Science Library Pad

how to geocode Wikipedia entries for Google Earth display

The Google Earth User blog describes how to code your Wikipedia entry to appear in the new Geographic Web layer:

Editing Wikipedia Layer Content

via Google Earth Blog

I think we are going to see more and more of these kinds of cross-linkages.

IT directions for National Library of Australia

Libraries, IT and Everything
Mark Corbould
Assistant Director-General
Information Technology
National Library of Australia (NLA)

presented at Library and Archives Canada (LAC)
December 15, 2006

presentation notes by me, Richard Akerman

- strategic vision of the national library of australia

- function: basically, maintain a national collection and make it available

- 479 staff
- over 550,000 [physical, presumably] visitors
- 110 million page views on website, up 59%

~ 9 million items (including 2 million manuscripts and 2 million serials)

Access

- 365,000 physical items delivered
- 45,000 reference enquiries (4,000 via Ask Now)
- 13 million digital objects delivered

~80 TB of digital object storage, including Australian Web Domain Harvest
- main stuff digitized is unique cultural heritage
- 40% of digital collection is oral history

Web Site Usage

- nice chunk on PictureAustralia, new chunk on MusicAustralia

- IT Strategic Plan (3 years, annual update)

Strategic Directions [phase] 1

* for a long time it was build, describe, preserve and provide access to the physical collection

Strategic Directions [phase] 2 [in addition to phase 1]

* since 2000 "to provide rapid and easy access..."
- outcome: online federated discovery services with "no dead ends"

Looking Outwards

* Internet-enabled collaboration
- lots of freely available content
- organizations are making their content available for remixing and repurposing
- low barries to participation
- light-weight trust models, no MOUs
- sharing personal views of contemporary events
- creating social networks around areas of interest
- near enough is good enough
- loss of control
- need to be less risk averse

Strategic Directions [phase] 3 [in addition to previous]

* In 2006, "to enhance learning and knowledge creation by further simplifying and ... services..."
[slide switched before I got the rest]

Key IT Outcomes

1 ensure collecting record of Australia
2 To meet user need for rapid
5 Ensure relevance

[yes, he skipped a couple]

IT Goals

many including
* Develop and deploy new full-text search software
* Provide online spaces to support publishing, collaboration, contribution and interaction

The rest of the world wants to find stuff in Google etc.
"we've got to get our data out there"
worked with Google to get their books in Google Scholar

Get this item

* Bookshops
* Suppliers

Also A9.com - Libraries Australia is searchable by using OpenSearch lightweight protocol

working to do federated search across museums and other organizations, using OpenSearch

Libraries Australia [national union catalogue I think]

* considered replacing individual library catalogues (as a starting point) with
"Libraries Australia, as the  primary database to be searched by users"

to do this you need to be able to integrate well with all the OPACs, which of course is a problem

Expanding Borrowing

* Wake-up calls: statistics and commentary
- [Lorcan] Dempsey "Materials are not being united with users who want them" [not sure of quote,
switched to next slide]
[You can see the entire quote and more info in Kent Fitch's presentation A New paradigm for “getting” (PowerPoint) from Libraries Australia Forum 2006 (LAF06)]
- Long Tail argument

Current Fulfillment
- charge $13 for ILL, total cost actually $49

steady decline in ILL

ILL: Strong disincentives to participate
- Expensive
- Slow
- Loss of control of assets
- Inconvenient / impossible

Fulfillment

Making "Search, find, get" seamless

* Lend directly from library to reader - NetFlix model - "NetBooks"

Also get your presence into e.g. Amazon.com "Borrow this book from Libraries Australia" (using greasemonkey)

PictureAustralia
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/

includes pics from Flickr
about 6000 images harvested

  "All you need in Aussie" - by Alicia Zappier 
  Originally uploaded by desertgirl.

MusicAustralia

* bought metadata catalogue of australian contemporary music - will interface to ecommerce gateway

Model

* "metadata discovery should be free, but you may have to pay for fulfillment"
* or I would say "easy access is more important than zero cost"

AustraliaDancing

* "Take Part" - customized wiki

There's more...

* People Australia, based on using authority file
* Open Access Journals - "really cheap and easy, blurs between publishing and collecting"

Issues

* Sustaining existing services
* Managing expectations
* Supporting innovation
* Enabling rapid prototyping
* Being vibrant and relevant

Ok, but how

* Reorg IT

* Review IT Architecture
- Service Oriented [emphasis mine]
- Consolidate metadata repositories
- "single business" model

* Create an IT-aware organization
- Communicate, collaborate and train

42 IT staff, over 400 library staff

Additional tech notes
- using Lucene full-text search
- using Confluence - new IT architecture is on a wiki
- training business analysts in BPM

Q: How does IT decide on priorities for projects?
A: Through the operational plan, reviewed by Corporate IT Group that sets the priorities

If necessary, escalate to corporate management.

