Digital Archive Sabbatical

Friday with DRC-Dev

2005-08-05T15:06:00.000-07:00

Last Friday (July 29) the development team missed a conference call as Peter Murray, our leader at OhioLINK, was sick with walking pneumonia. However we resumed today with use of Gizmo software for conferencing. See www.gizmo.com. Gizmo works fine for 2-3 people, but with an entire group on the line, it was difficult to hear and people got dropped. Perhaps we will return to using Elluminator.

New terms arose today, as seems always to be the case with me! Terms such as
FOXML
RDF - Resource Description Framework
XACML - has to do with access control
semantic web
kowali triples - RDF is structured as a triple or triples. Triples include three pieces of info about an object: the subject, its attributes, and its value.
CBS trees - Complete Binary Search tree

I discovered a great Scientific American article (May 2001) on the semantic web by Tim Berners-Lee et al. Scientific American: The Semantic Web
A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities

This helps to explain some of the concepts we discussed today. The goal is to create an institutional repository that will be flexible in describing objects and creating relationships among them, even when they are dissimilar object types or in different "collections."

Strauss' UC career

2005-08-04T17:44:00.000-07:00

Today I went to the UC Archives and perused the UC Catalogues for the years that Strauss was at UC. He started as a freshman in 1888 and graduated in Civil Engineering in 1892. Back then there were only about 125 students in the entire Academic Department of the University, with about 16 of them in Civil Engineering. One professor, Henry Turner Eddy, taught the entire Civil Engineering curriculum back then, and also served as dean of the Academic Department (as distinct from the medical, dental, and pharmaceutical departments of the university). In fact back in 1884-1885 Eddy taught Civil Engineering, Math and Astronomy!

The year after graduation Strauss was listed as a graduate candidate for the Master of Letters, and also living in Trenton NJ as a draftsman at the Steel and Iron Company. In 1893-1894 he was again listed as a masters student, though not a candidate for a degree. His address was back in Cincinnati at 290 West 7th Street (rather than his family home at 360 West 9th Street). In 1894-1895 was an instructor in the Civil Engineering program, teaching alongside Professor Ward Baldwin, who served also as registrar for the Academic Department. By this time the Academic Department had grown to 247 students.

Back then the catalogues listed all the graduates for each year, their credentials, and what they were doing. Strauss was listed in the 1895-1896 catalogue as a draftsman at Elmira Bridge Company in Elmira NY 1895-. In 1910 the university couldn't keep up with the graduate listings, but created a directory of graduates. Strauss was listed in the 1926 directory as living in Chicago at 3100 Sheridan Road. His bridge company was in Chicago, but by 1926 he was also spending much time in San Francisco selling the idea of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Fedora discussion

2005-07-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

Friday the DRC-Dev team discussed the underpinnings of Fedora, the platform selected for creating the Digital Resource Commons. The presentation method itself was interesting, using Elluminate software available through the Ohio Learning Network (OLN) to push information on a whiteboard to remote users and allow discussion and text messaging among participants. The process was definitely successful.

We learned about Fedora's digital object model, with four components: a DOI or handle as identifier; methods to disseminate or view the object; content; and system metadata. And there are four content types: managed, external (like a URL), redirects to other sites, and XML. The overall architecture consists of an interface (web service plus OAI provider); application logic in Java; storage, a relational database management system (RDBMS).

There are more acronyms and terms to learn and/or review:
digital object serialization defined by XML schema
extensible = can associate services with objects
extensible object model
DOI and handle
OAI-DC
SOAP-based versus web-based
web service
server container package

University of Virginia is deveping for digital archive application. See http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/fedora.html .
Their archive using Fedora? http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/collections/image/

A May 2005 Users Group conference hosted 110 implementers with objects as diverse as streaming data from a temperature sensor.

Faculty presentation

2005-07-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

Today I presented a brief description of my academic leave activities to the University Libraries Faculty. The information is summarized in a power-point presentation.

USC Digital Archive

2005-07-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

Today I reviewed the USC Digital Archive. It's been redesigned! I remember serving on the committee that started the redesign back in the fall. They have gone live with it. You can browse collections, and search across collections. You can even search within specified collections with the Advanced Search. You can scroll through images. You can see the metadata for the images. And of course you can get a larger view of the images. It's fun to see something I was working on come to fruition!

DRC-Dev homework

2005-07-08T14:01:00.000-07:00

I can see that keeping up with the DRC-Dev group will require some review on my part. After the conference call today I made a list of all those feisty acronyms and terms with which I need to be more conversant. Things like

Metabuddy
VRA 4
DC (Dublin Core) and FGDC
CEN
Getty Crosswalk
Shibboleth
DMAP (descriptive metadata application profile)
Luna crosswalk - CWA
other crosswalks - CDWA XML, etc
Handles and handle servers
RDF (resource description framework)

I covered many of these way back in October but they didn't "stick" yet.... We are still debating about multiple schemas and interfaces for users - how can we be complex but simplify for use? We are to look at interfaces of other places. We should stress the needed search functionality and design to that need.

DRC-Dev Team

2005-07-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

On April 22 I wrote that it looked like OhioLINK would be using Fedora to build the Digital Resource Commons rather than Documentum. That's indeed what's happening. Fedora is an open access software developed at Cornell. (Interestingly, the Cornell librarians at ASEE reported they are not using Fedora at Cornell for their digital archive....) The University of Virginia is using Fedora as its platform though, and has done much development work.

Fedora out of the box is very "raw," a basic structure upon which to build. It is supposedly very robust, allowing capabilities not provided by other open access software such as DSpace. For example it allows not only cross-collection searching, but more importantly, the specification of object to object relationships. It enables mixing object types (videos, text, data sets, simulations, etc.) and varying uses (e-publishing, repositories, exhibitions, portfolios, etc.).

Peter Murray is heading the OhioLINK DRC-Development Team meetings. The conference calls are interesting, with participants from across Ohio, plus developers at OhioLINK itself. As Peter stated, the change from using a proprietary software such as Documentum to an open access softare such as Fedora signals a change in OhioLINK's approach to system development. OhioLINK members have become engaged in the development process via the DRC-Dev team. The project can be viewed at http://drc-dev.ohiolink.edu/wiki .

Today the DRC-Dev conference call struggled with the concept of object-specific application profiles and where the application profile for the metadata should reside - with the object? with a collection? Having different metadata sets for different types of objects means having different ingestion profiles for entering data into the system. This can get confusing, depending on who is doing the inputting. A trained team of "ingesters" is different than occasional inputting by faculty participating in a department repository. We want adequately to describe various objects while at the same time supporting global retrieval of all content.

I will be participating on the development team, lending what insight I can relating to

supporting teaching and research needs in terms of function
contributing content
helping to track relevant technologies
sharing ideas on what the DRC should look like
planning to use the DRC in my work.

The DRC will be the platform where I hope to put the engineering repository. It will be a while before it's ready....

Taking academic leaves

2005-06-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

Today I was able to give back a little. There was a workshop for library faculty to learn about taking academic leaves. As a freshly returned candidate, I provided some input for colleagues on the process, from developing ideas to reporting them. Fortunately my advice corroborated with that of the Provost's office.... For information see http://engrlib.uc.edu/PubServ/AcadLeaveWorkshop.ppt .

Poster session

2005-06-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) held its annual conference this past week in Portland OR. I belong to the Engineering Libraries Division (ELD) of ASEE; this year we had 110 attendees within our division alone. I prepared a poster session. Several librarians were interested in the variety of archive and repository software platforms I experienced, as they are attempting to select platforms at their home institutions. I was at least able to give them a little advice. See presentation at http://eld.lib.ucdavis.edu/conf/05/ELDPoster05.ppt . (UC Davis hosts the ELD web site.)

Back at work

2005-06-06T20:56:00.000-07:00

Well, it finally happened! My sabbatical came to an end last Friday. Today I was back at work in the Engineering Library at University of Cincinnati. It's a strange sensation to yank the brain into different arenas - meetings, reports, acquisitions, donors, web sites, orientations, queries - all swirling over the last 8 months of learning. Will it all be forgotten?

I'll be participating on OhioLINK's DRC (Digital Resource Commons) Development Team, albeit via conference calls and perhaps occasional face-to-face meetings in Columbus. I'll keep working to build a college institutional repository, and the Strauss web site will be developed as more material becomes available.

Kudos to Wellesley

2005-05-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

I referred to the Harvard President's controversial statements in my entry for February 24, at the time of my Harvard visit. In the Spring 2005 issue of Wellesley (alumnae magazine), President Diane Chapman Walsh wrote a great essay about women in education. Wellesley College founder Henry Durant specifically hired female full professors, taking issue with his Harvard faculty friend Edward Clarke. Clarke authored a book in 1873 entitled Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls in reaction to a social movement to make higher quality education available for girls. According to Walsh, Clarke "...warned that educating women would damage their health and their ability to conceive children."

Go Wellesley! Just had to insert this little item, irrelevant as it is to my sabbatical...

More Strauss materials

2005-05-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Stephen Cassady's Spanning the Gate and have started John van der Zee's The Gate. van der Zee has managed to see and meet a lot of resources I will never get to know. I wish I had the time.

The recent UL announcement to faculty about library online resources featured the Facts on File History Reference Center. I decided to look up Strauss. They essentially digitized the contents of the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Bridges and Tunnels, 2002. This is where I saw more Strauss bashing. I would not expect an encyclopedia to publish such editorial "facts."

Johnson and Leon used language such as:
"one of the most eccentric bridge builders,"
"curiously" Strauss spent as much time publicizing his affiliation with the bridge as he did working to build it.
"Strauss seemed most intensely focused on making sure no one got credit for building the bridge but he. It was surprising that Strauss seemed so distant from the project after it started since he spent a dozen years lobbying, politicking, cajoling, and sweet-talking anyone in sight to encourage its construction."
"quintessential outsider"
"claiming to be an engineer, possessed neither an engineering degree nor a membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers"
"obsessed with obtaining acceptance and validation"
"since the school [University of Cincinnati] did not have an accredited engineering department, he earned a bachelor of arts degree in its liberal arts school. However one of his areas of study was engineering"
"would continue to write poetry for the balance of his life. Most of it ranged from bad to really bad, indicating Strauss was about as imaginative a poet as he was an innovative bridge designer"
"hogging as much of the limelight as he could"
"penned some of his tortured verse to celebrate the construction of the bridge"

This editorializing is not the usual type of factual encyclopedia entry. I am not impressed with Facts on File.

Back to ECECS

2005-05-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

Not to drop the ball with ECECS, today I visited Hal Carter again to review our institutional repository idea in light of the OhioLINK delay. Hal introduced me to Chris Isbell, who has worked to mount the first reports locally. Chris told me that he used an open access content management software called Metadot to build the web site. For a small department it works fine. You can authenticate users with it, build your own "gizmos" etc, in PERL. Peter Murray at OhioLINK is aware of the software. Fine for what it does, but of course doesn't have the power for digital media that Fedora will provide for the DRC.

In discussing metadata and other preparations for eventual migration to OhioLINK, Hal gave me a useful description of systems design engineering basics. The system can be designed, the metadata defined, etc after crucial questions have been answered.

Q1: who are the customers, primary and secondary? They must be defined.
Q2: what are the products?
Q3: who are the producers of products to meet the needs of the consumers/customers?
Q4: what is the infrastructure? (web for distribution? environment, procedures, standards)

Producers: produce info, need an interface, audit function, standards
Products: directly disseminated? archived?
Consumer: need assessment of security, protection for product, etc.

Hal recommended that I see Karen Davis, who teaches database design, modelling, metadata, etc.

