Science Library Pad

cyberolfactorcartography

Carleton University cybercartographer Fraser Taylor and his colleagues have already developed multimedia maps and atlases that use sound, music, photos and artwork to convey information about places such as Antarctica and the Arctic. Now he and doctoral student Tracey Lauriault are working on maps with scents.

...

Ms. Lauriault is developing a scented digital map for the Bytowne Museum in Ottawa. She is considering, for example, using the smell of sawdust to help convey the importance of lumberyards that once dominated a large working-class neighbourhood.

Globe and Mail - Planning your next vacation, with dollars and scents - February 27, 2008

Also see Lauriault's Nature Network profile.

Adobe adds AIR to cloud

AIR is intended to help software developers create applications that exist in part on a user’s PC or smartphone and in part on servers reachable through the Internet.

To computer users, the applications will look like any others on their device, represented by an icon. The AIR applications can mimic the functions of a Web browser but do not require a Web browser to run.

...

“There is a big cloud movement that is building an infrastructure that speaks directly to this kind of software and experience,” said Sean M. Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president.

New York Times - Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web - February 25, 2008

AIR has graduated from Adobe Labs, and is now available for free download at

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

I have to say, I'm not really clear how this is any different from, or better than, Java.
I guess the argument is that it uses web standardsy stuff, so it's easier to program than Java.

Plus it's all well and good to say cloud this and cloud that, for example, but I don't see any indication that AIR provides you with some storage cloud from Adobe that you can use.

I found a posting by a GWT developer that briefly introduces the major competing technologies in this space

Adobe AIR/Apollo vs Ajax vs Gears vs Flash vs Silverlight vs JavaFX vs GWT - June 11, 2007

As well I wonder about the implications for searching.  Our search engines mostly eat text or things that can be converted easily to plain text (Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints).  You can do a whole fancy site in Flash and to a search engine it will barely exist.  If we move from building text-based web sites to interaction based web apps, how will we ever be able to find anything again?

the paperless home?

The New York Times article Pushing Paper Out the Door has been circulating around at work and it actually did inspire me to think about better paper handling at home.

First off, a clarification, there is no way my books are going away.

But I would like to get rid of the paper output of the consumer cycle: various bills, credit card receipts etc.

My plan is: scan->organise and backup digital object->shred paper.

The lifehacker Going Paperless at Home? answers are not quite aligned with what I need.

A lot of what the lifehacker people suggest is about going to electronic billing and payment.  Canada has had online banking for a long time, so that's not an issue for me, I did that over a decade ago.

Inputs

• junk paper mail - goes directly into recycling bin in mailroom anyway - can also reduce with http://www.reddotcampaign.ca/
• bills/statements I still get in paper - although I pay all my bills online, I still get some statements mailed in paper, simply because I trust "information I hold myself in my house" more than "information offsite that could be changed at any time" in case I have to challenge a billing item
• credit and debit card reciepts - Canada also went electronic point-of-sale payment a long time ago, but although I have no paper money, I have tons of paper receipts from every transaction.  It would be nice if instead of a paper receipt you could just plug in a memory key and have it "print to storage" - and yes, I reconcile my receipts with my statements each month, using an old version of Microsoft Money
• miscellaneous incoming paper mail

There are some recommendations for the SnapScan scanner, but it's showing at over U$400 on Amazon.
I got a shiny multifunction flatbed instead, it's Mac and PC compatible.

For me, the main issue is organisation.  Most people on lifehacker seem to be scanning to PDF, and letting their desktop search handle the rest.

I'd basically like Picasa for scans, except with an extra layer of organisation.
I want to be able to organise scans by:

• date scanned
• date on document
• types and categories of documents

That should be pretty easy, but I haven't found anything that quite does what I want yet.  Are there photo organisers that also handle PDF?  Or should I look for specific scan organising software?  Maybe I could use one of the tools that is for management of downloaded PDF articles, and use it generically for all PDFs, i.e. a reference manager for receipts?

Maybe something like Bookends?  Or one of the others from this Mac list of reference managers?
What about PC equivalents?

Or maybe I should run my own home digital library or institutional repository?  (I am only half-joking.)

We've put so much thought and technology into managing digital objects for libraries, surely there must be some of that I can reuse at home?

