Science Library Pad

the de-zoned BL struggles with its popularity

Would that we all had such problems with our reading rooms.

in 1998 the library moved to a modern red-brick building on Euston Road, and four years ago it liberalized its admission policy. It opened its new reading rooms not only to writers and academics who depend on material from its singular collection, but also to “anyone who has a relevant research need,” a spokeswoman said.

Which is all fine. But “anyone” includes college undergraduates, and the problem with them, at least in the eyes of the older researchers, is that they tend to behave like the teenagers that many of them are.

...

Researchers have been grousing about the boisterous atmosphere and crowded conditions at the British Library for years. But the dispute — a philosophical battle, really, over who should be allowed access to a great national library — spilled out in public last week when The Times of London published an article quoting various distinguished figures complaining about the out-of-control mood over spring break.

New York Times - Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling - April 28, 2008

Although there are 1,480 seats in the library, the author Christopher Hawtree was last week forced to perch on a windowsill while the historians Lady Antonia Fraser and Claire Tomalin have swapped horror stories of interminable queues. Library users complain that the line to enter the new building in St Pancras, central London, has recently been extending across its enormous courtyard.

Speaking to The Times yesterday, Lady Antonia said: “I had to queue for 20 minutes to get in, in freezing weather. Then I queued to leave my coat for 20 minutes [at the compulsory check-in]. Then half an hour to get my books and another 15 minutes to get my coat. I’m told it’s due to students having access now. Why can’t they go to their university libraries?”

Of particular irritation is the notion that many undergraduates now come to the library to relax, meet and text friends, and play on laptops, rather than to read books. “It’s become a social gathering,” Lady Antonia said.

The Times - Frustration for authors as students hog British Library reading rooms - April 21, 2008

One Big Library Unconference - Toronto - June 27 2008

John Dupuis announces

the One Big Library Unconference

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

E-mail: [email protected]

When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Where: The Centre for Social Innovation,
215 Spadina Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Areas of interest:

    * The future of libraries
    * Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
    * Uses of social software in libraries
    * Tools to support and extend the One Big Library

Looks really interesting, it's great to see more experimentation with the unconference format.

the end of cognitive zoning

Lots of buzz around Shirky's cognitive surplus post.
To me the idea is very similar to my assertion that peer production happens mostly in the bright areas of the world at night map, in the places where we have the leisure time to do these things.  (See where in the world are users generating?)

Shirky's idea is presented as reclaiming the time that was lost for generations to television, but I think of it as more like cognitive re-zoning.

We still live in the echo of the Industrial Age.  And the Industrial Age gave us efficiency, Taylorism, and as part of that, zoning.

How our space is organized has a deep relationship with how our lives are organized, which in turn shapes the possibilities for the lives we can lead.

Think about old houses, each small room for its specific purpose, the kitchen, the dining room, the front reception room (closed, for guest visits only).  Now think of new, unzoned designs, the flowing great rooms that are now preferred, kitchen into dining room into living room.

Zoning permeated, and still permeates, our lives.  There are 9-5 weekdays, where you PRODUCE (or if a student, LEARN), and 5-11 weekdays and all day weekends, when you CONSUME.

Drive into the city work zone to PRODUCE, drive out to the suburbs to CONSUME.

All nice tidy zones.  And zones which made sense in the industrial age, since to live next to where you worked at that time was to be next to a giant smoking clanking factory.  And if you're doing physical work all day, you really do need downtime just so your body doesn't collapse.

The problem with zoning in the post-industrial age is that it's an epic disaster.  A disaster of urban planning, and a disaster of social engagement.  PRODUCE and CONSUME excludes a lot of desirable things.  Like say, Think, Reflect, Eat, Discuss, Discover, Continue to Learn... basically, most of the things that make life worth living.

And in the unzoned life in the unzoned city, all of these things can flow naturally together.  Not in a destructive way, in which PRODUCE expands into your downtime so that you are always working, but in an organic way, so that you are able to mix working, learning, thinking, relaxing...

Sometimes people say to me about blogging, isn't it a waste of time, where will people find the time, which is nonsense.  All old-style PRODUCE does is define a tiny set of things: meetings, emails, legacy inefficient processes, as "work", and anything else as non-work.  So you end up in a time of constant change when you've literally defined learning and planning out of your work day.  It's no wonder people can't adapt to change.

