Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Fascinating

This is just cool.

This is worth listening to.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

It's good Slashdot's Paying Attention (Click link here)

Because, really, ...

No. I won't be sarcastic. This is definitely an important issue, and it is actually one of the main reasons why so many people work in digitization in archives; one should ask the question, "How much has been lost?" just to address the digital record of the past, say, fifteen years. (In a very short time, it's scary to realize how much has either been lost or is inaccessible due to lack of proper information regarding the digital artifact.)

And a question I have been considering for the past few months: What ought we to save? Should we, realistically, scramble to save every bit and byte out there for the sake of preservation of information?

My thoughts are thus:
1) What do we have from, say, 550-1066AD England? The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, the Seafarer, lots of Anglo-Saxon translations of Latin biblical verses, Beowulf. I think it is fair to say that what we have left is rich and important, but if I could take a time machine to see what the world was like then, aye, there's the rub. So the next question is . . .

2) What ought we to save to give future human beings a fair perspective of the years, say, 2000-2010AD? Would/should we save more than what we have left of dark age England? I think so, yes, but then I have to ask

3) Should curators of cultural memory make value judgments based upon the need to provide a "fair and impartial" view of life on Earth, in the United States, in the year 2008?

I ask these questions because I sincerely don't believe we should be saving everything on the green earth; but I know also that people become terrified when they hear the idea, "Someone's going to choose to take a snapshot of this time and this place, and that is all the future will know of it." Why do people duck under the table when a person pulls out a camera at a party? They don't want a record of their having been there? They don't want a record of frazzled hair and lipstick teeth?

Of what value is an archival record if value judgments are made in compiling it? And, conversely, of what value is an archival record if no value judgments are made in compiling it?

I wonder what people would want to save if they were asked to save a digital something.

(Of course, now I'm thinking about the websites I used to love to visit. One of my favorites that is long gone was Mail-A-Malady. It was a horrible little website, perfect for torturing friends.)

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The two things have nothing to do with each other, really. Google promises

Allow me to say again: I love Google. Really, I do.

And I have no idea if the two things really are related or not, but I find it very interesting that Google patents this filter stuff by country-of-origin, but blocks another kind of filter in an ostensibly unrelated matter.

(Click the link in the title of my prior blog post. That's the article I'm referring to.)

Monday, February 15, 2010

Aww, Look at Google and Y! Being the Good Guys ... It's so cute!

(I originally accessed this article from Slashdot's posting of it.)

I love to read things about free speech being protected, especially when the "protectors" are companies like Google and Y!. Now, I'm not saying that I disagree with opposing Conroy's plan, but I do have to critique people's immediate willingness to jump on and declare Google and Y! heroes for helping the community. Sure, we don't want to be China--THEY'RE NOT CAPITALISTS! (Insert gasp here.)

Is there a bottom line here? Oh, I think so.

Yet again, I have to say, I'd have no doubt bowed to the social order offered by Emperor Palpatine, but I don't think I'd pretend it was anything more than, "This society is super organized, and that appeals to my sense of feng shui!" It's called capitalism, people. Savor it. Enjoy it. Benefit from it. But don't overlook the fact that these companies are enjoying a profit from lack of filters.

I sometimes gripe about capitalism--don't get me wrong, I recognize that I thrive in an easy country to live in, but I also would prefer not to have broccoli shoved down my throat while someone tells me it's fried oysters.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Five Professional Development Things I Learned This Week

I remember in grade school, one of the things I was always terrible at was coloring pictures with crayons. One day, I sat down to color for a fourth-grade competition, determined to color the prettiest picture I possibly could, mainly in order to completely over-shadow and outshine the competition. (As Hagar the Horrible once said: "Winning isn't everything. It's also important to humiliate your competition.")

This was back in the mid-eighties, when light-pastels were en vogue, and the lighter the colors used, the better the teacher believed the picture to be. I determined to make a picture with the hues and shades of a stained-glass window: Sharp, dark, rich. (Because another method I've always employed in competition is to think differently than the opponents.)