What are you using to manage scanned and born-digital paper at home?

(Born-digital paper?  What an age we live in.)

your unique author-ity

There are many ways to generate lists of one's publications, Martin Fenner lists a few in

An easy online list of all your publications

Mention is made of both the Scopus author ID, and the Thomson ResearcherID.  This makes me wonder what ever happened to the Digital Author Identifier system in the Netherlands.

A Google search turns up

Digital Author Identification (DAI) is a unique national number assigned to every author who has been appointed to a position at a Dutch university or research institute or has some other relevant connection with one of these organisations. SURF and OCLC PICA have set up a link with the PICA thesaurus of personal names that is maintained and updated by the university libraries. One very important factor in this system is the link between the Metis research information system and the repository.

surffoundation.nl - Digital Author Identifier (DAI)

Searching also turns up a paper and running system for UAI_Sys

UAI_Sys is a pilot Java web application allowing each one author to register/update his/her own metadata content and request a unique identifier that s/he is going to retain and make use of for life. Apart from obtaining his/her unique author identifier (codenamed: UAI code), the author specifies the subset of his/her personal (meta)data that s/he wishes to become globally available to all interested parties, including variations of his/her name used in publications s/he has (co-)authored. The system supports the industrial standard interface for other applications to connect to and co-function with, over the Internet.

See UAI_Sys application and paper at DLIST.

Of course, this gets me thinking about Name Authorities and whether there's some way to get a worldwide name authority unique ID.  I discover that Lorcan of course has already written about this: Names, Names, Names - VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File)

UPDATE 2008-02-25: I also found a report from a Knowledge Exchange Institutional Repositories workshop - Author identification report (PDF, September 2007).

standard geotagging logo?

Bruce McKenzie of bioneural.net proposes a standard icon to indicate geotagged information, postings etc.

In A web standard icon for geotagging, he writes

co-ordinates are typically encoded within metadata (or microformat) tags making them visible to machines but hidden from people. We have de facto web standard icons to help identify feeds, OPML, and sharing—so why not for geotagged content?

Sounds good to me.

via Geotagging Flickr group, further discussion in Flickr Ideas group

UPDATE 2008-02-29: http://www.geotagicons.com/

Google Health Records

Associated Press reporting

Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that's likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the Internet search leader.

The pilot project to be announced Thursday will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google's new service, which won't be open to the general public.

Each health profile, including information about prescriptions, allergies and medical histories, will be protected by a password that's also required to use other Google services such as e-mail and personalized search tools.

...

Contacted Wednesday, a Google spokesman declined to elaborate on its plans. The Associated Press learned about the pilot project from the Cleveland Clinic, a not-for-profit medical centre founded 87 years ago.

The clinic already keeps the personal health records of more than 120,000 patients on its own online service called MyChart. Patients who transfer the information to Google would still be able to get the data quickly even if they were no longer being treated by the Cleveland Clinic.

Globe and Mail - AP - Google to store health records - February 21, 2008

Also reported by the New York Times - Google Health Begins Its Preseason at Cleveland Clinic.

In case you're wondering where you've seen MyChart before, it was mentioned in the Health Infoway EHR posting I did.

Personally, no way no how do I want my health records going anywhere near Google, Microsoft, or any other giant online corporation.

Previously:
April 04, 2007  Google ponders health information

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.

transcript - Senate Committee on S&T Strategy

The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology (of Canada) met on January 30 and 31, 2008 to consider the federal government’s new Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy — Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage.  The full transcript is now online.  The heads of NSERC, CFI, CIHR, NRC, and Industry all spoke, amongst others.

39th Parliament, 2nd Session
(October 16, 2007 -   )
Committee Proceedings

• January 31, 2008
• January 30, 2008

The proceedings were aired on CPAC but I wasn't able to find any online video of them.

Previously:
May 21, 2007  PM Harper announces Canadian Science and Technology Strategy

the Nature of Canadian science

In an editorial today, Nature expressed concerns about the position of science and science advice within the Canadian government

When the Canadian government announced earlier this year that it was closing the office of the national science adviser, few in the country's science community were surprised. Science has long faced an uphill battle for recognition in Canada, but the slope became steeper when the Conservative government was elected in 2006.

