Science Library Pad

Mashed Libraries UK 2008

Owen Stephens, inspired by Mashed Museum, is proposing Mashed Libraries UK 2008.

the idea is to have a reasonably informal event at which we try to do interesting stuff with library technology and/or data

He's put together a starting list of possible APIs... there must be many more that people could add or offer...

Services/APIs/Systems/Technology/Data that we could use

via Twitter

science conference in World of Warcraft

John Bohannon has quite a lengthy article on the logistics of organizing the first science conference in World of Warcraft.

Slaying Monsters for Science
Science 20 June 2008:
Vol. 320. no. 5883, p. 1592
DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5883.1592c

via Duncan Hull's FriendFeed

You can find more information about the guild they created, Science guild, as well as some info about the conference.  It is reported that full transcripts of the conference itself (which was on the topic of research performed on and in virtual worlds) were recorded, but I couldn't find them.

If this sounds rather esoteric, consider

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. ... World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia.

World of Warcraft Reaches 10 Million Subscribers - 22 January 2008

That's active subscriber count, at about $15 per month per subscriber.
In other words, this single game is a billion dollar enterprise.

Second Life seems to get more attention in academic circles, perhaps because it is free to the end user, and you can manipulate the environment, creating objects.  It took me a long time to "get" Second Life, and my eventual conclusion was that it was like being inside of a programming language.  It is not a game in the conventional sense.  Second Life is platform, not narrative.

By contrast, World of Warcraft (WoW or just Warcraft) [1] gives you a huge and (if your computer is up to the task) high-performance, visually-rich environment to explore.  I am often somewhat disappointed that most of us have tremendously powerful computers but we rarely are presented with any software that fully exploits those capabilities.  Google Earth was the first application in the past few years that I found truly revolutionary.  Getting a guided tour of WoW from John, and seeing the endless detail of its cities and countryside, was the second time in recent years that I was truly impressed by the "step change" in what is now possible.  The game world is enormous, and completely consistent.  Bridges don't stick out into thin air, paths don't run across water... everywhere you go, there is a richly detailed world.  In addition, the world is live (and dangerous).

[1] Technically Warcraft refers to any of a number of games from Blizzard, previous versions were not full multiplayer worlds.  I will use it just as shorthand for World of Warcraft in this posting.

I've written a few times about Warcraft, as well as having an entire Second Life category.
August 27, 2007  World of Warcraft... in The Lancet
January 14, 2007  a library quest
January 11, 2007  World of Warcraft has over 8 million subscribers
December 5, 2006  more Second Life, plus South Park [and Warcraft]

If you want to know more about the logistics of holding a Warcraft conference, some very game-specific info is below:

By live, I mean that you are not alone in the world.  If you are flying and you see fighting going on below you, this isn't just some game cinematics, it's real people somewhere in the world, playing the game.  In the cities, hundreds of human-controlled characters are busy shopping, banking, and selling.

There are clearly very sophisticated proximity and latency algorithms powering an engine in which groups of geographically dispursed players can coordinate on tasks where a second's delay is literally the (game world) difference between life and death.

With a huge cash flow, Blizzard is able to not only sustainably grow the infrastructure of the game, but to continuously add to the game content as well.  An entirely new world, Outland, was added to the original world of Azeroth.

Given that this is a complex and mostly unconstrained, live-running game world, it is not surprising that the logistics of organising a non-game event are substantial, and the Science article is mostly about that experience.