Tailgate Trio

2005-05-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

Well, if you missed the Student Helper Appreciation party today, you also missed hearing the Tailgate Trio that provided musical background entertainment. It all started when Ted Baldwin and I offered a violin/piano performance for the Fine Arts Fund. Kathy Kinsey won the performance and donated it to the student party. We invited Erma Fritsche to join us with her flute. With a tailgate theme for the party, we had to do something to tie our more classical style into the event. Hence the notion of wearing tails and calling ourselves the Tailgate Trio.

We concluded with "When you're smiling," appropriate for all public services staff - the whole world will smile with them...!

Strauss bashing

2005-05-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

I finally got up the courage to view the programs about Strauss that put him in ill light. Actually, the first one, an A&E video from 1994 entitled The Golden Gate Bridge was not too hard on him. He was not known to be easy to work with, given to fits of temper and insisting on having the limelight. But the tone was OK. (CAS has this video, TG25 .S225G65 1995.)

The more recent PBS video from the American Experience series is entitled Golden Gate Bridge. This was recently ordered at my request for the Langsam collection (TG25.S225G66 2004). This is the video that dramatizes the conflict between Strauss and Ellis. It gets in plenty of digs about Strauss, the cantankerous Chief Engineer "who lacked an engineering degree." They also dubbed him as feisty, conceited, runty, and insecure. His bridges heretofore were dubbed ordinary, mundane, functional, patterned bridges, with little credit given his designs. His Aeroscope, designed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, was written off as not a feat of engineering. To their credit, they recognized Strauss for the visionary he was, as well as a promoter and champion of the GGB. And he was recognized as a commanding ego who saw in others special talents which he empowered.

They placed some emphasis on his adding C.E. after his name, representing a "graduate certificate of engineering, a degree he never received. " They also told how he watched the construction of the Covington Bridge (I think they mean the Cincinnati-Covington Bridge) when he was laid up in college from a football injury. Note the bridge was completed in 1867 and Strauss was born in 1870. What construction was he watching ca 1890? Hard to believe this is the work of PBS....

It gets my dander up.

Strauss timeline

2005-05-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

I got back from LA on Thursday, April 28. Now that all the photocopied materials from Stanford and Berkeley have arrived, I am spending time reading every page in detail and inserting tidbits that refer to Strauss into a huge, detailed timeline. I am afraid the timeline is turning into notes for a book, a book I don't intend to write.

The more I read, the more I would like to know about Strauss' business and family firsthand. The business letters don't tell what was really going through his mind, and they focus primarily on the GGB project. Strauss had two sons. One went to Stanford and one went to Westpoint. The Stanford son Richard K. made it onto the company letterhead as Contracting Engineer some time mid-1935. I don't know what happened to the other son, Ralph V. Strauss. Or to Strauss' widow Ethelyn Annette. Perhaps I should track the families down!

Strauss and LA

2005-04-27T16:32:00.000-07:00

Eric's final recital at the Colburn School of Performing Arts was Monday the 25th. The recital was a fitting conclusion to Eric's two years in residency at Colburn.

I got started on the Strauss research after the recital. Ted Baldwin's friend at the LA Times, Peter Johnson, supplied me with an obituary. It told that Strauss' residence when he died in 1938 was on Wilshire Blvd. It named the chapel where services were held and the mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (largest in the U.S. I believe) where Strauss was laid to rest. I was able to take pictures at Forest Lawn of the chapel and mausoleum.

The obituary named Ernest Holmes, founder of the Institute of Religious Science, as the person to preside at the services. Since Strauss had a Jewish heritage, I thought this curious. But secondhand stories tell that Strauss met with family disfavor when in 1895 he married a Cincinnati girl who was not Jewish. Perhaps he strayed from his heritage. During the 1920s Ernest Holmes was developing as a religious speaker. In 1926 he spoke Sundays at the Ambassador Hotel, the very hotel where Strauss stayed in 1933 when he "disappeared" for a while. That is also the year he supposedly remarried. In 1934 Holmes moved to the Wiltern Theatre on Wilshire Blvd, not far from Strauss' final residence. I would love to learn more about the connection between Strauss and Holmes, if any.

What's happening?

2005-04-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

Here I am back in LA - for a quick visit to hear son Eric play a cello recital and do a little research on Strauss. He died here and according to the obituary lived on Wilshire Blvd. I have to check that out! Also his burial place, if I can get a car to go see it. So it's a quiet Sunday morning, film crews are set up in a few places on the street below doing their usual Sunday morning thing. The Cathedral bells ring the start of the Spanish language service. And then I notice the shouting. I thought it was the film crews shouting directions. But eventually, as the din escalates, I go to the balcony to look out. A parade! about 4 blocks long. Heading south on Grand from somewhere north of the Disney building, past Colburn School of Performing Arts, past MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) to the plaza in front of Deloitte & Touche. Well-dressed people shouting and chanting.

It's not a parade. They are shouting angrily, they are carrying red flags and banners in Chinese. They must have marched from Chinatown, just over the 101. Some signs are in English. Something about Japan. They are angry with the Japanese. Are they part of the recent Japan bashing, harking back to WWII and China's bad treatment by the Japanese? Mounting tensions have been reported in the news. Or has there been an incident? I wish I could understand their chants, songs and rally speeches, now taking place.

Film crews are busy shooting from trucks and cherry pickers, and interviewing people in the street. Is this a real rally? or part of a movie? In LA you are never sure what's happening.

The OhioLINK saga

2005-04-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

Back on October 25 I mentioned vaguely my raison d'etre for working at USC in the fall. They invested in a software called Documentum, to which they are migrating their digital archives. OhioLINK was interested in this process, as OhioLINK used Bulldog to build the Digital Media Center (DMC) and Bulldog was bought by Documentum to enable them to enter the digital/media arena.

I tracked progress at USC as they grappled with the various aspects of migration: database structure, metadata, ingest forms, search capabilities, etc. It wasn't an easy task, and I supplied reports to that effect to Anita and to Peter Murray, newly appointed but not on duty until January 2005. Peter was hired to turn the DMC into the new, expanded Digital Resource Commons or DRC. I put Peter in touch with people at USC so he could query them about Documentum.

Meantime with OhioLINK's budget growing lean, the powers-that-be researched the possibility of open access software in lieu of the very expensive Documentum software. I was hoping for DSpace, as I have a little familiarity with it. But it looks like the choice will be Fedora, developed at Cornell and University of Virginia. Needless to say this OhioLINK decision takes me in new directions. Time to learn about Fedora!

Back to IR

2005-04-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

IR = institutional repository. I haven't forgotten my original mission, to create a repository for the College of Engineering. I visited Hal Carter, Head of the ECECS Department, armed with my knowledge from Cal Tech, Harvard, and MIT. I was scouting for potential material to begin a pilot. Turns out ECECS was just in the process of developing its own little repository. And Hal liked the appeal of the material eventually being part of a larger, possibly state-wide engineering repository at OhioLINK.

We put our heads together and created a project proposal following OhioLINK's guidelines for submissions to the Digital Media Center (DMC), with the last version of the draft dated today. It will go under review by UC's Digital Department and advisory committee.

Short time out

2005-04-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

My sister Fran came to visit Wednesday. Thursday we drove all the way to Beckley WV to hear the Calder Q play in concert there. The concert was an excuse to get out and enjoy beautiful weather and the countryside. We drove east through Ohio and back home through northern Kentucky on Friday. We caught a snack with Eric after the concert, and Friday visited Tamarack in Beckley before heading home. Tamarack is an interesting facility where artists to perform their crafts and for onlookers to watch the process as well as purchase the products. It's the kind of place Fran loves.

Saturday we had dinner with Dean Shupe and family (Dean is a retired engineering faculty member and brother-in-law of Fran). Today we heard the CSO's concert with Sarah Chang performing. Tomorrow Fran heads back to Milwaukee.

Strauss web site

2005-04-01T18:43:00.000-08:00

Armed with goodies from my research in Cincinnati and San Francisco, I began working with Sudha, our graduate assistant, to build the web site about Strauss. Sudha created a basic design with areas to serve as placeholders for what could be a future full-blown archive. But right now the focus is on setting the story straight. Mike Baseheart will be contributing an introductory piece to explain the purpose. For what it's worth, these meager beginnings can be viewed in the Strauss directory on the Engineering Library web site.

I have discovered in my research that secondary sources are frustrating. They perpetuate stories that might have been mere imagination, or they build on facts that aren't exactly right. Thus I have focused as much as possible on primary sources. My dream would be to get a huge grant to digitize all the primary material and some secondary material I was working with, plus the treasures I haven't even seen yet. Among the latter would be material at the GGBHD, or even Strauss' own company files. Where are they?

Partners in such an enterprise would include for starters:
University of Cincinnati Archives (Kevin Grace)
Cincinnati Historical Society (Ann
American Jewish Archive (Kevin Profitt)
Environmental Design Archives, UC Berkeley
Transportation Archives, UC Berkeley
Water Resources Center Archives, UC Berkeley (Paul Atwood)
Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
Stanford Special Collections and Archives (Margaret Kimball)
GGBHD (Mary Currrie)
San Francisco Public Library History Room
CalTrans Archive, Sacramento
Chicago Public Library
Newberry Library
University of Chicago Library
Purdue University Archives
Purdue University

I notice that the American Experience "Golden Gate Bridge" production was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, dedicated to enhancing public understanding of technology. Perhaps they would be interested....

Easter activity

2005-03-27T21:10:00.000-08:00

The birthday party went well! There were just a few relatives gathered at a restaurant. A manageable size, but nice spread of ages from 2 to 90.

We also had lunch on Thursday with Harold's cousin who works for the Bonneville Power Administration. Good Friday we made a little escape to Bainbridge Island, a 5-hour drive. There we visited my niece, who together with her husband, works for Linblad Special Expeditions cruise company. Ross maintains the vessels and was away; Andrea works in personnel in the Seattle office. We were eager to see their "new" home, a fixer-up'er that they had made much progress on. We had a great walk around the town, and then a good dinner and breakfast before heading back to Portland.

In both directions we passed over the bridge that replaced the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that collapsed in a high wind in 1940. Did you know it was designed by Moiseiff, the same man whose theories and designs guided the construction of the GGB? He carried his idea to an extreme. The length to width ratio of Galloping Gerdy was 72 to 1, whereas the GGB was only 47 to 1. The engineer who studied the collapsed bridge was none other than Clifford Paine, Strauss's Vice President. Paine was therefore brought in to inspect the GGB in 1951 after a 69-mpg gale caused it to pitch one side of the roadway 11 feet higher than the other! Paine prescribed stiffening girders criss-crossed between the chords underneath the roadway the length of the span.

After we returned safely to Portland, we had dinner with Harold's cousin and her mother. Today, Easter Sunday, we attended Irwin's church and then visited old Cincinnati friends now living in Lake Oswego. Tomorrow it's time to return to Cincinnati. Too bad. I really wanted to return to San Francisco to hear the Calder's play at the Herbst Theater. But the airlines wouldn't cooperate in their pricing structure....

Goodbye, San Francisco

2005-03-23T21:04:00.000-08:00

One more day at Stanford and it was time to leave the Bay area. Too bad. There is so much more to do there. The History Room at the San Francisco Public Library is purported to have material, not to mention the GGBHD offices. But I didn't want to overstay my welcome with Peter and Georgia, and there is only so much one can absorb at a time. My hand was cramped from writing. Next time I'll take a laptop into the archives. Pencils and laptops - the only tools allowed. At least I have a reason to go back!

