da blog

The PICT project is pretty much over, but I can steal a few moments out of my day every now and then to do a bit of house keeping, try out a new plugin and maybe even blog about it.

Inspired by Rob Sanderson’s lightening talk at dev8D on Memento I decided to go for the bounty offered for writing a memento client. My tack was to enable a mediawiki instance to handle the Accept-Date protocol using an existing plugin. Then to write a little PICT tool that supplied a user interface by which users could specify a date and browse their PICT enabled mediawiki “from the past”… spooky!

Thanks to getting nowhere near the deadline (those involved with this project will be grinning at that), I got nowhere near the prize, but I did finish a prototype plugin and threw it up on a mediawiki instance for another project: CLASM-demo. CLASM is the name of project not a piece of conjurers’ onomatopoeia, so click on that link to see the PICT-memento client in action. A wiki with more pages would have been a better example, but at least it does have a lot of revisions.

Did I mention that we are very excited to be contributing to UCL’s Bentham Transcription Initiative. This is an AHRC-funded project to complete the digitisation of the manuscripts of 18th Century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and transcribe them using a wiki-based collaborative approach. It is being run by the Bentham Project at UCL, with support from ourselves and UCL’s newly-launched Centre for Digital Humanities. You can read an overview of the project on Melissa Terras’s blog.

Obviously, transcription of manuscript materials is an important digitisation activity that can rarely, if ever, be left to computers, in the way that printed texts can be, using OCR. But it’s painstaking and laborious work, and anything that eases the burden is welcome.

The project is already throwing up some very interesting conversations about transcription.  At ULCC we have thought about transcription before, particularly with regard to our ongoing work for the Linnean Society archives, and we hope that there will yet be synergies to exploit. It is a great feeling to be so closely involved with disseminating the work of two such seminal figures as Linnaeus and Bentham.

We’re not naïve enough to think that collaborative web-based transcription is new, but we’ve yet to find any substantial comparable examples. A comment on UCL’s Digital Humanities blog teases us with the prospect of information about other similar projects, but fails to provide even a single link or hint, so is effectively useless: hardly in the collaborative spirit! A more useful lead was Joanne Evans’ link to the National Library of Australia’s Australian Newspapers project, which is crowdsourcing the proof-reading and correcting of OCR outputs, and has an impressive-looking site – I’m sure we’ll be borrowing some ideas from there.

Another useful lead has been from Ben Brumfield of Austin, Texas, directing us to his blog about collaborative manuscript transcription which has been going even longer than DA Blog, and looks like it’s going to make interesting reading. Ben’s recent blog post about a distributed transcription exercise of the US Geological Survey’s Bird Phenology Program includes a link to a training video for volunteers (it even sounds like it’s been recorded in a birdhouse).  In the video we can see a database-form approach to transcription, which is particularly appropriate for transcribing data already entered on structured forms.

For more heterogeneous and free-form texts, such as the Bentham manuscripts, wikis seem to me much more appropriate, being in essence discrete hypertext engines. As for collaborative features, MediaWiki in particular has strong and proven features: there can be few better advertisements for effective virtual, global collaboration and crowdsourcing than Wikipedia.

One thing that is particularly compelling about the BPP video is that it is an excellent example of a thorough approach to online collaboration, giving clear and unequivocal guidance to contributors. Now that screencast tools are so readily available, it’s clear that for many activities like this, video-based instruction is the ideal tool, and often preferable to any number of written instructions. No less than for online teaching and learning environments, the need for effective induction and inclusive management of the online community must never be overlooked.

Greetings. It has been a while. I thought I would give you a bit of an update about what we have been up to at DPTP. Our next DPTP takes place 29th, 30th and 31st of March 2010. We are really looking forward to it and have been updating various aspects of the course.

The Digital Preservation Coalition are also generously giving three, yes THREE scholarships to attend the DPTP. Once again open to DPC members. Remember folks, this can include your institution or your professional association.

Hope to see some of you there!

Beacon cited through fog

Who would have thought that reference management could be so interesting? We spent a  very informative and enjoyable Thursday in snowy Milton Keynes, at the Innovations in Reference Management (#IRM10) event (part of the OU/JISC TELSTAR project). All thoroughly blogged by Owen Stephens, and tweeted by many.

Owen Stephens and Jason Platts of OU described the outputs of the TELSTAR project, which integrates the OU’s Moodle VLE with Refworks. This means that students using the VLE can move seamlessly between their reading lists and Refworks, locating resources, maintaining consistency of style and generating bibliographies easily.

Paul Stainthorp of Lincoln University described some exciting, bleeding-edge uses of Yahoo Pipes to mashup data from Refworks, OPAC, and Amazon. Arguably even more bleeding-edge was the presentation by Euan Adie from Nature Publishing, who showed us Help Me Igor, a reference manager plugin for Google Wave. Speakers from CiteULike and Mendeley also gave us fascinating insights into their respective social-tinged bibliographic management offerings.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kevin and I brought to the table the theme of web preservation. With reference to our work with JISC-PoWR, UKWAC and ArchivePress, we reminded anyone who hasn’t heard our spiel already that there are many important, valuable and eminently citable web resources, notably blogs by academic researchers, that are at risk of disappearing – making references to them virtually useless.

Authors may not be responsible for ensuring their readers can access the resources they reference, but we think they should at least give them a fighting chance of doing so! We  therefore proposed that students and researchers should be encouraged to locate and cite copies of web resources in stable web archives (such as the UK Web Archive) rather than “in the wild”.

We also discussed the idea that persistent collections of web resources could be created at the institutional level, whether that were an open archive of blog posts by a university’s researchers, or a closed repository where researchers can store copies of the web resources they cite.

One of the strong themes that emerged in discussion was the need for information literacy/digital skills training at all levels to address current tools and trends in reference management; and to re-assert the purpose, value and nature of citation in online digital environments

An interesting suggestion also made was that reference management tools are becoming a natural part of the environment, just as email has: is provision of specialised applications by universities an “aberration”?

I’m inclined to think not, after all it was clear from the workshop that there’s still a need to support ongoing study and research effectively, and scope to develop and validate new approaches.  Microsoft Word may now include reference management features, but that doesn’t obviate the need to educate people in how to use them effectively, and why.

We’re very grateful to Owen for including us in his programme: this is a fascinating area, where e-learning, libraries, preservation and publishing collide, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it.

On 1st December Malcolm Todd of The National Archives gave a good account of the work he’s been doing on File Formats for Preservation, resulting in a substantial new Technology Watch report for the DPC. It was a seminar hosted by William Kilbride, with participants from the BBC, the BL, NLW and others. The afternoon was useful and interesting for me since I teach an elementary module on file formats in a preservation context for our DPTP courses.

My naïve thinking in the area has been characterised by the assumption that the process is rather static or linear, and that the problem we’re facing is broadly the same every time; migrate data from a format that’s about to become obsolete or unsupported, onto another format that’s stable, supported, and open. MS Word document to PDF or PDF/A…now that, I can understand!

In fact, I learned at least two ways of thinking about formats that hadn’t occurred to me before. One simple one is costs; some formats can cost more to preserve than others. This can be calculated in terms of storage costs, multiplied over time, and the costs associated with migrations to new versions of that format. Read the rest of this entry »