Lorcan has a great quote from the Economist in his blog, which he is using to discuss mobility, but which I will use to talk about the death of zoning

“a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”

I think the language is interesting: "ad-hoc workspaces".  Because a workspace should be what - fixed?  Established?  Serious?  I would put it another way: there is no work zone and home zone.  There is only place and context.  Today the coffeshop is a place to sit in the sun and chat with friends, tomorrow you're writing a report there on your laptop.  Today your computer room is for playing World of Warcraft, tomorrow you're filling in a spreadsheet.

Think about your spaces and your cognitive activities in an unzoned world.  How do things change?  We've already seen great progress in libraries on this, as they accept food and noise and gaming and more.  And I think we're also starting to see progress in some organizations as people's work activities and groups are unzoned, so the we can cross silos and we can mix blog reading and writing in with Very Serious Business Meetings.

As well, as luck would have it, we already have some models that we can draw upon, as most of the world's great cities give us examples of mixed, zoneless life, where you can move from work to shopping to eating to an art gallery to a park, all within the space of a few blocks.

In case you're wondering why I uppercased producer and consumer, it's to highlight how these roles are reintegrating, or dezoning, back into prosumer, as envisioned notably by Toffler.

Previously:
December 18, 2006  the Internet, it's made of people

availability, discovery, and delivery - redux

• Availability does not equal accessibility: researchers’ top concern about scholarly communication is that they cannot access all the content they wish to access
• Researchers tend to use tried-and-tested discovery tools, or those which their library specifically trains them to use. Google and other web search engines remain the most-used search tools for work-related information. The main problem with discovery is coming up against an access barrier
• Researchers do not always know how to seek out a freely-available copy of an article that they want and which they have discovered behind a toll barrier

Key concerns within the scholarly communication process: report to the JISC Scholarly Communication Group, March 2008 [Word document]

via Lorcan Dempsey

I find it interesting that the focus of concerns is around delivery, not discovery (perhaps this is how the questions were framed).

I think the academic library faces two challenges:

1. Ensure that your researchers can always get from their chosen discovery environment easily to
1. Get to your licensed resources
2. Get to free copies, if licensed versions aren't available
3. Get to purchase options, if free copies aren't available
2. Ensure that as many of your resources as possible can actually be discovered

I'm not convinced that we're doing a particularly good job of addressing these fundamental challenges even after years of working on proxies, federated search, link resolvers, and "live in your environment" plugins and external website settings.

It seems to me that librarians were so focused on trying to control the discovery experience, trying to make people discover resources "properly", following established librarian search protocols, that the simple challenges above were not addressed.

I think we need to spend a lot of time with researchers letting them search however they want, and seeing whether they dead-end either by not being able to get to a resource at all, or by landing at a paywall for a resource we license or can get to for free.  Fix that first.

And I'm not entirely convinced we have all the tools we need to fix that problem right now.

Then once you have addressed consistent delivery, work on improving discovery.  I think discovery is much harder to fix.  And to some extent, there should be vendor pushback.  I don't care how rich or comprehensive a licensed resource is, if my users can never discover it, then the message to the vendor should be "enable easy ways for my user to discover your resources within their preferred discovery environments, or next year we're not licensing your content".

Previously:
Lorcan and I had a bit of a back-and-forth about discovery and delivery in 2006.

August 08, 2006  Discovery and disclosure - Lorcan Dempsey
August 09, 2006  online library role in discovering and delivering - Science Library Pad

Facebook Mini-Feed wants to be your Life-Feed

Facebook launched some "lifestream" integration features on April 15, 2008

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small "Import" link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us [and now Digg]—are available for importing at the moment

Facebook Blog - A new way to share with friends

Sidebar: Facebook also seems to have silently taken away the feature where you could X stuff out of your News Feed, which was supposed to teach it to only show friends items that interested you, over time.

Yahoo - the SearchMonkey cometh

Well, as long as it isn't a flying monkey, ok.

Enter the Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS). ...

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

...

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results.  ... launch party May 15 [2008]

http://ycorpblog.com/2008/04/24/developer-welcome-mat/
(Exclamations removed because I refuse to put exclamations all over the place, including inside of acronyms.)

SearchMonkey is what I previously described as "semantically-enriched search results".

General story of Yahoo Open Strategy very widely reported, e.g. Globe - Associated Press - Yahoo plans social makeover.  SearchMonkey bit via Search Engine Watch blog.

Globe on Lifestreaming

Today's Globe and Mail has a good article on lifestreaming, the article is a reasonable combination of skepticism and information.