I flew to Portland OR where we'll be celebrating Harold's father's 90th birthday tomorrow! Our arrival was a surprise. He lives in Gresham. We're staying in a nearby motel. Tonight we had dinner with Harold's Oberlin classmate and his wife.

Back to Berkeley

2005-03-22T20:53:00.000-08:00

I wasn't really done at Berkeley. There was another archive to see - the Water Resources Center Archives. There they had the files of Derleth, Dean of Engineering at Berkeley and consulting engineer for the GGB. His papers were interesting, corroborating much of what I had seen already. At the WRCA I had to do my own copying, and had to fortify myself with dimes to copy the many letters and articles that appeared interesting.

I worked there all day. Librarian Paul Atwood kindly helped me to search for dissertations on the bridge, done by students at Berkeley and Stanford. We found the 2003 dissertation entitled "Paying the toll...." It was mostly about the funding of the bridge and had little to say about Strauss. I need to get my hands on a 1958 dissertation that looks promising....

At day's end I whisked over to the Bancroft Library, but only in time enough to learn their policies. I suspect they have photographs that might be of interest, but I have already seen some of them posted on the internet. Perhaps my retracing those steps is not necessary.

Music@Menlo

2005-03-20T20:25:00.000-08:00

Friend Peter and his wife Georgia are music lovers and support the new Music@Menlo chamber music program in Menlo Park. The festival runs in the summer, but during the off-months they organized a thank-you concert for donors. I got to tag along as a guest. The program featured past, excellent students from the program, and also Wu-Han, pianist. The setting was amazing - in a house tucked on the side of a hill in Los Altos. They had a veritable theater in the home, the result of Mrs. Birnbaum being a singer. She claims she sang with the Cincinnati Opera back when performances were at the zoo. She predates our time in Cincinnati apparently.

Mr. Birnbaum was assistant to Carly Fiorina, president of HP that was recently forced out. I learned after leaving that he recently gave an IEEE presentation on IT and electronic libraries. See "Cybersecurity considerations for digital libraries in an era of pervasive computing," Birnbaum, J., Proceedings of the 2004 Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries, 2004, 7-11 June 2004 Page(s):169. If I had known I would have struck up a conversation!

Later that day we had lunch with my college roommate Ann Hill, who drove up from Salinas. She is a prosecutor for Monterey County, and that keeps her busy. Her beat is abusers/molesters. Disheartening cases.... We walked and talked to exercise her dog. Thus ended the weekend.

Saturday in San Francisco

2005-03-19T20:11:00.000-08:00

My cousin lives in San Jose. She offered to take me on a walking tour of San Francisco. After two long days sitting in the Stanford archives, I was ready for a break. Gail picked me up early in the morning and we whisked into town, parked near the Ferry Building, and began the day with a cruise through the Farmer's Market. We bought some vittles, but nothing bulky as we would be walking all day.

Gail had a book on stair walks, and she led me on a walk combining two of the tours in her book. It was fascinating. We had views in all directions, needless to say, and took in places such as Coit Tower, Lombard Street, and much in between. We descended through China Town, got a late lunch at the Ferry Building, and then caught a ferry to Sausalito in order to view the GGB from the water. Upon our return, we rode the trolley up to the Castro District where we had dinner. By then it was getting dark, so we trollied back to the car and drove it through Fisherman's Wharf area to the south end of the GGB in order to see the statue of Strauss. I was amazed at the display of cable, a 3-foot diameter cross-section. It looks so delicate at a distance! It was too late to walk across, but at least I got to see the bridge up close.

Heading back to the freeway we passed landmarks such as the San Francisco Conservatory and San Francisco State. We were bushed but pleased to have had strenuous exercise while taking in a myriad of sites. Next time I'll have to walk across the GGB and back.

Lunch at Stanford

2005-03-17T21:09:00.000-08:00

I found my counterpart at lunch time - Karen Clay - in the Stanford Engineering Library. We joined other science librarians and staff at the student center. There I reconnected with others I knew, including Sharon Propas who at one time worked in Langsam Reference!

I was thinking about being envious of Karen and her position at Stanford, such a prestigious institution. But when I found her she was in her blue jeans, pulling journal volumes off the shelves to go to storage. This was her first foray into sending off items for which she also had electronic access. And she had to fight for the space. We are progressive in Ohio. We can be thankful for that.

By the way, though friend Peter dropped me off in the morning, I was able to walk "home" at the end of the day. It was a 30-minute walk past the hospital area and the faculty/grad housing. It's a huge campus, not to mention the shopping center they own....

Stanford next

2005-03-17T20:30:00.000-08:00

Stanford had the files of Keesling, Chairman of the Building Committee for the GGBHD (Golden Gate Bridge Highway District) and sat on the Board of Directors. Needless to say he had lots to do with Strauss as Chief Engineer. Keesling was a Stanford graduate, hence their acquisition of his personal files. Some of the files were devoted to his work on the bridge; in his real life he was a lawyer. Stanford had a set-up similar to the Environmental Design Archives at Berkeley, in that they asked me to identify material for copying and then they would copy and send for a fee.

It was hard to restrict myself as I screened the material for any correspondence related to Strauss specifically. I especially liked two habits of Keesling. One was to keep a calendar in which he noted with whom he met, the topic, and a brief description of content. Much in the way a lawyer would track billable hours. He also had someone take transcripts of meetings so that you can see who said what verbatim. This got interesting when Strauss was on the hot seat.

San Francisco, here I come

2005-03-16T19:11:00.000-08:00

The Ides of March. That's the day I flew to San Jose from LA where I heard the Calders the night before. I have high-school friends who live in Menlo Park, right across the stream from Stanford. How lucky could I be? They picked me up at the airport, fed me well, and gave me a good night's sleep.

Today I actually started in at the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley in order to catch them on days they are open. Also, I had to give Stanford time to fetch files from storage. It was an adventure getting to Berkeley by public transportation. I took CalTrain to Millbrae and then BART to Berkeley. It took a while, but I made it!

The Archives have a file of Irving and Gertrude Morrow. Irving Morrow was architect for the GGB. The file contained much correspondence between Morrow and Strauss. The Archives allowed me to identify items for copying, which they would do for a price and send to me at home.

Who should I have lunch with, but Elizabeth Byrne! She was head of the DAAP library way back when.... It was great to see her, and to have a tour of her library, the Environmental Design Library. She looks great, especially so following a spate of serious health problems. She took me to the Women's Faculty Club on campus. Wouldn't you know they had to have their own, back in the day when women weren't allowed in the Faculty Club. But now everyone is entitled to use both....

Calders in Ohio

2005-03-04T21:26:00.000-08:00

Weird. I just HEARD the Calders at MIT Friday. This week they played in Dayton and Springfield, right in our backyard! Fun for us, but hard on them. They drove all the way from Boston for these two concerts March 2 and 3 and then had to drive all the way to Bethlehem PA for a March 4 concert....

Family entertainment

2005-02-26T16:07:00.000-08:00

Special entertainment was provided this week by sons Mark and Eric. On Thursday night, Margret and I, plus her husband Ed Goldman and Bruce Lippert, went to All Asia, a little club in Cambridge right near MIT, to hear Mark (Markaholic) in a debut performance of his songs, complete with dancing girls! He even included Eric playing cello in some songs. It was a small but supportive and enthusiastic crowd that cheered him on. He survived the test of public performance!

On Friday night the Calder Quartet played in Kresge Auditorium at MIT to an unexpectedly huge crowd of at least 600. Perhaps it was the result of an appearance earlier in the week on WGBH, or because two of the players come from Boston. They were received warmly and enthusiastically. So Eric and his performing group also survived the test of a Boston public performance.

Back to Boston: Shadowing at MIT

2005-02-25T13:03:00.000-08:00

After my outing to Harvard, I spent two days at MIT. There I shadowed Margret Branschofsky (known to us at UC as Margret Lippert), who now works on the DSpace project. Her job is spreading the gospel to new institutions interested in using DSpace, and encouraging departments and other "communities" at MIT to join up. She gave me a brochure that lists all the wonderful reasons why people should use DSpace. I plan to use this type of information when stimulating interest at UC Engineering in an institutional repository.

Among the compelling reasons for DSpace are a larger audience, quick distribution of research, organized access to work of department, College, etc., stable URL for future access, long-term preservation of formats. Their content consists of preprints, working papers, tech reports, data sets, simulations, images, course materials, and more.

Also during my days at MIT I visited with Steve Gass to tell him our reactions to RefWorks, which they were considering. On the 23rd I visited the Institute Archives & Special Collections to see if they had any information on Joseph B. Strauss. That they didn't have, but they did print out a list from LC's NUCMC of other archives that do have material. Stanford was one of the locations.

Back to Boston: Trouble at Harvard

2005-02-24T14:28:00.000-08:00

Tuesday I was on the plane headed from Chicago to Boston. First thing on my agenda was a Wednesday visit to Harvard, where the science librarians are using DSpace to create an institutional repository for their stuff. In case you are curious, you can see the list of science libraries at http://lib.harvard.edu/libraries/listings_sciencelib.html . Not an insignificant number.

I met with Connie Rinaldo in the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. They have field notes and other artifacts that they are digitizing, ever so slowly. The Physics Librarian Michael Leach has led the initiative to put DSpace on the physics department server and rely on the physics department IT staff to keep it running. Truthfully, there is not much to look at yet, but it was useful to hear about the process of setting things up, bringing in faculty, deciding on material, metadata, finding staff support, etc. This is definitely a shoe-string operation, with the OK of the administration but no funding....

Did you know they have a storage facility at Harvard? I believe our SWORD modules were modeled after the Harvard model. But there's one difference. Connie says they have to pay to get materials back, so no one wants to use it. Yikes!

A funny thing happened on my trek across Harvard Yard. I could hear chanting, mostly of female voices. It was a demonstration by students railing about the President's comments on females and science/math education during a faculty senate meeting. That hit the papers big time - nationwide. What was he thinking?

Intro to Chicago

2005-02-22T13:09:00.000-08:00

There is a reason to visit Chicago. It is the city where Joseph B. Strauss, UC '92 (that's 1892) set up his Strauss Bascule Bridge Company of Chicago in 1902. When Peder, my "Norwegian brother" (from host family during my 1961-1962 year in Norway) said he was going to Chicago to research a musician from his home of Voss, I couldn't resist the temptation to join him and learn the ropes of doing research in Chicago.

Granted, most of our time during the last two days was researching Knute Finney, a violinist and teacher active in Chicago starting at the turn of the century. We visited music stores, instrument makers, music schools, the offices of the Chicago Symphony, and the old Norwegian section of town near Belmont (now mostly Hispanic). We talked to music librarians at Roosevelt, Northwestern, and other interesting places. Peder is an impressive researcher, with innumerable contacts and a 3-ring binder full of his sources. That on top of his real job as a physician and avocation playing bassoon in the Voss orchestra!

The key research spots for me - the Chicago Public Library and the Newberry Library - were alas closed for President's Day. Peder was able to visit them today, but I am on my way to Boston, for another adventure. I will have to learn via email whether those libraries have good material for me. If so, a return visit will be in order.

The Jewish connection

2005-02-18T14:52:00.000-08:00

Strauss was of Jewish heritage, and thus the American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati also has files on Strauss. I spent a couple of days there this week, pouring over their files. Kevin Profitt was very helpful in connecting me with the material. He subsequently took vacation in San Francisco and was inspired to take a walk across the GGB!