Here are a few things you need to know:
* You start off as a level 1 character, in your race's starting location (a location always some distance from a city)
* You can travel by walking, but the amount of aggression (aggro) you attract depends on the level difference between you and your enemies.  At level 1, you aggro everything.
* While you cannot[2] be attacked by other human-controlled characters (unlike many games of this type), there are world beasts wandering around that can and will attack.  Wandering around is a recipe for a quick death.  You are somewhat safer (you generate less aggro) if walking on a defined path or road, but at level 1, even this does not provide full safety - beasts near the edge of the road will run on it to kill you.
* Level 1 characters have so few health points that they die very quickly in battle.  Often a single hit will kill them.
* There are two "factions", Horde and Alliance.  They have cities and outposts which are guarded by computer-controlled guards who are high-level (usually the maximum player level, 70, or higher).  They WILL attack characters from the opposing faction.  There are some neutral cities where both factions can meet, but they are in medium to high-level areas.
* Travel in the game takes real time, walking or running is slowest.  Mounted travel (e.g. horses) is not available to low-level characters.  Any level of character can access flight paths, but they have to go to the flight end points first and they have to be able to pay (there is limited free public transit, such as the Deeprun Tram).
* The game is organized into realms, each realm is a copy of the entire virtual world.  Individual characters are bound to their realm, and can only see and communicate with other players in that realm.
* When you die, you can be brought back to life, but it requires either travel (to "get back" to your body) or high-level characters with resurrection skills or equipment
* Equipment (such as better armor) costs money, and is constrained by levels (i.e. you can't give a level 1 character a set of level 70 armor).
* It is possible you may attracted "griefers" who, while they couldn't attack your party directly, can not only run around shouting and being generally annoying, but can also "pull" monsters into the conference area, whereupon the monsters may start attacking conference attendees.
* When they are killed, monsters will "respawn" in roughly the same location shortly thereafter.  You can't permanently clear an area of monsters; you have to keep killing them as they respawn.

[2] Unless you explicitly flag yourself for Player-versus-Player (PvP) or are on a PvP server

So a conference presents numerous challenges:
* If you want a broad attendance, you need to support both experienced characters and newbies/n00bs (level 1 characters) who bring many challenges: they aren't familiar with the game, and it is a dangerous environment.
* Additionally level 1 characters are squishy (easily killed by beasts and guards) and have very little money.
* Experienced players are likely to be scattered across many different realms and belong to existing guilds; they are unlikely to want to change realm, although they might temporarily change guild.

So the best you can do is find a realm with enough high-level players who are interested in helping, both financially and in terms of offence and defence.  A conference is the WoW equivalent of an Escort Quest - you have someone you need to protect as they move from location to location.  However it's an Escort Quest on an unprecendented scale - in WoW the largest collaborative efforts, raids, are 4 combined teams of 5 players, for a total of 20 people.  For a conference, you may have hundreds of attendees. (Although it is true that sometimes groups this large are organised for the fun of e.g. attacking another city, similar to the end event of the conference.)

To do it properly, you'd have to find a defensible position for the main conference sessions.  Then you have to get everyone there alive.  Then if you want to do tours or field trips, you have to again keep everyone alive.  We're talking classic medieval age warfare.  In Azeroth they can't be attacked from the air, so you need to form a defence perimeter, with high-level characters clearing away all possible threats, additional high-levels scattered throughout the group to provide assistance for any problems or threats that may pop up inside the perimeter and characters with healing or resurrection powers in case something befalls the low-levels despite all the other efforts.  The logistics of it are actually quite an interesting challenge.

UPDATE:

Also I forgot to mention that realms are limited in the number of character accounts they will permit, for performance reasons, and high-level characters are more likely to be on realms that are full or nearly full.

For these reasons it seems to me this best option, if it were possible, would be for Blizzard to provide a test server and allow users to copy or temporarily move their characters over for the duration of the event.  I'm not saying they should make the environment otherwise any different (i.e. no "holodeck safeties on") but just provide a dedicated conference realm.

ENDUPDATE

If you want to get some idea of the richness of the environment, you can see my World of Warcraft - solo set on Flickr.  It's more "stuff I thought was cool" than a comprehensive overview of the world.  Here's one screenshot:

OR08 - the presentation layer is destroying our data

I have lots of raw notes, but I'll wait to see whether the presentations show up at the Open Repositories 2008 conference repository (for some reason, I keep wanting to spell this "respository").

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

One of the main themes that I've heard in terms of doing science with repositories over the past couple days is that presentation formats, particularly PDF, are destroying the data (e.g. chemical structures and reactions) that we have so carefully assembled.  Then we have to make machines work really hard to try to reconstruct this data, which is madness to me (although I accept it may be the only practical solution in the near term).

I would argue that HTML plays a similar role in emphasizing "what looks good" rather than adding to that "and is also usable by machines under the hood".