Q: Web Harvest?  How made accessible?  Federated discovery - what challenges?
A: Paid the Internet Archive.  Ran for 6 weeks.  About 180 million files.  On a PetaBox, installed in
Australia.  Internal access but not public.  Also the Internet Archive will put it up.

Permissions/legal issues within Australia.

Issues with robots.txt - if you follow robots, you may not get inline images or CSS.

Federate search is basically around OpenSearch, plus may need to add relevance ranking.

Q (me): How are you doing relevance ranking?
A: Currently Teratext

but going to use Lucene.

IASSIST open data blog and conference

IASSIST = International Association for Social Science Information Service & Technology

There is an upcoming conference, the 33rd annual IASSIST conference, with theme Building Global Knowledge Communities with Open Data, May 16-18, 2007 Montreal, Quebec, Canada (at McGill University).

In the IASSIST blog (IASSIST communiqué, "A voice for research data and its preservation"), they say

The conference theme for IASSIST 2007, Building Global Knowledge Communities with Open Data, is very timely given new interest in defining and describing the open data concept. This week Peter Murray-Rust, who spearheads the SPARC-Opendata discussion list, posted a message announcing his entry for Open Data in the Wikipedia and inviting others to contribute to this entry.

(from posting An Opening for Open Data)

As a side note, they are also working on a Wikipedia entry for Data Library

Luis Martinez, IASSIST member and Data Librarian at the London School of Economics, has begun an entry on Wikipedia on the topic “Data Library”. Luis welcomes this community’s help in fleshing it out and providing more context. For those who have never been involved with Wikipedia, the editors come round and add comments, and often seem to judge the importance of an entry based on the number of people involved with ‘curating’ it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_library

Previously:
September 04, 2006  open discourse + access + data equals open science?

JISC Digital Repository Wiki

At ECDL 2006, Rachel Heery pointed us to the JISC Digital Repository Wiki.

If I understand correctly, it's basically trying to collect information about all different types of digital repositories and related projects.

open discourse + access + data equals open science?

I have been thinking about e-science and it seems to me there are two separate but complementary threads.  There is the technology thread that leads us through grid computing and massive storage to the research cyberinfrastructure, I'm not sure how much of a library role there is in this, it's mostly technical.  There is an intersection maybe at advanced repositories.

But there's also another thread, of open access, open data, and open (or more open) discourse, that's maybe taking us to something called open science.  This is very much in line with the library role of providing public access to a wide range of written works, and promoting an informed debate about ideas.

Lorcan has some good pointers on the more technical side of things, in his posting Some e-science resources.

On the open science side, I find iCommons.org - Rio Framework for Open Science

In the weeks preceding the iCommons Summit, it was clear to Heather Ford and John Wilbanks that the event could play a role in connecting open science and free culture. The two respective Executive Directors of iCommons and Science Commons agreed that the meeting in Rio should serve as a means for initiating discussion, in the hopes of discovering a way to bridge the divide. The result - the Rio Framework for Open Science.

“It was clear that members of the free culture movement weren’t connected enough to the open science movement,” said John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons and co-creator of the draft framework, “Things I knew at [Science Commons] weren’t filtering to Creative Commons and vice versa. There were people at [Creative Commons International] who knew licenses but not technology.”

Serving as a link farm, Open Science is the first substantive outcome of the Summit, delivered less than two months after it was conceptualized. Developed and tailored by Ford and Wilbanks, the first draft of the Framework was released on August 19. It is maintained on the iCommons wiki.

Right now, Open Science is a skeleton - a home for a minimal set of tools for universities and institutions, with the potential and hope that it expands exponentially as more users utilize the resources. By having the infrastructure live on a wiki, community members are able to actively edit, comment, annotate and add to the existing base.

via Open Access News - More on the Rio Framework for Open Science

What might some foundational components of Open Science be?  Well, there's the idea of open discourse, which Andrew I. Dayton characterizes as opening up scientific discussion to wider participation

Even Open Access leaves a vast inequality in scientific discourse. If you can’t afford to attend the latest scientific meetings (say, for instance, you work for the US government) or are not a member of a prestigious institution, you can be frozen out of cutting edge scientific discussions. You can neither query the major players nor contribute to the debates, unless your prestige or the media value of the subject matter is such to garner you a published letter to the editor.

...