The files contained pictures, articles, and many 1927 letters and telegrams attesting to Strauss' bridge-building skills addressed to the Port Authority NYC. Happily the AJA also had some photos, postcards of the Redwoods, about which Strauss wrote a poem dated October 2, 1932 and also sheet music for a setting of the poem by Oscar Rasbach. The AJA gave permission to use this material with acknowledgement. In fact Kevin even arranged for them to digitize it and provide it to me on a CD.

Strauss beginnings

2005-02-14T16:33:00.000-08:00

Where to begin? At the beginning. Since Strauss was born in Cincinnati, our local resources seemed a logical place. I began at the Museum Center's Cincinnati Historical Society Library.

There I found references to Joseph B. Strauss (JBS) in the Victor Heintz collection. I believe from a note in the file (hand-written by Mary Ellen Heintz in the early 1970's) that JBS was Heintz' ΣAE pledge brokee at University of Cincinnati. Strauss in fact founded the chapter. Heintz became a lawyer and later an active figure in the Republican Party. He had considerable correspondence with Strauss in 1919 and 1920. Strauss sought Heintz' assistance in introducing Strauss by letter to people in decision-making positions when seeking to get contracts on bridges.

It took a couple of days to read through all the correspondence, which I then recommended to be digitized. The librarian indicated they wished to begin digitizing portions of their colletions and that this would make a good pilot.

Joseph B. Strauss

2005-02-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

Joseph Baermann Strauss was Chief Engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge (GGB). He was born in Cincinnati in 1870 and graduated from UC in 1892 with a degree in Civil Engineering. Creating an archive about Strauss was mentioned as one of the ideas to pursue during this sabbatical, way back on Friday, October 8, 2004!

Why an archive about Strauss? It seems that he has received bad press lately, following the exposure of a conflict between him and his one-time company Vice President Charles A. Ellis. After Strauss dismissed Ellis, all traces of Ellis' contributions in calculating stresses for the GGB were eradicated. In their zeal to restore Ellis to his rightful place in history, his proponents went a bit overboard in denigrating Strauss, claiming for example that he did not even have an engineering degree. Some of these mis-facts were perpretrated and dramatized in a 2004 PBS American Experience program entitled "Golden Gate Bridge." UC engineering faculty member Mike Baseheart and I thought it would good to set the record straight, from the UC point of view. Hence the project.

Librarians, libraries, and DSpace abroad

2005-01-04T15:30:00.000-08:00

The London trip had its librarian moments! First was the trip to Cambridge, riding the train with Bents' friends. Mike and Irene are both librarians. Mike worked in archives and lost his job. He is currently looking. A bleak scene in London really. Irene works in a public library. I was unable to visit her work place however. Once in Cambridge we all met Eleanor, another friend of Bents, who is also a librarian! She too is a public librarian!

During our visit Ian Bent wanted to show us his new study, a room built over the garage across the back garden from their townhouse. He was eager to show us his project about Heinrich Schenker, music theorist, whose works Ian is translating and digitizing. (Ian is retired from the Music Department at Columbia and continuing work on Schenker in retirement at home in England.) As I looked about Ian's study, I notice a large notebook labeled "Dublin Core!" I told him the origin of the name (being an Ohioan!) and then asked why he had it. He said he used it to develop his metadata for the Schenker digital archive! And where should his archive reside but on DSpace!!! The tech people at Cambridge University are helping him with DSpace software so that he can "publish" his work begun at Columbia. So there across the sea, in a retired music professor's home office, I discovered the very thing I had taken the year to study, digital archives. Except he was doing it!!!

And finally we could not leave London without seeing the fabulous new British Library, just a half mile walk from our flat. We caught a glimpse of the exhibits, but ran out of time for the full tour. We learned that the document delivery people are not in London, so I couldn't see the very department we have been dealing with for Engineering Library delivery service.... It is an impressive building, one I hope to revisit for a longer time.

London activities ad nauseam

2005-01-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

Byers London Trip
December 23, 2004 to January 2, 2005

Thursday, Dec 23
Cincinnati snowstorm – 12”!!! with ice crust on top.
Flight cancelled. Shovelled driveway. Plow didn’t show.
Eric flew nonstop LA to London

Friday, Dec 24
Flew to London via Chicago
Trip down driveway most harrowing.
Eric arr at flat on Gray’s Inn Road in Bloomsbury. Wandered around London; services at St. Paul’s full.

Saturday, Dec 25, Christmas!
Arr early in London. Saw Buckingham Palace, Harrod's, Trafalgar Square, Green Park, St. James Park, and Regency Park from lost bus.
Everything closed incl subway, except special bus to Paddington, that lost its way in town.
Naps followed by walk in evening over Waterloo bridge and back on Westminster bridge. Saw Royal Festival Hall, St. Martin's in the Field Church. Ate near Picadilly - all else closed.
Stephano’s Cafe

Sunday, Dec 26
London Eye (giant ferris wheel next to Thames with great view of London, 30 min ride) at sunset/moon rise (full moon!). Walked to Westminster Abbey, Parliament buildings, Big Ben.
Boxing Day when gifts are presented to servants, etc who work Christmas Day.
Evening London Walk tour “Jack the Ripper” with Ellen Parkhurst, Harold’s cousin.

Monday, Dec 27
Cambridge via train from King’s Cross to Bent's* (St. Thomas Choir School friends). Walking tour of Cambridge with Ian Bent, who attended St. John’s College. First adequate (festive!) meal! Rode with their friends Irene, Mike and Katie Pollack; friend Eleanor and son Jon were at home. Irene, Mike and Eleanor all librarians! Boys went to Walkabout night club in evening back in London.

Tuesday, Dec 28
British Museum, saw top items of interest and more.
“Mousetrap” by Agatha Christie in evening. Dorothy guessed who-dunnit.
Ate at nearby Thai Garden restaurant before play, at Bella Italia after play.

Wednesday, Dec 29
Richmond. Joel Foreman and Michelle Moncrieffe's wedding festivities; walk in park and along Thames. Met friends of Joel (Harold’s nephew) and his wife.
Ate at Princes Head pub after walk. Jamaican hors d’oeuvres at home of Monica and Winston Moncrieffe.

Thursday, Dec 30
Internet cafe. Quick glimpse of British Library at St. Pancras near King's Cross station. Walked to Sotheby's on New Bond Street and to see (closed) art galleries on Cork Street.
Saw Magna Carta and other old manuscripts.
Marriage celebration at Clapham Junction, followed by dinner and dance.
Took train from Victoria station.

Friday, Dec 31
Leeds Castle and Canterbury with Murray Foreman, Harold’s brother-in-law. Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas Beckett was murdered (guest parish choir).
Another excellent London Walk tour trip from Victoria Station.
Dinner in London at Delhi Brasserie.
Boys to New Year’s Eve party at boyfriend of Jon's friend Jessica.

Saturday, Jan 1, New Year’s!
St. Paul’s Church (peeked in only) and Millenium Bridge to Shakespeare’s Globe Museum and Theatre (peeked in only) and Tate Modern Museum.
Tate in old power station. Lunch in café with views.
The only day it rained!
Ministry of Sound night club at Elephant and Castle (sold out tho) and “Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” (Mark and DB only)

Sunday, Jan 2
Eric nonstop to LA.
Others to Cincinnati via Dallas. DB sick on flight to Cincinnati.

Monday, Jan 3
Recovery day.
DB still sick. Snow gone, temps 60!

*Ian and Caroline Bent are Mark’s godparents. Jonathan graduated from St. Thomas Choir School the year before Mark.

Purpose of trip: to attend the marriage celebration festivities of Joel Foreman (Harold’s nephew) and his wife Michelle. They live in Bemidji MN right now. Joel is a lawyer, Michelle a journalist.

In general, the boys couldn’t get enough to eat in London. Portions are small and expensive. Many things were closed for the holidays, which made planning difficult. Since Christmas and Boxing Day were on the weekend, many shops took the following days off as well. Everything cost twice what it does in the US, so thank goodness the museums were free.

Unexpected Christmas

2004-12-26T14:33:00.000-08:00

I got home at last, Tuesday December 21. That only left one day to get ready for a trip to London! to attend the marriage celebration of Harold's nephew Joel. We were to leave Thursday before Christmas, but that great storm I fought in Iowa caught up with Cincinnati and dumped 12 inches of snow, topped with an inch of ice. All travel came to a halt. We couldn't even exit our driveway. We learned later that our drive was not plowed out until two days after Christmas. I spent Thursday shoveling two tracks from my parking spot down our long, steep driveway, hoping that gravity would play its part in getting the car down the hill.

Next day, Christmas Eve, my plan was tested. I "drove" the car down the driveway, with Mark and a neighbor pushing on either side. It was a roller coaster out of control, but I managed to hit the street without crashing into any stone walls along the way. We made it safely to our plane, having changed our reservation before the mad rush of stymied passengers.

We arrived in London early Christmas Day. Remember Scrooge awakening in London on Christmas morning? the children, snow, singers, and other jolly-makers? That's not the London we saw. Everything was shut down tight as a drum, even the tube. Special buses took passengers to town and dumped us at a closed station. The best part of Christmas Day was finding our flat in Bloomsbury and meeting up with Eric, who had arrived safely from Los Angeles the day before with nary a problem. He had spent Christmas Eve wandering around London on his own, after being turned away at St. Paul's along with crowds of others.

We spent most of Christmas Day walking, looking for any sign of Christmas or people or food. At last, near the theater district, we found an open restaurant. By then the boys were famished. Generally speaking, London was tomb-like during the entire week following Christmas. Many shops and restaurants were closed, but the museums were thankfully open.

Joel married a young woman named Michelle from SW London, and our family represented the Byers set of relatives. We enjoyed many marriage-related festivities, as well as doing some sight-seeing. See next entry for details.

Dog Trots and Tumble Weeds

2004-12-20T21:52:00.000-08:00

Today I set out homeward from Loveland, Colorado for Iowa City. The wind felt good on a clear 48-degree day. But after turning northeast onto I-76, the wind became unfriendly. The sun that shone on the snow-covered peaks behind me faded into a haze that must have been dust. Then I noticed tumble weeds scooting over the highway. And more, and more. Some were as big as little Christmas trees. I tried dodging them after one crashed into the side of the car with a thud. But at high speed, dodge ’em is not possible and I resorted to braking and speeding to let them pass ahead or behind, with some success. In all I was hit violently 3 times on the side and once on the windshield. The trucks were dog-trotting down the highway, with their rear axles into the shoulder while the cabs held the lane. Everyone was buffeted mercilessly. After three hours of enduring the debris, the survivors had tumble-weed trophies stuck underneath or in front, or even on the roof midst leaning bicycles. Mine decorates the license plate.

I looked forward to heading east on I-80, but by then the north wind had brought a nasty cold front with freezing rain and sinking temperatures all across Nebraska. By Des Moines the salt trucks were of no avail, so slick was the glaze that formed on the highway. I gave it up after seeing several cars off the road, and watching two adjacent ones do 360’s in the high speed lanes, honking as they spun to warn nearby cars and trucks. So scoff not at Super 8 where I welcome shelter from the perils of the road. May tomorrow be a better day.

Goodbye LA

2004-12-19T23:28:00.000-08:00

The last week in LA went like crazy. Having dinner with friends, getting a chance to hear a concert (Messiah) in the new Disney Hall, holiday lunches, and a good-bye lunch for my with librarians from USC's Leavey Library and the Digital Imaging Management crew. We ate outside at a wonderful Italian restaurant downtown LA on Figueroa called . The perfect send-off.

Saturday December 18 I began the long journey home, my car packed to the gills with my own possessions and those of Sharon Yeh (son's ex-fiancee). I took the risky northern route in order to drop off Sharon's bicycle and other items in Loveland CO where she will be moving to study at Colorado State in Fort Collins.