For every bon mot you leave [online], a breathless news release documents the leaving of the bon mot. Assemble all those press releases together, and you've got a lifestream.

...

A lifestream is just a [Facebook] mini-feed writ large, covering not just the cloistered confines of one site, but stretching across the entire Web, pulling in data from every site that is willing to share it.

Globe and Mail - Billy blogged! Sarah e-mailed! Tell everyone! - April 24, 2008

There is also accompanying audio (presented in a video window, I guess so they can show you an ad first).  I like when he describes his worry that full lifestreams will be mostly full of "random detritus" of your web wanderings.

FriendFeed is kind of the canonical application in this space, but to some extent, anything that can aggregate RSS feeds can do a basic job of serving as a lifestream.

Free Public WiFi - the wirus SSID that went round the world

So you're out and about, time to upload some photos, check for a hotspot

Hooray, Free Public WiFi.

Everywhere you go - airports, coffee shops, even right now sitting at my desk at work - Free Public WiFi.

Which would be great, except it doesn't work.

It is a profoundly peculiar interaction of human behaviour and a Windows bug.  Not helped by systems and people who can't distinguish between infrastructure networks (which commonly connect you to the Internet) and ad-hoc networks (which are for a small group of computers to quickly communicate with each other).  Of course, some interfaces, like my N82 above, don't distinguish between the two wireless network types at all.

It looks like the world's greatest social engineering hack - create a wireless virus (a "wirus", if you will) that puts up a network name (an SSID) called Free Public WiFi, and then cheerfully compromise any machine that attaches, and continue to propagate.

In fact, it turns out just to be a bug.  The short answer is, Windows does something stupid.  The long answer is, Windows will present an SSID (with no intervention from the users) of networks it has previously seen in ad-hoc mode.

It's relatively harmless for now (but don't connect to it).

See more info at

Pogue's Posts - Free Public WiFi - January 29, 2008

and a reasonably clear explanation of it (and how to avoid connecting to ad-hoc networks) at

WLAN Book - “Free Public WiFi” SSID - July 16, 2007

If you want the most technical explanation, read this advisory, which dates back to January 2006

Nomad Mobile Research Centre A D V I S O R Y - 14Jan2006
Microsoft Windows Silent Adhoc Network Advertisement
Severity : High (albeit lame)

Sidebar 1: Posting prompted by a Tweet from Paul Walk about seeing this SSID on the train, and re-prompted by it coming up when I discovered WLAN scanning was running on my Nokia N82 while I was at my desk.

Re-found Tweet through

http://twitter.summize.com/search?q=%22free+public+wifi%22

which shows this problem continues to circulate daily.  Owen Stephens provided a quick pointer in response to Paul's query.

Sidebar 2: Shiny screen + trying to take a photo of one (quick to power down to black screen) cellphone with another (quick to power down to inactivity) cellphone was quite a challenge.  This shiny screen everywhere trend wreaks havoc on taking photos, unless you want to mirrorshot yourself every time.

CBC Spark Wiki + library tech

CBC's radio show Spark has a wiki.

we're really pleased to announce the Spark Wiki. We hope it will complement this blog and the radio show (and podcast). Right now, it's an experiment: a place to collaborate on story ideas, suggest guests, music selections... whatever. It's a many-to-many form of communication, and I'm really excited to learn how we can use it to make more participatory, collaborative radio.

from the Spark Blog - January 09, 2008

You can see a vaguely related discussion from Globe and Mail Video, "CBC's wiki experiment".  It seems to me they might have been better off talking to someone directly at Spark.

The wiki itself is at

http://www.socialtext.net/spark/

There is a Spark story proposal up for Libraries and technology but it hasn't had much activity.  If you'd like to hear about library tech on Canada's national radio, maybe you might consider adding some ideas or suggestions of people for them to interview.

Second Nature: Science and Science Fiction

Title: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Speakers: Prof Mark Brake and Rev. Neil Hook, Glamorgan University

Date: Mon 28th April [2008]

Time: 9am SLT, Midday NY time, 4pm GMT, 5pm London time

Location: Second Nature Island

from Nature Network - Joanna Scott's blog

I certainly think a common background of consuming science fiction informs both physics and computer science (the only science areas I've worked in).

the social shotgun: blasting your updates everywhere

In the library world we would probably call this something like "federated updating".
With the proliferation of different targets, particularly different social presence sites, people are trying to do one-to-many updates.

