Accept no substitutes

Category: Information Commons (Page 19 of 26)

Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other

BitTorrent @ ibiblio (Osprey)

John Reuning and TJ have been working hard at getting torrent.ibiblio.org set up. This is the central site for getting bittorrent downloads of material from ibiblio. What Osprey, the software that drives torrent.ibiblio.org, adds to BitTorrent is a perma-seed so that there is always a seeded torrent available of the listed material from our tracker and structured and managed metadata to allow you to understand what is in each torrent.

The site will allow ibiblio contributors to create, describe and manage their own torrents and will allow folks who want to get material from ibiblio an easy way to find the material and a reliable way to get a torrent going in case the material is suddenly highly in demand.

The goal is to make ibiblio torrents easy to install, easy to discover, reliable, authoratative and accountable — and of course legal.
Among the existing torrents are videos of talks given by Larry Lessig (1998), Eben Moglen (2001), Roblimo (aka Robin Miller), Cory Doctorow (2004), Doc Searls (2004), Dan Gillmor (2005) and others, DVD images of all of Project Gutenberg, Eclipse tools, rpath Linux, Fedora Linux,

Press on MO Plagiarism

The Bryan Lebeau/Cornel West plagiarism story uncovered by Sally Greene and expounded on by Eric Muller has moved from the Chronicle of Higher Education to the Kansas City Star and the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
A lot of hair-splitting about whether copying a speech (and whitening it up with some really bad writing and bad thinking in the process) is worse that copying say parts of a book. But then the speech in both cases was published and distributed. Sounds like a big problem to me.
Even bigger problems arise in the appropriation of West’s work made during the rewrites by Lebeau as Sally points out.

Ethics of Plagiarism – Missouri style

Sally Greene googled up a coincidence or out right theft when looking for a phrase from Hegel. The result was what seems to be a Dean and History Prof in Missouri taking and whitening up a speech by Cornel West and presenting it as his own — then publishing it in his newsletter and on the web. The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story in print (and unfortunately behind the bars of their subscription login), but Sally tells a good bit of the tale and Eric Muller has more to say as he asks if Dean Bryan LeBeau will be held to the same standards as the ones to which he holds his own students. All three have links to the speeches and some strong opinions on the matter.

JCDL: Integrating Collections at the Cervantes Project

Integrating Collections at the Cervantes Project by Neal Audenaert. Looking to support humanists who work particularly of a single author. Much like the Blake Project so far. This is a good presentation but it’s getting late in the day.
I wonder how does this talk about the tricks of Cervantes such as the idea that Don Q comes from a manuscript discovered by Cervantes that there are layers and layers of the story that we often miss in cleaned up translations. Not part of the business of the presentation, but what’s on my mind. The way that C works with narrative is complex and amazing. I want to know more.

Question period:
How to deal with language issues? Spanish mostly but remember that spelling in Spanish of the period was not standardized. Over 15 languages used overall including that from the icon collection.

Will the limits of the tools be discussed by scholars — of course.

JCDL: CI Track Panel: Cyberinfrastructure as Computation vs. Support for Meaningful Interaction

Session called: “CI Track Panel: Cyberinfrastructure as Computation vs. Support for Meaningful Interaction” Panel.

Mostly a talk about NSF Cyberinfrastructure Initiative. Not just tech issues. Human and social themes. Tech is not the problem. IP spoken of as copyright is — again. Funding etc.

Reagan Moore first. From SDSC. Overview of NSF presentation on cyberinfrastructure. TeraGrid noted. Diskspace dedicated at SDSC for “good projects in supercomputer areas” Very much a talk Dan Reed would love and could give. Most of this on the SDSC site where cyberinfrastructure is a front page feature.

Steve Wheatley of American Council of Learned Societies. About Humanities and Social Sciences. Here is their page. How small the funding is for Humanities as opposed to Science is addressed and to make sure that Humanites and SS are included in the funding. Are they really only trying to put their fingers in the NSF money pot? No No No Of course not ;-> This talk mostly borrowed from one by John Unsworth of UIUC and from the ACLS site linked to above and here. Stories about Humanities successes such as cuneiform compilations at Stanford. Humanities will help us know about the evolving cybercultures. Copyright and privacy are the two biggest problems. Privacy biggest for social science says he.

