Archive for October, 2005

Dedication of the Bostock Library

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

The Perkins Project at Duke has involved building an extension onto Perkins, the newly-opened Bostock Library. There are some inaugural events coming up:

The Opening of the Bostock Library and the Karl and Mary Ellen von der Heyden Pavilion, October 17 through 22

Dedication of the Bostock Library and the Karl and Mary Ellen von der Heyden Pavilion, Friday, 11 November 2005

Sustaining Humanities Scholarship in the Digital Age

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

You are cordially invited to attend a series of public lectures centered on the theme: “Sustaining Humanities Scholarship in the Digital Age: the Future of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri.” The purpose of the events is to explore the special challenges and opportunities of preserving long-term access to digital resources for humanities scholarship. All events will take place in the Rare Book Room, William R. Perkins Library. This program is made possible with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with co-sponsorship by Duke University Libraries, Department of Classical Studies, and Information Science + Information Studies.

Monday, October 24 – Sustaining Communities of Scholarship
Time: 4:30 pm — 6:00 pm, reception to follow
Speaker: Bernard Frischer
Director, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
Bio: Bernard Frischer is a leading scholar in the application of digital technologies to humanities research and education. He founded and directed the Cultural Virtual Reality Lab at UCLA, which uses three-dimensional computer modeling to reconstruct the Roman Colosseum and the Roman Forum.

Tuesday, October 25 — Good Practices for Digital Collections
Time: 4:00 pm — 5:30 pm, reception to follow
Speaker: Priscilla Caplan
Assistant Director, Digital Library Services
Florida Center for Library Automation
Bio: Priscilla Caplan manages projects to build the FCLA Digital Archive. She is the author of Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians (2004) and numerous articles on metadata, reference linking, digital libraries and digital preservation.

Wednesday, October 26 — Humanities Scholarship in the Digital Age
Time: 10:00 am to 12:00 pm
Speaker: James J. O’Donnell
Provost, Georgetown University
Bio: James J. O’Donnell has published widely on the cultural history of the late antique Mediterranean world and is a recognized innovator in the application of networked information technology in higher education. He is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (2000) and Augustine: A New Biography (2005).

Thursday, October 29 – International Collaboration in Papyrology
Time: 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm, lunch served
Speaker: Roger S. Bagnall
Professor, Classics Department, Columbia University Bio: Roger Bagnall is an internationally acknowledged leader in the field of papyrology and a recipient of Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Professor Bagnall has played a pivotal role in the creation and development of important papyrological institutions, including the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS), the first digital union catalogue of papyri.

ur-udon

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

world's oldest noodles

The oldest noodles ever found, have been excavated in northwestern China.

Culinary archaeology: Millet noodles in Late Neolithic China, from Nature

The bowl was found upside-down and embedded in brownish-yellow, fine clay. When we lifted off the bowl, the remains of the noodles were found inside, on top of the cone of sediment that had filled the inverted earthenware container… The noodles were thin (about 0.3 cm in diameter), delicate, more than 50 cm in length and yellow in colour. They resemble the La-Mian noodle, a traditional Chinese noodle that is made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the dough by hand.

Blackboard and WebCT to Merge

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

This news is less than an hour old, as I post this. I feel so in the loop.

Blackboard and WebCT, leading providers of enterprise software and services to the education industry have announced plans to merge.

From the press release:

The merger of Blackboard and WebCT marks a major milestone in the build- out of networked learning environments by colleges, universities, schools and other education providers. It creates a large, collaborative community of academic institutions-a global e-Learning “Community of Practice”… Currently, more than 3,700 higher education, K-12, corporate, government and commercial academic institutions enhance their learning environments with solutions offered by the two organizations.

Well it’s red

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

It’s been a busy week & I haven’t had much time to post here. So to keep you, My Beloved Audience entertained, let me post something that I’ve been meaning to post for a while now: an OPAC where you can actually search by the color of a book’s cover. The New England School of Law’s Color Index.

I especially like the filename: well_its_red.html. Truly, genius.

4-track

Monday, October 10th, 2005

4-track player

Ron Bergquist visited me in my office earlier today & gave me a 4-track player & a tape. The player is the very one in the photo here (was there ever more than one model of 4-track player manufactured?); the tape is Otis Redding The Dock of the Bay. Why did he give this to me? Probably to get the damn thing out of his house. Also because I seem to be developing a mini museum of obsolete technologies in my office. I have punch cards, though these are actually not all that difficult to come across in the more obscure books in an academic library. (The real trick is to find a book that hasn’t been taken out in so long that it doesn’t have a bar code in it, so that to check the thing out you have to wait while the librarian goes through the whole process of associating the bar code with the OPAC record. When it’s an undergrad intern at the circ desk this tends to really blow their circuits.) I have a 5¼-inch diskette, a vacuum tube, a slide rule, even an Edison cylindrical phonograph. Somewhere I even have a 3½-inch diskette that’s a DOS boot disk… manufactured by Apple. And now a 4-track player & cassette. The most amazing thing about the 4-track — other than the fact that Ron had it at all — is the condition. The thing had the Owner’s Guide & a power cord to plug into a car cigarette lighter, stashed in the battery receptacle. No batteries in the thing, fortunately; they would no doubt have leaked acid a long time ago. There’s also a rather amusing sticker in the battery receptacle: warranty void Aug 1969.

