25 augustus 2008
Op naar Ticer: Digital Libraries à la Carte 2008
Morgenochtend zeer vroeg uit de veren omdat ik een dagje naar TICER mag. Dit jaar beperk ik het maar tot een dag in tegenstelling tot de vier van vorig jaar. Voor mij zijn op voorhand Stephen Abram en Herbert van de Sompel de trekkers om morgen daadwerkelijk weer naar Tilburg West af te reizen.
Wat ik leuk vind is dat er ondertussen een goedkoper alternatief met twee sprekers van deze dag georganiseerd is in de OB Rotterdam door DOK Delft. Wanneer ik niet de kans had om die twee morgen te horen zou ik zeker op woensdag naar Rotterdam te gaan. Voor hen die daar naar toe gaan op de Ticer site staat nog wat recommended reading materiaal van de twee heren klaar. Hoewel voor Stephen Abram zou ik me maar concentreren op zijn blog, zijn powerpoint staat daar al klaar.
In de voorbereiding op morgen al een rondje langs de blogs gemaakt, twitter en Flickr maar het is daar allemaal nog wel akelig stil. Guus is actief, die mocht een rol spelen in de organisatie. Adel verplicht.
Mijn verslagen van de dag zijn morgen op mijn Engelse blog te lezen.
Wat ik leuk vind is dat er ondertussen een goedkoper alternatief met twee sprekers van deze dag georganiseerd is in de OB Rotterdam door DOK Delft. Wanneer ik niet de kans had om die twee morgen te horen zou ik zeker op woensdag naar Rotterdam te gaan. Voor hen die daar naar toe gaan op de Ticer site staat nog wat recommended reading materiaal van de twee heren klaar. Hoewel voor Stephen Abram zou ik me maar concentreren op zijn blog, zijn powerpoint staat daar al klaar.
In de voorbereiding op morgen al een rondje langs de blogs gemaakt, twitter en Flickr maar het is daar allemaal nog wel akelig stil. Guus is actief, die mocht een rol spelen in de organisatie. Adel verplicht.
Mijn verslagen van de dag zijn morgen op mijn Engelse blog te lezen.
30 augustus 2007
John MacColl's presentation
Right at this moment I am listening to the presentation of John MacCol at Ticer. Just googling some facts he was just saying, and I found his current presentation on Slideshare. Thanks John.
Labels: English, John MacCol, Ticer
29 augustus 2007
Open Source Software and XML Workshop by Eric Lease Morgan
In advance I had thought really hard about attending this session or not. After all, it is a bit outside the scope of my daily work. The objective as I formulated it to my superiors to get permission to attend this module of the Ticer summer school, was that I would gain a little bit more insight in the things they were doing at our own IT department. Not that they are really secretive about things at all, but just that I would be able to understand their language a wee bit better.
Eric Lease Morgan actually asked some of the participants about their objectives to attend his workshop. What I just described was also what I answered on his question. Perhaps another objective was that I could use some of the stuff I learned today and apply that on my own little bibliographies, or perhaps even my websites.
The workshop was started with some OSS evangelism. While he was spreading the word, I really wondered what kind of OSS tools our guys and galls were using in our systems. I really don’t know, whereas we have a completely independent in house developed LCMS. Have to find out though.
That Eric is serious about OSS, is clear from the fact that all his material used for this workshop is freely available at http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/07carte/publicat/oss-and-xml.zip. It includes, manuals, software and exercises. So if you are really interested you can go ahead. I think I you search a little bit around the same stuff can be found at other places as well (Lockss we call that). What you don’t get, though, when you do it yourself is Eric’s humoristic and enthusiastic way of presenting seemingly complicated matters. He is a gifted teacher.
Further on in the morning we did little exercises on writing and reading MARC records, extracting them from the Library of Congress, building a database of MARC records, indexing it and search the database. Interesting assumption on his part is that he assumed that most library catalogs were based on MARC records. That might be the case in the USA, but is not necessarily true in Europe. But this did not really matter for his exercises or the purpose of the exercises.
In the afternoon, we got around to XML. It really covered the mere basics, what I found interesting were some of the exercises where we actually transformed and presented the same texts (files) with different xsl or css. I new these things, but so far never actually did these little things myself. It was a bit of getting you hands dirty yourself. Some exercises were command line prompted, that gave those annoying little stupid mistakes. Reminding me of my days programming in Fortran.
All in all, an interesting day. We could have gone a bit deeper into the details and I would have loved a little instruction on Perl as well. There are only a limited hours in day though.