We see an example of some infrastructure for this in Yahoo's FireEagle, for collecting and redistributing location updates.

There was also a nice example at the CRIG Repository Challenge, called FileBlast, which allows you to upload a paper (an article) and then send automatic notices with the link to the paper to multiple sources, such as Twitter and your blog.  It is build on the FeedForward infrastructure, and you can read more about it (as well as find a link to the code) in the FeedForward blog.

Today, via the Outsell Headlines feed, I find news that TypePad has a new Facebook app called Blog It, which  can send a single update to many sources of your choosing, including various blogging platforms (TypePad, Blogger, LJ, Vox, WordPress) and various "statusy" services, including Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook status itself.

UPDATE: The article Outsell pointed me to, Six Apart Gives Facebook Bloggers Blastability, uses the term "lifestreaming".  I wonder if this is where we're headed, from the blog to the lifeblast.  ENDUPDATE

I think there's always this tension between decentralisation and centralisation, and these kind of notification federations may be one way that we manage this.

In particular, "article blast" to multiple repositories using SWORD may be a very compelling solution to a lot of ingest and content recruitment issues.  (And feel free to contact me if you're interested in SWORD ingest across platforms.)  Julie Allinson did a great job of introducing SWORD in her Open Repositories 2008 presentation.

Celebridée – Ottawa - May 2 to 19, 2008 - Chris Anderson, Salman Rushdie, Kunstler...

As part of the tulip festival, a collection of thinkers and music and stuff.

In 2008, Celebridée will come into full bloom in the Tulip Festival Mirror Tent headlining Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the world's most celebrated and controversial novelists. Other headliners include Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond.

...

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. Yale University's Amy Chua will present World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, ..., the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics will present The Mystery of Dark Matter, and Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City, will discuss Creative Cities.

Celebridée will also feature several partner events including 1783 – Subject or Citizen? an event on the Treaty of Paris by Library and Archives Canada and musical concerts including two evenings with Angela Hewitt: The Well-Tempered Clavier and Janina Fialkowska & The Chamber Players of Canada, all at St. Andrew's Church.

from http://www.celebridee.com/

Richard Florida's blog is also mirrored at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/creativeclass

UPDATE: I see Ottawa's own Clive Doucet will also be speaking.  I liked his book Urban Meltdown.

UPDATE: Since Colin mentioned he had some trouble finding the actual schedule, it's hidden away at http://www.tulipfestival.ca/en/Celeb_Events/

Vlickr - Flickr adds video

The rumours are true and “soon” is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.

Flickr Blog - Video on Flickr

also see http://www.flickr.com/help/video/

Unlimited Librarians

Unlimited is a relatively new (4th issue) Canadian business magazine, if you scroll down to the second story in their Now See Hear section you'll find this well-written piece about the enduring value of librarians.

Librarians – all 1,300 of us in Alberta, 12,000 in Canada, and 158,000 in the U.S., not to mention the rest of the world – do three things: we buy information, we help you find information, and we loan you information. In my experience, we try to do these things using every useful technological tool at our disposal. We buy e-books, instant-message you through a search, check blog feeds to keep an eye on innovations at other libraries. New technologies have not changed the fundamental function of libraries; they constantly change how libraries approach their core mission.

Open Source - Librarians Embrace the Google Era - by Leah Vanderjagt - Unlimited Magazine

(Obscure sidebar: When transcribing this I first wrote it as "Librarians Emerge in the Internet Era" for some reason.)

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).

NISO intros new site. Old links: kablooie.

You remember that NISO event I attended all of um, 4 days ago?

http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/

Kablooie.
Gone with no redirect.
If you dig around the site, you can make your way to

http://www.niso.org/news/events/niso/past/discovery08/

which is empty.

Why does this always happen on a site redesign?  Does no one care about preservation?  Persisting URLs?

I don't know if Archive managed to harvest them, they're not showing anything at the moment.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/

I guess the best that's possible right now is to look at the Google cache, just to prove I didn't imagine the entire event

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/

I wonder, should Archive provide a link to try Google cache, when it doesn't get a page match in its own DB?  How long does Google's cache of lost pages last anyway?

meta: test of ShareThis

Just a test to see what's going on with the ShareThis widget.

http://sharethis.com/typepad

Hmm... it takes quite a while, it finally pulls in the ShareThis widget after the entire page loads, jamming it after the Trackback link for the post if you're displaying the full blog, or after the Permalink if you're displaying an individual post.