I introduced Sharon, her sister and her brother-in-law to my niece Katie and her boyfriend Jason, who also studies at CSU and enjoys rock climbing. We had a good dinner in old Ft. Collins Sunday evening.

Cal Tech visit

2004-12-15T11:25:00.000-08:00

On December 14 I was able to visit California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in Pasadena. What a different place, Cal Tech in Pasadena. The surrounding neighborhood bespeaks old, comfortable wealth and the campus itself is rich with foliage and calm. Where the students? bicycle hoards? football players? irksome panhandlers? And why does it seem familiar? The library felt like an old shoe, with indexes and reference books as on shelves at home.

I was met by Jim O'Donnell, Head of Collections, Information and Research Services and Head of the Geology & Planetary Science Library. He introduced me to several other people involved in maintaining CODA, their institutional repository. They were George Porter, Technical Reference Librarian in Library Information Technology (LIT), Betsy Coles, Applications Development in LIT, and Jay Walters, System/Network Administration in LIT.

Their approach to digitizing (CODA) couldn’t be more different from the efforts at USC. It has grassroots origins; it grows as needed with scarcely a guideline other than it must be faculty work, and must be academic; it is tended by these four eager persons who share their time willingly; and it runs on whatever servers they can spare for the effort. It is as they say a shoestring operation, and it works. It’s how techy types do it. I felt right at home.

I learned about how they manage their repository, which uses EPrints, an open access software. They started before D-Space at MIT was developed. Each person plays a role in operating CODA, with no one working at it full time. They even call upon the document delivery staff to assist with scanning, as they have the staff and equipment to handle the task. I liked their style of collaboration and experimentation, with their modest beginning leading to a fuller product as faculty became aware of the opportunity to participate and the team learned to handle a variety of materials.

They use CODA for theses, lab reports, technical reports, articles, report series, born-digital conference proceedings created using CODA, and complex geographical presentations. Right now CODA consists of separate groups of materials, with no cross-collection searching. Adding federated searching is a current goal.

At the end of the afternoon I met Kim Douglas and had a chance to brainstorm a bit about the direction of digital repositories, federated searching and other challenges. I was enticed to want to return and work with the CODA team in the spring, though working with OhioLINK's selected repository software would probably be the wiser thing to do.

Dante's View and Venice Beach and LACMA

2004-12-13T11:59:00.000-08:00

Saturday December 11 was glorious. Totally.
I arranged to take a rigorous walk to Dante's View in Griffith Park with Joel Flashman, former teacher of son Mark. Of all days, he was trapped in the elevator of his apartment building for two hours and missed the hike. I hoofed it up alone, at a brisk pace. It was tank-top sunny with clear blue skies offering a complete panorama of Los Angeles, Palos Verdes, Santa Monica, and the ocean beyond. Happily, the gardens on top offered a hose for filling water bottles and dog dishes. Perfect refreshment for the reluctant trip back down.

Late in the afternoon, Saschka Haberl and her mother (from Berlin) joined Eric and me for a trip to Venice Beach. We drove over the canals, lined with houses lighted for Christmas, waded in the ocean, heard the drummers beating incessantly, watched roller skaters, browsed in Small World Books bookstore, and then ate next door at the Sidewalk Café. It was a perfect evening to see the sunset and say good-bye to the ocean.

Sunday the Calders played at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was a free concert that was broadcast live. Special audience guests were Wayne Smith (Eric's cello teacher from Cincinnati) and his wife Eva and son Daniel. All were visiting from their home in Berlin!

ISD party

2004-12-11T11:43:00.000-08:00

On Friday, December 10 everyone working in the Information Services Division at USC (all library and information technology personnel) were invited to a party hosted by Jerry Campbell, Chief Information Officer and Dean of the University Libraries. It was held at the Empress Pavilion in Chinatown. Attendance was limited to 350 persons! Guests were welcome. Son Eric was my escort.

It was a remarkable party, with delicious food served in countless courses, live music, dancing, prizes, and table favors (a tiny squishy USC football of course). Jerry Campbell delivered an emotional speech, counting the blessings of being among friends and co-workers after dealing with serious illness, and knowing this would be his last year. He visited every table, giving me the opportunity to meet him and thank him for approving my sabbatical time there. It was a memorable occasion.

Playing hookie

2004-12-10T15:30:00.000-08:00

The Calders were very busy last week, with a concert Thursday at Colburn, a Friday Colburn Orchestra concert, and a quartet concert on the UCLA Live! series on Saturday night. (The same night USC played UCLA in football and won.) It poured rain all Sunday, so Eric and I took Monday as a day off. We explored hiking trails in the nearby area, as the mountain roads had snow. We also drove through residential areas in the hills just below the Hollywood sign and in Silver Lake. Amazing constructions! Architects and builders must have nightmares trying to build there. If you look at any LA map, you will find these streets by their curly lines, as opposed to the grid-like lines in the flat areas.

In our search for a trail head on the west side of Griffith Park we discovered the Sunset Ranch, offering horse-back riding in the park. So we went for it - an hour trip with the half-way point a look-out south across all LA to the ocean. The sun came out just as we reached the look-out. Eric had never been on a horse before; he found it a fun new experience.

Other highlights of our day off included finding the Dodger Stadium and nearby hillock where we sat and watched the sun setting over the ocean beyond Santa Monica.

LACASIS/SLA-SCC

2004-12-09T13:36:00.000-08:00

Tuesday December 7 I attended the Joint LACASIS/SLA-SCC Holiday Program featuring the speaker Dr. Kevin Starr, a historian who writes about California. He was also formerly California State Librarian. He spoke somewhat autobiographically about his experience at Harvard with the California collection in Widener, and about his experience as State Librarian. Throughout he emphasized the importance of librarians as knowing content, not just data facilitators, as can happen in the digital age.

LACASIS/SLA-SCC stands for: Los Angeles Chapter ASIS / SLA Southern California Chapter. They have joint meetings once in a while. This was held at a hotel in Long Beach. I was surprised at the number in attendance, and at the diversity. Among the attendees was Doris Helfer, Department Chair Technical Services at CSUN Northridge. She is running for President of SLA. Her Dean Susan Curzon was also there. She invited me to see their robotic retrieval system and also their digital archive, running on CONTENTdm Multimedia Software . (Wayne at USC tells me they looked at this software when Documentum was selected for USC. The proprietary metadata structure limited the ability to create or label your own fields.) The CSUN Northridge archives can be viewed at http://library.csun.edu/spcoll/digi_coll.html .

Other librarians represented law firms, Aerospace Corporation, bank archives, the California African American Museum just south of the USC campus, hospital librarians, 20th Century Fox librarians, representatives from Ebsco, Lexis Nexis, and of course many academic librarians.

Winter

2004-11-30T22:23:00.000-08:00

Here’s how you get winter in Los Angeles. You go up. The Saturday before Thanksgiving it rained and a cold front came through. The Sunday morning temperature dropped a whopping 5 degrees to 45. This did not daunt us northerners; son Eric and I set out for rock climbing in the San Gabriel Mountains. But just 45 minutes up Route 2, after passing rocks and other debris in the road from wind and rain, we encountered signs requiring chains or snow tires on drive wheels. We were not so equipped, so we parked the car and instead hiked five miles up the road to Mt. Wilson Observatory.

We must have reached an elevation of 5,700 feet; the temperature had dropped to 30 and the wind was relentless. It was snowy and icy underfoot, but we proceeded with determination in anticipation of warmth, a bathroom, and a tour of the observatory. Alas, the observatory was closed due to the weather. But the view was spectacular. The cold front had cleared the air, revealing a breathtaking panaroma of Los Angeles. We could see south to the ocean beyond San Pedro and Long Beach to the left of Palos Verdes, and the ocean beyond Santa Monica to the right of Palos Verdes. Even more remarkable, we could see the islands of Santa Catalina and maybe even San Clemente beyond Palos Verdes!

The day after Thanksgiving was warmer and the entire family drove to the Observatory, hoping for another panaromic view. But alas, the city lay under a white cover. Across the mountains far to the east however we could see the Cogshill Dam, where Eric and I bicycled two weeks before. We also got to see the 100” telescope which Hubble used in his pioneering work on the Big Bang and expansion of the universe.

Deep Dive

2004-11-30T22:21:00.000-08:00

One day the week before Thanksgiving the user studies group watched a video of Deep Dive, an ABC production of Nightline with Ted Koppel. Deep Dive investigates the design process as illustrated by the company IDEO. The company was founded by Dave Kelley, a Stanford Mechanical Engineering professor, and creates 90 new products a year. They are experts on the design process. See their web site at www.ideo.com.

What intrigued the group at USC was the IDEO culture, which emphasizes creativeness to the point of zany, with a few guiding principles such as one conversation at a time in group discussion, focus, no critiques. IDEO would call their approach “focused chaos.” Employees are free to generate ideas and solutions within the confines of customer needs. One important concept is to fail often to succeed sooner.

The model of giving free rein to the creation of ideas and solutions is one that the user studies group hoped to apply to their work at USC, releasing their creative potential from the confines of a more structured process. It’s similar to the way The Incredibles was created, by investing in an excellent team and relying on their talent to produce the final product.

I was struck by the similarity between IDEO ground rules and techniques (such as posting sticky-notes with any and every idea and using team judges to sift through the ideas) and the strategic planning process recently used at UC’s University Libraries.

Helicopter

2004-11-19T21:23:00.000-08:00

Helicopters warn that this cloistered house is an island in a Teeming City. Sometimes they are checking traffic on "the 10" which is close to the north. But when the search lights come on and pan the area over and over I know they are looking for something sinister. One evening as I walked home from the USC Tram stop in the dark, I noticed one circling over the house. Its beam almost hit me in the face. I rushed through the gate and felt relieved to close it behind me. Now (Friday night) I hear another chopper overhead. But no matter - I am safe in my Secret Garden.

SMART charts

2004-11-17T23:52:00.000-08:00

Back to process and project management. Wayne was tasked with assessing all the archive projects (collections) in the offing and prioritizing them. There are about 30 of them. Today he showed me a technique called SMART Chart for developing his priorities. It comes from the business environment.

On the first sheet of an Excel workbook:

List in the left column relevant criteria or attributes, such as status of the metadata, status of the content, whether the collection was previously available in the legacy system, whether there will be copyright issues affecting publishing, and so forth.
Place the collections across the top row.
Rate the readiness of each collection based on the criteria using, in this case, a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest weight.

On the second sheet:

Match the criteria against each other by listing them in the left column and also across the top row.
In each intersecting cell give a 0-4 rating, where 0 represent "much less important" and 4 represents "much more important" and 2 is neutral - neither more nor less important
In cells where a criterion is matched against itself, enter a 2.
For the remaining cells, enter an importance rating. For example: is it more important or less important that the metadata are ready versus the collection has already been available (and users are accustomed to having access).
If a 3 is entered for A versus B, then a 1 is entered for B versus A so that both ratings total 4.
Add the ratings for each row (for each criterion) to get a total importance rating.

On the third sheet:

List the criteria in the left column, as in Sheet 1.
List the collections on the top row, as in Sheet 1.
Again match each criterion against each collection, this time multiplying the total criterion rating from Sheet 2 by the collection value on Sheet 1. (A macro can be written to do this.)
The column totals show the number of cumulated points for each collection, with the highest totals receiving the highest priority.

Voila! Your decisions are made!

