an OAIS solution with a hostile data provider. The reason they’re hostile is because the data has political implications in the short run, but the archives needs to preserve the material for the long run. In the next year or so, I hope the archives will write and present a case study what they eventually ended up doing.

• I’m a fan of user personas, but building personas for applications is an interesting idea.
• SocialStartup.com identifies five fundamental social patterns:
  • Public Timeline
  • Asymetrical Follow
  • News Feed
  • Re-blogging
  • Social Proof
• Via the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog:
  • The Electronic Library 26, no. 6 (2008): Includes “A Metadata Manager’s Role in Collaborative Projects: The Rutgers University Libraries Experience,” “Usability Study of Digital Institutional Repositories,” and other articles.
• Good editorial article on how Libraries are Becoming Community Living Rooms

I’ve been asked by a small-sized museum / special library to make a suggestion on what kind of equipment a start-up digitization studio would need while operating under a budget of approximately $3,200. This studio would need the cabability of digitizing photos, and possibly some text, post-processing the scans, hosting the images on an existing web server, and then preserving the master scans. It’s an interesting project, and one that can easily be accomplished within a tight budget. By putting the recommendation online, I’m hoping that others will find this and make further recommendations on the following:

Here are the criteria for the digitization studio:

1. Budget of $3,200
2. Manageable by a staff of basically one, with minimal to no technical support
3. Capable of digitizing photos & text according the best practices per the BCR Digital Imaging document
4. Capable of long-term preservation of master files
5. Capable of public access to the resulting web-ready scans

Here are some recommendations using the lowest prices (found via Google Product Search) as of this writing:

Scanning

Computer-Baseline: $600

What’s amazing to me is that a baseline studio-ready PC can be had for as little as $600, maybe less. While it’s easy to spend more, as long as it has a minimum of 2GB memory and 100GB+ hard drive you’re good to go. Upgrade options here include a larger monitor and more memory. Macs will be more expensive, but can be a good solution.

Scanner-Baseline: $735

PlusTek OpticBook 4600: I’ve used the OpticBook 3600 previously and was very happy with it. It offers a scanning area that is good enough for 8 1/2″ x 11″ photos while also being configured to drape books over the side in a way that won’t break the binding and still allows you to get deep into the gutter of the page.

Upgrade option – Epson 10000XL Photo: $2,500. This scanner has excellent dynamic range, which for photos is paramount but comes at a price. Other options include a digital camera, but if you go in this direction you’ll need to worry about lighting and dealing with RAW files. For a start-up studio that may be more trouble than it’s worth.

Post-Processing and Quality Control

Image-processing baseline: $176

Photoshop CS3 is probably your best option. The latest version is CS4, but for a start-up studio the earlier version is going to work fine. This software will be used to run the scanner for capturing master images and to create derivative files that are web-ready. Price: $150

Alternately, the open-source software Gimp is an excellent solution. It will do almost everything that Photoshop can do. The only downside is if your just learning image manipulation, most of the tutorials available are for Photoshop. Price: Free

Tutorials: Ben Willmore’s Photoshop CS3 Studio Techniques is an invaluable resource. It will walk you through everything you need to know to make web-ready derivatives: straightening, cropping, adjusting levels, sharpening, resizing, etc. Price: $26

File Name Editing: Bulk Rename Utility is a good resource for renaming an entire directory-worth of files. This is an invaluable resource and free.

Image Quality Control: I find IrfanView to be an excellent, light-weight, and fast image viewer. This is crucial if you need to browse through a couple thousand images quickly and easily. It also has the capability to do some simple image editing, like cropping. Price: Free

Optical Character Recognition: OCR will give you the capability to convert images of text to actual text. This will allow you to create PDFs as well as text files of the scans. Most scanners come with the Sprint version of Abbyy FineReader, which is fine for starting out. Upgrade to the Pro version is a good idea when the studio expands its capabilities. Price: Free ($179 for an upgrade to Pro)

Public Image Presentation

Hosting Baseline: Free (as in “free puppy”)

Greenstone is open-source hosting software designed with the small institution in mind. As long as you have a web server to place files on, you’re good to go. Alternately, you can go with CONTENTdm, which has either a hosted option or a version that you host yourself. Fees for this can be quite steep, so moving to this later may be an option. One caveat: if technical support is not available to you, getting content you’ve placed on Greenstone into CONTENTdm is not trivial. Plan on rebuilding your collections from scratch with any migration. Price: Free

Long-Term Preservation

Preservation Baseline: $749

This is about ensuring that the master files created in a digitization studio can be kept indefinitely, at least on a bit bit level. Migration, emulation, etc. is another issue entirely. (Most istitutions are taking the attitude that we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.) For a small institution without a network, what’s needed is redundant storage that’s easy to maintain. Data Robotics has an elegant solution in its Drobo product. It accepts cheap and easily purchased hard drives which it monitors for you to guard against bit rot (which is inevitable, eventually). If a drive goes bad, you simply replace it and Drobo manages the reformatting and transfer for you. With this setup two copies would be kept: one on the scanning computer, and one on the Drobo. If it’s also possible to keep another copy on a network, that would help spread the risk.