The decision in 2004 by the then prime minister Paul Martin to appoint a scientist for independent, non-partisan advice on science and technology was a good one — in principle. Arthur Carty, the chemist who secured the position, duly relinquished his post as president of the National Research Council Canada, which he had revitalized.

But his new office was destined to fail. The budget was abysmal and the mandate was vague at best. After winning power from the Liberals, the Conservatives moved Carty's office away from the prime minister's offices to Industry Canada. In 2007, the government formed the 18-member Science, Technology and Innovation Council (STIC). ... It can be expected to be markedly less independent: although it is stocked with first-class scientists and entrepreneurs, several government administrators also hold seats.

Concerns can only be enhanced by the government's manifest disregard for science.

Nature 451, 866 (21 February 2008) "Science in retreat" | doi:10.1038/451866a | Published online 20 February 2008 - Full Text - PDF

First published in 1869, Nature is a prominent international journal of peer-reviewed science.  According to Journal Citation Reports information available at in-cites.com, Nature was the second most-cited scientific journal worldwide in 2006.

UPDATE 2008-02-22: Reported today in the Globe and Mail

In a strongly worded editorial, entitled Science in Retreat and published in yesterday's issue, the British journal Nature wrote that while Canada's researchers consistently rank among the world's finest, the same cannot be said for the federal government's position on science and research.

...

In a rebuttal letter to Nature, Industry Minister Jim Prentice writes that the government is committed to "supporting world-leading research."

UPDATE: Also in the February 22, 2008 Ottawa Citizen

Under the headline "Science in Retreat," an editorial in yesterday's issue of the British journal Nature says Canada's Conservative government has a "dismal" track record on science and the environment.

The government issued a pointed rebuttal late yesterday afternoon, saying some of the criticisms are "completely misleading," while one is "incomprehensible."

...

It "has expressed what many of us feel," says geologist Andrew Miall, of the University of Toronto, and president of the Royal Society of Canada's Academy of Science.

The academy has not taken an official position, but Mr. Miall said via e-mail that he and his colleagues, as individual scientists, are "very concerned" about the dismantling of science advisory bodies and dismissal of senior independent advisers -- most notably Canada's national science adviser, chemist Arthur Carty, the former president of the National Research Council.

...

"How anyone can state that 18 bright minds [on STIC] cannot perform the task of one science adviser -- who decided to retire after years of dedicated public service -- is incomprehensible," Industry Minister Jim Prentice says in the rebuttal [to the Nature editorial] provided to Canwest News Service.

Disclaimer: I'm just the messenger.  Any statements quoted from the Nature article above, or indeed any statements I quote from any article, represent the opinions and research of the original authors alone, and don't necessarily reflect my opinion.  When it comes to anything to do with the Canadian government, this blog has no official opinions of any kind whatsoever.

Next Generation Discovery - NISO Forum - March 2008

http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/ Next Generation Discovery: New Tools, Aging Standards - http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/
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

Canadian health records going online

Ontario's Privacy Commissioner even keeps her electronic health record, called MyChart, on a memory stick, a device the size of a pack of gum that neatly tucks into a pants pocket.

"Given that I travel extensively, it's very important to have access to my [medical] records at a moment's notice," said Ann Cavoukian, who has undergone neurosurgery three times.

Although MyChart is available only to patients at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, other Canadian hospitals are coming out with their own versions of the paperless health record.

"By 2010, the goal is to have half of the population with an electronic health record," said Richard Alvarez, president and chief executive officer of Canada Health Infoway, an independent, federally funded agency that works with provinces and territories to invest in electronic health-record projects, typically by funding half the cost. By 2016, he wants every Canadian to have one.

Globe and Mail - Your medical chart, just a mouse click away - February 18, 2008

Canadian Canada Health Infoway has been like the multibillion dollar project no one has ever heard of, but they seem to be slowly raising their profile of late.  Their entire site is was down (well, unreachable from my computer anyway) at the moment when I tried to access it this morning (hopefully not a harbinger of things to come), but you can of course read the brief info on Wikipedia.