Eric Lease Morgan actually asked some of the participants about their objectives to attend his workshop. What I just described was also what I answered on his question. Perhaps another objective was that I could use some of the stuff I learned today and apply that on my own little bibliographies, or perhaps even my websites.
The workshop was started with some OSS evangelism. While he was spreading the word, I really wondered what kind of OSS tools our guys and galls were using in our systems. I really don’t know, whereas we have a completely independent in house developed LCMS. Have to find out though.
That Eric is serious about OSS, is clear from the fact that all his material used for this workshop is freely available at http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/07carte/publicat/oss-and-xml.zip. It includes, manuals, software and exercises. So if you are really interested you can go ahead. I think I you search a little bit around the same stuff can be found at other places as well (Lockss we call that). What you don’t get, though, when you do it yourself is Eric’s humoristic and enthusiastic way of presenting seemingly complicated matters. He is a gifted teacher.
Further on in the morning we did little exercises on writing and reading MARC records, extracting them from the Library of Congress, building a database of MARC records, indexing it and search the database. Interesting assumption on his part is that he assumed that most library catalogs were based on MARC records. That might be the case in the USA, but is not necessarily true in Europe. But this did not really matter for his exercises or the purpose of the exercises.
In the afternoon, we got around to XML. It really covered the mere basics, what I found interesting were some of the exercises where we actually transformed and presented the same texts (files) with different xsl or css. I new these things, but so far never actually did these little things myself. It was a bit of getting you hands dirty yourself. Some exercises were command line prompted, that gave those annoying little stupid mistakes. Reminding me of my days programming in Fortran.
All in all, an interesting day. We could have gone a bit deeper into the details and I would have loved a little instruction on Perl as well. There are only a limited hours in day though.
Labels: English, OSS, Ticer, XML
Another teacher who understands it
I am about to post about the entertaining workshop of Eric Lease Morgan, all of his stuff is to be found freely available on the web. This evening, albeit 10 hours late, I found out that David Free has posted his presentation for tomorrow on Slideshare already. Interesting stuff. I wish I could be there as well. However I have chosen the other track.
Labels: English, Podcasting, Ticer, Vodcasting
28 augustus 2007
A well packed day at Ticer
Somehow somewhere I would have expected a kind of Library 2.0 day at the Ticer course today. But in the end it did not really materialize as such.
The first presentation was a sales pitch from OCLC. Well in the Netherlands we are always glad to receive some information from OCLC (Ohio) since we don’t receive that much information from OCLC Pica on their moves, strategies or plans. Should we therefore attend an expensive course to happily receive this sales pitch?
Robin Murray started to sell himself first, followed by outlining what OCLC actually is and does. His sales pitch was “synthesize, specialize, mobilize”. It is actually a well founded pitch, his whole story can be read in Ariadne.
To be honest he had some interesting observations and plans. But as was remarked later in the discussions, OCLC excels in plans, reports, and visions, but the actual products were lacking. Perhaps that is a little too harsh, since I really do like what they have achieved with open worldcat. But at the local or group level (considering the Dutch libraries as a group) there is a lot of misunderstanding as to how does open worldcat relate to the (expensive) service of NCC or Picarta. But I might be too stupid to see through all these things. The lecture was more of a sales pitch, some good ideas though. But the sales pitch was my lasting impression, rather than a round up of what direction the library world, is or should be moving too.
The second talk of today was a really nice summing up of the developments around the catalog since NCSU launched their Endeca powered catalog. Peter Binkley did his overview future enhancements of the library catalogue around the themes of clustering, ranking, exploiting, contributing and deploying. His presentation was very up to date. Peter’s preferred choice of new open source library systems was VUFind. Reminds me of Koha which he didn’t cover.
In the afternoon we had a really interesting presentation on the use of chatbots in German libraries. Anne Christensen covered 4 different chatbots in operation at German libraries. The idea is appealing. There are some serious costs involved, but they actually got used. It brings the fun on a library website, and that should be worth some money.
The last presentation was a tough one. A boring, albeit important subject, as identity management, and that spun out over an hour, at the end of the day. That was really testing us. And then going into some detailed technical level, it was a bit over the too much for me personally. It would be wonderful if people from our university IT service could have been present at this lecture as well. A scheme like this should be endorsed by the library and the IT department, and I am under the impression that there is a little disagreement on some points at my home university on this area. Interesting to hear about the developments in this field, but really and totally beyond my interest.
