Technology

Personal Archiving Systems and Interfaces for Institutions: PDA 2011

/ dwakimoto

And, we’re back. This session is about personal archiving systems being used in institutions. Very interesting and relevant topic given how many institutions are using institutional repositories. So without further ado, on to the summaries!

Enriching the Digital Junk Drawer
Birkin James Diana

Talking about Brown Digital Repository (BDR): instituional repository, platform for digitized library collections, departmental projects, and personal digital archiving piece. Built the BDR uploader: upload, describe, and manage access to them. In a perfect world, students and faculty would use it to store class projects, class materials, etc. (university related stuff and not personal stuff).

Worried about the personal digital archiving space becoming a digital junk drawer. Working assumption: A good repository helps user to navigate to their items/easy to upload and then users’ will be more likely to upload good content (and actually use it). Need quality metadata for this to work. But if you require long forms to create metadata, people won’t upload their materials. (Make it simple and people will actually use it) BDR requires a title and a tag in order to upload materials.

How, then, do you get quality metadata?
The best way is via background processes that do not require user mediation. If you have ability for users to optionally edit metadata, you will get even better metadata. What BDR is interested in is an approach that has background processes but requires user interaction,.

Want to test hypothesis that users will be willing to spend nano-blocks of time organizing and describing their materials if it is easy and they see the benefit of it. Mechanism: occasionally shown a single question about: item, importance of item, and about relationships between items. Show real-time benefit display, better navigation, improved utility-assessment, and more relevant scholarly-resources based on their answers to the questions. Evaluation of experiment via a thumbs-up/thumbs-down toggle and a go away button. Result would be understanding the users’ experience and data to modify weighted randomization algorithms for question frequency/type.

Privileging easy deposit of digital objects over metadata, but want metadata because it is necessary. So using easy-to-use ways of getting that metadata without creating a barrier to use. (Very, very cool. I can’t wait to learn a little more when I have time to research it after the conference is over.)

Digital Collections at the NCAR Library and Archives: Archiving in 21st century
Kathleen Legg from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

NCAR is “devoted to service, research, and education in the atmospheric and related sciences” and is funded by the government. Legg is focusing more on access. She is working on preserving institutional memory documenting the activities of NCAR.

Vision for archives: trusted resource used by a wide-ranging audience, documents the history of NCAR and development of the atmospheric sciences, and provide an optimal user experience. (Love the user-centric approach)

Flagship collection is the Dr. Warren Washington papers. Dr. Washington received National Medal of Science and is a NCAR scientist. His papers document his work as a scientist, mentor, and as an advocate for diversity issues. Many different formats of materials. Using Washington papers to create a digitization model for NCAR.

Need to move away from traditional ways of access in the archives because researchers expect more in the digital research world. Meet expectations by providing a variety of ways to access collections:

  • Archives website (online finding aid, keyword search capability)
    Have EAD finding aids in ARCHON with ability to keyword search the finding aids–great for experienced archival users
  • Warren Washington Digital Exhibit: a way to increase access to materials for those who are not familiar with archives. Targets students as one main user group. Also serves as a jumping off point for other scholars.
  • OpenSky: Institutional Repository. Launched in September 2010–holds all digital assets from the archives, published NCAR research, and grey literature. Great way to increase understanding of context in scientific research via seamless integration.

Nice work NCAR! Love the user-centric view and seamless access to the materials.

Constructing a Digital Identity Compatible with Institutional Archives
Jay Datema (Bookism)

Great article about personal digital archiving: Jeremy Leighton John, “The future of saving our past” in Nature 459 from 11 June 2009

Talking about technological tools for personal digital archiving:
XML, RSS, Atom
Personal Home Page: PHP, WordPress, Drupal

The Egosystem: photos, blog posts, email, publications, activity streams
The id: Does someone want to read what I did in the future? Family, Institutions, and history may be interested.

Datema’s thinking has been influenced by Jacques Derrida: The Post Card and Archive Fever. Also, loved Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone. Sees social network data as postcards: data moving around and connecting different people and things. See media commons: a digital scholarly network. Many ways to capture your data including his creation Bookism.

Take away: Archives are doing some amazing work in the realm of improving digital archiving and increasing the usefulness to users. I love the user-centric viewpoints of these talks.

Makers: DIY Personal Archives at PDA 2011

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Next up, talks on creating DIY personal archives as part of maker culture. Check out Collin’s post on Maker Subculture for a good overview if you haven’t heard about Maker culture.