UPDATE: I can reach the site now.  There's also lots of info at

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/partners/free/infoway/

Monbiot in Second Life, round 2

Speaker: George Monbiot
Topic: Global warming and what to do about it
Date: Thurs 21st Feb, 2008
Time: 5pm GMT, 9am SLT (Pacific)

Nature Network - Joanna Scott - February events: Manatees, George Monbiot

Previously:
December 06, 2007  Nature Climate Change series in Second Life

Bora interviews Christina Pikas

What is your Real Life job? What does it mean to be a Science Librarian?

... the questions I get are either really tough or the scientist or engineer needs an exhaustive literature review. I do the fun part, interviewing the scientist to see what he or she needs, then doing the searching, summarizing and presenting the results ...

A Blog Around the Clock - Librarians have been doing it for a hundred years! Interview with Christina Pikas

It's great to hear the perspective of a passionate science librarian.

via Facebook

an end to health care waiting - CIHR Café Scientifique

I thought Café Scientifique was just a clever name from CIHR (we do this sometimes in the Federal Government to get around bilingualism issues) but it turns out it is a Movement.

Wikipedia comes through with the info as usual: Café Scientifique

CIHR has held and will hold events across Canada, the next one is

All I ever do is wait! Putting an end to health care wait times

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008, 6 p.m.
Mercury Lounge
56 Byward, Ottawa
Please RSVP: [email protected]

Also LIVE on the Web at www.webcastcanada.ca/cihr-irsc

CIHR - Café scientifique - or in French, err... Cafés scientifiques des IRSC

Amazon S3 outage

Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations.  While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests.  Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.

Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls.  The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place.  In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles.  This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST.  By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.

As we said earlier today, though we're proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable.  As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements.  We are taking immediate action on the following:  (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls.  Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=19714&start=75&tstart=0

Science Friday in Second Life

From

to

thanks to Ira Flatow doing Science Friday on the radio and in Second Life.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/

the SL audio stream maxed out, I'm listening on http://wkms.org/listen/

The topic is [US] Federal Government and Science.

UPDATE: If you missed it, they have an audio podcast as well as video and other features.

when recommendations go bad

Seems like a "related category" filter might be in order...

"Would you like some pepper with that wifi, sir?"

Previously:
January 07, 2007  things you won't see on the WebOPAC

The Agenda on Microhoo and the Compute Cloud

The Agenda had their somewhat-usual technology suspects on talking about the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, with a majority of the show devoted to the idea of the "compute cloud" future for computing.  It's quite impressive that they took this fairly technical topic on, and they did a good job of covering it from various angles.

The Debate: The Coming Cloud (switch to the Mark Evans tab for the other discussion) - video is linked from these pages, just click on "Watch video" there

also available as iTunes audio and video - I'm npt seeing it in iTunes yet though

Overall I liked the show, but I would have liked to have seen a cloud computing user, rather than just a panel of pundits.  Show me someone who has moved their enterprise over to Amazon EC2/S3 or other cloud services.  (For example, Internet Archive has been experimenting with this... and I see I'm the top hit for this information: "Science Library Pad: Internet Archive 20th Century Search".  Also SmugMug photos uses Amazon S3 storage.)

I think the future splits into multiple models of computer use.  Gamers, for near-term, need local graphics engines and local storage (holding the multi-gigabyte virtual environments they use).  The intensive computer users like me probably still have their whole elaborate local network and local storage and local computing... well, basically entire personal data centre.  We're probably the only ones left with a lot of non-cloud data and computing.

The digital dividers (old people, poor people, the technically unsavvy) will have very simple devices, something very akin to thin clients - probably in many different form factors - built in to televisions, set-top boxes, things like OLPCs and Eee PCs, "intelligent LCD displays".  The highly mobile will have quite sophisticated but completely mobile devices.  All of the data for both groups lives in the cloud.

This being said, there is a very, very long history predicting the demise of the PC and its replacement with set-tops and thin clients, and it has yet to materialize.  People use a bunch of devices (cell, camera, PDA, laptop) AND their home computers, not instead of their computers.

SIDEBAR: Jesse Hirsh had quite the slag on for the Preventers of Information Services in IT Departments.
First he says home users can't be trusted with personal computers, and then he says work users must be trusted with unlimited use of Internet applications.