JournalReview.org is not the sole source for Open Discourse. Retrovirology (4) and other BioMed Central journals (5) already provide a specific tool for all interested participants to submit comments (without anonymity, though) about a published work using the “Post a Comment” function...
A site similar to JournalReview.org, BioWizard (6), hosts commentaries, but only on articles reached by searching through PubMed (7), and requires posters to at least identify their institutions and cities. PLoS ONE (8) plans to offer commentary on its publications, once it is launched. Even the dowager empress of biological journals, Cell (9), has ventured a cautious toe to the tide, inviting public commentary on selectively “featured” articles. The concept, it seems, is coming of age.

Anyone who can work the phrase "dowager empress" into a scientific article gets my attention.

Beyond open access: open discourse, the next great equalizer
Andrew I. Dayton

Retrovirology 2006, 3:55     doi:10.1186/1742-4690-3-55
Published           30 August 2006

text from Provisional PDF

(Note: Mac OS X Preview didn't seem to like the PDF very much, but it was fine in Acrobat.)

via Open Access News - Open review, open commentary, open debate

Peter Murray-Rust addresses various aspects of open, including open data, in Is Openness “ethically flawed”?

Data. I believe that scientific data belongs to the commons, not to publishers or secondary aggregators which is why I supported the continuation of PubChem last year in its struggle against Chemica Abstracts.

...

Apart from the “full-text” the act of scientific publishing is extremely destructive of the scientific record. We have much anecdotal evidence that most scientific data (80+%) supporting primary publications are lost for ever. Many publishers do not support supplemental (factual) data and those that do, do not support its capture in semantic form (PDFs destroy information very effectively). True, we are exploring with several publishers how to tackle this, but they can currently make no strong ethical claims for current practice.

via Open Access News - A new blog on open access and open data

I think there is a strong case to be made that libraries have an opportunity to be at the forefront of an open science movement, combining all of the elements discussed above.

I have been advocating enhanced scientific discussion and discovery tools for some time.

Previously:
August 03, 2006  my review of The Long Tail
June 21, 2006  my article on peer review for Nature
December 02, 2005  Nature: free your data, blog about your science, and use Web Services

the planetquake hits Wikipedia

Although I have expressed scepticism at the Wisdom of Wikicrowds mythos, it is certainly impressive how the WIkipedia page on

Planet

has been continually updated and improved all day, in order to reflect the new definitions.

About which: now we have minor planets (which I guess we are now supposed to call the rather unpoetic small solar system bodies) and dwarf planets?  Oh great.  That's going to be easy to explain.

Plus which: I demand Xena and Gabrielle!  Not some stuffy official name.

30 days of DRM (in Canada)

Michael Geist has launched "30 Days of DRM", in order to better inform people about the issues before Parliament starts up again.

Many people are still in summer mode, but the Canadian copyright rumour mill suggests that there is a lot happening behind the scenes with a copyright bill quite possibly a top priority once the fall session begins in 31 days.  While there was much to criticize about Bill C-60 (the last attempt at copyright reform), given the continuing pressure from the copyright lobby and the U.S. government, I fear that the Conservatives' bill may be far more extreme in its approach. 

He also has a wiki with links to all of the articles.

via Library Boy

wiki etiquette

This is probably career-limiting, but anyway.
Wikipedia is a wonderful collaboration of user-contributed content, wisdom of crowds, blah blah blah

So I do my part, including creating and maintaining entries for some Canadian government / science stuff including:

• National Science Advisor (Canada)
• Council of Canadian Academies
• Canadian Association of Research Libraries
• Chief Government Whip (Canada)

Today I see Council of Canadian Academies is updated - that's great.
I had a long struggle to find any info about them whatsoever, before their www.scienceadvice.ca site finally went live.

But:
Amount of my body content that remains: 0%.
Number of intra-wiki links now: 0.
That is not so very cool.
It is now a delightful sprawl of unwikified organizational boilerplate.
Where did that come from, one wonders?

nslookup 209.217.122.91
91.122.217.209.in-addr.arpa     name = mail.scienceadvice.ca.

I'm not saying it isn't good to add your own content.
I'm just saying you might want to do it without

1. obliterating all previous content
2. making it into an advertisement or a repeat of your website
3. ignoring all wiki etiquette

I'm just saying, it's all well and good to talk the wikitalk, but you have to walk the wikiwalk.

If you want to compare versions, my last one was

18:02, 20 July 2006

and the current one is

15:37, 24 July 2006

So what do you think, should I restore info such as

• the fact it was originally going to be called the Canadian Academies of Science
• the wikilink to the Royal Society of Canada
• the see also wiki section that points to the National Science Advisor

Tool Kit for Expert Web Search goes wiki

It has the scope of listing the best tools for searching the Web from the perspective of an academic librarian.

http://wikis.ala.org/LITALibrary2.0/index.php/Tool_Kit_for_the_Expert_Web_Searcher

yeah, you read that right, wikis.ala.org

What I'd be interested to know is what percentag of academic searches even make it to Google Scholar, let alone other search engines.  I suspect 90+% of searches even by academics are done using just regular Google.

via LITA Blog - Tool Kit for the Expert Web Searcher now a wiki

mythical wisdom of wiki crowds

Sometimes I wonder how much of an echo chamber we're in.  "Because the World is Flat, the Wisdom of Crowds is producing so much content in the Long Tail that we're reaching a Tipping Point.  I now demonstrate this with my slide of deliFlickrTubeAmazooglePediaSpace."