And in a different way, PowerPoint, with its constraints of display and its style of bullet points, discards our complex ideas and presents them in a lossy, radically oversimplified way (with a dependency of course on the skills of the presenters).

OCLC stuff - NISO Discovery Forum

Very raw notes.  Basically OCLC continues to build out services based on their data holdings, are adding services where organisations can provide additional information, and are aiming to systematize the services with documentation on OCLC DevNet.

Mike Teets
VP Global Engineering, OCLC

identities, xISBN, xISSN

other identifier services are coming...
xOCLCnum service
WorkID service?

-

Worldcat Identities

http://orlabs.oclc.org/identities

-

Worldcat API

OCLC Grid

"invitation only release"

essentially programmatic access to WorldCat

Web Services
- access WorldCat records and holdings
- mashups with WorldCat

Request: OpenSearch & SRU
Response Formats: RSS, Atom (OSS), Marc XML, DC (SRU)
Return holdings based on geographic context

WorldCat Search Web Service builder
(a demonstration application)

-

WorldCat Registry

institution registry

worldcat.org/registry/institutions

unique id for each institution

-

Worldcat OpenURL Resolver Gateway

worldcatlibraries.org/registry/gateway

Allows you to register your IPs and associated resolver.

contacts:
Roy Tennant tennantr@oclc.org
Don Hamparian hamparid@oclc.org *

Developer's Network
worldcat.org/devnet

Building SkyNet for Science - presentation for NISO Discovery Tools Forum

My presentation is available at

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/building-skynet-for-science-discovering-new-frontiers-using-embedded-knowledge/

A lot of it is conceptual, so you may want to wait until the audio is available from the NISO site (hopefully next week).

UPDATE 2008-03-28: I forgot to mention that all of the supporting links for the presentation (will be) available at http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/nisodiscovery2008  ENDUPDATE

I thought it went well, although as first speaker up there is a disadvantage of not seeing how other people set up.  I was in a bit of a rush to get started so that I would finish on time, so I didn't do a great job of attaching my mike and I just held the wireless transmitter in my hand.  With the transmitter in one hand and my laser pointer gripped in the other for the entire 50 minutes, it's possible I looked a bit of a prat.

I usually try to remember to keep my hands free for presentations so that I can use more natural body language, anyway lesson learned.

I also forgot to say "The future is not set.  There's no fate but what we make for ourselves." before the last slide.

There are some common themes emerging from the presentations, I'm always amazed when a bunch of people develop presentations in isolation and then they actually all fit together when presented.

I've posted some photos of the presenters in my Flickr under nisodiscovery2008 (my cameraphone can upload directly to Flickr over WiFi), they also show up because of the machine tag linkage on the Upcoming page.  No pics of Chapel Hill yet as I don't have a car and it turns out while we're only about 4km from the town, the most direct route for me to get there I think would be to walk beside a six-lane divided highway, which is not too appealing.

UPDATE 2008-03-28: The carbon offset for my flights from myclimate.org (including the trip to Open Repositories) was about C$118.

Open Repositories 2008

Through an unexpected series of events I find myself going to Open Repositories 2008

http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

The lineup looks great including a keynote from Peter Murray-Rust, and two (!) sessions on Scientific Repositories.

There is also a Repository Challenge for developers with a £2,500 prize, which is like a million US dollars now (finally, Canadians get to make US dollar jokes).  Kudos to David Flanders for leading this "let's just build stuff and see what works" approach.

I will be blogging under tag/category or08, and twittering under hashtag #or08

I made an Upcoming event, mainly because then if you add the machine tag

upcoming:event=455039

to your Flickr photos, it will automatically put in a nice "Taken at Open Repositories 2008" logo.

9th International Bielefeld Conference

Happened to be checking the conference website and I see that, although it's one year off from its previous 2-year cycle, the International Bielefeld Conference is pre-announced to be back February 3-5, 2009.

Bielefeld University Library will continue its successful series of conferences in early 2009.

