Access 2009

Day Three of Access definitely finished off triumphantly. My favourite talk ended up being the Closing Keynote, and I was very happy to learn that it was given by one of our very own, Professor William Turkel from the UWO History Department.  William opened our eyes to a new way of doing humanities and social sciences research, using the digital technologies of today.  The main thesis of William’s talk was: “Why should we create things that can be hacked (including research)? Because real humanists make tools. When you create a tool it changes you as much as the work you do. Making things with our hands is a form of knowing and hacking things is a hands-on experience. In this digital world, we have new projects to study – the job of humanists is to make sense of what we are doing as human beings. We need to create projects that can be reused, remixed, repurposed, and hacked – but to do this requires the use of open source.  I highly recommend watching this presentation from the Access web page.

Gwen McNairn from Dalhousie university reported on the research that she has been doing with Computer Science grad students and the use of Zotero – a bibliographic management open source tool that works with the FireFox browser.  Gwen’s research was interesting – and I found her reasoning

made sense – her students are more apt to pick up an open source product than yet another commercial interface.  Gwen needs to do more research on this with the new version of Zotero.

Cathy Hartman & Mark Phillips talked about the Portal to Texas History – a wondeful repository project based out of the University of North Texas. They talked about the importance of taking on this project – and how they have become a key source of information for all communities in Texas and beyond.

And finally, Mark Leggott, the University Librarian from UPEI, and our very gracious host of this year’s conference updated us on the Islandora Project, another wonderful digital repository. I wanted to mention that Mark did an amazing job in organizing the conference this year.  The conference was one of the best that I have ever attending because Mark balanced very interesting topics with a lot of fun. For instance, in between sessions, Mark had us playing Bingo with really great prizes to be won including an iPod Nano, iPod Touch and a MacBook.  Alas, I didn’t win.

There were lots of interesting sessions today, and I feel as though I need to explore a bunch of different software programs – and I’m not even a programmer! They made them THAT enticing.

Cary Gordon highlighted libraries using Drupal and talked briefly about new develoments coming with Drupal 7.  From the presentation, it looks like Drupal has a lot of capabilities, and I think I’d like to learn more about the administrative side of it.

The Thunder Talks were great.

Lots of places have interesting projects in the works, and will be interesting to hear them again at future Access conferences, when their projects have been launched.  One Thunder Talk that stood out for me is the District 16 media project.  The presenters are media instructors and talked about the need for a system where students can upload media content.  YouTube just wasn’t appropriate for what they wanted their students to do, so they developed a great site using Drupal.  It’s definintely worth checking out, and I heard a rumour that we might see them present again at OLA.

The University of Manitoba has implemented a system that allows LibraryH3lp to receive text messgaes.  This sounds like something we should look into implementing at UWO.

My favourite session so far has been Dorothea Salo’s “Grab a bucket, it’s raining data”.   I took pretty detailed notes in point form, so I think rather than resynthesize my notes, I’ll post them as are:

Data curation -Dorothea is seeing the lack of foresight that occurred with Institutional Repositories.  There are a lot of problems that come with it…Dorothea is going to cover the problems so that we know what we are getting into, but she is a supporter of these efforts being done through the library.
Data are widely diverse in nature…

Libraries have to get our own data organized first, before we can have any authority to go out to researchers and say “give us your data”.
Example of research that we would need to archive – that doesn’t fit with the tool sets we

currently use: http://www.exploringthehyper.net/
Librarians are neat…Researchers are messy messy messy.
Data aren’t standardized.
Digital analog – there is no longer a distinction

Dorothea’s university is trying to rebrand/rename their Digital collections, with a look to remove the digital name.

What to keep and what to toss…talk to any archivist and they are usually thinking about what to throw away not what to keep.
“Decameron Web” – beautiful site, but we don’t know how they did it – the infrastructure is

hidden. It’d be great if it was open- and could be repeatable.
Context is fluid- constanlty being built and rebuilt

We can’t build the one interface to build them all…but it is possible to go too far in the other direction – and to build too many interfaces…how are we going to manage all the code behind our interfaces?
WE’ve already lost a lot of digital projects to the silos.

We need to develop a coordinated and collaborative rescue effort – to save these silo projects. We should start with our own institutions’ projects.
We need to let go of the inward focus that we have with our Institutional repository.

We should be able to show any data at the repository…but the truth is they are not built that way. They are built for research papers. The static model for data curation does not work withinteractive data…WE need to take the stuff in anyway, because if we wait until it’s cleaned up and static we’re going to lose it.

This is a human problem – we are putting requirements on the data before it can be kept – when this is NOT the way researchers work.
the Fedora program is the new world…but it still needs to change.
Dorothea also likes “bagit” and “repomman”.
California Digital library is doing some good things – they are using Solr – a good tool.