Imaging

2004-11-17T23:20:00.000-08:00

Today I tried my hand at using some of the fancy equipment in the imaging studio at USC. Matt Gainer and Giao (pronounced Yiao) Luong are digitizing USGS topo maps of California from the early 1900's. They have a Sinar P 4x5 camera on a huge 9' camera stand with a BetterLite Super 6K2 Scanback device in it. The camera faces straight down to a 32"x46" black platform that is large enough to handle the maps, posters and other large formats. BetterLite has its own scanning software (ViewFinder) that controls the camera and Scanback, captures the image, renders a tiff file, and sends it to a Mac with Adobe Photoshop for post-processing and quality control (cropping, rotating and converting etc.). KinoFlo daylight-balanced fluorescents (2 sets of 4Bank) shine on the black platform. A QP color target card is scanned with the image with a white/grey/black color scale to help assesss color and tonal values.

Once the image is created, it is examined for focus around the edges, saved, and reviewed to make sure the color is OK. (Careful color evaluation is not necessary for the topos. Images created for the USC Fisher Gallery collection on the other hand will require critical color evaluation.) The images are stored on portable hard drives (Firewire) until they are tfp'd to the staging server. (Portable hard drives make it easy to move work from one person and/or station to another.)

Renditions are later created on the staging server according to the specifications of the collection. Typical derivative renditions of the images include thumbnails, 256x256 jpegs for a quick view, 1024x1024 jpegs, and MrSID compressed images where zooming is required, such as with these topo maps. Tiffs are stored on tape as the archival digital images but not used in the public interface. The imaging process to create content runs parallel to the creation of metadata describing the images. Metadata is sometimes pre-existing, sometimes created from scratch, or sometimes migrated from Excel spreadsheets, as with the Seaver collection. Eventually the metadata and content are brought together. (Part of my work for the last two weeks has been using the ingest system to create metadata for the LA Examiner photos and adding links to the photo images.)

Not in Cincinnati

2004-11-17T23:04:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning as I was reaching "home" from my early morning run to USC and workout at the Lyon Recreation Center, I spotted a couple of school boys on top of a wall surrounding the yard of a nearby house. Their friends on the sidewalk were catching oranges which the boys were stealing from a tree that spread above the wall. Do orange trees grow in Cincinnati and bear fruit in November? Would I have been running in shorts?

Last night I performed with the USC Concert Orchestra, a campus community orchestra made up of non-music majors, faculty, staff, and a few music majors for extra support. The fun piece on the concert was Dvorak's New World Symphony. Elizabeth Pitcairn, violin soloist, played Zigeunerweisen. I was surprised at the size and strength of the orchestra. There must have been 30 violins! UC tried to start such an orchestra back in the '70's but it flopped. I noticed recently a sign on the board in Baldwin Hall seeking players to try again. In a university the size of UC it should be possible, but the infrastructure needs to be there. USC's infrastructure features a conductor who teaches conducting and works well with the students, access to rehearsal rooms and concert halls complete with stands and other equipment, 1 semester credit for students who participate, access to music faculty who sometimes do sectionals , and a student manager (TA perhaps?). Sharon Lavey started 7 years ago with a handful of players. Now there must be at least 80 if not more.

Did I see rain?

2004-11-14T23:39:00.000-08:00

I believe there were some drops this week, even a few on Saturday morning, the day of USC Homecoming! But it all cleared up for game time. I was advised to stay clear of campus during homecoming, so I went in the opposite direction - on a bike ride in the San Gabriel mountains with son Eric. We drove east of Pasadena on the 210 to Azusa and then headed north on 39 to the "trail head." The trail was actually a paved service road along the San Gabriel river leading about 8 miles up to the Cogswell dam. I thought I was weak from running in pancake-flat Los Angeles but on the return trip I realized that we had climbed a significant amount. This web site gives an idea of where we were: http://www.nearfield.com/~dan/sports/bike/mountain/sgwf/ .

Friday night I heard the Calder Quartet in concert at Los Angeles Harbor College, as part of the South Bay Chamber Music series. There was a repeat performance today at Pacific Unitarian Church in Palos Verdes. What a view from the church! a panoramic vista of Los Angeles and the bay, looking north all the way to the mountains in the north. I heard both performances - of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven op. 130 including the Grosse Fuge. The fugue boggles the mind; it's impossible to decipher all the voices at once. The Quartet is sounding excellent - very polished, great ensemble, lots of energy, and much finesse.

I finished reading Life of Pi, another art work to boggle the mind. The symbolism and allegory stretch the imagination, just as Beethoven does. At the end you shake your head and say to yourself: did I get that?

The many faces of digital archives

2004-11-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

This past week I continued to work on the Los Angeles Examiner photo archive. I noticed that in the early 1950's "Commies" were in the news, as were Korean War soldiers and families.

Happily this work was interspersed with meetings! They apologize about all the meetings, but it's nothing new for me, except that I can attend as in interested by-stander, without responsibility. The CIS (Collection Information System) group is project based, charged with moving the existing (legacy) digital archive to the new platform based on Documentum. Their weekly meetings, conducted by the project manager Tim Stanton, serve to make sure each subgroup is on task and to handle any problems along the way.

The subgroups work on thesaurus management, metadata and migration of it to the new system, the web user interface and testing thereof for usability, the Contributor Module for ingesting new documents into the system by staff and/or faculty themselves, and production (modifying the system architecture and documenting it). These meetings give me a chance to hear input from these various components of the project.

I notice that process is almost as important as content. The focus on project management is intense, with deadlines strongly adhered to and reporting required frequently. This culture is fairly new I am told, replacing a former casual culture that did not always produce timely results. While the goal of project management is noble and probably necessary given the complexity and size of the project, I feel a certain tension between time demanded for process versus time needed to "do the work."

Another meeting was DIM, Digital Imaging and Management. These are the people I am working with right now. They meet to discuss status of imaging projects, metadata, migration of metadata to the new system, needs of new projects coming into the system, etc.

I had occasion to see one new project firsthand. Friday morning Wayne and I met with people at the Seaver Center of Western History Research at the Natural History Museum south of Exposition Boulevard. I had never been in the building. It's a great museum; I hope to get back there as a tourist. At the Seaver Center they are digitizing photos from various collections depicting western history. Then they will be added to the USC Digital Archive. USC already has received some of the images, but the topic Friday was the descriptive data and how it would be migrated from the Center's Excel spreadsheets to the Archive. Wayne had prepared a sample of records showing conversion from an Excel record to a record in Dublin Core (with all the descriptive tags) as it would appear in the USC Digital Archive public interface. He then reviewed the intermediate steps of mapping each Excel column to a Dublin Core element such as title, subject, date, etc. And finally he showed how the record would look in XML for import into the CIS Oracle system.

The Seaver Center staff were having to make decisions about number of subject headings, use of synonyms (include as subject headings? as part of descriptions? or just let future thesaurus modules create the synonyms?), whether size of glass plate negatives or photos was something users needed to search on or sort by, forms of names, etc. They had to decide whether to allow several objects (photo, negative, glass photonegative) to be on the same record, or whether each object needed its own record. There was also discussion about ID numbers and whether a user could recognize the appropriate ID or "call" number needed to enable staff to find the originals if necessary. They also had to discuss copyright notice and whether a statement with each image or one for the collection would be sufficient. There are many details involved in making sure the final records will look good, be searchable, and provide staff as well as users with sufficient information about each record.

So it was a full week of learning. I am still sifting through it all, trying to make sure I understand how everything fits together. It is confusing because they are dealing with two systems, the legacy BRS-based home-grown system and the new Documentum-based system. The initial Seaver collections will come in under the legacy system to move the project along, rather than wait for the new system to be ready. Migration to the new system will take place later.

Sunny California

2004-11-06T10:46:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard this expression, sunny California? Now I understand it. Rain has been forecast all week, but try as forecasters might, it has not rained. In fact, there has not been a single cloud in the sky all week...until this morning.

I woke up and saw clouds! OMG (oh my gosh) as my son would say! But by the time I finished my laundry mid-morning, the clouds had blown east. I see only blue sky now.

Temps 50-70 daily. Students practice outside, eat outside, meet class outside. Bicycles everywhere, and parked outside university buildings like a Japanese train station. My housemates eat breakfast on the back deck enjoying their coffee and the early morning sun. My windows are open day and night, with no screens! I understand the lure of sunny California.

Creating metadata

2004-11-06T10:28:00.000-08:00

I have a new assignment, to get some hands-on experience. I am working with Wayne Shoaf, who is in charge of metadata for the digital archive here. (Wayne, a horn player who graduated from Oberlin, was once in charge of the Schoenberg collection here. When the collection was moved to Vienna, he had the opportunity to try out the new location for 6 months, after which trial he chose to return to sunny CA.)

One collection that is being "ingested" into the archive is from the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper, photos from the 1950's. The photo negatives have already been scanned and given accession numbers using PixArc software. My job is to find the corresponding descriptive information written on the negative jackets (a student has already photocopied these and put them in a notebook) and enter the information into the database using an ingest form. The ingest form is homegrown, and will eventually be migrated to another based on Documentum. USC is having to do a lot of customization to get Documentum to function as they need it to.

This job is like cataloging, having to make sure the proper fields are present, formats are consistent, and that anticipated user terms will pull up desired records. While I am not coding in XML, I am creating content in metadata fields that have already been defined for this collection.

An interesting consequence of this assignment is learning about newspaper photo collections and Los Angeles history. You see the same phenomena in most cities - burglaries, accidents, fires, abandoned children, etc. But you also see lots of actors and actresses in the news, whether it be posing at a special event or getting a divorce.

Not like home

2004-11-02T08:58:00.000-08:00

It's an unusual circumstance. The sun rises early here, on the eastern side of the time zone. So do I, as a result. I am out the door on my run before the traffic spews exhaust and back in plenty of time for shower, dressing, breakfast and a walk to campus.

The problem is, I am getting here early! The office does not open until 9. At 9 I am usually the first one here. Many librarians come late and work late - perhaps because of traffic. Right now I am killing time in the Leavey Library Information Commons waiting for the offices to open. The work day is 7.5 hours. At the end of the work day I leave at 5, take the USC Tram home, and have plenty of time for dinner and after-dinner activity. How can this be?

Just like home

2004-11-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

On my 15-minute walk to USC every day, I pass by the Max Kade Institute on Hoover. Saturday I had a chance to peek inside, after trying my rusty German on the people standing outside. It has an inviting living room and dining room, which serve also as a library. Upstairs students live. Apparently Max Kade wanted to support students coming from abroad.

Then further toward the USC campus is Hebrew Union College! It took me a week to realize I was walking by it every day. I plan to visit soon. I know they have exhibits. It used to be that students could not complete their rabbinical studies here, but had to transfer to Cincinnati, New York, or Jerusalem. But now, according to an acquaintance in Cincinnati, students can complete all their studies here in LA.

Cin City Shootings

2004-11-02T08:45:00.000-08:00

I am reminded that LA is the home of cinema every day. A man lying on the sidewalk downtown with fake blood on the cement, with a friend taking shots. A couple shooting with camera on tripod through a window pane into someone's house. Five trucks lined up on Exposition Blvd Sunday morning outside the Mudd Hall of Philosophy, dragging equipment in. And today a truck outside a women's shelter next to the compound of the Second Church of Christ Scientist. Not to mention random activities on campus. In fact the libraries even have a Student Filming Policy at http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/about/facilities_usage/student_filming_policy/ ! It's a way of life here.

Weekend in LA

2004-11-01T13:02:00.000-08:00

I discovered Exposition Park on my Sunday morning run. I had seen the Natural History Museum building along Exposition Blvd, south of campus. Little did I know that it was the tip of an iceberg. There is a science school, California Science Center, the stadium where USC plays football, an arena, nature trail, rose garden, fieds of grass for impromptu soccer and much more.