Like the previous ones, this conference will provide an international platform for trendsetting and stimulating discussions among customers and providers of information services, especially among scholars, information specialists, publishers, library managers, and patrons.

http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/

Well, I know what I'll be adding to this year's list of proposed events (my planning cycle is March-March).

I think it's invitation only though...

I don't know what's best for a tag, I'm going to go with 9ibc for now.

Previously:
April 28, 2006  conference proceedings: ICSTI eScience, Bielefeld + Taiga + LtF on academic library future
February 15, 2006  roles and challenges for the academic library in e-Science

The Web Revolution - May 2008 - Toronto - not free

Chris Anderson will present his new book, FREE.

The conference, not so much free: $590 if you register before April 15, $790 after.

Interactive Marketing Conference: The web revolution
Date:     Thursday May 15, 2008
Location:     Metro Toronto Convention Centre
(255 Front Street West, Toronto) *Limited seating

08:30 to 3PM, Chris' closing keynote is at 1:30 PM.

If you prefer your free stuff to be, err, actually free, you can see video of him at Nokia World, listen to him at IT Conversations, or wait for his audiobook version, which is supposed to be given away free.

IT Conversations link via David Flanders twitter.

Next Generation Discovery - NISO Forum - March 2008

Next Generation Discovery: New Tools, Aging Standards
March 27-28, 2008
Chapel Hill, NC

Discovering scholarly information and data is essential for research and use of the content that the information community is producing and making available. The development of knowledge bases, web systems, repositories, and other sources for this information brings the need for effective discovery -- search-driven discovery and network (or browse) driven discovery -- tools to the forefront. With new tools and systems emerging, however, are standards keeping pace with the next generation of tools?

I will be presenting.
I also (after fighting with Yahoo accounts) managed to make an Upcoming event.

Other confirmed presenters include Peter Murray, Karen Hawkins (talking about scitopia.org), and Eric Schnell & Dave Munger (talking about researchblogging.org and the BPR3 initiative).

I'm proposing a tag: nisodiscovery2008

UPDATE 2008-03-10: And a Twitter Hashtag #ndf08

conferences to maps: a demonstration

For some reason, our lists of library conferences are, how shall we put it nicely?  Geocoding challenged?  Semantically unrich?

The easiest way this could be fixed would be for the list creators (or others) to run the lists through a simple geocoder and produce GeoRSS.

In the meantime, here's a demonstration hack to show how easily it can be done.

"Library Related Conferences" list from

http://homepage.usask.ca/~mad204/CONF.HTM

Let's chop it up with an online tool.

RSSxl - Convert an HTML Web Page to RSS

Item start/end: <tr> and </tr>
Description start/end: <td> and </a></td>
Link to extract: 2

http://www.wotzwot.com/rssxl.php?pageurl=http%3A%2F%2Fhomepage.usask.ca%2F%7Emad204%2FCONF.HTM&sf=&si=%3Ctr%3E&ei=%3C%2Ftr%3E&sd=%3Ctd%3E&ed=%3C%2Fa%3E%3C%2Ftd%3E&linkno=2

Ok, we've cooked some RSS.

http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/geotest/wotz-conf.xml

Pass it to GeoNames RSS-to-GeoRSS encoder.
It doesn't like some embedded unicode - com.sun.syndication.io.ParsingFeedException: Invalid XML: Error on line 46: An invalid XML character (Unicode: 0x13) was found in the element content of the document.

Strip out everything except legal characters using BBEdit.

http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/geotest/wotz-conf-zap.xml

GeoRSSify

http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?feedUrl=http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/geotest/wotz-conf-zap.xml

Result: GeoRSS test file

http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/geotest/wotz-conf-zap-geo.xml

Visualize!

Acme GeoRSS Map Viewer

http://www.acme.com/GeoRSS/?xmlsrc=http%3A%2F%2Fscilib.typepad.com%2Fscience_library_pad%2Fgeotest%2Fwotz-conf-zap-geo.xml

It's that easy.  Yes, the placemarks on the map are clickable, and the hyperlinked dates will take you to the particular conference URL.