Cliff Lynch next. See his talk at UNC Symposium on ibiblio. No slides of course. This is Cliff afterall. He will be brief (hee hee we know better). He will offend us all eventually says he.
Nature of Cyberinfrastructure. What an odd word. In Europe, they use eWhatever as in eScience or eGov. That lets us focus on changes of practices of scholarship instead of changes of tools.
Questions of knowledge representation for example. Draft report from National Science Board about the management of long-lived data collections. And about digital curation centre in the UK [alert Helen Tibbo]. What are the disciplinary norm for sharing need to be paid attention to. Platforms for collaboration. How does the corpus of literature fit in? How to handle and mine this.
Two or three other things in conclusion. Funding strategies are not so new. Consider the history of the role of funding in the development of high performance networks for example. We cannot be nationally bound or disciplinarily bound. Especially Humanities for international cooperation and peer relationships. Break disciplinary silos [or siloes]. Funding agencies need to be open and not worry so much about which agency owns what parts, but they should collaborate even more broadly. Include arts, libraries etc. Don’t look from large gifts from on high, but plan to contribute [as we have in the past]. CI must be a multiway partnership.

Questions from audience:
Asks Steve about Privacy as an issue. News to her. Huge gov databases including census and health don’t allow some innovative access to their data.
Cliff steps in to talk about the dark side of CI. He says that Henry Brady on UC-Berkeley is the best on this problem. Medicine understands this, but social science has problems here. IRBs are also a big problem as they interfere with say oral histories. He cites this as a problem of privacy over-reach.
Greg Crane of Tufts. Begins rant about NSF funded research not funding any humanities or acknowledge previously funded humanities projects. Why should NSF or anyone fund this? Wikipedia has the biggest impact on general public without our [our being scholars] participation.
Reagan first. No examples in the slides, but yes humanities scholars do use supercomputers. He wavers to explain them tho. How do we reach the public? National Virtual Observatory is one he likes.
Steve now. Perhaps he was too subtle or too ironic in his talk. He nods to Cliff’s representation of knowledge. He sees CI as a way to open the discussions. He agrees that Humanities scholars don’t reach out to the public in production or in research.

Back to the panel. Some stuff not covered here. Cliff talks about DLI2 and about the need for more policy clarity from the federal agencies and about the ambivilence of NSF toward the humanities.
Cliff now gives props to text searching as not so bad, but worries about our ability to support image use across the broad world of scholarly communities.

Person from Bath asks about the silos of vocabulary that separate the disciplines and about standardizing datastructures with crosswalks. Reagan says that they are on it and mentions the multivalent browser for text parsing.

What about the cultural norms for sharing and for preservation within each discipline. People have to release their intellectual property [says Liz the moderator]
Steve: progress in the humanities moves forward funeral by funeral [he says he quotes someone he will not name]. Presses are understrain and must move to new technologies and social practice must also change. Learned Societies are acknowledging the need for collaboration.
Cliff: progess in datasharing are improving. Science does active collaboration and how multi-authored papers are now the norm. But humanities cannot cope well with that. back to datasharing. Reproducability of scientific work demands datasharing. Dead Sea Scrolls noted as bad humanities practice.

Cathy Blake [from UNC] talks about her work and how can tools get to agreements and disagreements and bring them to the fore via text mining (say).
Steve talks about the slowness of the cycle of discussion in the print culture. We are getting better he says.
Cliff says that in Health Sciences does this with analysis of clinical studies. Humanities are harder to do for various reasons.
Reagan says turn the question inside out. Publishing data is often required in science. what is the similar publication in humanities? sources? etc? he doesn’t see that in the same way.

Cyberspace is here, says guy from Norway whose name I didn’t catch. Rant about how it is here like it or not and detailed. Rant in a nice Norway way. How many funerals does it take for things to change? [humourously asked] but seriously what is the funeral rate necessary for progress?
Steve sees a tipping point at this very moment. We need to provide the infrastructure so that scholars don’t have to build a printing press before they publish. Infrastructure should be open so that any field can use it. That said the work may change the entire intellectual and scholarly landscape.
Cliff threatens to be controversal. Two different folks Active rejectors. Time will fix that. But there are also folks who don’t want to use the new stuff and why should they as long as they don’t block others. Now on younger scholars. Just because folks grew up with technology doesn’t mean that they know how to use it. So folks born after photoshop don’t necesssarily know how to use photoshop but need to be taught image manipulation say. So curiculum reform is needed.
Reagan says different research questions will be asked now that were not asked in the past. Since large scale analysis will be the future, collaboration will be necessary.