The Smallest Day: A nerd and his dad set out to digitize the family archives
Stan James (Lijit Networks)

Stan’s dad had begun scanning 35mm slides and his wedding photos. Scanned nearly 20,000 photos at 600 dpi, 68 home movies, and 54 audio reels. They have also tagged the photos with information of people in them. Also scanned World War II newspaper clippings, postcards, and other manuscript materials.

Tools used: Picasa, Audacity, Dragon Naturally Speaking, Live Mesh, mozy, ancestry.com, LogMeIn and Windows. (Much of this software is free)

Google Street View was a huge hit with Stan’s family to see change in the landscape over time. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for transcription of scanned letters. Face tagging was also a hit.

Problems: Tagging in Picasa is linked to your Gmail contacts so had to write hacks in order to tag photos with relatives’ names who never had email. Dates before 1970 cannot be used on Picasa web.

SmallestDay Project (working on right now)
Open-source, WordPress-style
All media types
Login-agnostic
Scan-to-web
Mechanical Turk transcriptionWiki-style collaboration
Sync’d to individuals
Interested in helping? Contact Stan at stan@wanderingstan.com

This is a great family project and you can take your memories with you on a laptop because it’s on the cloud. Great way to reconnect with family history and to work with your family.

What do we mean by Personal when we consider Personal Digital Archives?
Lori Kendall (University of Illinois)

“Personal” in Personal Digital Archives can make us emphasize the individual over the social. Kendall has been looking at SOKOL: Joseph L. Bobek via an enthnographic study. Bobek was Kendall’s grandfather and the document was created by Kendall’s mother. Created with many scanned documents and other media. Compiled as a PDF document and distributed on a disc with other digitized family documents.

Distribution as another type of archiving. (Interesting thought–makes archiving more social.)

Archivists do not agree on what to emphasize in personal archiving:
Personal archiving as personal (Cox, 2008, pp. 3-4; McKemmish 2001, p. 3; Hobbs, 2010, p. 222)
Emphasizing the social in personal archiving (Harris, 2001; Nesmith, 2006)

Personal archiving occurs in social practices, social contexts, social materials, and social and sociotextual identities. We identify as people through our connections to social groups. Therefore, it is not surprising that personal archiving reflects these social conditions.

Note: Great talk integrating theories and ideas with personal archiving. I really enjoyed the connections, that I saw, with collective memory, collective identities, and photographic theories (especially Susan Sontag’s work).

The Splendiferous Story of Archive Team and the Rapidly Disappearing Digital Heritage
Jason Scott (Archive Team)

Jason Scott is an activist and collector. He wants to share his stuff with people. Runs the website, textfiles.com in order to save and share digital files. Helps preserve data that is in danger of being lost. A lot of computer history is in danger and being deleted.

Created ArchiveTeam.org to save “in danger”digital objects. Duplicated as much of GeoCities as possible when GeoCities was being shutdown. Archive Team collected 900GB of data. Put up GeoCities on Pirate Bay in order to get more attention.

Need ways of empowering people to take charge over their digital data. We need plans *before* the disaster to preserve our data. Archive Team is working on this at the moment (so is Internet Archive).

Take away: Personal digital archiving does not have to be a solitary activity. In fact, it can be a great opportunity for working together and reconnecting with family. There are many ways to archive one’s materials and we’ve seen many idiosyncratic ways and ideas thus far.

Strategies, Tools & Services: PDA 2011

/ dwakimoto

Next up, three talks on personal digital archiving strategies for individuals.

The Lost Curator: Personal Digital Archives and the Death Transition
Evan Carroll (The Digital Beyond)
The Digital Beyond is a website that helps people understand what happens to digital data after they die.

Identity Preservation
Objects are passed to heirs as an act of identity preservation–and often give with family stories. Objects are imbued with meaning via the stories. Now we have a shift to digital objects in the cloud.

Issues with passing on digital content: awareness, access, ownership, preservation, and many more. But we aren’t talking about this today.

Talking about Meaning
How can we design personal archives so that a lifetime of digital content can be accessible and meaningful for future generations?

We have lots of stories that go with digital photos, but we don’t connect the two. And this is a problem and we could potentially lose the contextual meanings.

Need to also think about value and how it changes with time and with who is using the object. “Value is extracted from more than just the content. Sometimes you need the story behind the object to appreciate it.”

How do we transition from creator to new curators? It can be a burden to the survivors because there are so many digital files and not a lot of organization. Need to honor and respect the wishes of the deceased–did they really want you to see their files?