I'm particularly wary of this idea that you can just stick something up and the Wisdom of Crowds will start generating content for you.  Wikipedia is presented as if the crowd just freely contributes equally, whereas in reality, there is a relatively small number of contributors with a quite elaborate policy and management structure.

I found How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko to be very informative.

DR: What about the 'collective intelligence' or 'collective wisdom' argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?

EB: No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic. In this respect, Wikipedia is not different from classical encyclopedias.

KN: Elian is right. Also, most of the short articles remain short and of rather poor content.

via Slashdot - Interview Looks at How and Why Wikipedia Works /.

LibraryStuff also had some interesting info today,

in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, "1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content..."

library Web Services - are we making any progress

I'm getting a feeling that other than a few proponents, library Web Services are still having difficulty gaining traction - lots of discussion, not a lot of beta services being exposed.

VIEWS has morphed into something called the NISO Web Services and Practices Working Group, with a wiki hosted by Talis.

Is there some way we can create a more library-driven (rather than vendor and consortium dominated) working group?  To me, we should be trying to rapidly make services available so they can succeed or fail on their own merits, rather than endlessly debating frameworks.

There certainly seems to be enthusiasm for the idea.  In The Changing Nature of the Catalog (PDF), "Web services and interoperability", Karen Calhoun writes

Several respondents talked at length about Web services— technologies allowing applications to communicate across platforms and programming languages using standard protocols based on XML—to connect catalogs and other library resources to search engines, e-learning systems, portals, Amazon, etc. with the goal of providing a more seamless and satisfying experience for information seekers in research institutions.

Access 2006 will be one opportunity to have this discussion, followed by LITA Forum 2006.

Previously:
April 03, 2006  standards and discoverability for library Web Services - DSLR Workshop
September 06, 2005  library service frameworks: avoiding wheel reinvention
April 27, 2005  Web Services and the future library interface

Delicious paperbacks LibraryThing

I scanned the bulk of my paperbacks into Delicious Library.
Which result I can't proudly display to you because

1) Delicious Library, inexplicably, has no good web export tools and
2) LibraryThing is currently reporting

You have 514 ISBNs in your lookup queue, including 0 failed and 514 active.

Finishing estimate: between 36 hours, 17 minutes and 48 hours, 23 minutes. There are 8195 books in the queue ahead of you.

*** DELICIOUS WEBIFICATION

Some Delicious Library webification options include:

• DeliciWeb
• Delicious Exporter
• Delicious Library Translate

Delicious Library Translate would have been my choice for displaying a large library, if it produced output like this, unfortunately I couldn't get it to produce properly formatted output.

As well there are some specialized translators.

At Williams College, for their Willams Students Online wiki, they have some code for (Media)Wiki-fying a Delicious Library.  The results can be added to their Books You're Welcome To Borrow page

Obviously, Schow and Sawyer are the best places to find books on campus. You can even search their online catalog without putting on pants. But it gets pretty chilly around Williamstown, and sometimes it'd be nice if you knew that someone in your dorm owned a book you were looking for so you didn't have to put on 8 layers of clothes and brave the cold. Here are books owned by people who are willing to share them, and their locations.

Hmm, shades of the peer-to-peer library, methinks.

crschmidt gets to web display using XML -> RDF -> HTML

*** SCANNING PAPERBACKS

I discovered an unfortunate feature of (UPC barcode) scanning paperbacks: it mostly doesn't work.
It turns out that

A lot of mass-market paperbacks have a generic UPC on the back that will not work, but these generally have an EAN barcode on the inside front cover that will work, so, try scanning that one.

from paperbacks not well received

Feature suggestions:

1. Do a quick lookup in a local database of generic UPCs, and if there's a match, display "generic UPC detected - try inside front cover or enter other identifying information".  I spent a long time in the scan - wait - no match cycle, until I figured out that I wasn't going to get many UPC matches for paperbacks.
2. OCR on the ISBN.  Just that semi-standard ISBN that's printed on the back of some books, in that weird computer-ish font.  You can grab the ISBN data when the UPC code is scanned.  I know it's going to take a clearer image to get a good OCR on the ISBN, but it would be handy.