Ig Nobel Prizes

Friday, October 7th, 2005

Ig Nobel

The Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded yesterday — last night, in fact, as we here in SILS were holding our Louis Round Wilson Academy shindig. Coincidence?

Some of the more amusing prizes, in my opinion were:

  • Physics, for a seriously longitudinal study.
  • Literature, for spam as a short narrative form.
  • Peace, for making a a locust watch Star Wars. What I want to know is, how can you tell if the locust is paying attention?

And in the best academic tradition, there was a fair bit of scatology: both the Nutrition and Fluid dynamics prizes were for poo-related studies. One involving penguins. No, I’m not kidding.

I live for three forms of recognition: receiving tenure, having my computer be the one to find THE signal from aliens and so being listed as a co-discoverer, and winning an Ig Nobel Prize. Sadly there’s no category for Information Science. Well, at least tenure and detecting aliens are within the realm of possibility.

The New Republic of Letters

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas, from the Chronicle

It’s all about carnivals for me recently, for some reason. Anyway, it’s gratifying to finally see some positive treatment of blogging in academia.

Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. … Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won’t replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.

And because I’m a geek, I just had to include this:

…the difference between academic publishing and blogging is reminiscent of “one of those Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes where it turns out there is another species sharing the same space with us, but so sped up or slowed down in time, relatively, that contact is almost impossible.” Which is not to say that blogs and more conventional forms of publishing can’t complement each other very nicely.

Seems to me that the academic blogsphere provides a venue for informal peer review before the official peer review process begins. Who reads academic blogs? Our colleagues, our students and former students, our friends. We have the opportunity to get feedback on our ideas from all of these people before we write them up for publication. If one of the purposes of the peer review process is to improve the quality of scholarly writing, then surely more peer review would be a good thing. My question is, will blog posts be considered prior publication by publishers?

Carnival of the Infosciences

Monday, October 3rd, 2005

A pleasant surprise from the blogsphere today: yesterday’s post was selected as one of the Ringmaster’s Choices for the Carnival of the Infosciences #9. See the comments for that post.

That’s cool, but what the heck does it mean? From my brief investigations, the Carnivals of the Infosciences seem to be a floating, more or less weekly compilation of interesting things in the library blogsphere. Floating in the sense that it’s been on 7 different blogs so far. An interesting idea. Not exactly the Pulitzer Prize, but I’ll take it.

But will this achieve my goal of actually having someone conduct the study that I proposed in that post, & that was excerpted in the Carnival post? One can only hope. I post research ideas here from time to time; I come up with far more that I never bother to post. I don’t have the time or the skills or the interest or the whatever to do most (any) of these studies; I post them in the hope that someone else will take an idea & run with it. If this is you, all I ask is that you let me know when you have some results to share; the reason I post these ideas & don’t do the studies myself is that all I’m interested in is the findings.

I’ve thought that maybe there should be a more centralized repository of research ideas than just my & presumably other people’s blogs, & scouring journal literature. Masters students are always looking for Masters paper ideas, doctoral students are always looking for dissertation ideas. Should we, as faculty, provide our cast-off ideas for our students to pick up? Sure, part of being a student is learning to come up win interesting research questions of your own. But I don’t know a research project yet that ended where the researcher thought it would end when it began. Plus, how many Masters papers and dissertations started because someone read in a journal article a sentence like this: “future research will be necessary to…” Also, don’t we do this already, just not in so obvious a way? We present ideas & questions in class, in our writing, in conversations with our students working with us on research projects or doing independent studies or over coffee. Is there something pedagogically to be gained by letting students pick through our speech acts to isolate the ideas that really interest them? Would there be something pedagogically to be gained by letting students select more or less pre-formed ideas for research projects?

I honestly don’t know. Students, any thoughts on this?

Open Content Alliance

Monday, October 3rd, 2005

Yahoo Works With 2 Academic Libraries and Other Archives on Project to Digitize Collections, from the Chronicle

Another search engine company has joined with academic libraries to digitize large collections of books to make them easily searchable online. Yahoo Inc. has teamed up with the University of California, the University of Toronto, and several archives and technology companies on a project that could potentially bring the complete texts of millions of volumes into digital form.

Yahoo officials say that the project is not a response to Google’s partnership with five major research libraries to scan millions of books, and that some planning for the Yahoo project was under way before Google announced its plans last December.

Whether or not you believe that, this sounds intriguing and will be worth following closely:

The new archive is called the Open Content Alliance, and it was conceived in part by Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. The archive will be doing much of the actual scanning for the project, using a process it has developed in recent years. Libraries involved in the project can have their books scanned by the Internet Archive for 10 cents per page, which leaders of the project say is far below the standard price of scanning.

Leaders of the project stressed that no books that are under copyright will be scanned unless the copyright holders give explicit permission.

I’ll be interested if publishers object to this project, & if so, on what grounds. I think this has the potential to show publishers’ true colors.

“One meaningful service for a library community is to build something which enables the libraries to identify instantly what’s in there and what’s not in there,” and then add to the collection, [Daniel Greenstein] said. “One of the interests of the group is exploring ways to get people to upload materials directly to the archive.”

All LIS students out there, take note: that’s what I call a call to arms.

The Open Content Alliance site.