Design Principles
Take a user-centric perspective at the transition between creator and next curator:

  • Ensure awareness and access: not easy to find digital objects, need to have archiving systems that provide easy access.
  • Wishes: need to ensure the wishes of deceased are respected and prevent loss of meanings.
  • Communicate value: need to tell why objects are important, need to get metadata, especially in ways that are passively captured (yay for easy-to-use, behind-the-scenes capture of metadata)
  • Tackle Quantity: “One important object is often as valuable as 10,000 objects.” How do we deal with overwhelming quantity of digital objects? Need ways of appraising massive amounts of data
  • Communal Experience: digital objects move us away from experiencing them together in person. We need ways to capture comments and conversation. Stories are inherently social.

Curating Digital Intellectual Lives: A Discipline-based Approach
Ellysa Stern Cahoy and Scott McDonald (Penn State Library)

Discussing workflow for managing faculty’s digital information/personal information collections. Need to help faculty organize and effectively mine personal information collections. Physical library needs to start thinking about the users’ libraries on their own computers. (Very interesting thought–need to bring this idea back to my library)

Workflow of information for faculty:
Find, store, organize, annotate, cite, archive, reflect: all linked by sharing. Need to think about this workflow is actually a workflow (a continuum). A big problem is that everyone is using different programs and they don’t talk to each other. Faculty are using many different tools for research. Faculty are becoming their own librarian/archivist because less mediation between the faculty and the information.

We need to help faculty with their own digital curation because they are often overwhelmed with the quantity of their research information. (Aren’t we all a bit overwhelmed?)

Krause Innovation Studio at Penn State has been created to help faculty members with curating their digital information and create a useful workflow. Penn State Libraries are working on creating educational program for faculty. The libraries envision themselves working with faculty via data management services, personal library management tools, and storage for scholarly works.

Agile Archiving
Judith Zissman (Independent)

Talking about how individuals can use ideas from agile software product design to personal archiving. What does “good enough” archiving look like? Looking at the Agile Manifesto: individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaborations, and responding to change are what are valued the most.

Need to give tools that will work today for individuals to use. Think about “just in time” versus “just in case” value in tools. Value simplicity. Treasure the things that are valuable and getting rid of non-valuable digital objects make it easier to see the value in the things that are kept (also, it increases the signal to noise ratio in your digital archive which is always a good thing). Need personalized solutions.

Take away: Lots of questions, not a lot of answers, but we are in this problem of digital personal archiving together.

Major Projects in Personal Digital Archiving

/ dwakimoto / 2 Comments

First session of Personal Digital Archiving 2011 Conference: Major Projects in Personal Digital Archiving. Highlights noted in this post.

Preserving Your Family History Records Digitally (published at familytech.familysearch.org)
by Gary Wright

Wright created a paper to provide information about digital preservation and digital archiving for family history. Good introduction to many archival issues for family historians and those doing genealogy. Highlights are below:

Why should you embrace digital records?
No worry about physical records being too fragile to handle and now more and more records are created digitally.

Digital Preservation: storing digital records with descriptive information, for a very long time in multiple locations, at the highest resolution affordable, and migrating data to new storage media and changing file formats before they become obsolete.

Main challenges:
Storage media decomposes, as all archivists know, so be careful about what media you use. Need to migrate files. Recommendations for file formats: PDF/A, JPEG 2000, AVI and Quicktime. (Luckily file formats have become obsolete at a much slower pace than many thought they would earlier in digital preservation research.)

Tips for personal digital archiving of family history:
Renaming files
Add in metadata/tags
Talks about digital rights/copyright (librarians all over cheer!)
LOCKSS principle (librarians and archivists cheer again!)
Periodically test your digital records, at least annually
Need to educate people about preserving their own history

New web service: LegacyDox allows you to send in your files, they will create an M-DISC (archival CD) and index it for you. Nice, I wonder how much it costs.

Take away: Good introduction for those who are not archivists, but a basic review for those who work in digital preservation and archives. This may be a good paper to give to your researchers and patrons to help them get into digital preservation.

Next talk:
Personal Informatics: Fuzzy Hashes, Virtual Machines and Visual Analytics
Jeremy Leighton John (from the British Library), Curator of Digital Objects

Vision for British Library and released Treasures Mobile app.

New team at British Library, Digital Scholarship, coordinate digital scholarship. Researched and wrote as a team, Digital Lives Study.

What does a modern curator of digital objects do?
eMSS Lab: 2.0 at the British Library looks at:
Digital Forensics
Curatorial Examination
Enhanced Curation
Ancestral Computing
Basically, a lot of really cool stuff and reminds me a bit of the awesome digital preservation unit at the Library of Congress.