EA/SOA are about business process, not technology

I would claim that, by the time I left, the technical team within which I worked had a better overview of the business processes of the university than any other part of the organisation. We were able to successfully re-apply that knowledge to subsequent development, to great effect.

Paul Walk - SOA and reusable knowledge - February 26th, 2008

Microsoft Summit on Repository Interop - notes

April 1, 2008 - I had read the posting by Savas (probably via Lorcan), so it was great to have an opportunity to hear about Microsoft's thinking directly from them.  The most dramatic announcement was that Microsoft Research will be developing entirely on the Linux platform.

UPDATE: Lee Dirks said I almost gave him a heartattack with my little April Fools' prank, and the day is wearing on, so it's time to update and move my text up from the bottom...

Thanks go to Lee Dirks and David Flanders for making my first full day in Southampton a very interesting one.  The Linux platform bit is was my contribution to April Fools.  MS Research Tech Computing are in fact of course entirely dedicated to Microsoft platforms.  ENDUPDATE

For further discussion of the MS Repository Platform efforts, they have created a group

http://community.research.microsoft.com/forums/90.aspx

I'm sure it has happened before, but it was the first time I had seen the leads/directors of Fedora (Sandy Payette), Dspace (Michele Kimpton) and Eprints (Les Carr) brought together.

There was a lot about SWORD and also some on OAI-ORE.

Notes on Microsoft Summit on Repository Interoperability event

Lee Dirks
External Research, Technical Computing
- Putting computing into science
- Putting science into computing

Science + computation are not the entire equation
* Microsoft must improve its offerings throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle

Approach: Conduct prototyping projects and proofs-of-concept to evolve Microsoft's scholarly
communication offerings

Five factors Microsoft considers key
* Interop is paramount
* Optimize for data-driven research & science
* Data preservation (and provenance) should be baseline
* Community protocols & conventions
* Social networking & semantic knowledge discovery

when possible IP shared at
http://www.codeplex.com/

Project Execution Models
* internal FTE
* external devel (vendor)
* external devel (institutional partner)
* mixed models

projects 1-2 years

Examples:
* GenePattern for Word 2008
- integrate data and images from GenePattern workflows into research papers
- will move into production in April/May 2008

* Math in Word 2007

* Chemistry Drawing for Office 15
- Peter Murray-Rust et al.
- Chemistry Markup Language (CML)
- proof-of-concept plugin ... but two versions of Office from now, Chemistry will be built-in (we hope)

* PLANETS
- EU project
- preservation of Office documents based on Office OpenXML (OOXML)

===

Savas
"Supporting researchers worldwide"

working towards an "eResearch Platform", a grouping of Microsoft tools that can support research

Flow: Author->Publish->Archive->Discover

Author
* Semantic Annotations for Word
(current target: protein databank)

* NLM DTD plug in - will support SWORD
- export a Word document in NLM DTD -> .nlmx

* Research Ribbon concept - tools relevant to researchers in Office

* can search arXiv from within Word using OpenSearch

Publish
* Conference Management Tool (also SWORD endpoint)
* eJournal - manage peer review (also SWORD endpoint)

Archive
* Research Output Repository (also SWORD endpoint and will support OAI-ORE)
* arXiv (also SWORD support)

? Repository interop/federation

Q: Shibboleth / OpenID support?
A: haven't started looking at it yet

===

Santosh
Microsoft's Research Output Repository Platform

Platform for storing scholarly works and metadata
- papers, videos, presentations, lectures, references...
- enables the development of new funcionality and services on top of the platform
- relationships between stored entitities

* SQL Server 2005 or 2008, Entity Framework, .NET 3.5

* the repository software (but not the servers) will be available to the community for free

Platform Overview
- variety of resource types (publications, tech reports etc.)
- resource tagging
- relationship between resources (triple-based)
- set of well-known predicates (IsVersionOf, Contains, etc.)
- new resource types and predicates through extensibility

Platform
* Core API
* Framework API
* OAI-PMH, Syndication, BibTeX, Search
- UI Web Controls

"A semantic computing platform"
- hybrid between relational database and a triple store

community.research.microsoft.com/forums/90.aspx

===

Stewart Lewis
Update on SWORD Protocol & Future Directions

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWORD

- Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit

JISC/CETIS end of 2005
- identified lack of standard deposit API as #1 issue

2006: Creation of Repository Deposit working group

November 2006
- JISC call for funding, bid submitted for SWORD
- Julie Alinson
- lightweight and agile project