You can also feed GeoRSS directly into Google Maps

http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=http:%2F%2Fscilib.typepad.com%2Fscience_library_pad%2Fgeotest%2Fwotz-conf-zap-geo.xml&ie=UTF8&ll=7.325,-53.266667&spn=179.115283,360&z=1&om=0

I've been thinking a lot about how you could cleanly parse these lists and accurately geocode them, but this was the simplest demo I could come up with, without any programming involved.

Ottawa *Camp

There are various OttawaCamps

http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/OttawaCamps

specifically BarCamp (unconference), DemoCamp (lightweight, brief event where people do demos), and CaseCamp ("a marketing-oriented ad-hoc gathering")

Ottawa Demo Camp 7 was last month, Centretown News wrote about it (the URL will change when it goes into the CN archive unfortunately)

The room is packed with about 60 people, their attention focused on the speaker. His name is Luc Levesque and he’s the general manager of TravelPod, a blogging company. He’s showcasing the Traveller IQ Challenge, a website application that tests a person’s knowledge of geography.

...

Levesque is just one of the seven presenters at Ottawa’s DemoCamp. The event aims to connect entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in an informal setting where they can share ideas.

(TravelPod is more like an online site for sharing info about your travels, than just a blog.)

Previously:
May 23, 2006  Ottawa BarCamp - April 22, 2006
May 23, 2006  three stories of travel websites

ECDL 2008 in Denmark

ECDL 2008 will be September 14-19, 2008 in Aarhus (Århus) Denmark.  Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard is General Chair.

Important dates:
Workshop submission deadline: 15 February 2008
Registration opens: 03 March 2008
Paper, Tutorial, Poster & Demo submission deadline: 14 March 2008

Topics of contributions include:

    * Concepts of Digital Libraries and digital content
    * Collection building, management and integration
    * System architectures, integration and interoperability
    * Information organisation, search and usage
    * Multilingual information access and multimedia content management
    * User interfaces for digital libraries
    * User studies and system evaluation
    * Digital archiving and preservation: methodological, technical and legal issues
    * Digital Library applications in e-science, e-learning, e-government, cultural heritage, etc.
    * Web 2.0 and associated technologies

Previously:
My notes from ECDL 2006

CNI Fall 2007 presentations, podcast

Lots of interesting material from fall CNI.

An audio interview with Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Director of Development at the State and University Library in Aarhus, Denmark about the Summa search system and other academic library topics.

Current Experiments & Future Directions in Scholarly Communication - Timo Hannay, Nature

The eCrystals Federation: Open Data Repositories Supporting Open Science
Liz Lyon, University of Bath
Simon Coles, University of Southampton
Manjula Patel, University of Bath

Summa podcast link via DigitalKoans

Previously:
October 26, 2006  the future of the scientific paper and more on open web science (Timo Hannay)
March 31, 2006  presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation (Dr Liz Lyon)
October 11, 2005  ILI2005 - Tuesday 11th - Living with Google: New roles for libraries (Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard)
September 27, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 09:00 - Developing e-infrastructure to support new research and learning paradigms (Dr Liz Lyon)

Museums and the Web 2008 - Montreal, April 9-12

Libraries and museums have some overlapping concerns when it comes to Internet outreach and getting collections online.

Museums and the Web 2008 - Montreal - April 9-12, 2008

One session I noted:

Social Presence: New value for networked museum audiences

Brian Dawson, Canada Science and Technology Museum Corporation, Canada
http://technomuses.ca/

Social networking Web sites have achieved a critical mass of popularity in an astonishingly short period of time. Sites such as Facebook have become part of mass culture, and now rank among the most popular sites on the Web. These sites are radically changing on-line behaviours in the process.

The Canada Science and Technology Museum has a Facebook group.

getting HEP to scholarly infrastructure

As an appropriate follow-on to my previous post thinking about domain-specific sites on the net, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN DG-elect, shows us what a High-Energy Physics (HEP) e-Infrastructure for Scientific Communication may look like:

1. Build a complete HEP information platform
2. Enable text- and data-mining applications
3. Demonstrate and deploy Web2.0 applications
4. Preservation and re-use of research data

www.scoap3.org/files/APE2008-Heuer.pdf

As you might expect from the URL, there is also some discussion of the SCOAP3 initiative.