More information about enhanced curation: Take photographs of offices/workspaces of artists, writers, and scientists and these become museum objects in their own right. Can then use the photos to create panoramas of their workspaces. Also do video work with the scientists, etc.

Update on Digital Forensics: Looking into portable forensics set up to go to offices and capture data instead of having to do the forensics back at the digital curation labs at the British Library. Also working with emulators to recreate desktops of individuals.

Fuzzy Hashes: Relatedness
Use to find related files. Look at the hashs to see the similarity. Get the hash for a specific file and then scan the rest of the disk to find files that are similar in values. Very cool. Could be useful also in FRBR (has this already been done? I’m not as up on FRBR as I should be).

Lots of other very interesting software programs being used to analyze digital files and people’s data (I’m sorry, I couldn’t catch all the names. Check out the British Library’s website for more information).

Take away: Awesome work and research is being done at the British Library. Check out some of the links above for more information.

Personal Digital Archiving 2011 Conference: Day One Keynote

/ dwakimoto

At the Personal Digital Archiving 2011 Conference in San Francisco today. It is a bit surreal as we are at the Internet Archive which is housed at an old Christian Science church. I’m sitting on a pew, in the old sanctuary, listening to Brewster Kahle introduce the conference. I’m excited for the conference and hope to get some good information. Now on to the keynote!

Keynote: “people are people and things change”
Cathy Marshall from Microsoft Research (can follow on Twitter: @ccmarshall)

Focusing on what has changed since she has started her research. Talked about her laptop and not backing up her computer. Then talked about Twitter losing her tweets (known issue–happened to me too and it isn’t fun). She doesn’t think of tweets as transient. There are ways of archiving tweets. She hasn’t done that either.

People fail to archive their data. Two-thirds of Americans store personal data in the cloud, 48% of Americans are social networks (Lee Rainie, Pew Internet 2010). “2002 should be considered the beginning of the digital age, first year digitial storage capacity overtook analog; as of 2007 we were 94% digital” (Martin Hilbert USC School of Communication).

Personal archiving has shifted dramatically in the last 6 years. People were experts in certain software programs, but didn’t understand backing up their data. Did a study on lost website recovery study: surprisingly, data loss isn’t due to technology. Now working on social media ownership attitudes.

Benign neglect and side effects. People accumulate stuff: just move over stuff from old computer to new computer. People seem to organize their analog collections much better than their digital collections. People also show ambivalence about the value of their digital files. (I can’t believe this–I would be crushed if I lost my digital files).

Personal digital archiving is not like archiving a personal digital collection. I think we need appraisal and not keep everything! Does digital hoarding really exists? Marshall doesn’t believe that digital hoarding exists; people just accumulate stuff.

People put copies of stuff in different places online and digital safety of data is a side effect. Losing data online is due to many different things: lost account, service/server discontinued, ISP IT policies and practices, hacking, unknown, and only 5% due to hard drive failure. Copies take on a life of their own because people can download them, augment with metadata online, etc.

Ownership of online media is now controversy in many people’s minds. People see it as a slippery slope. People just download photos, videos, etc. without thinking about ownership or copyrights. People don’t read legal agreements on sites about the usage of their data. People see ownership as quite broad and extends it to public material. Removal of material is the controversial action for people. People were uncomfortable about universal access to Twitter archive at the Library of Congress.

Take away message: Everyone feels like it is someone else’s responsibility to archive our data. Digital information only survives if someone takes care of it. So take care of your digital information.

Teaching Outside the Library

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I can’t believe we are to the middle of another week already. For the last bit of this week, I’ll be at the Personal Digital Archiving Conference in San Francisco and will hopefully be blogging some of the sessions. However, first I want to talk about teaching outside of the library (aka one shots). Most academic librarians will, at one time or another, have to teach one shot classes, usually with too much information to cover in too short amount of time. But I don’t want to talk about the difficulties inherent in this type of format, I want to talk about how you can be effective in subtly nudging your way into being asked to come to classes, rather than feeling like you must claw your way to getting time to talk with students in class.

As many of you are aware, there is ample literature on teaching information literacy one-shot sessions. We won’t be going over that again here. I’m just going to share what has worked for me with the hopes that it may help those of you who also teach one shot sessions or are looking to increase the number of sessions you teach.