I turned my picture in, was the only kid who did the stained-glass window thing, and I was so happy. Of course the teacher (and my fellow classmates who were voting in the coloring competition), completely ignored what I had put a lot of heart into creating--it wasn't pastel; it wasn't light; it was definitely different.

Meh. You reach an age where you realize that the self-expression opportunity is more important than winning...and let's face it, I'm competitive enough to admit that the two things are equally important to me. It still irks me that those people had no proper taste in coloring.

Of course, it's probable that I didn't color within the lines, too.

This week, I had the opportunity to engage in extended conversation with a competing department's digitization head. The digitization program this person heads is leaps and bounds ahead of ours. And clearly this person has a better foundation for doing this, has had a lot more training--and a little more time--than I have to get my feet under me. (And, as this person continually said, "You have to start somewhere.")

But either way, what I've learned, in swallowing my very fierce competitiveness--and as a third sibling of three, this is difficult--is threefold:

1) Communication, however you can establish it, is important, helpful, significant, and you never know how it might become productive down the road. Now, since I had already developed an opinion that this person was fairly patient and generous with knowledge, I figured I should establish communication for the sake of information exchange.

1B) Training is expensive, and it is generally more expensive than my own institution (for example) can afford.

Therefore: If you can communicate in even small ways, it's important try to learn, to sponge as much information from others in the field as possible. (Naturally, you don't want to become known as a mooch, so you should certainly proffer good humor and witty conversation in exchange for a contact's patience.)



2) Don't compare yourself. Don't compete. AND, something I constantly strive to remind myself: Don't be so arrogant that you think you're coloring the perfect picture because you've chosen a different tactic; you could simply be very bad at color. Listen to what other professionals in the field have to say, and try to glean from both spoken and unspoken critiques what you can learn to strengthen what you're doing--or to entirely scrap weaknesses in your methods. Do you rely too heavily on one theory of digitization, for instance that everything must be accessed, to the exclusion of digital preservation? (Thank you, anonymous person, for this nudge.)

3) Think things over. At this point, I am honestly disheartened by the level of my own work, and I am going to strive to raise the bar, even if it's to the point of handing off other job duties (like raw web design), toward the goal of enacting a small handful of what I consider more important things.

But I also am a pragmatist: What I am working on (DSpace) is, and always was, a deliberate choice, after testing. For my institution, it is viable, preservable, and scalable. It is a pretty good archival software; and though it meets the demands of what an institution requires, it does have its flaws. (In proofreading this, I have to say: Can we ask this question of ourselves as employees, too? And perhaps even as human beings?) And as I was reminded also, you must start somewhere; but in digitization, somewhere needs to at minimum be sustainable.

4) Be patient with yourself, with your own work, and focus on it being -your own work-. My own feeling of disappointment in myself springs from my constant desire to be at the top of class, to always produce the best essay, to always ask the smartest questions, to never, ever look intellectually silly. (And yeah, this is deep-rooted.) But I am recognizing this week, that it's also significant that I appreciate that, of course, I'm not going to be the best or the brightest, rather that I have to develop a proper tool for a proper job. And I have to spend time learning that tool and to appreciate that there indeed are reasons for choosing it.

5) Most important, always evaluate your current state, try to figure out what needs to be improved upon, but also figure out what you're doing well. (And this isn't just in technology or digitization. It's in life in general.) Then, after understanding what is well, building a foundation upon that will provide an excellent foundation for development.

It's been a humbling, educational week; I have learned a lot, and I hope to enact some of what I have learned. I hope that anyone who loves his/her job can understand that I am humbled, not because I had originally thought that what I was doing was perfect, but because I genuinely love my work, and I feel like I've been a bit of a neglectful or spread-too-thin parent toward what I love. I'm going to retrench some things and work toward enacting and incorporating other things.