Although there are of course aspects that are unique to the HEP community, there are also lots of ideas that are generally applicable to domain portals for other areas of science.

Previously:
June 11, 2007  IATUL 2007 - June 11 - Dr. Rüdiger Voss - Open Access - SCOAP3
June 11, 2007  OA and repositories : beyond green and gold - Jens Vigen - June 11 - IATUL 2007

whither the generalist library in a world of domain specialists?

Peter Murray-Rust blogging about the Academic Publishing in Europe conference (APE 2008)

Panel Discussion: What Matters? The Future Role of Libraries in Science and Society? Swallowed by OA Repositories, turned into University Presses or kept as Book Museums?

Here I have a problem. I appreciate that libraries have many roles and I’m a keen supporter. Guardianship of scholarship, preservation, access, etc. But this doesn’t come across in science. I see librarians because I’m working on information-rich projects but if I didn’t I wouldn’t. How many PhD chemistry students will come to the library. (We have a lovely library in our building, funded by Unilever, and students like working there because it’s quiet. But we wouldn’t build the same facility today. And Henry tells me that Imperial has closed its departmental library. They have a nice quiet work area - with terminals - but it’s not a library.  Librarians cannot make a new role out of being super-purchasing and contract officers for information - scientists neither see nor care. So I challenged the panel with this and similar points.

Science and technology move so fast that none of us can keep up. Subject librarians trained on the classical model cannot provide what scientists need. The bioscientists look to PubMed, EBI, PDB, etc as the repositories of knowledge - not to their institutions. What they need are information scientists embedded in their laboratories. People who know how to hack perl, python, Java, XML, RDF, RSS, etc. Where the flow of meta-information is from the scientist to the information scientists as well as the other way round. It’s a tall order. But the average 18-year old does not look in a library for scientific information - they look to Google and Wikipedia (which is why I contribute when I can find time).

Thes views are reinforced by what the biscoientists and physicists are doing. They create domain repositories. They either have large national or international organisations which are beneficient and wish to oversee the free movement of scientific infomation. With bio- it’s Pubmed and Pubchem, NCBI, PDB, EBI, etc. and with physics it’s arXiv and SCOAP3. These are domain repositories and that’s what we critically need.

I can see that certain primary research will naturally go to IRs - mandated fulltext, theses, etc. But  many will see Pubmed and SCOAP3 as the primary places, not their institution.

I guess underlying this is an element of social networking that the Internet exposes: allegience to local institutions is an artefact of physical proximity.  When physical interaction is a real part of your community, this is not a problem - the local public library remains a real meeting place.  The university library acts as a neutral meeting ground and study area.  But we find in the online environment, people tend to coalesce around their interests, not their locations.  When you go online, do you go to your city or neighbourhood web network (if such a thing even exists?) or do you instead go to sites around your personal network and interests: your Facebook friends, a digital photography site, your Warcraft Guild page and Guild Bank, your aggregator with blogs that interest you.

I never really quite got this school spirit thing of "our" team versus "their" team.  You may find that scientists consider their peers in their discipline as the group to which they owe their loyalty, not their institution.  That means their content and their efforts are going to flow to the online representations of their scientific network, whether that's domain repositories, conference sites, or specialised scientific discussion groups.

This is a challenge for the physical library, which brought together disparate groups on the basis of being the gatekeeper of physical content, and then built services (e.g. reference) for the crowds of people who flowed in.

One possible role is for the library to participate in the domain networks, as we see with the roles of NLM and British Library in PubMed Central and UKPMC.  And it's certainly a legitimate role to be the collector of the institution's output in an IR, as long as you recognize that the IR is just going to be one node in a much larger network of content that may be aggregated on a domain basis (e.g. one can imagine a chemistry portal that draws on PubChem, anything "chemistry tagged" across any IRs it can search, and other chem resources).