The other big annoyance for me in Delicious Library is that it switches shelves when you scan.  I'll be entering data in Bookshelf L-1-3 but then it jumps back to Recent Imports when you scan.

*** Mac OS X Book Management Alternatives

I discovered that there are quite a few programs out there, other than Delicious Library.  These include:

• Bookpedia (which can do a direct import from Delicious Library XML)
• Books (free) (UPDATE 2006-07-19: Can also do a Delicious Library import.)
• Booxter

As a side note, one could always just give up and simply use books for decoration.

conference tag goodness with HitchHikr

HitchHikr (by David Warlick) brings together a couple different conference aspects in one place.
Mainly, letting you specify a conference tag (allowing me to retire my unusued wiki List of Library Conference Tags).

As far as I can tell, it basically provides a central conference inventory, and then uses all the tags indicated to query Technorati for postings and Flickr images.

Here's what he has to say about choosing tags in the FAQ:

First of all, I think that you need two tags for a given conference event, assuming that it is an annual or otherwise regularly held event. One tag should apply to the conference as an organization or concept. For instance, for the North Carolina Educational Technology Conference, a general tag would be ncetc. This tag would bring up all blog, podcasts, and flickr images associated with the conference regardless of the session, or any actual occurrence.

The second tag would be built on the general tag, focusing on a specific conference event or date. Typically, for an annual conference, this would require adding the two digit year. The next North Carolina Educational Technology Conference would be tagged ncetc06.

Finally, tagging blog entries and photos with specific conference presentations or features can be accomplished by adding an acronym for the feature or the speaker at the event. For instance, I might ask attendees who blog my presentations to tag them with ncetc, ncetc06, and ncetc06warlick. I, as a presenter, would need to visit Hitchhikr.com and add that tag to the conference.

I've been thinking about this for a while.
Personally, I think the tools should be mature enough that we can combine tags.  Taking his example, we end up with both

ncetc ncetc06

To me, if our tools were good, we'd just do

ncetc 2006

and search on the intersection.

I'm also anti-two-digit.  As a CS person, particularly since we just turned the century mark, it bugs me to see two digits when I know this will break in a hundred years.  Also, 05 could mean "the 5th conference", not 2005, as I mentioned in a previous posting.

I do very much like the idea of adding the first presenter's name as a standard way of tagging presentations.  And put this at the end of your presentation, so people know what to use.

In case you're wondering why I have such an interest in conference blogging, this blog started in November 2004 as a more professional (e.g. less strewn with cat photos) hosting space for my presentation notes from Internet Librarian 2004.

Wishlist:
It would be nice if you could automatically add conferences to the calendar tool of your choice (Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, etc.)

HitchHikr found via Disruptive Library Technology Jester.

Previously:
April 30, 2006  Postgenomic - conference review markup
April 24, 2006  Google Calendar experiments
November 07, 2005  conferences, tag collisions, the power of AND
October 26, 2005  blog and wikis for conference coverage *****
October 24, 2005  IL05 - Internet Librarian 2005 - blogging and such
September 05, 2005  Internet Librarian International 2005 in 5 weeks
July 05, 2005  more ideas for conference websites and webtech *****
June 27, 2005  Gnomedex conference
June 07, 2005  how to tell if you're at a geeky conference
May 02, 2005  in which everyone finally starts to get wikis
March 17, 2005  some thoughts on conference blogging
February 16, 2005  more on conference blogging
February 12, 2005  OLA! more grumbles about conferences
January 17, 2005  SLA blog and wifi?
November 20, 2004  very old conference notes

the rise of new media, the fall of the old

So which will libraries be, old media or new media?

The ubiquitous Jian Ghomeshi ("CBC pop culture specialist") is doing a series called

The End

This includes The End of Radio, TV and

The End of Print

which will air May 20, 2006 at 9:30 pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld.
All episodes will be available online as Windows Media or QuickTime, currently only The End of Radio is up.  From a library perspective, the blurbage for End of Print is interesting

Google Print, a full-text search engine of every book ever published launched the project late last year with much fanfare. The project has the potential to replace yellowing card-catalogs with a book search product as powerful and comprehensive as Google's search engine for the web.

Yeah, we really should think about some way to put that Public Catalogue Online so that it can be Accessed.

<rant>I do have an ongoing issue with the CBC (and other channels) that try to "youthify" their networks by bringing in youth experts who are... middle aged.  George Stroumboulopoulos is not edgy.  He's ancient.  Street Cents is the only show that succeeds somewhat in this area, what with it using people who are actually like, under 30 years old.</rant>

The Economist recently looked at media from the reverse perspective, discussing blogs, wikis, and other usual suspects in a Survey on New Media - Among the Audience.

the Trotts decided to build a better “blogging tool”, which they called Movable Type. “Likening it to the printing press seemed like a natural thing because it was clearly revolutionary; it was not meant to be arrogant or grandiose,” says Ms Trott to the approving nod of Mr Trott, who is extremely shy and rarely talks. ...