JCDL: Bud Tribble

Bud Tribble is now back at Apple. Once he was at Eazel a startup that almost made a great difference by creating the Nautulis file manager (it did more than just that) for Linux, but 2001 interfered and the company never found second round funding. I have a warm spot in my heart for him because while he was at NeXT he was the Vice President of Software Engineering and a key architect of the NextStep operating system. My NeXT is still alive! and I loved NeXTStep, an OS and interface to which Mac OS X still attempts to match.
Bub Tribble is the keynote speaker on “Digital Content: Creating, Sharing, Searching”

The wooden house of books or the house of wooden books or the house of wood carved to look like books — an amusement while we wait.

Tribble begins. I avoid, almost, saying the “trouble with Tribble.” Apple taps the human need to create and communicate. That is the soul of the company. How Apple leads digital content:
print with words and images. partnering with adobe and pagemaker to create desktop publishing.

also always involved in creation of sound and of music. iTunes roots etc are in the long relationship with musicians and with studios.

photos videos and movies from home to k-12 to major studios.

itunes, iphoto, imovies idvd garageband = ilife. consumer-based products

then “prosumer” products like final cut pro

then professional products

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info
from 2002. [see also 2003 report]

New information creation is growing at about 30% per year most on hard disk. 0.01% went onto paper.

What about material that needs to be digitized? Google is doing a lot of it. But most content is yet to be created and will be created digitially. Pulls out the “Digital Immigrants” v “Digital Natives” discussion [picked up from Marc Prensky but uncredited here]. 5 year old expects to be able to “pause” the TV (because TiVo has always been a part of her life).
State of Maine program in which every 7th grader gets an iBook (some years back). Universal access changed education there. We see a promo video about the program. More about the program here. Replicared at over 100 places [what places? not 100 states obviously]. The funds come often from not buying text books. [think vitalbook here]

So much for creating now on to sharing content.

Storage. lots and more to come.

Networks for sharing for moving things around. lots and lots more to come. thanks to dotcom boom. need better distribution of the bandwidth though. say to homes. US is 5th to 17th in the world for at home high speed access. wireless kicks this in the immediate term

legal framework to allow sharing. DRM is complex and not even understood well. p2p works great but the legal issues… bitTorrent gets attention here.

[break by Jones]

Open Standards – [interesting to hear from Apple, but he was at Eazel] he says open standards will win in the long run. American Memory’s maps are in some non-Apple viewable format. Props to European govs work on require open standards.

Funny retro pictures of what 5mbs then 4 gigs looked like shown. leading to ibm microdrive. Storage costs per MB drops faster than Moore’s Law. Drops by more than half in less than 12 months. gigabyes per square foot chart. No sign of slowing down.

Apple and content sharing — itunes music store. is sharing the right word for selling stuff online? one interesting thing is that they don’t use a browser; you can buy in the ‘jukebox’ instead. no adverts on the itunes music store [he says]. ownership is a personal issue rather than rental models which Apple sees as an emotional issue. that’s why they sell rather than rent music. Every songs of the 1.5 million at the itunes store has been bought once at least. Props to the Long Tail. Much about access for new musicians. Now more people buy mostly from itunes than get music via p2p.

Searching for digital content. Google for searching the net. But searching on your own laptop is a pain. Quote from star trek next gen about search command from picard. V. Bush gets props “As we may think.” Notes how Bush complained about “too much published” even in 1945.

Promotes Spotlight. [I have Tiger so I have Spotlight. I love it.] Shows off Spotlight [non-Tiger folks feel free to die of envy].
A bit about metadata there. You can add metadata. But no normal person will ever do that.

Open source projects. About 1/2 of the Mac OS is built on open source.