The first presentation was a sales pitch from OCLC. Well in the Netherlands we are always glad to receive some information from OCLC (Ohio) since we don’t receive that much information from OCLC Pica on their moves, strategies or plans. Should we therefore attend an expensive course to happily receive this sales pitch?
Robin Murray started to sell himself first, followed by outlining what OCLC actually is and does. His sales pitch was “synthesize, specialize, mobilize”. It is actually a well founded pitch, his whole story can be read in Ariadne.
To be honest he had some interesting observations and plans. But as was remarked later in the discussions, OCLC excels in plans, reports, and visions, but the actual products were lacking. Perhaps that is a little too harsh, since I really do like what they have achieved with open worldcat. But at the local or group level (considering the Dutch libraries as a group) there is a lot of misunderstanding as to how does open worldcat relate to the (expensive) service of NCC or Picarta. But I might be too stupid to see through all these things. The lecture was more of a sales pitch, some good ideas though. But the sales pitch was my lasting impression, rather than a round up of what direction the library world, is or should be moving too.
The second talk of today was a really nice summing up of the developments around the catalog since NCSU launched their Endeca powered catalog. Peter Binkley did his overview future enhancements of the library catalogue around the themes of clustering, ranking, exploiting, contributing and deploying. His presentation was very up to date. Peter’s preferred choice of new open source library systems was VUFind. Reminds me of Koha which he didn’t cover.
In the afternoon we had a really interesting presentation on the use of chatbots in German libraries. Anne Christensen covered 4 different chatbots in operation at German libraries. The idea is appealing. There are some serious costs involved, but they actually got used. It brings the fun on a library website, and that should be worth some money.
The last presentation was a tough one. A boring, albeit important subject, as identity management, and that spun out over an hour, at the end of the day. That was really testing us. And then going into some detailed technical level, it was a bit over the too much for me personally. It would be wonderful if people from our university IT service could have been present at this lecture as well. A scheme like this should be endorsed by the library and the IT department, and I am under the impression that there is a little disagreement on some points at my home university on this area. Interesting to hear about the developments in this field, but really and totally beyond my interest.
Labels: English, Ticer, Ticer07
27 augustus 2007
The Science Commons and the Library: Opportunities and Business Models
A provocative talk by John Wilbanks, the Executive Director of Science Commons. The interesting thing was that the first time I really noticed Willbanks work, or that of the Science Commons was in the last issue of CRWatch Quarterly. On which I blogged in Dutch just the other week. My problem then, was that in that issue a lot of noise was generated on the changing face of scientific communication, but none of the articles listed there actually mentioned libraries, or anybody from the library sketched their perspective on the changing face of the scientific discourse.
Today’s talk was different though. John Wilbanks pleaded strongly for an major library role in the changing face of scientific communication. That is encouraging. However, as to the exact role that libraries should take, there isn’t a single blue print yet. The Science Commons have some interesting examples of text mining initiatives on medically oriented databases, Bibliographic databases in combination with protein databases en genetic databases. I think it is an illustrative example of technologies and expertise most academic libraries have not easily, or readily available.
I think I can foresee technologies like this in the mid term future, but most libraries are not ready for the roles outlined by Wilbanks.
Should we just sit and wait for the blue prints for these future applications to arrive. No of course not. Wilbanks is also an OA advocate and presses the librarians to go out into the faculties and educate the researchers about Open Access and Copyright issues. Because at this moment copyright laws are hampering the kind of big science that e-science really stands for. In addition to his recommended reading I would like to add his paper in CRWatch Quarterly.
Willbanks, J. (2007). Cyberinfrastructure for Knowledge Sharing CTWatch Quarterly 3(3): 58-66. http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/cyberinfrastructure-for-knowledge-sharing/
Today’s talk was different though. John Wilbanks pleaded strongly for an major library role in the changing face of scientific communication. That is encouraging. However, as to the exact role that libraries should take, there isn’t a single blue print yet. The Science Commons have some interesting examples of text mining initiatives on medically oriented databases, Bibliographic databases in combination with protein databases en genetic databases. I think it is an illustrative example of technologies and expertise most academic libraries have not easily, or readily available.
I think I can foresee technologies like this in the mid term future, but most libraries are not ready for the roles outlined by Wilbanks.
Should we just sit and wait for the blue prints for these future applications to arrive. No of course not. Wilbanks is also an OA advocate and presses the librarians to go out into the faculties and educate the researchers about Open Access and Copyright issues. Because at this moment copyright laws are hampering the kind of big science that e-science really stands for. In addition to his recommended reading I would like to add his paper in CRWatch Quarterly.