SciBarCamp in Toronto - March 2008

SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a weekend of talks and discussions.  It will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on the weekend of March 15-16 [2008], with an opening reception on the evening of March 14 [2008].  The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture.  The themes are:

• The edge of science (eg, synthetic biology, quantum gravity, cognitive science)
• The edge of technology (eg, mobile web, ambient computing, nanotechnology, web 2.0)
• Science 2.0 (open access, changing models of publication and collaboration, scientific software)
• Scientific literacy and public engagement (eg, one laptop per child project, policy and science, technology as legislation, enfranchising the poor, the young, the old)
• The interactions of science, art and culture:  Scientists and artists as partners in the continuing evolution of the culture.

http://scibarcamp.org/

I had the privilege and the pleasure of attending last year's Nature-O'Reilly-Google SciFoo, and I found a lot to like about the unconference experience.  It's nice to see a science unconference closer to home.

via A Blog Around The Clock

IFLA 2008 satellite conferences for science and medical libraries

IFLA 2008 will be in Quebec City this year, but I have discovered there are quite a few associated satellite meetings in different venues.  I don't know if I will go to IFLA proper, but I plan to attend the science portals preconference in Montreal.  Here are a few of the events that are relevant to science libraries:

Disappearing disciplinary borders in the social science library - global studies or sea change?
Dates: 6-7 August 2008
Location: University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Contact person: Lynne M. Rudasill <mailto:rudasill@uiuc.edu> 
Website: http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/ssls/

National Science Policies and Science Portals
Dates: 8 August 2008
Location: Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal (Montreal)
Contact person: Irma Pasanen <mailto:irma.pasanen@tkk.fi> 
Website: http://lib.tkk.fi/ifla/IFLA_Science_Portals

The role of evidence based research in medical libraries
Dates: 9 August 2008
Location: Québec City (exact location to be advised)
Contact person: H. Todd <mailto:h.todd@library.uq.edu.au> 
Website: to be announced

Rethinking Access to Information: Evolving perspectives on information content and delivery
Dates: 6-7 August 2008 (arrival and social event of 5 August)
Location: Boston Public Library, Boston, MA (USA)
Contact person: Poul Erlandsen <mailto:poer@dpu.dk> 
Website: website with link from IFLA website

ICSTI video - "Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information"

Videos of the presentations from the ICSTI 2007 Public Conference "Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information" are now available.

You can see the programme with links to presentations, and the video page is separate, with links to each topic (RealVideo format - click on the camcorder icons on each sub-page, not on the presentation titles), I was in Quality, certification and peer review - Part 1, my presentation was Web tools for peer reviewers...and everyone (RealVideo, 35 minutes).  I encourage you to check out the other topics, I found there were some really informative presentations.

(As I said in my previous posting about my presentation, the title is not great, it's more like "categorizing the problem space of journal article exploration, and what new features or metrics we might use in this new space, as well as what new scholarly objects we might certify by applying peer review".)

My hair is, as usual, sticking out at some odd angle.  Fortunately for you, most of the time the video shows the slide I'm talking about. It's probably not entirely clear from the video, but about 14 minutes in the projector died, so I was left talking beside a blank screen (I could still see the slides on my own monitor) for about 5 minutes until everyone decided they'd had enough of that and we took a break and came back when the projector was fixed.

The next (closed, members-only) ICSTI meeting is coming up next week in Paris.  I don't know whether there is an accompanying public workshop.

UPDATE: The first version of this post ended up with an amusingly unfortunate URL.

library 2.0 presentation from GTEC 2007

A Google search for library 2.0 books happened to turn up this presentation

Library 2.0 Library Services & Web 2.0 (PPT) - GTEC conference - October 16, 2007

by Donna Bourne-Tyson of Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) in Halifax, NS

A couple things I hadn't known

NRCan libraries in delicious - http://del.icio.us/nrcanlibrary

Dalhousie University implementation of LibGuides - http://libguides.library.dal.ca/

carbon labelling

If Loblaws follows other retailers in green labelling, shoppers could get the chance to literally calculate their exact carbon footprint from a new pair of boots or even a box of chocolates.

Loblaw Cos. Ltd. is thinking of adding carbon labels to its private label products to show consumers how much carbon dioxide was emitted in producing the goods.

Following in the footsteps of shoe specialist Timberland Co. and grocer Tesco PLC, the Canadian supermarket retailer's potential initiative could capitalize on consumers' growing concern about climate change and greenhouse gases.

