It’s been forever since I have written to this blog, or so it seems. It was another world when I was a student and a library worker (soon to be a “real librarian”). Now, I am one and it is funny how it looks from the other side. I thought I knew, but it is not quite the same. I enjoy helping students find resources. Thank you, Dr. Van Fleet for the reference class. It should be mandatory for all future librarians.

It’s funny how each SLIS class has impacted me. It truly was a growth experience. I don’t intend to stop growing! Right now, I am experimenting with Twitter for library promotion. This summer, I worked on our library web page. I made some progress. It is good to have access again to the materials that are posted. I wish that I could upload the finished pages to the website, instead of having to edit them through the CMS (Content Management System). It is tedious to recreate html links and to have to explain to non-librarians where changes need to be made, and why. If your library allows more access to the finished product, you are lucky indeed. Unfortunately, those who are in control, do not realize that libraries have changed and “are not their father’s libraries.” Digital management is so important to library success!

I am back playing with Facebook, but it is more a personal project, much like my genealogy work. Yet nothing is a stand alone product. We are all products of all our efforts and insights. We don’t always realize it, but it is better when we do.

The Internet and Communication. Our readings for our class this week discuss how it all works together, using such things as TCP/IP, packets and connectedness. What I liked about reading Joseph Miller, is that he explains the terminology, rather than just talking about it.

It seems impossible with billions of IP numbers available, yet we are using up the available IPs. Yet Miller explains that not all of these IP addresses are available for all to use. Additionally, offices and homes are using up multiple IP addresses for printers, networked peripherals, with more items being added all the time. I looked around my office at work and realize that every computer and most of the printers have IP addresses. Additionally, the computers that the library patrons enjoy have IP addresses. Furthermore, I recently read about household appliances becoming connected to the Internet, but it didn’t seem significant until I read Miller that each of these appliances would need an IP address. So if my refrigerator needs “to phone home” or tell me that we need to buy milk, then it would need to connect to our home network, or to the Internet directly. Amazing!

Other facts that I found interesting, included the connections to the Internet, some I have used over the years and others I knew were being used. Miller kindly explained the differences, rather than using jargon to talk about them. I think that is what I like about Miller the most. Years ago, computer experts would not share their information readily, for a variety of reasons. Yet today, with information all around us, it seems that there is a gap between the very basic knowledge available about technology and the jargon filled expert knowledge. When a novice wishes to learn more about technology, it can be a daunting task to break through the barriers to understanding what the technology is all about. I think Miller should have been considered as a textbook for our class.

One major milestone finished. I completed my portfolio and my defense successfully!! Hooray.

It was not easy, but I did not expect it to be. My portfolio is about my goals and my growth as a professional. My defense included a paper I wrote about digital collections. It seemed to be the best choice of my papers. I used so many things from my classes when I worked on that paper.

Funny as I have progressed through my classes, I find myself drawing from previous courses. It is a great feeling, yet it is humbling to realize how much more that is out there to learn and to know. I think that is part of the lifelong learning that we all like to talk about. The more we learn, the more we draw on it and the more we want to know.

Yes, it is finally here. I am working on getting my portfolio in shape to present and keep up with classes and work. Juggling it all is part of the cost, yet ends up being part of the reward.

I look over my approaching assignments. Another blog on another server. That will make me 3 blogs. One set up at the urging of my advisor, one set up for a class, now yet another one. Maybe they should talk to one another and make my life a little bit simpler

The cataloging project is underway. My teammate and I have settled on a thesis statement and proposal. We will submit and hopefully get approval on the first try. We are looking at the problems in bibliographic tools and the possible solutions in today’s technology driven world. No that is not the exact thesis, but we are looking at bibliographic tools and how they are not meeting the needs of the users. Are the possible solutions such as RDA, EAD, Dublin Core, and more, the answer?

There is a lot of literature out there. Those catalogers like to write!

Yes, there are some controversies out there after all. I have just scratched the surface and stumbled upon more than I bargained for. Some I care very little about, such as which tag goes where, unless it it my favorite tag, which changes from time to time. It all depends upon what I am trying to do. Today I like the 780/785 tags. This group discusses tags that I have never seen before, so they must be very special tags indeed. As I learn about cataloging, maybe I will have some new favorites. At least I will hear about some secret tags!

