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.

I took a smashing poster describing our work on Linnean Online and the SNEEP extensions for EPrints, and also spoke about these projects to the EPrints User Group sessions and had to endure the now inevitable Minute Madness. I was pleased to spot the SNEEP Comments plugin in use when Jessie Hey demonstrated EdShare, another of Southampton’s learning resource repository projects. It was also great to meet up again with Patrick McSweeney who has been tweaking SNEEP at Southampton, and discuss ways of keeping ongoing work on the plugins in sync. Regular readers may remember Patrick from OR08, and he cut an even more unforgettable figure this time.

The talk of the event seemed to be the relentless buzz around the unification of DSpace/Fedora Commons, engendering the new creation that is DuraSpace (and DuraCloud). This offers a lot of exciting possibilities that we’ll need to keep track of, though it won’t be the first repositories event that has offered us a surfeit of jam tomorrow… For now, for the curious, here’s the Duraspace FAQ.

By contrast, it’s slightly disappointing that, over the water, the EPrints user group seemed a tad under-subscribed. Features available in EPrints 3.1.x, and those imminent for 3.2, from cloud storage controllers and desktop folder visualisations to preservation support, promise quick wins for anyone wanting to push the repository model further: Les and the EPrints team waste no time in responding to the latest demands of the zeitgeist. All the same, informal discussions with users and non-users of EPrints suggested substantial resistance to its Perl-based core. Yet EPrints continues to push more configurability away from its Perl source: in the kind of repository-driven future oft foretold – from WordPress-type exensibility to modular service-oriented solutions – the underlying code base ought to become increasingly irrelevant as long as the package does what it says on the tin.

As usual it was great to meet some old friends, and lots of people for the first time. Memorably serendipitous (re-)discoveries included:

• Bibapp – “a Campus Research Gateway and Expert Finder”. There have been many attempts to integrate personalised, portfolio pages with repositories, and this looks like an effort worth investigating further, particularly as it claims to be repository neutral (and a good excuse to try out Ruby for real?).
• ParallelArchive – another variant on the repository model: “a personal scholarly workspace, a collaborative research environment, and a digital repository”. Run by Open Society Archives (OSA) at Central European University in Budapest – of particular interest to students of cold war and related issues
• E-Lis – still a superb multilingual collection of LIS resources, and undoubtedly the acid test of all EPrints internationalisation efforts
• MIT Open CourseWare – the mother of all OERs?
• The great Peter Sefton – great to meet him at last, at 6′ 7″, someone I can truly look up to. For a much more thorough account of the conference, see Pete’s Blog

I didn’t manage anything in the way of sightseeing, though the Aquarium seemed to be top of most locals’ list of recommendations, and we went there. Perhaps I should have made more of an effort to see the Civil War museum. For the visual record of OR09, content and context, you might like to see Jim Downing’s photos from the event, and the official photo OR09 set on Flickr.

Since November 2007 the linnean-online collection has allowed the public access to digitised images of plant (and since this summer insect) specimens held by the Linnean Society of London. This week the on-line collection has been expanded to include 144 images of fish specimens held by the society. This part of the ongoing digitisation project was made possible thanks to generous funding from amongst others His Majesty the Emperor of Japan and the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers.

As well as these further specimens, 3845 images of correspondence to and from Carl Linnaeus have also joined the on-line collection. The correspondence enrich the collection providing important insight and historical context. Most of the letters are written in latin, however where possible links are provided to translated summaries at The Linnaean correspondence, an electronic edition prepared by the Swedish Linnaeus Society, Uppsala, and published by the Centre international d’étude du XVIII^e siècle, Ferney-Voltaire.

The conference was organised with gusto by Les Carr and the Southampton team, who kept things moving at a rapid pace, seemingly unphased by any of the inevitable challenges of staging an event like this for over 300 people. Encouragingly, as well as the usual crowd from western Europe and anglophone countries, other countries represented this time included Serbia, Ukraine and Sri Lanka.

One interesting innovation was using Crowdvine to create an online community of delgates, which proved very simple and effective. And of course there’s an Eprints repository of all the conference papers and proceedings.

My own presentation came in a plenary session on Tuesday morning which was a bit like a rerun of our Web 2.0 Pow-Wow in December. Ian Mulvany was there to talk about Connotea’s latest ideas (David Kane from Waterford Institute of Technology was on the bill too, but was unable to come); Daniel Alexander Smith effused about Rich Tags. In a few spare minutes at the end, Patrick McSweeney, one of Les’s 3rd year undergraduates, impressed everyone hugely with a spontaneous demonstration of a Flash-based Cover Flow visualiser he is developing for Eprints.

Sandwiched between Ian and Daniel, I shared my thirty-minute thoughts on the history of annotations, from Linnaeus and Carlyle, to Flickr and SNEEP. If you’d been there you would probably have seen something like this, and your notes might look a bit like this (unless you preferred to Twitter like this).

From the encouraging feedback I got afterwards, it looks like quite a few Eprints repositories, running or planned, will be interested in one or more of our SNEEP plugins – including our bonus “Easter Egg” Notes (private comments) feature, which Rory has already been working on, since it so inevitably falls out of developing the main Comments plugin. Hope also that Rory and I can touch base soon with Tim and Sebastien at Soton, and get their feedback on the Comments alpha.

There are too many other things I could report (all the usual themes, such as sustainability and interoperability, are well covered in the programme) but I’ll limit myself to some random things that caught my eye:

• Dave Millard’s refreshingly clear grasp of the issues around managing Learning Objects in his paper Towards an Open Repository of Teaching Resources.
• Licia Calvi’s expert usabilty evaluation of repository interfaces, that found them wanting in several critical areas.
• Julie Allinson’s poster for York’s Digital Library that sets a new standard for eye-catching OAIS advocacy.

OR09 will be in Atlanta.

At the Society’s headquarters in Piccadilly, Julia Hoare, Linnean Society’s Project Manager for the extensive digitisation project, delivered a consummate and well-received demonstration to a colloquium of orchid specialists. This event is being treated as a “soft launch”, and feedback is being sought from this small community initially, before the system gets a full public launch in December.

The system uses Eprints to manage access to the objects and their metadata. The Herbarium can be browsed according to Linnaeus’s own binomial, Latin system, or searched across all the supplied metadata fields, including genus, species, collector and location.

Eprints takes care of searching and arrangment, as well as user registration and management. A commercial image viewing system, FSI Viewer/Erez, has been used to provide a high-definition zoom function for viewing the images.

Rory has added two features to Eprints to meet the Linnean Society’s requirements: a plugin for bookmarking objects, and another for registered users to add comments. We will be further developing these as part of the JISC-funded SNEEP project, and ultimately release them as open source extensions for Eprints.

Other collections from the Linnean Society will follow and be added to the repository. These include shells, insects and fish, as well as letters and portraits in the Society’s possession. The eventual size of the online archive is estimated to be several (check) Terabytes.