It is true that some of the Dr. No aspect of IT is arbitrary, but some of it is either out of their control (layers of regulations imposed from on high), and some of it is related to user support.  IT is about user productivity.  Computer secure, applications running smoothly = happy IT.  If this could be guaranteed through the magic of trusted cloud computing, that would be fine.  But the reality is, users download a bunch of cr*p and access a bunch of cr*p websites, and then IT has to come in and try to clean it up.  That's why IT tries to lockdown.  Lockdown is about being able to guarantee a stable computer, network, and sustainable support experience.

If you want to see what happens in an uncontrolled environment, just let a bunch of consultants into your organisation and let them "manage themselves" and see how well that works...

LimeWire led to data breach: N.L. justice minister

an outside consultant had installed LimeWire, a popular program used to swap music for free, on a laptop computer that was being used to work with data for the Workplace Health, Safety and Compensation Commission.

As a result, information — including names, addresses, dates of birth and medical and work histories — related to 153 individuals was exposed

END SIDEBAR

SIDEBAR 2: A minor quibble with terminology used during the show, Amazon's S3 is cloud storage only, their compute cloud service is EC2.  END SIDEBAR

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

LibraryThing 1200

The 1200th book in my LibraryThing library is Brunelleschi's Dome.  It's quite interesting so far.

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)

Deloitte & NMC Tech Horizons

Deloitte has released their Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Trends: Predictions 2008 (also available via URL www.deloitte.co.uk/predictions )

The full PDFs for each of the three sections are free online (with copying of text disabled), along with about 10 minutes of audio for each section.

In the Media report, they assert something that I have been saying for a long time, which is that e-Books have limited use, but e-Reference (e-Textbooks, medical reference, etc.) makes a lot more sense.

Also they discuss the carbon footprint... of your living room.

Deloitte via Google News.  If you want to see all the bullet points in one place, see an article in the Exchange Morning Post.

The 2008 NMC/EDUCAUSE Horizon report is also out, you can get it from the wiki

http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page

It seems to be mostly about the mobile and the social, with "Collaboration Webs", "Mobile Broadband", "Collective Intelligence" and "Social Operating Systems" as major topics.  They also discuss "Data Mashups", mostly in the context of map mashups.

The power of mashups for education lies in the way
they help us reach new conclusions or discern new
relationships by uniting large amounts of data in a
manageable way. Web-based tools for manipulating
data are easy to use, usually free, and widely available.
Research can be displayed on interactive graphs,
charts, or maps that make the concepts clear.

Previously:
February 15, 2007  Tech to Watch in 2007 Horizon Report

future of academic libraries - presentations

Presentations from "The Future of Academic Libraries - the Road ahead" seminar held earlier this week in Oslo are available, including

The future of academic libraries - the road ahead - seen from Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF)

What are the challenges for the academic libraries in the near future?

• Become user oriented in all respects
    – Become digital
    – Develop user-friendly simple systems (“as well known daily systems”)
    – Push the systems to the users in all ways
    – Forget one stop shopping
    – Accept not all content will be used
    – Deliver extra value (content or service)
    – Implement resource sharing – nobody can do everything nationally or internationally

Which services do the academic libraries’ institutions (and users) expect them to deliver?

• Content acquisition (licensing)
• Integrated search and delivery
• Research registration
• Institutional repositories
• Information literacy support
• Study environments
• Virtual reference desk
• VLE support?
• E-science support?

presentation by Bo Öhrström, Deputy Director, Danish Library Agency and overall responsible for DEFF

The presentation also talks about the need for shared infrastructure

Integrated search as an architecture

• Not only a search engine – but a national architecture
• A university has only 5% of the relevant information resources for a user in its own holdings
• The user wants to search in all relevant quality research information independent of which institution provides them.
• The library needs cooperation with other libraries about
    – larger amount of data
    – more seamless document delivery systems
    – new technology access control systems

Denmark has two integrated library search systems, Summa (open source) and Primo (Ex Libris).

There are also presentations with the perspectives from Talis (UK), Finland, Sweden, and Norway.

Link via BiblioBabl.

Previously:
February 05, 2007  Danish library strategies
September 27, 2005  Info Grid 2005 - Tuesday 27th, 11:40 - Overview of DEFF SOA activities