These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however, also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era, which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings, especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of the transition at all, find it puzzling.

Calling it the “internet era” is not helpful. By way of infrastructure, full-scale participatory media presume not so much the availability of the (decades-old) internet as of widespread, “always-on”, broadband access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, whereas America and other large media markets are several years behind. Indeed, even today's broadband infrastructure was built for the previous era, not the coming one. ...

The age of participation

... Last November, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet—from text to pictures, music and video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them

In addition to the articles, there are five audio interviews (MP3 format).

The Globe referenced the Economist article on wikis in an editorial

Wikipedia's world, and where it points us
Monday, May 1, 2006, Page A12

The Wikipedia model is not perfect, but its success has implications that go far beyond how people conduct research. It puts a question mark over the whole idea that information must move from credentialed producer to passive consumer. That presents established companies and organizations with a big challenge. Media groups will have to find a way to emulate Wikipedia and bring readers and viewers inside the tent, as this newspaper is trying to do by, among other things, inviting on-line comments and organizing question-and-answer sessions with journalists. ... Government itself, that ultimate control freak, will have to open up to the views of its Web-empowered citizens. In the same way that Wikipedia presumes "collaboration among users will improve articles over time," government should learn to accept that collaboration among citizens can change things for the better.

If we can harness our collective wisdom the way Wikipedia has, the potential for unleashing human creativity is enormous. Instead of a camel, we just might create a unicorn.

This did not impress some people, such as

PAUL AXELROD

dean, Faculty of Education, York University

Toronto -- Your benign defence of Wikipedia (Wikipedia's World, And Where It Points Us -- editorial, May 1) is misplaced and naive. It is one thing to hail the Internet as a "democratic" venue for the expression of opinion, informed or otherwise. It is quite another for an "encyclopedia" with no academic standards and no discretion with respect to the choice of authors to pose as some kind of intellectual authority, and, worse, to be legitimized as such by The Globe.

It's one of three comments under the heading Weni, widi, wiki.

Writing on May 6, 2006, Shannon Rupp covered the issue of Wikipedia's reliability for the Globe

Working through Wikipedia's vanity fair

...

Wikipedia's name gives the wrong impression, said Simon Fraser University communications professor Richard Smith. The open-source site (meaning it can be written and edited by anyone) is called an encyclopedia only for lack of a better term.

"It's socially produced knowledge. But they didn't know what they were producing when they began," Prof. Smith said, explaining that many of the volunteer editors are authorities on their subjects. "It's like being cool in high school: You build up social capital. You do something uncool and you're gone. If you lied on Wikipedia, you would shame yourself."

... new media or old, the same guideline applies: Always consider the source.

The Globe also had an article about modern photography.  It went something like "Flickr Flickr, Flickrflickrflickr".  That's it.  Everyone is now officially banned from talking about Flickr.  Find a new example.  The article is One Giant Web Gallery.

Also in Globe world, Dave Chalk discussed web video in Nothing on TV?  Where's my Canadian iTunes TV, that's what I want to know.

Lastly, Digg unearthed a past BayCHI event

Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information
Neil Hunt, Netflix; David Porter, Live365; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Kevin Rose, Digg; Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us; Rashmi Sinha, Moderator

There is audio (1h48m, MP3) as well as notes.

Bioclipse - open-source visual platform for chem and bio

The Bioclipse project is aimed at creating a Java-based, open source, visual platform for chemo- and bioinformatics based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).

There is a wiki and code on SourceForge.
They plan to release version 1.0 on May 19.

Info via the interesting chem-bla-ics blog.

Network Computing reviews 4 commercial wikis

Network Computing uses MediaWiki internally, but they decided to review four commercial wiki packages:

Wikis in the Enterprise

Four vendors sent us a form of their product: Atlassian Software Systems sent its Confluence software-based wiki tool; JotSpot and CustomerVision gave us access to their hosted solutions; and Socialtext sent an appliance.

They liked Confluence the best.

eScience meets eFramework, plus data

The UK has not only a national eScience initiative, but also is doing work on a framework for (Web) Services related to learning, thus:

eScience meets eFrameworks
28 April, 2006 10:00 AM - 05:00 PM
e-Science Institute, 15, South College Street, Edinburgh

The e-Framework is an international activity to which JISC in the UK is a major contributor (http://www.e-framework.org). It aims to create a framework addressing the definition of services and procedures for the creation and re-use of software components and tools in a Service Oriented Architecture. Services may be common across the domains of e-Learning, e-Research (e-Science) and Digital Information. They may also be domain-specific.

