fresh + new(er)

Just a few days after the Picnic08 discussions of ‘openness’ comes a very timely report from the OCLC on cross-sector collaboration between libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) titled Beyond the Silos of the LAMs. Diane Zorich, Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway are the authors of the report.
The report is the result of a series of [...]

One of favourite music and culture bloggers (and DJs), Jace Clayton has a lovely piece in Frieze which explores the issues around how collectors might trawl the digital music of today in forty years time. He starts out looking at the recent craze in African funk reissues - records recovered from master tapes buried in [...]

Lorcan Dempsey pointed to this rather excellent presentation titled ‘There’s No Place Like Home?’ from Ann Cameron at the National Library of Scotland. In it she describes way that the NLS has been uploading archival video materials to YouTube and highlights some of the issues around Copyright, and metadata that have emerged from the project. [...]

As a lot of museums (and libraries) have been using Flickr in lightweight ways for various purposes from image storage to building community engagement for quite a while, it is exciting to see a new formal collaborative project between Flickr and a major institution launch.
Flickr Commons is a project between Flickr and the US Library [...]

Over in the New Yorker is an excellent article on digitisation, the various book scanning projects, and a historical look at the urge to record and catalogue everything written by historian Anthony Grafton.
Here are some pull quotes of specific note -

Peter Brantley over at O’Reilly has put together a short post on his vision of the future of collections - specifically those held by university libraries - which should have resonance with those in collecting museums.

Another paper from the Steve researchers has gone online and is generating interesting discussions. It elaborates on the content of an earlier summary podcast. To be presented at ICHIM07 the paper describes some of the emerging patterns in tagging behaviour in the different interface trials.

Late in August OCLC held a special event called ‘Digitization matters: breaking through the barriers, scaling up digitization of special collections‘ in Chicago. The audio of the event is now available on the OCLC site and is important listening for museums trying to come to terms with mass digitisation and the new access demands of [...]

The New York Times announced last week that it was stopping charging for archival and subscription content on its website. As its self-report explains, the NYT has realised that selling and managing subscription service to archival content now is not going to be as profitable as selling advertising on this content and making access to [...]

So your museum has already done the easy part of digitisation - taking digital photos of your objects, but now you have a complex hand-written materials you need to digitise . . . what can you do?
This is a question that has popped up in several meetings over recent months.
Our Curator of Information Technology, Matthew [...]

When Bad News Follows You in the New York Times (via Nick Carr) is a fascinating article about what can happen when ‘everything’ is put online.
The article looks at the new array of problems that have come about as a by-product of the NYT optimising their site and archives for Google with SEO techniques. Suddenly [...]

Internet Archive/Open Content Allinace has launched a public demo of its forthcoming Open Library project. Having heard Brewster Kahle speak about the OCA at Museums and the Web 2007, it is fantastic to be finally able to get some hands-on time with the work he was talking about.
Open Library is a very exciting project because [...]

A very interesting new development in the digitisation space as reported in The Chronicle (via Siva Vaidhyanathan).
Amazon, which made its name selling books online, is now entering the book-digitizing business.
Like Google and, more recently, Microsoft, Amazon will be making hundreds of thousands of digital copies of books available online through a deal with university libraries [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion on the web about Microsoft’s Photosynth but this demonstration from TED really reveals the real possibilities. The image navigation opportunities offered by Seadragon are quite amazing but as Blaise Aguera y Arcas points out in the short demonstration, what a collective Photosynth experience offers is the ability for one [...]

reCaptcha is a nifty project that uses the now familiar ‘Captcha’ web form spam prevention technique to help fix OCR problems in global digitisation projects.
Currently this great example of socially responsible crowdsourcing is helping fix digitisation errors and inconsistencies in books scanned for the Internet Archive - books that will be reproduced in the [...]

Museums & the Web is very big this year. There must be nearly 1000 people here and there is a good buzz in between sessions.
Today opened with an entertaining and motivational opening plenary from Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. Kahle talked about the Internet Archive disucssing the various types of media it is [...]

OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey’s idea of libraries “getting with the flow” (from 2005) is something that has resonated well beyond the library world.
The importance of flow underlines recurrent themes:
- the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment
- integration of library resources should [...]

Audio transcription is an essential part of digitisation. Our curatorial researchers are recording thousands of hours of interviews with subjects onto a mix of analogue (tapes) and digital (MP3/WAV) media. These oral histories are filed away for preservation purposes but will remain almost unusable in any serious way until they are digitised - that is, [...]

Fascinating archive project from venerable US gaming magazine Computer Gaming World puts archives of issue 1 (1981) through to 1992 online as PDFs. It has obviously been an enormous scanning and digitisation project.
This is a great trip down memory lane and is an insight into not only how games have developed, but also how computer [...]

Yesterday at the Digital Collection Summit in Adelaide I presented a short 5 minute overview of our OPAC2.0 and Design Hub projects followed by Dr Fiona Cameron introducing the upcoming theoretical research into Design Hub impacts.
Quite a few people have asked for a copy of the presentation - so here it is. Unfortunately it doesn’t [...]

GoogleMaps plus gaming -
- Goggles : a flight simulator using GoogleMaps as the terrain!
- Endgame : real-time strategy wargaming using GoogleMaps

There’s a really interesting article here from ctheory.net written by our old mate Lev Manovich that looks at ‘understanding meta-media’ and examines “what new media does to old media?” focusing particularly on the idea of simulation.
The article references some great new media works that explore the concept of ‘mapping’ as key framework for undertsanding the [...]

Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike.
With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library [...]

If you have a long journey home then download this great 1hr podcast on the Google book project. It is a good discussion and covers some essential areas around the privatisation of knowledge and the Copyright conflict over Google’s activities.

UbuWeb.
As they explain themselves, Ubuweb is “the definitive source for Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry”. Check it out and be amazed, and listen and watch some of out of print music and video and text from a slew of artists whose names will be familiar but whose work is notoriously hard to get hold [...]