Archiving

Detailed notes from yesterday’s Metadata and Repositories SIG Meeting at Birkbeck are now available on Wetpaint. My post yesterday forgot to thank organiser Neil Fegen and the team from Heriot-Watt, who ended up having a nightmare journey from Edinburgh down to London when their plane was cancelled and re-routed to a different airport! They heroically managed to arrive in time for the afternoon’s developer demo session.

In this EDUCAUSE Live! podcast, join host, Steve Worona, for the topic "Challenges of Film, Video, and New Media Preservation". Steve's guest is Howard Besser, Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Master’s Degree Program at New York University.

A PowerPoint version of the slides from this presentation can be found here.

Increasingly, moving images are part of students' daily lives. Students record scenes they witness on their pocket digital movie cameras, download clips from free movie sites, and create remixes and mashups. Students recognize something that many libraries don't—that moving images are one of the richest ways of capturing events and that they tell us an immense amount about the history of their time, as well as current culture and styles.

Increasingly, moving images are part of students' daily lives. Students record scenes they witness on their pocket digital movie cameras, download clips from free movie sites, and create remixes and mashups. Students recognize something that many libraries don't—that moving images are one of the richest ways of capturing events and that they tell us an immense amount about the history of their time, as well as current culture and styles.

Many academic libraries have collections of film and video that have been a low priority to organize, catalog, and preserve. One reason for the backlog is that this type of material requires different ways of thinking about handling, preservation, and browsing.

In this 40-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Joanne Kaczmarek and Taylor Surface in a session entitled The Real At-Risk E-Content: University Web Resources. They will share how the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed open-source software to efficiently manage the process of archiving Web documents, Web pages, and entire Web sites in support of an institution's work to record its history as represented on the Web.

RAMBLE was a small JISC-funded project that linked mobile blogs with online learning environments. To practise what we preached, we maintained a project blog with many of the entries written offline and then posted from a handheld device.

We hosted our own blog server called Pebble, feature-rich multi-user multi-contributor blog by Simon Brown, written as a Web application in Java and released under an open source license .  Those who have deployed it are invariably impressed (saying typically, "Pebble rocks!") and it keeps getting better; it was well suited for the project because it supported the private blogs that were need for personal student reflections in addition to public blogs.

When colleagues in the department heard about Pebble, they also wanted a blog.  So we let them hop on board and blog away, even the Director, but we could offer no guarantees of service reliability.  This was - as so often is the case - a service run largely on good will and very little else!  A year or so later, with blog spam escalating at an alarming rate, we were obliged to call it a day, at least until some more resources come along.

The Oxford Text Archive, perhaps the oldest electronic text archive in the world is turning 30 this year. With a heavy focus on linguistic corpora, the archive also acquires the outputs of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded academic research.

The Oxford Text Archive (OTA) was established in 1976 to collect, catalogue, preserve, and distribute the electronic products of research and scholarship in all areas of textual, literary, and linguistic studies. The OTA holds an extensive collection of electronic texts and linguistic corpora in a variety of languages which are of interest to academics working in the humanities. These resources are free of charge

In this 23 minute recording, we'll touch base with the University of Minnesota's Eric Celeste to learn about his work archiving Internet2 with Heritrix.  We'll also learn about the UThink blog serivce and engage in a healthy discussion about social software. 

At last fall's CNI meeting, I also spoke with the University of Minnesota's Joseph Konstan. 


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

Tune in Apr. 18 to for a discussion of archiving and preserving the Web with the Internet Archive's Dan Avery and Kristine Hanna. Busy then? You can listen later by visiting the archives.

When I asked Brewster Kahle about the potential for integrating social bookmarking into the Internet Archive, I envisioned a service that would provide a social, human element to the archive.  One that took snapshots of sites as users found them of interest ... one that would provide an archive of content that was closer to the cultural experience that caught that person's interest.  Well, in the last session that I attended at ETECH, I sat through a presentation from the folks at Hanzo:Web ... a service that very closely resembles what I was thinking about.  It has a very nice interface (and the new version will be even better).  If I remember correctly, Clay Shirky suggested that services like these provided a mechanism for tapping into the demand-side economics of user attention.  A interesting take.

I wondered about the potential for archiving the actual web page that the user was viewing ... rather than the source from a robot that didn't included a user's unique experience and view of content ... an archive that displayed a rendered web page complete with all the greasemonkey mods and personalized view of content that wouldn't be available from a robot's view of content.  In other words, take the content rendered on the screen and archive it.  We're not there yet, but I think it will be interesting to see what happens when/if we do get there.

This 39 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled ePresence: An Open-Source Interactive Webcasting and Archiving System for E-Learning.