Long term archiving is hard. [thanks for telling us] Formats change as do the devices. Brewster gets props for Way Back.

univerally accessible digital repository:

continued operation of moore’s law

long term archiving

legal framework for ip needs attention

open standards

Questions:

not a question: guy talks about owning music and downloading. he hates the DRM from apple especially the “fair play” DRM for shuffle which killed his music.
tribble says work not done yet on drm. apple wants to innovate as is real and microsoft. not time for standards for drm because we are still in an innovation period.

follow up on drm. do you see how you can solve drm for long term archiving.
tribble gives props to lessig. how does stuff get into the public domain when it’s encrypted?

more on itunes. itunes is not sharing, says he. but selling only major labels there. how about “real music” by “real bands”
itunes now getting indys. over 1000 so far. started with the 4 majors for example. nine inch nails garageband mix gets props. questioner wants more emerging bands.

JCDL: One Minute Poster Madness

Everyone of the 50 poster presenters is given 60 seconds to describe their project as presented on their posters. After 60 seconds, an annoying sound begins. So far everyone has been on time. Very close to the limit too. Several persentations from the Digital Library for Earth Science Education, nearly 10, here in Colorado. Xerox PARC will be doing a demo of a zooming information tree. Also their UpLib systems a personal digital library. 7 million PDFs scanned by SETI@home like techniques. M2K from Indiana and EVIADA for ethnomusicial videos (need to talk to them about folkstreams); part of their work is with annotations of the video etc. Several from Indiana on Music projects. Michael Khoo is very funny. Aihara has videos of arts and crafts masters — a reciprocal platform? Video recommenders from includes work by Gary Geisler and Mike Nelson using Open Video. NCSU has a wood anatomy database — giant project as far as wood goes. Small image library for PDAs in booth 32. 33 is annotation for health portal from UNC SILS. More than one BioPortal in the world — this one is in Arizona. The mic wasn’t on for John when he started talking so he lost maybe 8 seconds. He still came off well and folks seemed interested. We’ll see if they stop by later. We are near the food so chances are high.

JCDL: Interacting with Media session

Cathy Marshall of Microsoft is chairing the session called “Users and Interaction Track: Interacting with Media”

  • *Addressing the Challenge of Visual Information Access from Digital Image and Video Archives
    Michael G. Christel, Ronald M. Conescu
    Mike Christel presenting. concept-based vs content-based retrieval of video. concept-based using manually described text descriptions of what is in the video. very labor intensive. annotation is incomplete and inconsistant and based on the annotators own experiences and knowledge. words have a tough time describing pictures. content-based is done by computers. good at color, texture and shapes and motion or lackthereof. but people don’t know how to ask for content-based systems. a symantic problem. even forming a query is difficult. can content-based get to concept desctiptions — know if the image is of buildings cars etc?
    TRECVID – is a TREC video search. NIST sponsored corpus of news videos. next year international news video. given a multimedia need and topic can a user find the document (aka video)?
    CMU created an interface of storyboards of keyframes. 3 kinds. one “best sets” like best roads. best people done imperfectly by machine. one color match — all with yellow background. third, text query. 24 novices in the study. independently worked for 15 mins to do 4 topices. full system vs video only.
    precission was very close between the two runs of the two systems. full system generally but no always wins. when does video only win? generic topics v specific copies. man-speaking v bill clinton say. on generic full always beats video only. and people liked the full system better. so full system (includes closed captions etc) always wins. same for experts as novices. people do better than automatic (run without interactive feedback).
    experts used “best search” much more than novices. novices even with video only used much more text in their searches than experts. why do novices use text even when there isn’t hardly any text there?
    see paper for more

    For novices, text annotated is much better than video only. Interfaces encourage text only.
    http://www.infomedia.cs.cmu.edu

    Questions:
    Cathy asked about improvements. how to get there and be as good as Google Image search? better detectors (like road detector) will get more precision even tho recall will still suck.
    what about color and texture searches? find more like this. worked sorta.

  • *Assessing Tools for Use with Webcasts
    Elaine Toms, Christine Dufour, Jonathan Lewis, Ron Baecker
    Christine Dufour speaking. Reusing webcasts is the topic. abstract here. How do people use the tools for webcast. ePresnece webcasting system used. 5 tools: video window, slide window, timeline, search button, table of contents. users given three tasks. n=16 students. 56% had never used ePresence. Not sure what to take from this one. Useful critique of who folks use ePresence and of ePresense Interactive Media I guess. Can we extend from this? And to what? Looks like text is the big winner again here.
    Questions:
    what is the user modivation? so far assigned tasks, not true user needs.
    rate of tool use. how much time spent with each and does that matter afterall?
    Cathy asks how was table of contents created? by powerpoint or by human annotation — inconsistant. since powerpoint was the most useful (since it had the most text i bet) how would people do if just given powerpoint (NB Cathy’s company owns powerpoint)?