Globe and Mail - carbon footprint - January 18, 2008

If this is done properly, it should help people to relocalise their commerce, since transportation is a big component of the carbon footprint.

Jon Udell has been writing about this, the idea of tracking carbon through the production chain.
Having information on product labels is nice, but this information should also be available for any online transaction as well.

See e.g. The transparent supply chain.

There is also some positive news coming out of conferences (I hope conferences will start banning bottled water as well).

The first place SLA expects to see a significant chance to make an environmental impact is the SLA Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO in Seattle in June 2008. Seattle is well-known as a pioneer in green initiatives and has been recognized for its citywide environmental efforts. In addition to what the city offers, such as public transport and green hotels, there are a number of ways for attendees to make their own conference experience a greener one. SLA will be working with INFO-EXPO exhibitors and conference sponsors as well as attendees on how they can participate in this initiative by offering options such as providing the opportunity for them to purchase their own carbon offsets, and supplying free wireless Internet access throughout the conference center, allowing attendees to access hand-outs electronically and eliminating the need to print thousands of paper copies.

Special Libraries Association Announces Green Initiative - January 11, 2008

Previously:
December 3, 2006  airlines and everything with built-in carbon offset

Access 2008 CFP

Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Date: October 1-4, 2008 (Hackfest: Oct 1; Conference: Oct 2-4)
CFP Deadline: Friday, February 22, 2008
URL: http://access2008.mcmaster.ca

Access is Canada's premier library technology conference, featuring a single stream of sessions that deal with technology planning, development, challenges and solutions. ... now accepting proposals for prepared talks on the following topics (other ideas are more than welcome):      

• customized web applications and search interfaces
  
• open source software
  
• national and provincial/state-wide consortia technology initiatives
  
• information policy
  
• digital and social media
  
• library catalogue innovations
  
• digitization projects
  
• institutional repositories
  
• end-user searching behaviours
  
• protocols and metadata

...or anything else suitably geeky, innovative and/or awe-inspiring

Previously:
Access2005 Access2006 Access2007

ICCBSS conference 2008 - SOA and component-based software

7th IEEE International Conference on Composition-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS) - "icecubes"
February, 25-29, 2008 - Madrid, Spain

The programme is already set, it includes NRC's Anatol Kark with SEI's Tricia Oberndorf, doing a workshop on "Research Agenda for System of Systems Interoperability" and a keynote by Alan Brown of IBM Rational Software on "Practical Approaches to Delivering Service-Oriented Solutions: The Role of Software Architects and Architecture in an SOA World".  Many of the papers/presentations cover SOA or related topics.

ELPUB 2008 in Toronto June 25-27: Open Scholarship

The CFP for ELPUB 2008 is out.

Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB 2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences , and new dissemination channels and business models. We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of these communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of scholarly communications.

deadline is January 20, 2008

Designing Cyberinfrastructure 2007

I am a bit late to this content, but there was a conference "Designing Cyberinfrastructure" in January

http://cyberinfrastructure.us/
or http://www.si.umich.edu/cyber-infrastructure/

with the papers published in a special issue of First Monday in June

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_6/

It's more grid, policy and patent focused than about specific IT architecture(s).

Some papers and presentations of interest:

• The Open Science Grid (paper), Building Large-Scale Cyberinfrastructure Through Collaboration (PowerPoint presentation) - Paul Avery
• Cyberinfrastructure and Innovation Policy - Brian Kahin
• Cyberinfrastructure, Institutions, and Sustainability - Chris Mackie
• Implementing Openness: An International Institutional Perspective - Sacha Wunsch–Vincent, Taylor Reynolds, and Andrew Wyckoff

I hope that these sorts of discussions will continue, but also as I indicated, start to encompass the idea of IT architectures for (in Christine Borgman's term) "scholarly infrastructure", that will bring in many more services and capabilities than just the compute and storage focus of the grid initiatives.

Previously:
November 12, 2007  Enterprise Services Architectures - Chris Mackie - DLF Fall Forum 2007
September 30, 2007  Blog for OECD Participative Web goes live (Sacha Wunsch–Vincent played a key role in enabling this)