Sunday at 5 son Eric played a cello recital at the Colburn School of Performing Arts. It was an awesome program, each piece more challenging than the next. Fitting that on Halloween the program ended with the Cassado's Dance of the Green Devil. I thought the performance full of fire and lyricism, in graceful juxtaposition. It was great to hear him, after more than a year.

Laundry and preparing for a reception with food after the recital ate the remainder of my weekend time.

MATRIX

2004-10-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

One task of the CIS librarians is to review potential collections for the system. I attended a meeting with a medieval historian with a database entitled MATRIX Bibliographia, visible at http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu/bibliographia/ . Discussion is at the preliminary stages, with the Bibliographia scholars hoping to get a grant to keep it going. Discussions center around the cost of imaging, copyright, pushing copies to the public as needed, growth in resources, ownership of the images, adding new scholarship (like an open access journal), and so forth. This is an especially interesting example, as it is run by faculty around the country, and dependent more on the faculty person rather than on a local department or research center. CIS has to consider the cost of getting the collection into the system, the value of the collection to end-users, the ownership of the images, and the future of the collection should the present faculty member want to pass the responsibility on. CIS has developed a form for potential participants to fill out. I'll get a copy....

CIS and DIM

2004-10-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

I am learning the acronyms. CIS is USC's Collection Information System. The group I am working with is creating the system using Documentum and Oracle, and migrating away from a legacy system built on BRS and its non-relational database.

DIM is Digital Information Management. They are the people that digitize the information and create the metadata for the Collection Information System. I had meetings with both groups this week. The CIS people are very much into working through their agenda of finishing the migration, adding to collections, improving thesaurus control, and improving the Contributor software for adding material to the system. This they are building themselves.

The DIM area has fabulous scanning facilities - an entire studio devoted to it, with cameras large and small, scanners large and small, special lighting, editing software, and temporary storage devices to hold the information until it is approved and moves on to have derivatives created (thumbnails, jpegs and the like) via MrSID and gets metadata treatment.

The metadata group uses qualified Dublin Core and XML to serve descriptive information to the public. I got a good description of the positives and negatives involved in adapting Documentum to the tasks at hand. Documentum was designed for corporate revision control and audit trails. It is requiring customization for application in the digital archive arena.

The whole system runs on 3 servers, one for ingest (getting info into the system), one for renditioning, and one for thesaurus management using Documentum's Content Intelligence System (also CIS, not to be confused with USC's Collection Information System!). More than anything I am amazed at the staff resources being applied to all of these steps, in particular to the customization of Documentum.

Home Scene

2004-10-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

Just a little about the home scene.
I am staying in a Victorian house 10 blocks north of USC. I have my own room and bathroom, an internet connection, and a view into the back garden where the sun shines in all day. The garden has a furnished glassed-in room for parties and doing laundry. I can practice the violin there too and not bother anyone. The garden's fountains are always bubbling. The foliage is so thick I can scarcely see the Victorian B&B that sits across the garden. It is called the Pink Lady, for obvious reasons.

The entire garden is surrounded by a fence, lending a feeling of peace and security. There is also an off-street parking area, which inspired my decision to drive to Los Angeles. The owner of the B&B does not even lock her car! She also owns Cafe 29 on Hoover Street, which I have yet to visit.

There are six rooms in my house, each rented on a short or long-term basis by people generally related to USC, as are the alumni owners. Currently they range from the young Italian woman getting a doctorate in Slavic Literature to the Indian computer science research associate downstairs. For a few days, the parents of a student are visiting - the father from my hometown of Minneapolis but now a diplomat in Croatia. A Chinese couple just moved in while they seek a permanent apartment. We all share a living room with TV, and a huge kitchen with the biggest range I have seen - 8 gas burners, a griddle in the middle and 3 ovens! We each have spaces in cupboards and in the frig for our food supply. It seems a comfortable arrangement.

Research in Visual Arts

2004-10-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

At Doheny (USC's main library) in the Intellectual Commons (a room set aside for symposia and the like) there was a presentation yesterday (Friday) for visual arts scholars on the resources and services available to scholars in the LA area. Presenters were from the various institutions in LA that house visual materials. An impressive array. I have summarized the information elsewhere, but the institutions represented are listed below. They have literally millions of photos among them, much relating to CA history and also the movie industry.

The Huntington: Jennifer Watts
USC Regional History Collection: Dace Taube
UCLA Dept of Special Collections: Online Archive www.oac.cdlib.org
Getty Research Institute
Academy of Motion Picture Art and Science: the OSCAR people
Margaret Herrick Library
USC Cinema Library
USC AFA (Architecture and Fine Arts)
Art history slide library
USC Digital Archive

USC beginning

2004-10-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I met Barbara Shepard at USC and began the process of orientation. In addition to learning a bit about what is going on in her area, I had to get phone, email, and USC ID card. I also checked in with ISD's Human Resources.

Following a lunch treat at the University Club with Barbara and Deborah Holmes-Wong, who is working on metasearching using ZPortal, I settled in to reviewing the CIS documents on the intranet, mainly a charter spelling out the goals and project plan for 2004-2005. The plans are ambitious, including enabling OAI/PMH, evaluating user interfaces, expanding content, implementing a contributor module, not to mention management reporting and thesaurus management.

I walked to work yesterday and took the free USC Tram home, arriving just before the rains. It rained all night. The talk of the town.

Today I had occasion to meet Mr. Lynn Sipe, head of collections here. Continued to review Digital Information Management documents. I was interested to learn that the people who do scanning and digitizing are completely separate from this unit, that is just building the infrastructure for future digital projects.

The LA adventure

2004-10-25T18:45:00.000-07:00

I returned from Michigan to Cincinnati, repacked the car, and set out for LA on October 22. After three hard days of driving (36 hours) including an overnight stay with a college friend in Santa Fe, I arrived in Los Angeles.

Today I checked into my lodging, a room in a Victorian house about a half mile from the University of Southern California (USC). I spent the afternoon unpacking, setting up my laptop, and getting groceries. I will be sharing a kitchen and garden area with other tenants, one of whom is an Italian student getting a PhD in Slavic Literature.

Tomorrow I will meet with Barbara Shepard at USC and my work there will begin. I have some questions from Anita at OhioLINK about the software they are using at USC. Hopefully I can get some useful answers.

Metadata

2004-10-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

The Getty Museum has a thorough description of metadata, some of it written by Anne Gilliland-Swetland. Is that the Anne Gilliland that used to work in Records Management at UC? That is my focus today - wading through the metadata world. It's at http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/index.html if you are interested.

Yesterday was a Sunday, and the library was closed. I ended up performing in the Benzie Area Symphony Orchestra in a concert featuring two high-school award winners, a flutist from the Leelenau School and a cellist from Interlochen Arts Academy. I am amazed that they even have an orchestra here. Some ringers were pulled in, from the music department at the local public school and from Interlochen.

Today is my last day before heading back to Cincinnati from Frankfort (had you guessed where I am?) There will be a hiatus now as I re-pack and get myself to LA, a long solo drive.

CODA

2004-10-16T13:40:00.000-07:00

I couldn't seem to find much on the web showing behind-the-scenes workings of the USC Digital Archive. So I went to Caltech in Pasadena to see what they were up to with their CODA product (Collection of Open Digital Archives). Their material is of interest, as they too are a sci/tech institution. I am just exploring the interface at this point.

I took a little time out last night to attend Collage at Interlochen Arts Academy. It was 90 delightful minutes of short performances by over 200 performers - in groups ranging from jazz band to classical ballet, interspersed with soloes, small ensembles, and an amusing rhythmic group performing a la Stomp. It was a great way to spend a cold and rainy evening. Though Interlochen is 30 miles away, the people sitting in the next seats were cottage neighbors! It's a small world up here, with many hardy people who have retired and stay year round despite the cold winters.

DSpace Demo

2004-10-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

This morning I dispensed with some papers from my office. Trying to tie up loose ends. When it was time to work on my sabbatical, I returned to DSpace! Margret Branschofsky at MIT sent me the login and password for the DSpace Demo, so I played with it and then used it to submit a poem to the Demonstration Community. You can view it at
https://dspace-demo.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.2/3469/1/A+Walk+in+the+Woods.doc .

I wrote the poem last week after walking in the woods near the cottage. Most of the women here say they won't walk alone any more because of the cougar sitings. That's for real. Cougars have been seen in the very area where I was walking. I didn't think of it until part way through my walk, as you can see from the poem. I was wondering if the fear that gripped me was like what soldiers experienced in Vietnam, and decided theirs was worse - they were dealing with intentioned dangers in a dense jungle, not just "innocent" cougars in a friendly woods....

The User Side of DSpace

2004-10-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Today I returned to MIT’s DSpace and looked at the public side and its user interface, driven by Jakarta Lucene [do you know her?]. I also rummaged through some of the material posted by the various Communities. Stumbled across a biography of a possible relative, Edward Furber Miller (Furber being my maiden name). Born in 1866, he was a Professor of Steam Engineering and headed the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Institute from 1911 to 1933! See https://dspace.mit.edu/html/1721.1/5558/miller.html.

I gleaned some good ideas for what could be done at UC in the way of sci/tech repository material. I also added more acronyms and terms to my posting.

Lunch break was exciting. I sat at a picnic table between the library and the lakeshore, enjoying the brisk air and blue sky. I ran to the car to get my water bottle, and returned to find my sandwich dumped on the table and a seagull flying away with the plastic wrap! Luckily the plastic wrap unfolded and left the sandwich for me. I chased after the seagull and recovered the plastic wrap, lest the bird choke on it.

This afternoon it was time to switch gears and take a look at the USC Digital Archive. That is where I will be working just 12 days from now. I thought it a good idea to see what their content and interface look like. You can see it at http://digarc.usc.edu:8089/cispubsearch/ . They focus on the history of Los Angeles for the most part. I will be working under Barbara Shepard, who went to USC from the Getty Museum. USC is using Documentum, the software that OhioLINK is using for its institutional repository. An interesting aside is that CCM Dean Lowry’s wife used to work at the Getty in an office next to Barbara. I am to take greetings when I go.

During breaks I succumb to the fiction that surrounds me in this little library. I discovered a book – The Life of Pi – that was recommended by two sources, Sudhindra Rao, grad assistant at my library, and friend Elizabeth Hill, member of the local book club. They just finished reading it. I am not able to check books out, as my township does not support this library, so I sneak peeks at the book when I tire of the computer, or when the transmission slows down. When done, I practice my rusty skills in shelving fiction, aided by the gap on the shelf and the interesting neighboring book, Harvard Yard.

DSPace continued

2004-10-12T16:29:00.000-07:00

Today I spent more time looking at background technology info for DSpace. I used lots of terms to beef up my posting of acronyms and terminology. [Be sure to check that posting as well as my links posting from time to time. I keep adding things.] Not done yet though. I sure am thankful for all the explanatory information MIT's DSpace folks put on the web.

I took a break about 2 pm. You can only watch bicyclists and roller-bladers go by so often before having to join them. The bike trail that goes by this little library starts at Lake Michigan and goes all the way to the town of Beulah, along an old railroad right of way. It is a beautiful 10-mile ride one way, with red and golden trees lining the paved path. Sometimes you can see the Betsie River, and sometimes vistas over the wetlands. The last 3 miles or so are pea gravel on a clay base - worked for my street tires. The trail parallels Crystal Lake for the last couple of miles. Can't beat the scenery! The whole trip took 2 hours, including a conversation with the woman who runs the conservancy office in Beulah.