Before going further, I should give you fair warning that the majority of these techniques take months if not years to reap benefits, but I think that is okay. You can also make gains in the shorter term, as we’ll discuss, but because so much depends on personal relationships it takes time to really build up a sustainable and long lasting instructional program.

So first, the easy bits. You should, obviously, introduce yourself to your faculty members in your liaison areas. This should occur via email, at faculty gatherings, in the line at lunch, basically anytime you can get a minute of their time. Don’t go into stalker territory, but do be proactive about meeting people and sharing information about the libraries. It is always amazing how many faculty members don’t know about all the great databases my library has to offer for research. I don’t care what anyone says, connecting in person has been the most successful way for me to further the library’s instruction agenda and get into classrooms.

Now for some of the longer term and more involved ways of getting invited to come and speak with classes. I think these are the ways that create a truly sustainable basis for instructional programs and lead into becoming more embedded with classes. Again, I just have to stress that relationships take time to build, as most of us know, and that means that you may not see the rewards of these approaches for a couple of years. I have been at my current position for 2.5 years and am just now really reaping the benefits of taking time to cultivate relationships with many faculty members.

So what are my two pieces of advice?

  1. Get on university level committees or organizational boards if at all possible. Being on committees (even though I’m really not a huge fan of committees) does have the distinct advantage of forcing you to come into contact with faculty and staff members from many different departments. It’s a great way to show off your mad librarian organizational and research skills thus proving to others that librarians are very cool people with a lot to offer. This matters because, as trite as the saying is, actions really do speak louder than words. Prove your value on committees, sneak in some plugs for the library when appropriate, and you’ll be well on your way to being asked to come in and help with information literacy instruction in their classes. Really. It works. And this is one of the few reasons that I think committees are worthwhile, on the whole.
  2. Meet the people who run your faculty development office and offer to lead workshops on technology and library topics. This is one of the best ways I’ve found to help faculty with learning new technologies and meeting those who might want me to come into their classrooms at some later point. I, along with a few of my colleagues, teach many workshops for our faculty development office. It is a lot of fun and we almost always come away with new contacts and ideas for collaborative projects. For example, after a workshop on Google Sites, a professor had me come to work with his graduate students on creating e-portfolios using Google Sites. Students then contacted me for help with the technology and with research questions. And the professor and I are thinking about working on other projects and research studies together. Another faculty member came to one of our talks about online library resources and then had us come and work with her students on their research projects. Does it take work to prepare and teach these workshops? Of course, but it is definitely worth it if you are serious about making connections and getting out there to help in ways that are meaningful to the faculty and students.

I hope sharing my experiences help those of you who are instructional librarians. I’d love to hear about the best methods you’ve found to become more ingrained and essential in the teaching of information literacy, etc. in classes outside of those that may be run through the library department. Remember, connections take time to build, but they’re really the only way to accomplish great work and, you know, keep society going and all.

I hope you have a fabulous rest of your day, dear readers. I should be back tomorrow with some thoughts from the Personal Digital Archiving Conference. Fingers crossed for good wifi and not getting lost on the way to the conference. Take care and thanks, as always, for reading. Allons-y!

Online Security and Travel

/ dwakimoto / 2 Comments

Happy Friday! I’m so ready for the weekend, dear readers. But first, a very short post on some of the great articles about online security and travel. Yes, today’s post was inspired by my desire to take a vacation soon and no, the conferences I’m going to this month and next month don’t count as vacations. But that is neither here nor there, so let’s get to the helpful bits of the post.

Lifehacker has been on an online privacy and security kick over the last few weeks and I think it behooves you to take a quick look over a few of their articles. They are, of course, great to share with your library patrons and colleagues. First, how to secure and encrypt your web browsing on public networks. It’s has easy-to-follow instructions and would be a good thing to do before going on your next trip, even to the local coffee house.

You should also check out the collection of tips on how to secure your online life the easy way. Just to point out one tip, if you haven’t enabled two-step verification for your Google Account you really should. Here’s the article on how to do it. I was happy that you can enable two-step verification for multiple accounts using the same smartphone which is very handy.

Now on to some helpful travel tools. Check out wanderfly. It’s still in beta, but is fun to play with while you’re still trying to figure out what you want to do for your vacation. Another plus, it is very easy to use. Also, check out the best travel apps for Android and the best travel apps for iPhone while you are trying to plan a trip.

Also, go check out John’s latest post over on Ink and Vellum on designing an information literacy course and leave a comment if you teach a term-long information literacy course. I have to go do that as we teach a required information literacy course at my university.

Finally, for your Friday viewing enjoyment, take a very quick break and watch Simon’s Cat in ‘Lunch Break.’