Workpackage 1: Evaluate existing standards
- WebDAV
- JSR
- OKI OSID
- ECL
- SRW Update
- SPI Google Data API
- ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP)

-> page on wiki examining them all

Workpackage 2: Tech Dev
- DSpace
- Fedora
- Eprints
- intraLibrary
* Java client library
- command line, desktop app, web interface

Workpackage 3: User testing and feedback
- arXiv
- SOURCE
- SPECTRa
- White Rose Research Online
- FeedForward

How does SWORD work?
* Two stages
- Discover
GET a Service Document
- Deposit
POST an item to the URI of the collection

GET
- X-On-Behalf-Of
- get a URI

POST

SWORD extensions to APP
* SWORD level
- 0
  - basic
- 1
  - full implementation

- X-On-Behalf-Of
- X-Verbose
- X-No-Op
- X-Format-Namespace

Discovery SWORD interfaces
* Recommend /sword-app
* Recommend /sword-app/servicedocument
* Recommend <link rel="sword" href="/sword-app/servicedocument" />

Authentication
- Required: HTTP BASIC

What?
- any package supported by the repository
- DSpace/Eprints: ZIP files with a METS manifest in SWAP format, with files
- Fedora: image files / METS documents (pull in referenced data streams)
- OAI-ORE resource maps

SWORD 2
- follow-on project
? more APP
? UPDATE / DELETE
? more clients
? client libraries
? provide support to users

Q: What is relationship with APP?
A: none

Comment: Sandy - We need a basic protocol that supports read and write.
Comment: Michele - We need to get into workflow - Zotero, EndNote etc.

Q: OAI-ORE and SWORD together?

===

Experience implementing SWORD at arXiv.org
Simeon Warner
Thorsten Schwander

1. Background
2. SWORD implementation choices
3. Ideas for SWORD evolution

automating from Microsoft Conference Toolkit

CS unusual in that conference publications very important
- use arXiv to host open access proceedings

work internally at arXiv to present conference proceedings as a whole

http://arxiv.org/help/api

Authority
1. author
2. the conference organizer
3. the CMT system (will use the organizer's authority)

returning errors
- all additional errors returned HTTP 400 Bad Request
- return an Atom document for each error code

3. Ideas for SWORD evolution

* Primary goal should be to reduce pairwise customization

- improved self description
  - self-describe size limits for uploads
  - improved error reporting
  sword:errorcode with namespace (and with description)

Integration with complex workflows
- asynchronous notification

===

DSpace
Michele Kimpton

Interop

* Business
- need defined business case / use case need because there is a small developer community

community will rally around common protocols

* operational
- policy transfer-control
  - embargo, authentication, dark archive...
- metadata loss
- identifier compatibility and acceptance

* technical
- numerous content packages
- representation incompatibilities
- interpretation of standards

Community Efforts

* OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, SWORD, METS, IMS, SWAP
* federation acorss DSpace repositories
* working with key apps
* integration with "content creation" tools to ensure materials are deposited

===

issues: strong standardization of library *DATA*
        weak standardization of repository data

===

Les Carr
Eprints

drawing funny diagrams

user level interop

===

Sandy Payette
Fedora Commons and Interop

2007 Content Model Architecture (CMA)
- Registry of "content model" types for digital objects

Now: Simplicity

2008: Atom Syndication Format, OAI-ORE, simple common web APIs with wide appeal
and adopt other standads where possible

high-end interop (web services apis)
backend interop (Akubra) - various underlying storage - transactional stores, Sun HoneyComb,
Internet Archive PetaBox

* Topaz - application level objects and semantic interoperability

ligh-weight ways to let apps define object types

info objects mapped into triples and persisted in Mulgara triplestore

* Fedora Middleware Projects
- Simple JMS layer with e.g. Gsearch, OAI, Ingest on top

What do users really want interoperability to achieve?

Q (me): heavyweight APIs vs lightweight?
A: light for integration with web apps, heavy inside enterprise

===

Issues
- federation & interop
  - support for delete, update
  - document formats
- content creation opportunities
- content flow -> ingest

discussion of harvesting for search, Google Scholar

how are people providing federated search
- OAI-PMH
- one-off federated integration

Andy said something like "there's fundamental tension between simple and complex".
You can find Andy's liveblogging of the event through his Twitter stream

http://twitter.com/andypowe11