Science Library Pad

Government 2.0

A grab-bag of things about government and Web 2.0

Wikinomics - Government of Canada and the Web 2.0 reports on a study done for Agriculture Canada

Library Boy - Federal Library Community Forms Web 2.0 Interest Group

Public Sector Marketing 2.0 - Update on Social Media Policies in the Canadian Government (January 2008)

If you want the latest official word, you probably want to go to the keynote by Ken Cochrane (CIO GoC TBS) at GTEC 2008.

The GTEC 2008 theme is "Make the shift to Government 2.0".

Also interesting in the lineup is "NRCan's Collaborative Technology Revolution" by Marj Akerley, Chief Information Officer, Information Management Branch, Natural Resources Canada and Peter Cowan, Director, Enterprise IM, Natural Resources Canada.

NRCan has a fully running internal wiki.

You can also watch videos such as "This is MY NRCan - Eric Gagné" in the jellybeancontest YouTube account and see the audio-less version of "NRCan KM Inspirational Video V8" on Slideshare.

TBS is moving quite quickly to support intranet Web 2.0 with policy.

Internet Web 2.0 (for the Government of Canada) is quite problematic however.  But it appears to me that you're better off taking a leadership role and just experimenting with things, and seeing the results.  I think people are afraid the policy police will come punish them, whereas it appears to me more likely that they will get an award for technology innovation.

It's still a challenging situation because unfortunately most of the Web 2.0 services are hosted in the US, and this creates privacy and control issues if you're gathering any information about Canadian citizens.  For example I use Typepad, Blogger (Google), Feedburner (Google), Google Analytics, jot.com (Google), Google Docs... hmm, it sure would be a nice start if Google Canada just set up a dedicated data centre here that they could guarantee would never be subject to US legislation...

CISTI jobs: Data Management

Manager, Data Management

LS-4
This is a continuing position.

Your Challenge

Reporting to the Data Management and Metadata Coordinator, the Manager, Data Management

• plans, organizes and manages the operation, support and enhancement of  Innovative Interfaces integrated library system (ILS) applications, as well as the production of output products from the ILS;
• plans, organizes and manages the analysis and mapping of source data for ingest to CISTI’s digital repositories and databases;
• represents NRC on Government of Canada metadata committees;
• maintains state-of-the-art currency on electronic data management and metadata standards;
• more...

Language Requirements
Bilingual imperative CBC/CBC

Closing Date
09/08/2008 (13 days)

for other positions see NRC Careers

Photosynth is next photo revolution

It's not often that I'm impressed by new things that my computer can do - Google Earth was the last application I considered truly revolutionary.

However, Microsoft's Photosynth is to me the next groundbreaking application.  It takes photos taken at all different angles and levels of zoom, and reconstructs a complete three-dimensional scene.  It does this through local computation - I can't imagine how complex the algorithms must be.  And it works amazingly well - I uploaded a set of photos of a building viewed from street level, looking up, and from building-top level, looking down, and it integrated them correctly.  For a 30-photo set, it didn't even take very long, just a few minutes to process the entire "Synth".

There are some caveats: Windows only for now (unsurprisingly), XP and Vista.  This includes the viewer.  (The software does, however, run fine in Firefox 3 on Windows).  You can't view the scenes locally, the only option is to upload to the Photosynth site.

Also, Photosynth was massively overloaded yesterday and had to shut down, it will be interesting to see how they handle the load in the days and weeks to come.

But enough about that, here are a couple Synths I made

A simple panorama of Florence (Firenze) - not much different than existing pano software can produce

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=647b73f0-9549-4fa3-adc7-93e509517ffc

A Synth built from 30 photos of the Duomo - it didn't quite manage to connect the Campanile with the rest of the building, but otherwise quite impressive.  Use "play" (the standard play arrow, in the bottom "leaf" of the interface in the upper right of the Synth) to get the full tour through the scene it built.

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=9cb03c3e-3c57-4fbb-8b52-c83afedaa294

UPDATE: You can also imagine where this starts to go - there are already multiple synths of Florence and the Duomo - you can imagine making a metaSynth by combining them all.  Eventually, you would end up with a complete 3D model for any heavily photographed area, and in fact probably for most urban areas in the world.  It could become sort of like a crowdsourced version of Google's Street View.  (Currently the geotagging abilities of Photosynth are quite rudimentary, but with some minor enhancements you can see it would save a lot of compute time in terms of finding overlapping and adjacent synths.)

Previously:
November 11, 2006  3D photo environment - MS Photosynth Tech Preview

libraries disintegrate web pages

A rather grand title to describe increasing experiments in using "assemble your own web page" environments to construct starting pages or offer users the ability to customise their own pages.

Some examples:

• A bunch of demonstration module pages assembled by INIST - http://www.netvibes.com/bibliocnrs
• University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) - http://www.netvibes.com/cmb
• PennVibes
• University of Michigan Health Sciences Library - UM-HSL iGoogle gadgets

Some info via digicmb - iGoogle Tab sharing with University of Michigan Health Sciences Library
via FriendFeed

INIST info via IFLA Science Portals 2008 presentation "Past and Future of Portal Building for Scientific Communities - the INIST Experience".

CISTI jobs: Collection Librarian

Collection Librarian

Ottawa - Ontario

LS-3
These are two (2) continuing positions.

Your Challenge

The Collection Librarian negotiates license agreements and renewals for electronic collections; analyses collection data; evaluates and selects new material for the collection; participates in setting the CISTI Collection Development Policy; acts as a liaison with Canadian government and other sci/tech libraries on collection and licensing issues.

Language Requirements
English

Closing Date
Posted until filled

next generation open library system

I'm so used to bookmarking stuff into my FriendFeed these days I have to remind myself my blog is also a communications vehicle... I'd be remiss in not posting about this major SOA & libraries initiative.

The Open Library Environment (OLE) Project

With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project will convene the academic library community in the design of an Open Library Management System built on Service Oriented Architecture.

http://oleproject.org/

Duke University is the lead on this project.

UPDATE: Just for clarity I should probably mention that my organisation (CISTI) is neither a core nor an advisory partner.  ENDUPDATE

If you want to get an idea of the framework that this fits into, you can see my posting about the presentation Enterprise Services Architectures - Chris Mackie - DLF Fall Forum 2007.

It is great to see library projects starting to use a service-oriented approach, although given that this is the dominant industry trend these days, I'm not convinced that my four years of online and offline advocacy for library SOA actually had much of an impact on this choice.

(You can see my blog postings in category "Service-Oriented Architecture" going back to November 2004:
http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/serviceoriented_architecture/ )

Still, one does like to be right.

citizen science: camera in space

Some amazing images from a $1000 consumer camera sent 30+ km up into space on a sounding balloon as part of a Oklahoma State University project.  (Can't show the images here as they are all rights reserved.)

Check out Pentax k10d in Space - Flickr Blog - July 28, 2008

Previously:
September 05, 2007  schoolteacher's balloon photographs edge of the earth (unrelated project)