I will continue looking at the tech aspects of DSpace, as well as begin looking at it from the user perspective. I want to see what kinds of material they have collected from their various communities. Might give me some ideas!

Acronyms and Vocabulary

2004-10-11T17:20:00.000-07:00

API = application program interface, for example an API allows indexing of searching of DSpace content, using a Java freeware search engine called Lucene
http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html .
BSD = Berkeley Standard Distribution, see www.opensource.org .
CDWA = Categories for the Description of Works of Art, developed by CIMI (Computer Interchange of Museum Information ) and AITF (Art Information Task Force), including elements for orientation, dimensions, condition, etc.
Celestial = software that harvests metadata from OAI-compliant repositories and re-exposes that metadata to other services - in effect an OAI cache.
CIMI = prior to December 15, 2003, Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information, developed CDWA.
CNRI = Corporation for National Research Initiatives www.cnri.reston.va.us .
Creative Commons = a non-profit offering alternatives to full copyright http://creativecommons.org/ .
Crosswalks = visual maps showing relationships among metadata in different databases to enable searching federated repositories, or more generally, mapped relationships between schemas.
CSDGM = Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata, or FGDC-STD-001-1998, for describing geospatial datasets (topographic data, demographic data, GIS, computer-aided cartography files).
DA = digital archives.
DC = Dublin Core, a set of 15 metadata elements that can be used by any community to describe and search across a wide variety of information resources on the World Wide Web
DCMI = Dublin Core Metadata Initiative http://dublincore.org/
DIP = dissemination information package
DOI = digital object identifier, a name assigned to objects of intellectual property http://www.doi.org/ .
DRM = digital rights management.
Dublin Core LAP = Libraries Working Group Application Profile (descriptive attributes of a document such as author, title, etc)
EAD = Encoded Archival Description, an SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) DTD (Document Type Definition) for marking up the data in finding aids for online searching and display. Developed at UC-Berkeley, it is now maintained and supported as a standard by the Library of Congress and sponsored by the Society of American Archivists. The EAD can be used to represent complete archival structures, including hierarchies and associations. The kinds of functionality that EAD affords can also be implemented using Dublin Core, and it is also possible to migrate records from Dublin Core into the EAD format if necessary. More information on EAD is available at http://www.loc.gov/ead .
FGDC = Federal Geographic Data Committee, developed CSDGM.
Federated searching = searching across heterogeneous databases that follow different metadata standards rather than trying to convert all databases to one standard. Should be better than Z39.50 searching, which is keyword only, resulting in high recall, low precision.
GIS = Geographic Information Systems.
GNU = GNU's not Unix. Project started by Richard Stallman that has turned into the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to develop and promote alternatives to proprietary UNIX implementations, to build Unix(R)(TM)-compatible utilities and programs exclusively based on free program source code.
Granularity = level of detail, as in describing digital objects with metadata. E.g. for a video, identify the film as a unit, or each frame? describe a website as en entity, or each page within? depends on access need
Handle = persistent identifier or name for digital objects and other resources on the Internet. Can be used as Uniform Resource Names (URNs). URLs (locations) are not persistent.
Harmony Project = http://www.metadata.net/harmony/
IETF = CNRI's Internet Engineering Task Force .
= a framework to allow various schemes for transactions related to different genres such as music, journal articles, and books.
IR = institutional repositories
Jakarta Lucene = search engine, used by MIT for searching DSpace
Metadata standards: three important for web are 1) keyword and description metatags implemented by search engines, 2) Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and 3) Resource Description Framework.
LOM = Learning Object Metadata, an IEEE standard to enable the use and re-use of technology-supported learning resources such as computer-based training.
METS = Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, an XML schema for describing complex digital library objects, allowing management of digital library objects within repositories and exchange among repositories.
MIME = Multipurpose internet mail extension (so mail can recognize file types like .doc .jpg etc.).
MPEG-7 = standard for metadata elements, structure and relationships used to describe audiovisual objects (still pics, graphics, 3D models, music, audio, speech, video, or multimedia collections).
MPEG-21 = standard to provide framework for interoperability of digital multimedia objects.
MODS = Metadata Object Description Schema, a derivative of MARC 21, for rich description of electronic resources.
MrSID = Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database, a powerful wavelet-based image compressor, viewer and file format for massive raster images that enables instantaneous viewing and manipulation of images locally and over networks while maintaining maximum image quality
NDLP = National Digital Library Program.
OAI = Open Archives Initiative.
OAICat = OCLC's open source framework http://www.oclc.org/research/software/oai/cat.htm OAI/PMH = OAI protocol for metadata harvesting, enabling ability to harvest other digital archives and to be data providers for other digital archives so they may harvest metadata
OAIS = Open Archival Information System, a conceptual framework for an archival system dedicated to preserving and maintaining access to digital information over the long term.
OCW = Open CourseWare at MIT
OKI = Open Knowledge Initiative at MIT.
ONIX = Online information Exchange, an XML-based metadata scheme developed by publishers for online book sales, and includes elements for evaluative and promotional information on books (reviews, blurbs, book jackets, etc.).
PURL = persistent URL
RDF data = Resource Description Framework - a metadata standard. A formal data model from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for machine understandable metadata used to provide standard descriptions of web resources. It uses eXtensible Markup Language (XML). It is similar in intent to the Dublin Core, although perhaps broader in its scope and purpose. See the W3C RDF Page for further information.
RSS = RDF Site Summary. A lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format. RSS is an XML application, conforms to the W3C's RDF specification and is extensible via XML-namespace and/or RDF based modularization.
Schema = sets of metadata elements designed for a specific purpose, such as describing a particular type of information resource. There are schemas for describing web resources, electronic texts, digital objects, finding aids, learning objects, visual objects, multimedia, datasets, and so forth. Examples are Dublin Core, TEI, METS, MODS, EAD, indecs, ONIX, DCWA, VRA, MPEG-7, CSDGM, and DDI.
SFX = an open URL protocol link server from Ex Libris http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/sfx.htm
TEI = Text Encoding Initiative, developed guidelines for marking up electronic texts.
tuples = qualifiers and modifiers in a metadata structure
Unicode = provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. See http://www.unicode.org/
URI = uniform resource identifier
URL = uniform resource locator, a type of URI
URN = universal resource name, a type of URI .
VRA Core Categories = metadata schema whose elements describe a work of art as well as visual representations thereof.
WebChoir = thesaurus management tool. See www.webchoir.com
Wrappers = environment where a search is done, and then links to other content are automatically available within the original interface, unlike federated searching. See http://www.njit.edu/publicinfo/press_releases/release_544.php
XML = Extensible Markup Language for describing data. Works with HTML to display data. XHTML may be the successor to HTML and the future language of the Web. See http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_whatis.asp .

DSpace in Detail

2004-10-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

Today I focused entirely on DSpace at MIT. Did I ever explain what DSpace is? They tell it better at www.dspace.org . But it's an institutional repository (IR) that stores and makes available the intellectual output of a faculty in digital format. I read great articles telling all about it, and also documentation at http://dspace.org/technology/system-docs/, which helps to understand all those nasty little acronyms. I think I'll create an entry just for acronyms so I can keep track. Some of the articles and documentation were written by friend Margret Branschofsky (formerly Lippert).

I found a good treatise on Metadata - referred from the MIT site - produced at the Getty Museum. Interestingly, my "supervisor" at USC will be Barbara Shepard, who went to USC from the Getty. If you want to know about metadata, visit
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/index.html !

It's time to leave this nice library with the view of Betsie Lake and sound of gulls outside the open windows. I've been here 5 hours, counting a lunch break on the bench outside.

Weekend break

2004-10-11T13:56:00.000-07:00

There are many distractions here in northern lower Michigan. Try an art tour, taking you to painting, weaving, tile, pottery and zany sculpture (from junk) studios in town and in the wetlands. Try a bike ride to an historic lighthouse. Try dinner at neighbors with a fabulous view of Lake Michigan. Not to mention running in early morning mist or walking in the woods, watching for cougars....

Project ideas

2004-10-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

Engineering standards with Linda Musser
Institutional repository for UC Engineering College, a la DSpace
Joseph B. Strauss (a Cincinnati native and UC graduate) and Golden Gate Bridge archive with Professor Baseheart
Photo gallery of scientists and engineers w/ Mary Schlembach
Build subject collection (in engineering) together with other institutions, all open-archive (OAI) based

Fruitful links

2004-10-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

Cliff Lynch on institutional repositories http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html
Cornell tutorial on digital imaging http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/contents.html
Creative Commons and federated repositories http://creativecommons.org
DSpace at MIT www.dspace.org
DSpace System Documentation http://dspace.org/technology/system-docs/index.html
The DSpace technology http://dspace.org/technology/system-docs/
Dublin Core http://dublincore.org/
Dublin Core in XML implementation http://dublincore.org/documents/2002/12/02/dc-xml-guidelines/
Harvard policy for Digital Repository Service http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/drs/policyguide.html
Intro to Metadata http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/index.html
Metadata in a nutshell http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/publications/nutshell/
Metadata Glossary http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/glossary/
http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/4_glossary/index.html
NINCH http://www.nyu.edu/its/humanities//ninchguide/
NISO guidance for digital collections http://www.niso.org/framework/forumframework.html
OAIster at U. of Michigan http://www.oaister.org/o/oaister/
Open Archives metadata harvesting protocol http://www.openarchives.org/
Open Courseware Project at MIT www.ocw.mit.edu
USC digital archive primer http://isd.usc.edu/isd/services/dim/dap/index.html
USC imaging recommended practices http://isd.usc.edu/isd/services/dim/imaging/documents/DIM%20Imaging%20Stds.pdf

How not to start!

2004-10-08T13:03:00.000-07:00

Well, progress has been slow.
Emails have been taking 48 hours to get from Michigan to Cincinnati.
My car broke down three days ago (water pump, timing belt). I won't have it for another week. Wouldn't you know it just went out of warranty last month.
I could use my bike but it's raining today. Finally got a loaner car.

After all the interruption, today I made it back to the little public library with free wireless internet access. I am looking at background articles, on both digital archives (DAs) and institutional repositories (IRs).

I've read some on MIT's DSpace from their site at http://www.dspace.org .
Clifford Lynch wrote a great report on IRs available at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html .
If I can figure out how, I'll create a separate folder with good links in it.
I might also create one with ideas of projects I might do myself.

The beginning

2004-10-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my sabbatical officially began. I drove to a cottage in Michigan to remove myself from the normal routine and focus on my sabbatical work. It's cold here! The public library will definitely be the place to work.

The public library has a wireless access point. That enables me to create this blog, as well as dig into my sabbatical topic. I plan to lay out the many facets of digital archives and learn as much as I can before my sojourn to Los Angeles and USC.

Facets like:
what types of archives are other academic institutions putting up
what platforms are they using
what are their interfaces like
how do they handle copyrighted material
how do they organize the material
do they use federated searching of some kind across various archives
what sorts of metadata do they use
what exactly has MIT got in D-Space thus far
what are other technical institutions doing?
how is USC using Documentum, a product being used by OhioLINK
who has the best models for my needs?

I am sure I can glean a lot by viewing web sites for many schools. It's delightful to sit here by the library window with a view of Lake Michigan and search the web in pursuit of answers to these many questions.

Digital Archive Sabbatical Blog

2004-09-12T19:16:00.000-07:00

I am taking a sabbatical to study digital archives and institutional repositories for academic libraries. OhioLINK is using Documentum for its repository; others use D-Space or Luna.