This workshop will address specifically the needs of the eScience community, and to map the services and use cases in that environment to the larger framework being defined. It will consist of an opening presentation, and then a day of discussion covering the various topic areas defined in the eFrameworks documents.

The Canadian equivalent basically doesn't exist: we have neither a national eScience initiative, nor an equivalent national services initiative.  I think this is a huge gap in terms of supporting innovative science and learning.

They also have an upcoming public lecture

"Integrating Diverse Sources of Scientific Data: Is it safe to match on names?"
25 April, 2006 16:00 - 18:00
The University of Edinburgh Sanderson Building, Kings Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JF

The lecture information points to a wiki: SEEK (Scientific Environment for Ecological Knowledge: http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/) project.

The Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) is a five year initiative designed to create cyberinfrastructure for ecological, environmental, and biodiversity research and to educate the ecological community about ecoinformatics.   SEEK participants are building an integrated data grid (EcoGrid) for accessing a wide variety of ecological and biodiversity data and analytical tools (Kepler) for efficiently utilizing these data stores to advance ecological and biodiversity science. An intelligent middleware system (SMS) will facilitate integration and synthesis of data and models within these systems.

I'm worried that Canada is really far behind in funding these sorts of initiatives; I see participants in SEEK from the US and the UK, but no Canadian groups.

via e-Science Institute Forthcoming Event List

Previously:
July 13, 2005  Web Services and Cyberinfrastructure: the JISC e-Framework

building book and scientific linking into wikis

I like the idea of easy tools to integrate into wikis to provide powerful linking capabilities.

books

For example, in the SnipSnap wiki we use at work, we use a "plugin" (macro) called bookservices from Victor Volle.

We can just enter a syntax {bookservice:###isbn###} and then we get links to a list of services we define on another wiki page.  It embeds the links directly on the wiki page.

So - ~~A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture~~ by James McGovern et al. ({bookservice:0131412752})

turns into

A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture by James McGovern et al. (Amazon.ca, Chapters, CISTI, ISBN.nu, Safari, Wikipedia)

scientific

HubLog reports on a HubMed extension for MediaWiki

User A.I.Brown of ganfyd has been working on a HubMed extension for MediaWiki, which allows users to add tags like <hubmed>Myocardial Infarction</hubmed> that gets rewritten to add a link to a HubMed search for the specified keywords.

the future of science, and audio of presentations from the Long Now Foundation

Slashdot reports

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, speculates about the future of science based on a talk he have gave a few weeks ago.

He has some interesting ideas about computation and data in relationship to science.
The text is also available in a posting to his blog, The Technium.

The talk was a Seminar About Long-term Thinking (SALT) from the Long Now Foundation.
A foundation which doesn't seem to have heard yet about RSS, but anyway...

You can download audio of the seminars, they have posted the talks from November 2003 to February 2006 so far.  (They have no RSS, but they make a point of providing Ogg Vorbis format audio?)  Past presentations have included

• The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years - Rusty Schweickart - Mar 02004
• How Societies Fail-And Sometimes Succeed - Jared Diamond - Jul 02005

The main site is http://www.longnow.org/

It reports the next presentation will be  Friday, April 14, 02006 - Jimmy Wales - "Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture" - Doors open 7:00pm, talk at 7:30pm.  The talk will take place at The Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco.

There is also a discussion section and (ewww) mailing lists.

Library Camp - a Library 2.0 unconference

Edward Vielmetti proclaims

I'm happy to announce a date for Library Camp, a Library 2.0 unconference to be held in Ann Arbor, MI on April 14, 2006.

...

The event is free and open to the public, librarians and patrons alike. We have space for maybe 100 people to gather downtown at the library, and if interest overfills that we'll make room somehow. If you're planning to come, let us know. There's a Library Camp Signup Page on our wiki, or send mail to [email protected] and we'll help you out best we can.

via Library Stuff

CLA InfoCommons Wiki

http://www.infocommons.ca/wiki/

Canadian Copyright Law, Open Access, Intellectual Property... all that groovy stuff.

They're having a pre-conference on June 16, 2006 at the University of Ottawa (before the CLA conference).

via Ten Thousand Year Blog

Emerging Technology Watch

An assortment of ideas about performing an "Emerging Technology Watch" (I categorize this as Technology Foresight).  Does your organization have such a process / team?

So when my group, the Emerging Technologies Team, sat down to examine the current and future technology landscape, we quickly came to the realization that while there are some wonderful new things that can be put into our plan, few of them are actually new technologies.  Most are modifications or improvements on existing technology.  All of this leads me to believe that technology, at least right now, is in an evolutionary phase, whereas only two or three years ago we were still in a revolutionary time period where new ideas were rocking the library boat on a regular basis.