Willbanks, J. (2007). Cyberinfrastructure for Knowledge Sharing CTWatch Quarterly 3(3): 58-66. http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/08/cyberinfrastructure-for-knowledge-sharing/
Labels: English, Open Access, ScienceCommons, Ticer, Ticer07
Ticer, first impressions
Today was the first day of the Ticer course 'Digital libraries a la Carte'. The 2007 version of the course, that is. A course, or a summer school? Or perhaps just another conference. Whatever wording you use to describe the course. It is well done. A lecture of an hour. Half an hour interesting discussions or Q&A followed by half an hour coffee break where you can mingle with the people. You don't fit many sessions in a day this way, but the sessions there are get the time and attention they deserve. So there were only 4 presentations today. Three really good presentations and discussions, and one definitely a lot less. But overall a very good day at Tilburg. Worth rising early, and commuting down.
Tomorrow lots more.
A tip to fellow bloggers: Use the Ticer or Ticer07 tag on your posts. I am collecting them on del.icio.us so everybody can have their read. Admitting at once there are a large number of dutch posts. Ecobibl has been most active up untill now (In Dutch).
Tomorrow lots more.
A tip to fellow bloggers: Use the Ticer or Ticer07 tag on your posts. I am collecting them on del.icio.us so everybody can have their read. Admitting at once there are a large number of dutch posts. Ecobibl has been most active up untill now (In Dutch).
Labels: English, Ticer, Ticer07
26 augustus 2007
Op naar Ticer
De komende dagen is het weer terug naar school. Zomerschool. Bijscholing dus, er valt nog zoveel te leren. Morgenochtend vroeg op weg naar Tilburg West om vier dagen deel te nemen aan de Ticer Summerschool. Ik had gedacht mijn Enegelse blog op orde te hebben, maar dat is nog steeds niet het geval, dus de komende dagen ga ik jullie toch weer vervelen met verslagen in het Engels. Steenkolenengels voor mijn part. Maar ik hoop interessant genoeg om er voor langs te komen.
Morgen staan John Wilbanks, Ronald Milne, Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard en Stephen Town op het programma. Het is vanwege het laatste verhaal dat ik zeker de eerste dag niet zou willen missen. Twee jaar geleden tijdens de 6th Northumbria International Conferences on Performance Measurement in Libraries & Information Services al eens eerder leuke verhalen van hem en zijn groep gehoord heb. Frankie Wilson, een van zijn studenten had toen een erg goed verhaal over benchmarking en library quality.
Maar allas, de komende dagen over naar het Engels.
Morgen staan John Wilbanks, Ronald Milne, Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard en Stephen Town op het programma. Het is vanwege het laatste verhaal dat ik zeker de eerste dag niet zou willen missen. Twee jaar geleden tijdens de 6th Northumbria International Conferences on Performance Measurement in Libraries & Information Services al eens eerder leuke verhalen van hem en zijn groep gehoord heb. Frankie Wilson, een van zijn studenten had toen een erg goed verhaal over benchmarking en library quality.
Maar allas, de komende dagen over naar het Engels.
Labels: Ticer
06 september 2006
Springtime in the library
It was through the round-up of weblinks devoted to the Ticer 2006 course that I noticed this new Dutch biblioblog. This time however, it is a Dutch biblioblog in English. With his intention on covering library innovation in academic libraries, Driek Heesakkers has certainly caught my attention for sure. So library Spring is here, from Amsterdam of course.
Incidentally, I had seen Steven M. Cohen his post on this new blog, but I didn’t click through to find out that is was a blog from Dutch origin. That error has now been rectified. Driek, amaze us! And share with us your innovations.
One last observation on the Ticer course. Despite the high web 2.0 content of some of the presentations, it is odd to see that only PPT’s were used for presentation. With the only exception of Pierre’s podcasts. Why did nobody use a wiki as a presentation form, and where are the links to those useful lenses.
Technorati tags: Ticer; biblioblogosphere; biblioblogs;
Incidentally, I had seen Steven M. Cohen his post on this new blog, but I didn’t click through to find out that is was a blog from Dutch origin. That error has now been rectified. Driek, amaze us! And share with us your innovations.
One last observation on the Ticer course. Despite the high web 2.0 content of some of the presentations, it is odd to see that only PPT’s were used for presentation. With the only exception of Pierre’s podcasts. Why did nobody use a wiki as a presentation form, and where are the links to those useful lenses.
Technorati tags: Ticer; biblioblogosphere; biblioblogs;
Labels: Biblioblogosphere, Biblioblogs, Ticer, Ticer06
