dsalo
Posts by this author
September 9, 2009
Now that we've looked at how back-of-book indexes endeavor to organize and present the information found in a book, we can consider organizing books themselves. It's quite astonishing, how many people go to libraries and bookstores who never seem to stop to think about how books end up on…
September 9, 2009
I see this confusion so often it seems worth addressing.
If you scan a page of text, what you have is a picture. A computer sees it not as letters, numbers, and punctuation—but as pixels, bits of light and shade and color, just like the pixels in your favorite family photo on Flickr.
You can't…
September 7, 2009
Happy Labor Day, US readers. Time to clean out the "toblog" tag on del.icio.us again:
Everyone else has already linked to this Wall Street Journal article on data curation, so who am I to go against the tide? My chief takeaway is the trenchant observation that judging the value of data is not…
September 3, 2009
I found out from a few different sources (thanks, all!) that my post about back-of-book indexes made it into American Libraries Direct yesterday.
Welcome to any and all new readers! I hope you stick around. I'm going to tackle classification next…
September 2, 2009
Just a quickie post today—
In answer to my post about intertwingularity, commenter Andy Arenson suggested that the way to rescue an Excel spreadsheet whose functions or other behaviors depended on a particular version of Excel was to keep that specific version of Excel runnable indefinitely.
This…
September 1, 2009
A common problem adduced in e-research (not just e-research, but it does come up quite a bit here) is expertise location, both local and global.
You need a statistician. Or (ahem) a metadata or digital-preservation expert. Or a researcher in an allied area. Or a researcher in a completely different…
August 31, 2009
When I was but a young digital preservationist, I was presented with an archival problem I couldn't solve.
This should not sound unusual. It happens a lot, for all sorts of reasons. If I can keep a few people from falling into traps that make digital preservationists throw up their hands in despair…
August 27, 2009
I said awhile ago that we don't know who's going to do data curation yet. I absolutely believe that.
I probably should have added, though, that we can have a pretty good idea who's not going to do it: anybody who isn't right this very minute planning to do it.
Make no mistake, there's money (from…
August 27, 2009
Steve Lawson and the LSW are three-fifths of the way to the goal of $5000 for the flood-ravaged Louisville Free Public Library by September 1.
The last two-fifths are the hard part. If you can help, please do.
Comment here or send me email (dorothea.salo at gmail) to let me know you've donated, and…
August 25, 2009
I'd like to start our tour of book and library information-management techniques with a glance at the humble back-of-book index. I started the USDA's excellent indexing course back in the day, and while it became clear fairly quickly that I do not have the chops to be a good indexer and so I never…
August 24, 2009
Hello, Monday. My tidbits folder overfloweth.
Want to text-mine JSTOR? Looks like you can.
Garret McMahon talks about FriendFeed, scholarly communication, and embedded librarianship. Part of the reason I'm here is that I believe, with Garret, that we librarians can't kvetch about gettin' no…
August 21, 2009
Well, I've been here for about a month now, and I've quite enjoyed myself! (And I finally did send in my contract, Erin. Really. I did.)
Thanks to all who have commented. (Well, except a spammer or two, but I got rid of them posthaste.) You're a civil, engaged, and smart bunch, and I appreciate you…
August 20, 2009
Many people, first confronted with the idea of data curation, think it's a storage problem. A commonly-expressed notion is "give them enough disk and they'll be fine." Terabyte drives are cheap. Put one on the desk of every researcher, network it, and the problem evaporates, right?
Right?
Let me…
August 19, 2009
Five years ago (really? goodness, it hardly seems possible) I gave a preconference session at the Extreme Markup Languages conference (which is now Balisage) entitled "Classification, Cataloguing, and Categorization Systems: Past, Present, and Future."
I have learned to write better talk titles…
August 18, 2009
I see a lot of metadata out there in the wild woolly world of repositories. Seriously, a lot. Thesis metadata, article metadata, learning-object metadata, image metadata, metadata about research data, lots of metadata.