...

Our Emerging Tech team is also making a strong effort to push for the introduction of certain Web 2.0 technologies into our service offerings, such as formally encouraging the use of browser-based office applications such as Writely and BaseCamp.

LibraryCrunch - Evolutionary Technology and the Emerging Divide

Have you had the chance to dream at your library job? Have you had the chance to stop for a minute in the buzz buzz of your routine and think about the future? Are you encouraged to innovate?

If not, then I urge you to do so. And I urge library administrators to encourage dreaming on the job. Formalize it—call your innovation group “Dreamers,” or use the more-grounded moniker "Emerging Technology Committee". Give 'em a couple of hours a month to talk emerging trends, about trendspotting, and about creative thinking. Read some cool stuff like Business 2.0 and Wired and ask yourselves, "How might the technologies occuring outside of the library impact library services?"

Why? Because we have the potential to bring about the next big thing. We have the potential to be the leaders as we all move toward a seamless information and knowledge environment.

ALA TechSource - Michael Stephens - Are You Dreaming?

another nifty program offered through the Metropolitan Library System, which has offices in Burr Ridge and here in ALA-headquarter town, Chicago, IL.

“Are you Dreaming?" is about making room for dreaming—about imaginative ways the library can create and offer user-centered services to those in a community—and in it, he urges his fellow librarians to dream… at work, every month, and even formalize it! “Why?" he asks. “Because we have the potential to bring about the next big thing."

But that “buzz buzz of your routine" that Michael also refers to, a lot of the time, can be a stifling force in many of our overloaded realities, so even if you do get a chance to dream, will you get to see your dream come true?

Well, if you're an MLS member library, and if you take advantage of its new Zephyr Program, it's very possible you will. According to Kathryn Deiss, director of strategic learning and team leader of the Zephyr Innovation Incubator Program, if you can dream it, the creative thinkers at MLS can help it come true. And even if you can't dream it, they can help with that too.

... More information about Zephyr is available at www.mls.lib.il.us/cats.cfm?catid=175.

ALA TechSource - Teresa Koltzenburg - The Winds of Change

I think a wiki is a good collaborative space for the information gathering and discussion associated with a technology watch.  Via the blog of Adrian Sannier, Arizona State University Technology Officer, I find their University Technology Office Strategic Technology Plan 2005-2006 wiki.

Previously:
July 15, 2005  more on Technology Watch

New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE 2006 Horizon report

The 2006 Horizon Report [Adobe Acrobat PDF] is now available. The 2006 edition is a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program.

The 2006 Horizon Report, just as has been the case with previous editions of the report, highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years.

There is an extensive 2006 Horizon Project Wiki that was used to develop the report.

via Ten Thousand Year Blog

business wikis, including Canadian Meteorological Centre

A wiki is a Web site that can be edited by anybody who is granted permission. In a business environment, that can mean a workgroup, a department, or even the whole company. The people who access the data and documents in a wiki are also the authors of the wiki, making it ideal for information sharing.

While wikis aren't the best tool for discussions or real-time collaboration, they excel as resources for archiving documents and tracking workflow.

...

about 100 workers at the 250-person Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC), a section of Environment Canada that deals with weather forecasts ..., use a wiki based on the open-source Tikiwiki platform.

...

The Canadian Meteorological Centre was first introduced to the idea of wikis by a physicist who was contributing to Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia and world's largest wiki. He managed to convince his boss of the value of wikis, and the first wiki, based on the open-source Tikiwiki platform, was installed by the IT group. The wiki was at first relegated to a test bed, but quickly proved both stable and popular enough to graduate to legitimate status.

From there it was simply a matter of time as adoption grew. Michel Van Eeckhout, Scientific Programmer Analyst at the CMC, told us that within three months of the initial wiki deployment, eight wikis had sprung up. Van Eeckhout now administers 10 active wikis used by 28 employees, but adds that there are other wikis at the CMC that aren't administered by him. He estimates that about 100 CMC employees use wikis, and that number is growing every day. ...

Van Eeckhout ... told us that people were initially thrown by the idea of a wiki, but once they overcame that, the usefulness of the tool became evident.

from InformationWeek - Wikis At Work - February 3, 2006

Also see InternetWeek story Wikis In The Business World, from August 08, 2005.

What I want to know is, can you actually use a wiki officially in a bilingual government environment, according to the Official Languages and Common Look and Feel rules?  Because one reading of the rules says all content online must be in both languages, which kind of excludes the dynamic creation of unilingual pages.

ACS Chemical Biology wiki

The journal ACS Chemical Biology has a wiki as part of its Community of Chemical Biologists initiative.

via from your science librarian's desk via ICSTI Watch blog