  • Exploring User Perceptions of Digital Image Similarity
    Unmil P. Karadkar, Richard Furuta, Jin-Cheon Na
    Unmil speaking. Texas A&M. MIDAS Multi-device integrated dynamic a? systems. abstract here. MIDAS user studies here.

Chapel Hill Blog Teach-in

Anton aka Mister Sugar writes about the upcoming Chapel Hill Blog Teach-in.

Chapel Hill Blog Teach-in

Join us for a free event to learn about blogging and how to create your own blog:

* Saturday, June 11, 2005
* 12 noon – 2 p.m.
* UNC-CH Health Sciences Library Biogen Idec Classroom, a computer lab with 40 seats
* For anyone who wants one-on-one help becoming a blogger
* For new bloggers who want one-on-one help improving their blog or making the most of their blogware

More details at
http://mistersugar.com/tamtam/blogtogether/show/Chapel+Hill+Blog+Teach-in.

RSVP to anton@blogtogether.org.

JCDL: Is Digital Preservation an Oxymoron?

Panel on (mostly) born-digital preservation. MIT prof at retirement turns in his laptop as his personal archives.
Average life of a document on a government web site is only 44 days. Brewster gets props for some goodness but links are often broken. Long-term access fails (says she, she being Liz Bishoff).

Robert Horton – Minnesota Historical Society – speaks first.
largest of state historical society. 300 employees. broad collections including tv, video, audio of legislature, etc etc. every 20th century medium difficult to preserve. think of silent films and varieties of audio. what is the “use value”? the more something is used the more likely it will be preserved in some form.
government records perspectives now. move to egovernment makes records management extremely difficult. procedures now used are no longer sensible or even doable.
minnesota does not try to control behavior. everyone shouldn’t have to be a records manager (says minnesota). starting with lower hanging fruit with specific results. have to have partners. UCSD’s supercenter has been their partner. Using grid technologies and GIS resources via SDsupercenter. 1.5 terabytes there.
Technology is not the problem, but organizational change is. How to fund and educate and to manage partnerships. How to move lessons learned at the edges of the organization to the center.
From eGov. must connect to enterprise architecture.
Must build capacity by showing immediate return — to get funds. Like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors — Feed Me!

Mark Halbert from Emery U – part of DLF’s Aquifer Project also NDIIPP funded etc. Preservation is not boring, says he. Now he explains his NDIIPP project which is about getting 3 terabytes of Southern (that’s Southern North America) resources as a Metaarchive.
distributed preservation strategy – LOCKSS (lots of copies keeps stuff safe)
dim archiving – not necessarily high accessible. in fact. hold costs by not letting people see it!
flexible organization model
formals content selection process – use the farris encyclopedia of southern culture as the framework
project time line – network underway now. initial archiving will be done in august.
metadata schema – standards based http://www.metaarchive.org
cooperative agreement designed to grow and change over time.
copyright ambiguities are the biggest challenges. LOCKSS is not friendly to copyright restrictions. lawyers see copies are well copies; archivists see copies as preservation and necessary.

Taylor Surface next up. He’s from OCLC. Director of Content Management something or other (says intro). He too is part of NDIIPP with UIUC. OCLC on digital content preservation. OCLC as a service provider for other organizations. Two services. Web archiving service to provide permanent access via links and/or archived materials as captured from the web for certain constituents. Digital masters supports digitization services and preserving “digital masters” for control and management. Used by about 10 state libraries.
Preservation planning. the OCLC policy, which you can read on the web (says he). Global digital format registry. (my my spelling is bad). Specificially informed risk accessment methodology (INFORM). Trusted digital repository registry for a national and/or international repositories to show that your work will be preserved.
Question time.
What is a “dim archive”? Martin answers. That Dark Archiving is impenatrable, but they don’t like to provide high availability to preserved materials. That means that you can get to a registry but you may not be providing access especially high availablity.
Gary Marchionini asks about software for preservation etc. Emery uses LOCKSS (open source etc). Bob says storage resource broker from SDSC and contentVM in minnesota. OCLC guy makes his pitch and says they currently use Oracle but that that is changing even now. and there will continue to be changing.
selection at emery. the most difficult issue is what formats will preserve what including the relationships in software and in databases. how to preserve intellectual content? files of ?? format will have rotted (say like wordstar?). migtation will be concerned with the selection.
formats for gov records. only about 1% of gov records is preserved. content is more important than structure for gov docs says Bob of minnesota.
More on structure and on formats.