Grand Total: $2,260

That’s about $1,000 below budget, which will give you room to maneuver. Upgrading from here I’d recommend getting as large a monitor as possible, upgrading the ram of the computer to 4GB, and possibly finding a scanner somewhere between the OpticBook and the Epson.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

• The University of Minnesota Walter Library hosts World Usability Day talks in conjunction with Campus IT.
• New to me: Interactions which is available from the ACM Digital Library
• A description of user personas, this one with a useful persona template [doc]
• EDSF report on Color Preference in Web Design [pdf]

“Results from this research found that in the sample of over 200 participants, in excess of one third of the group preferred a white background with black text. In addition to the preferences for the white background, black text, 18% of the total group preferred that combination with blue hyper-links. These findings show that a greater proportion of those surveyed preferred high contrasting page layout with blue hyperlinks. These preferences may reflect or symbolize conventionality in conservative web design, but it may also offer the designer or web content manager with more predictability of interface with website contents and greater usability.”

From what I can tell from the report, below is a representation  of their instrument. They make a point of the following: “Color preferences were derived from the participant’s subjective choices without being coerced or persuaded with color samples through an assortment of prearranged background colors with text color and link color compositions”. This makes me doubt their findings since I’m not sure a participant can get an accurate sense of their choices without seeing examples. I think the below would prejudice participants unless examples were given for all iterations (which would be a lot of work, but not impossible.)


• A Berkeley Professor shares impressions on the Kindle and the joys of rediscovering public domain works.
• The W3C releases the proposed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
• New to me: Elements of Typographic Style applied to the Web
• Firefox based prototyping tool Pencil Project

I came across a very interesting article today by Michael Boock on the organizaation structure at Oregon State University:

Boock, M. (2008, September). Organizing for Digitization at Oregon State University: a Case Study and Comparison with ARL Libraries. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 34(5), 445-451. Retrieved October 6, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

I like the way he represents the various responsibilities in the following chart. The chart is read in columns, with 1 box indicating some responsibility, 2 boxes primary responsibility, and 3 boxes indicating sole responsibliity:

This matches what we’re doing at the University of Montana, if only that we’re thinking of digitization in terms of teams, instead of one solely responsible unit.

Until Zotero 2.0 comes out, which will be server-based as opposed to client-based, keeping track of research across multiple computers is a challenge. The solution I’ve been using on my windows boxes is a combination of Firefox Portable, Zotero, and MS Synctoy. Firefox Portable will let you install an instance of the browser on a thumb drive, or any other drive, on your system. That way you can keep it with you and access your citations from any machine. Because running anything off of a thumb drive is excruciatingly slow, what I end up doing is using it to transfer all my Zotero files between computers (letting Synctoy manage the updating) and run it from the hard drive, like this:

It works great, but what I’d really like to do is turn the whole synchronization over to the cloud. SugarSync is an interesting tool that will synchronize any folder on your computer (Macs included) doing much of what Synctoy is doing, but without a thumb drive.

It works well, and may be a good solution. It’s fee-based and you get 10GB space. The only drawback being that you can’t execute portable firefox remotely (which makes sense.) I’ll keep testing, and waiting for Zotero 2.0.

Jobs recently put up a position statement on his/Apple’s stance on DRM and the iTunes store.

The rub comes from the music Apple sells on its online iTunes Store. Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

Today in the NYT, is an article titled “EMI May Sell Recordings Online with no Anti-Copying Software“:

It is far from clear that the company, which has tested the concept recently by selling a song from Norah Jones in unprotected form, will reach a deal.

But if it does, it would be the first of the four major music companies to distribute its catalog without software designed to limit copying. Because various online retailers use different forms of security software, known as digital-rights management, their services are not always compatible with all music-playing devices on the market.

Interesting developments …

**update** EMI bows out of talks to allow DRM free music:

According to reports, EMI had asked the online stores for large upfront payments to guarantee their revenue.

I’m heading out to Cornell next week to attend a Digital Preservation Management workshop. In the preparatory readings, two preservations services caught my eye:

1. HD Rosetta: This service will etch documents onto a nickel plate at such a small resolution that from an 8.5″ x 11″ plate you can retrieve up to 18,000 pages of information using an optical microscope, or 196k pages using an electron microscope. Aye carumba.
2. Vintage Tech: This company maintains a veritable museum of servicable old computers. They even offer a data conversion and recovery service with an impressive array of accessible formats.

More on this later, I’m sure.

Terence Huwe has an interesting article in the recent edition of Online. Here’s the citation:

Huwe, T. K. (2006). From librarian to digital communicator. Online, 30(5), 21-26.

He charts the path through which the U. Berkeley’s Institute and Industrial Relations Library has inserted itself into the information flow starting back when e-mail was such a transformative technology. He envisions librarians as specialists in digital communications and I think that can be true. Apparently, they’ve actively adopted all types of communication technologies at IIR as they appeared.

He recommends “extend[ing] the services, community, and values of the library to the users you are trying to reach–including your own leadership. With the vast multiplicity of technological platforms, you can keep trying new approaches until you find one that works.” For them that meant taking over the schools listserv management, web management, and even the publishing of some marketing materials.

Terrence says that an “academic library that sees itself as a passive repository is a library at risk.” I agree with that. He also makes the point that moving the library into the center of the academic nexus of digital communication can take years of building trust.

To start, he’s recommending the following steps:

1. Start with an information audit. He doesn’t go into detail, but I see this as a holistic audit of the information environment including user needs and wants. Not just an IT audit.
2. Understand the leadership. (Key. There’s nothing harder than pushing a service that’s not seen as worthwhile by the leadership. Understanding where they’re coming from makes the task easier.)
3. Make mistakes (i.e. perpetual beta). But make sure you’re ready for damage control.

So is this library work? I vote yes, since academic librarians have always been responsible for managing academic discourse. With new and evolving channels for that discourse, staying on top of it all is core to the librarian’s value system.