Today the big discussion on Autocat was the Guardian post about OCLC claiming ownership of all the cataloging records. Interesting topic, but I think we are going to look at the OPAC and how it isn’t meeting the needs of the users of the library. There is a lot of discussion about where users start their searches. Funny it all ties back into the OCLC controversy in its own way. We will have to fine tune it. We, being myself and my partner on this project. Teamwork rules in library school!

Another semester and more classes. This time it is cataloging and information communication and technology. Cataloging is about controversies? I am to think about and write about controversies in my class. Now what could be a controversy in such a topic? Hmmm…

Wait and see. There must be something, or she would not have assigned it!

The question was asked, “What is the future of digital collections and digital librarianship? ” Where will we be with this in the next ten years? Will we welcome it?”

If the recent past is any indication, we have no clue! Now, that is not as really as cynical as it sounds. Who woulda thought that we would be exchanging pictures and sounds and all, online? Those who are younger, don’t really understand how rapidly this has evolved. Like a snowball rolling downhill. But hang on to your hats, its been quite a ride. The best may be yet to come!

Digital collections are becoming truly awesome. Digital collections are being built to show what can be done. There is more and more “wow factor” being put into these. Much like early graphic webpages with too much going on. The best digital collections, have a wow-factor, but more is needed. It is the objects that are contained and explained, and how they all relate to one another that makes a collection. If it is a historical collection being built, it needs explanations. It needs to have artifacts and tell the story. It needs to explain how, and why. OK, it needs to say: who,what, when, where, why and how. And it needs to show it! As Dr. Martens has tried to get us to understand, it’s all about the metadata. The metadata puts it all together.

Now, to me the metadata is one of the problems. There is no real standard yet. Lots of folks are trying out stuff. But even worse, some objects are being digitized and then stuck in files with numbered labels. No metadata, except that unhelpful label. It may be in a folder with similar items, but that is all. Unfortunately some collections are being built with no policy at all, just someone’s idea of “valuable stuff!’ In the worst case scenario, it may be that once it is digitized it will all be pitched. (I can hear the “everythings online” voices mummering, “Been wanting to clean out that junk for years!”) With no organization, an unlabeled digital file is worse than a bad vertical file! To build a great collection, someone has to see the whole picture, start to finish. If the collection is worth being built, it is worth labels and finding aids. Metadata!

Who will build these collections? I think the “haves.” We had a brief discussion about haves and have-nots in one of 5990 discussion boards. The haves don’t always realize what they have, but they have the funds. The have-nots know that they don’t have it, and sometimes realize what they are missing. Will certain segments of society select the “best” items to put online? Will we leave out others because we don’t want those voices heard? Will we forget where we came from with all the hue and cry? I see the “haves–money and technology wise--” making digital collections that will wow us! The have-nots will want to make some collections, so they will get awesome grants. Who will be in charge and who will see the big picture? Now comes the cynicism, probably the people who need to be in charge won’t be. Sort of like the famous “Peter Principle.” Promote someone to the highest level of his/her incompetence.

What I do see is technology taking over more and more of the searching and delivery. I know it is very unlibrary of me. Yet the ones who know the technology are the ones who are really the haves. They are determining how searches will be made and what will be retrieved. Will history be rewritten because of the new ways of searching?

Creating tags, adding metadata, can be tedius. So how can tagging objects be done? Maybe like the group of church ladies I blogged about. Everybody came and added metadata for the day. Maybe it will be done by all the eager users online doing social tagging (The church ladies used social tagging, too!) What will the role of librarians be? Maybe to help organize all these tags into some sort of authorities or some such organization. The librarians can’t do it all by themselves. They will need technology and they will need the masses. I used to think social tagging was silly, but now I am not so sure but what it may be the next metadata. It will need to evolve and develop. Too many generalities makes everything one big Google search.

If my classes have taught me anything, it is that we are the information locators and providers. We are the ones who can build the vocabularies to make social tagging work. We are the ones who will help gather items into collections. They will probably overlap and intertwine. They will be tagged with things we never thought of by ourselves, but we will adapt.

Ranganthan said we need to save the time of the user. We should not frustrate the user. We need to help the user find what is in these digital collections. To adapt Ranganthan some more, every book has its reader, well maybe every digital object has its viewer, or its use.