JCDL Keynote – Deanna Marcum of LC

Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress gives the keynote here at JCDL. Good news is wireless access in all the conference meeting rooms and there is no charge.

“The Sum of the Parts: Turning Digital Library Initiatives into a Great Whole” Can there be a discussion of digital libraries without worrying over Google in various ways? — appearently not. American Memory project has grown to 9 million items from over 100 collections. Originally designed for school children but now 3.4 billion hits from all over the world by (as near as they can tell) from people of all ages. Various projects from Library of Congress discussed (whilst Jason Moore IMs me from Rhode Island to tell me about his new job at UC-Irvine where he will be Digital Services Manager at their Library). Now about starting and maintaining born-digital collections. Buncha stuff about Dspace which is called “a newly developed digital repository created to capture, distribute and preserver the intellectual output of MIT.” Project Gutenberg gets props. Digital Librares Federation has 600 collections. [frankly there are many many not in DLF for various reasons]. TEL (The European Library) still seeks a “single access point” [why do libraries still think like AOL? and why are they obcessed by portals? Why not be more open and more flexible? Funding? Egos? Nationalisms? Continentalism? Or ease of use?] DLF has 34 members in their Aquifer portal. A bit about Open Archive Initiatives. More about how portals are so wonderful [I’m much less sure about that — portals seem so AOL]. A “dream of a universal library” cited [bypasses Borges — is he too obvious?]
Four major things to allow for the universal library:

  1. Update copyright to allow better access and open the Commons. Jamie Boyle gets props for his fencing in the commons and enclosure essay. Fear of licenses supplanting copyright. Problems of extension. Database access problems. Need to protect fair use for public access. Public Library of Science and SPARC get props. As does J-STOR (which I love less because of their charging scheme blocks access). Fear of Google initiative — sorta. Publishers are up in arms — especially University Presses who should learn better. Section 108 study group (sec. 108 of copyright law) described as looking for balance. [but Google is forcing the issue] Orphan works not mentioned though.
  2. Ensure Long-term Preservation. Need procedures and techniques or we will experience massive loss of knowledge and of digital resources. NDIIPP is one attempt at helping this happen [UNC and ibiblio are working on an NDIIPP funded project now with open video. We are one of 8 projects in this area.]
  3. Link Libraries and Digital Collections. Open Archives gets props here. Metadata improvements and metadata sharing. $292K to DLF for Open Archives Initiative.
  4. Get more Funding. [love this one] Google Initiative is a result of lack of federal funding? Brewster gets noted for his concern of private control of public resources. But Google is serious about very large scale digitization (says Brewster who has his own massive digitization projects).

Question time:
Big institutions favored by these approaches. What about personal and unique collections?
[wikimedia projects are not noticed. that shows how much is missed here I think]
Gary Marchionini at the mike now. Asking about funding. “Let Google do it” vs national and international initiatives. [misses the obvious wiki answers. the wiki way is unmentioned at this conference so far. to me that’s the most interesting model and biggest growth area]
Organizations serve their members. This causes problems.
Copyright issues up now.
Digital divide questions up now. Stories of funding for collaboration projects in poorly served areas.
Postman and media education mentioned. Contextual access to information needed.


[The unnamed challenger is Wiki Commons. pj]

Skype-omania

Skype is on the front page of the News and Observer this morning! A long
article from the Washington Post is carried mostly whole in the Raleigh
paper. Here’s the original article from the Post.

A few interesting numbers from the article:

  • 30% of Skype’s customers are businesses
  • Skype gets more new customers in a single week than Vonage has in total
    for its entire life as a company
  • Skype has 171 employees; Verizon landlines has 142,000.