And a lot of it is horrible. I'm sorry, it just is—and amateur metadata is, on…
August 17, 2009
The publisher Information Today runs a good and useful book series for librarians who find themselves with job duties they weren't expecting and don't feel prepared for. There's The Accidental Systems Librarian and The Accidental Library Marketer (that one's new) and a whole raft of other accidents…
August 14, 2009
I am furloughed today and going out of town, so here, have an early tidbits post.
I won't be at the iPRES 2009 conference, but I do recommend looking over the program; it gives a pretty good overview of what digital preservationists think about and study, and what keeps them awake at night. (…
August 12, 2009
I gave a talk for PALINET some little while ago about institutional repositories. The audience had been primed by the fantastic Peter Murray to think about looking after digital content as the "fourth great wave" of library work. (I wish that talk was online. It was absolutely brilliant.)
But not…
August 11, 2009
FriendFeed, now due to be absorbed into the Borg the Facebook empire, allowed me to lurk on the fringes of the scientific community Cameron Neylon mentions in his post on the takeover.
Insert all the usual clichés here: it was enormously valuable, I learned a lot, and I wouldn't have missed it for…
August 8, 2009
I hear talk about "the cloud" as the solution to research data curation. Data will waft softly up into "the cloud," and "the cloud" will look after it and give it back on demand, and there will be unicorns and rainbows and rainbow-colored unicorns, and—well, you get the idea.
I think this is bosh.…
August 7, 2009
Monado of Science Notes commented on my irreplaceable-data post thusly:
It sounds as if the best thing to do in the short term is not throw away the old equipment. And to use the old equipment to copy digital media to newer forms... for which no one ever gets a budget, right?
It's such a great…
August 6, 2009
Unconnected incidents are making me ponder questions of sustainability. I don't have any answers, but I can at least unburden myself of some frustrations!
I learned from a colleague that arXiv is looking for a new funding model, as Cornell is wearying of picking up the entire tab. Various options…
August 5, 2009
Yesterday the city of Louisville suffered a freak thunderstorm that dumped half a foot of rain in an hour and a quarter. Their library has been devastated, to the tune of a million-plus dollars in damage.
As a proud member of The Library Society of the World (and I have the Cod of Ethics to prove…
August 2, 2009
I cringe. I've accepted an invitation to speak somewhere, and an email comes back asking me politely for a bio. Cringe. Every single time. It's downright Pavlovian.
I loathe, despise, abominate, and abhor writing professional bios.
However. There's a point to the exercise: situating myself in…
July 29, 2009
All of today's tidbits are from one blog! Well, all but one.
David Rosenthal on digital preservation. I had this bookmarked to blog about, but…
Chris Rusbridge beat me to it, saying everything I would have. Yes, online-versus-offline. Yes, research data in uncommon, niche, and/or proprietary…
July 28, 2009
Another thing I meant to call out in the context of the Jupiter-goes-boom event was the nod to data gathered by people who aren't connected to the formal research enterprise save tangentially.
This event was first noted by someone not an astronomer by profession, and the article notes that this is…
July 27, 2009
There's a string of "day in the life" librarian posts happening, so I thought I'd throw one in. Today wasn't a typical day, I suppose… but I don't really have typical days, especially these days.
6:00-ish am: Wake up, kick the cat off the bed accidentally, get out of bed.
6:20 am: Dressed and…
July 25, 2009
Interesting and perhaps relevant:
Jean-Claude Guédon's examination of power in science. Does e-research destabilize this situation? How? If it doesn't, should it?
Should copyright in academic works be abolished? Makes the obvious point that journal-article authors don't use copyright for its…
July 23, 2009
Because I've seen it quoted, misquoted, and usually not attributed at all… “Converting PDF to XML is a bit like converting hamburgers into cows." That is the quote I know of. It comes from revered XML developer Michael Kay on the xml-dev mailing list in July 2006.
It's possible Kay got this from…
July 22, 2009
And we're back! (With a four-note theme. Wait, that's Peter Schickele on Beethoven. Never mind.)
So yesterday before our enforced break, I asked what we could learn about e-research from a big chunk of space flotsam hitting Jupiter. What had caught my eye was this passage:
… the planetary astronomy…