Last point, all this data is growing by leaps and bounds R. P. Feynemen, the physicist, (see previous post) explained how so much data could be placed on the head of a pin. We do that now. We will have to get better at miniaturization to carry this information around. We are getting there with our smaller and smaller gadgets. The metadata will have to adapt to those devices, too. That should be easily accomplished in the next 10 years. Will we welcome it or will we run from it?

One of my classmates blogged about Harvard’s open access database for faculty. This site is a different effort. A Selection of Web-Accessible Collections is a fine example of digital efforts. Chinese Rubbings is one such collection, but on that caught my attention, and I don’t know why Is Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. As I started looking at it, I saw the Spanish Influenza in North America, 1918-1919.

This was a pandemic and killed over 500,000 people during World War I. The collection is organized around other major outbreaks of disease worldwide. Obviously there was a real fear worldwide. According to the website the flu broke out at Ft. Riley, Kansas.

“Cover up your cough and sneeze, Otherwise you’ll spread the disease.” From the U.S. Public Health Service, “Spanish Influenza” Three-Day Fever” “The Flu”, Supplement No. 84 to the Public Health Reports, September 28, 1918: 4.

Other diseases include Cholera, Plague, Smallpox, “Pestilence,” Syphilis, Tropical diseases, Tuberculosis, and Yellow Fever. What makes this a great digital collection, are the grouping of items that are digitized and the connections to the time are shown.

It is a great example of a digital library, in my opinion.

Believe it or not, the US government has lots of digital collections. Since I work with government documents everyday, I probably have a different perspective than many SLIS students. Government documents are not what you think they are. Yes, there are plenty of dull and dry and statistical docs, but there are plenty that are interesting. Take for instance the Country Studies. This is a “digital collection” of 101 countries that have been arranged, digitized and searchable through the Library of Congess. Since I am an armchair traveler, I enjoy browsing through this collection. Another link is the home page at: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html.

While they were published during the years, 1988-1998, they still occasionally appear in print. For example, this year the Country Study of Iran was published. Our depository recently received our copy. Some countries changed names during that timespan and some countries disappeared and others emerged. This is an interesting series because of the information about the countries tha is covered. There is more information in these pages than would normally be found in an Encyclopedia. The Country Studies digitized text in the Library of Congress and in Google. (Google’s has advertisements inserted)

Shorter and probably more interesting are the Country Profiles. Click on a country you want to know more about. There are maps and text in these profiles. They are fully digitized and are truly a “digital collection.”

As many of you know, government documents set the goal of becoming a digital collection. In many ways they have succeeded. Most new docs appear online and not in print.

As a depository, we struggle to identify our selections and provide links from our catalog, OPAC, to the new publications online. (That is our metadata to the digital depository collection!). We use a PURL (Rersistent Uniform Resource Locator) that keeps the link alive to the doc, even if it moves. The PURL is a service of OCLC. As most people know, web pages move around. Metadata such as a PURL keeps the links alive. This is the PURL to the Country Study of Iran http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS40299. That PURL probably will not work without the referral from the library catalog where it was taken. However, thanks to PURLS we can keep links to the government documents digital collection alive.

Tagged: Digital Collections, Digital Libraries, government documents, world countries ]]> http://wheresthelibrary.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/country-profiles-and-country-studies/feed/ 0 aimee101 http://wheresthelibrary.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/nps-digital-collection/ http://wheresthelibrary.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/nps-digital-collection/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:00:52 +0000 aimee101 http://wheresthelibrary.wordpress.com/?p=170 ]]>

The National Park Service is one of my favorite Web site and digital collections. Yes, I think it is a digital collection. Lots of images, mingled with text. Interactive. Seems to be intuitive, so that I don’t have to think about what to do. (Another good resource—Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.) With your mouse, hover over a state and see an image of Federal Park Service land in that state. I think digital collections should be that way, easy to manuver.

Here is a little tour I took. The resources on these pages are set up for educators, but are interesting for all to see. The Website is transitioning, so even more digital images should soon be available.

For other learning styles (think Dr. Lester’s class 5053), there are sounds of nature.

Click on the picture to hear the sound.

Bringing it back to the NPS page and then home to Oklahoma.

Chickasaw National Recreation Area

National Trail is the Trail of Tears, National Historic Trail.

Oklahoma City National Memorial

Washita National Battlefield

This digital collection is interactive and interesting. Since I like the outdoors, it is fun to see (and hear).

The National Park Service has done a great job in setting up this site. Makes me wish they would include even more for me to see.