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I spent some of Friday at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for the launch of the Fürer-Haimendorf Photographic Archive, a JISC-sponsored digitisation project that makes available the fantastic collection of photographs of tribal cultures in South Asia and the Himalayas taken by Christoph von Fürer Haimendorf between the 1930s and the 1970s.

This is just the first phase of the rollout, not only of Fürer-Haimendorf’s pictures, but also of many other valuable collections at SOAS. We are pleased and excited to have been able to assist with this endeavour, by customising EPrints to meet the extensive requirements set out for the system by Susannah Rayner and Malcolm Raggett, who are leading the project at SOAS. No less than with Linnean Online, it is a rare privilege to be associated with a project giving a new impetus, and worldwide access, to such invaluable historically important, archival collections.

SOAS organised a fascinating series of lectures Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been quiet here recently. Partly because people have been busy with projects such as CLASM and ArchivePress, but also because we’ve been busy readying ourselves for a move. After nearly 40 years in the same purpose-built premises, we’re relocating to Senate House, the home of the University of London’s federal activity. Many staff members won’t be in the office on Monday or Tuesday 28/29 September and those that are will be fully occupied making sure that everything moves across in one piece and ends up in the right place with the right cables plugged into it. Please bear with us if you’re trying to contact us then and it takes a bit longer than usual to get a reply. Our email addresses stay the same but our telephone numbers are changing.

We’ve had to lose a lot of material relating to past computing technologies that is now of limited or no value to us – stuff we were keeping really just because we had the space. That includes extensive documentation on IBM and CDC systems of the past, as well as DEC systems and a huge variety of micros. We’ve kept a few gems (the reference card for the SNUFF editor is a particular personal favourite) and discovered a few as well. They include what’s probably the earliest evidence of ULCC’s web presence in 1994. I’ll be writing about that soon over on the JISC-PoWR blog.

SNEEP 0.3.2

The JISC funded SNEEP project (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints) – part of the original JISC rapid innovation programme – aimed to provide a set of social networking tools for EPrints repositories. It ran for 6 months and ended in May 2008. Since the rather low key publication of the resultant EPrints plugin interest and uptake has been slowly but surely gathering momentum.

Today I am pleased to announce a couple of significant SNEEP related developments. Firstly , thanks to my colleague Ben Wheeler here at ULCC, SNEEP 0.3.2 released this week offers an automagic installer. This does away with the (slightly tortuous) manual install procedure that we suspect discouraged all but the hardier EPrints hac… I mean administrators.

You can download SNEEP 0.3.2 and/or read Ben’s post to the EP-tech mailling list. The download page is also a good place to see SNEEP in action.

PICT

I am also pleased to announce a new project (funded as part of the 2009 JISC rapid innovation programme) that aims to build on the SNEEP work to provide SNEEP-ish services to a broader range of web resources. The goal of the PICT project (Platform Independent Community Toolbox) is a lightweight javascript tool that can be deployed across an number of web resources (not just a repository) to encompass the web-based real estate of a given research community and provide that community with collaborative tools available at the on-line research coalface.

Effectively PICT will allow resource owners to offer

• tags
• comments
• notes
• other goodies

from their web page. The data gathered by these tools will be managed by a PICT server (probably run by a community-minded resource owner) and be available for cross referencing with other resources in a PICT community.

If all that is a bit difficult to picture, rest assured that demos will appear throughout the course of the project that should help to clear the murk.

Japanese Zen garden at Brunei gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies.

So another DPTP over! As presenters we felt it went really well. We again had a great group of people. The level of knowledge was very high and even so it seems the course really does help consolidate many levels of knowledge about digital preservation. For many it was OAIS and the class project seems to have helped put the theory into practice. One quote from the feedback:

‘Things really fell into place for me during this exercise and models started to make proper sense. Moved things from theory to practice.’

Overall the level of satisfaction with what we are providing is high.

‘Overall an excellent course. Bringing together so many disparate ideas and concepts and making sense of the muddle! Just hope we can move forward using the models. Excellent group too, good interaction and discussion – I got as much out of this element as from the taught content. Thank you so much all!’

We are now looking to developing links with the DCC as well as moving on to another stage of the DPTP. We will keep providing these 3 day courses with readjustments and updates but we are also looking at developing the modules into e-learning objects. Now all we need is funding!

Iraq National Library and Archives, Baghdad, Iraq.

So we are on tenterhooks awaiting the visa applications of Rawaa and Waleed from the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA). The visas are now being processed in Baghdad and should be ready any day. Thanks to the British Council and the British Institute for the study of Iraq, Rawaa and Waleed are (hopefully) coming to attend the next DPTP which takes place in SOAS on the 18th-20th of May. The programme is really shaping up, we have added a few things and altered the schedule somewhat in light of feedback from the last course. So exciting stuff.

More about the INLA: The Iraq National Library and Archives had 95% of its holdings destroyed mostly during and post conflict. This was an institution which held 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals dating from the late Ottoman era to modern times, and a collection of 4,412 rare books and manuscripts.  Now with the energy and dedication of its director, Dr Saad Eskander and his staff the library is being rebuilt with donations and a lot of digital surrogates. Rawaa and Waleed are coming here to learn more about how to manage these digital assets which are vital to the reconstitution of Iraqi culture and history.

The alert among you will remember me talking about Dr Eskander before.

Here’s looking forward to meeting our Iraqi colleagues as well as everyone booked on the next DPTP.