I’ll be on the way to and in DC. Skype me as smalljones. I loved catching up with Mark McCarthy in Sudan via Skype.

Misc. on Sunday

Packing up for the trips to DC and to Denver. The first for the Computerworld Awards. Got tux. Got medal. Etc. The second for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Took in the North Carolina Boys Choir’s Spring concert which was delightful and was a sort of preview to some of the music to be sung on their tour to the UK in a couple of weeks.
Over on that side of the pond, Kristina, along with Will, is heavily documenting her adventures in Paris with some great pictures and a discovery of the secret of Manga hair!

More Heroic: Tux 2.0 (next Monday)

Getting lined up for a trip to DC for the next step in the Computerworld Honors Program. We are among the 5 finalists for the 21st Century Achievement Awards which will be announced at a ceremony at the National Building Museum next Monday evening. The Open Video project is a finalist in their area so we’ll be driving up with my collegue Barbara Wildemuth and will be met there by Gary Marchionini.
This event calls for tux and medal so I’ve ordered up the monkey suit again from the wonderful O’Neill’s.
We’ll be staying at the Cosmos Club (thanks to Jose-marie Griffiths) and although our time in DC will be brief (less than 24 hours), we’re looking forward to a grand time.
Directly after that I’ll be on the plane to Denver for the JCDL 2005.

IBM blogging unleashed!

Sayan points us to the official IBM policy on corporate blogging and further to Tim Bray’s reactions.
James Snell describes the construction of the IBM blogging policy:

The core principles — written by IBM bloggers over a period of ten days using an internal wiki — are designed to guide IBMers as they figure out what they’re going to blog about so they don’t end up like certain notable ex-employees of certain notable other companies. They’re also intended to communicate IBM’s position on such practices as astroturfing, covert marketing, and openly goading or berating competitors — specifically, don’t do it. As these guidelines were being drafted, we drew heavily upon our own experiences as bloggers and the excellent prior art in this space graciously provided by Sun, Microsoft, Groove and many others who have drafted policies and guidelines for their employees.

Snell also has a great parody of corporate activity policies on his blog called “Guidelines for IBM Breathers: Executive Summary”. One of my favorites: “Try to add value, and for goodness sakes use a breath mint.”

Service Science?

Out at IBM today for University Day. This is a time when IBMers talk about programs that support the local Universities and for the Universities to talk about their programs — this time mostly Computer Science departments (NCSU, NC A&T, Duke, and UNC especially).
One recurring theme, besides my personally beloved Open Standards, Open Code, and the question of Patents, was the attempt to start a discussion of a new area of study, “Service Science.”
Don’t imagine burger flipping. Instead think that 70% of Americans work in jobs in the Service sector. That means you (most likely).
When we were mostly agricultural, we created and developed Agricultural Science (later agro-science). When we were mostly industrial, we created and developed Industrial Science . Both of these fields further specialized and as they grew our insight into agriculture and industry grew and our practices changed and some would argue became more effecient. (Wendell Berry or authors of “I’ll take my stand” would probably disagee, but history at least in the immediate term is not on their side, but there is still resistance or at least a different tact on Agro-Industry Science).
That said, the IBM take on services is broad, very broad. It includes Grid Computing and social conscience as in the World Community Grid, services to customers like autonomic computing, and technological advances that drive and support services, as well as business and management practices like say remote group work, collaboration, extreme programming and the like.
To some extent, Services Science shows IBM taking a gamble at entering into Social Sciences. And other press is already out on this from Cnet, in an interview with Jim Spoher of IBM’s Almaden Services Research in which he calls Services Science the “coevolution of technology and business innovations”, in a Technology Review article called “Research in Development” featuring SILS Graduation speaker Paul Horn, and even in academic papers such as “The Role of Text Analytics in Managing of Intangible Assets and the Emergence of Service Science” by Dr. Wlodek Zadrozny.
So this is serious here. The question is whether Service Science is the buzzword of the quarter heating up only to fade as the insipid Knowledge Management seems to have or will it usher in a seachange of research and education. NCSU’s Michael Rappa, in a hallway conversation with speaker Lillian Wu and myself, points us to the sociology and history of science studies for clues.

Note: one of my appointments is in a School of Information and Library Science.

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