Have a fantastic rest of your day and a fabulous weekend. I’ll be back next week with more library and technology news.

Sandy Hirsh: Stepping into the Future

/ dwakimoto

Happy Thursday! I hope you are all doing well. You may be wondering what happened to my normal Wednesday post. Well, I was planning on writing up Dr. Sandy Hirsh’s talk last night, but my new cat decided that it was definitely time to play instead of letting me get some work done. So, dear readers, you get an unexpected Thursday post this week about the talk Sandy gave last night at the joint SLA San Francisco Bay Region Chapter and BayNet meeting. It was an interesting look at the changes happening in the library and information professions and how we can cope with the changes.

For those of you who do not know Dr. Sandy Hirsh, she is the current Director of the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at San Jose State University. You can check out her curriculum vitae here. She’s a really awesome person and a wonderful representative for the program. Plus, she is a good speaker as evidenced by last night’s talk, “Stepping into the Future:Perspectives on a Changing Profession.”

The two main points I took away from Sandy’s talk were that change is inevitable and we need to figure out how to leverage our skills and knowledge to take advantage of this change. I really appreciated her positive view on change, instead of the unfortunately all too common “doom and gloom” perspective that change is happening too quickly that includes reminisces about the “good old days.”

As Sandy noted, we need to be flexible, adaptable, and creative in order to remain relevant and help the next generation of librarians and information professionals remain relevant. She quoted Stephen Abrams who wrote, “LIS skills are good currency in this world–but only for those with the flexibility and insight to exploit the opportunities.” I think we all have the responsibility to continue evolving and figuring out better ways of marketing the valuable services and knowledge we have as a profession. As Sandy noted in her discussion of her journey to becoming a librarian, teaching in academia, transitioning to the high tech industry, and then moving back into academia, the skills and knowledge that librarians possess can be transfered to many other “non-traditional” jobs outside of the “traditional” library. But, as she also noted, we need to be able to better market ourselves and be able to translate what we can offer into the language of industry and professions outside of the library.

Sandy finished her talk with a discussion of how the curriculum and support services at the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose have evolved to better support and prepare students for the technological changes in our fields. San Jose has recently revamped its career development resources available online. Also, SLIS has receptions at many of the major library conferences and in-person programs for students. [Speaking of which, if you are a SLIS student and live in the Bay Area, there will be a Resume and Interviewing workshop on March 12th. If you go, say hi if you see me. I’ll be there talking with people about job hunting, interviewing, resumes, etc.]

SLIS has also developed new courses, such as Web 3.0: emerging technology trends and information entrepreneurship, and revised other courses, to better reflect changing technologies and skills needed in the workplace. And, as we all know, it’s not just the students who need to keep up with technology. We all have the responsibility to keep up with the changes in our field and related fields.

The one new technology Sandy mentioned that I hadn’t heard of before was Diff-IE which “highlights the changes to a webpage since the last time you visited it” which seems pretty useful. Too bad it’s currently just an add-on for Internet Explorer.

Overall, it was a great program and the Q&A was interesting as there were quite a number of San Jose students in the audience. For those who live in the Bay Area, I highly suggest coming to the SLA SF-Bay Area Chapter events and BayNet events. The next BayNet event is a talk by the Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

That’s it for today, dear readers. I will hopefully be back tomorrow with a library and technology related post. Allons-y!

Civility and Tech Redux

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! I hope you are having a lovely day and have a relaxing weekend planned. I’m quite looking forward to the weekend as I’m going to go see cool books and manuscripts. If you are going to be at the Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco on Sunday morning, do stop by the ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section table to say hi. But back to the topics at hand. Today I just have a few articles, posts, and bits of information that connect to some of the conversations we’ve been having in the previous couple of weeks’ posts. So let’s get into the good stuff.

Touching back on the post on civility a few week’s ago, check out this interesting post on using airplane mode to silence your phone instead of mute or power. Personally, I don’t care what you do with your cell phone as long as you don’t pull it out every time it goes off while eating dinner with me. I’m probably very old school about this, but one of the most impressive things (and how sad is it that I find this impressive?) is when a person actually puts his/her phone on silent or airplane mode while we’re out to dinner or having coffee. I think it’s a sad comment on society that I was actually told by a colleague that he loved to talk to me because I would stop what I was doing and give him my full attention and he never had to wonder if I was actually listening.

Anyway, off the soapbox and onward to technology news.

This is a very nice article on the digitizing of Vassar’s Special Collections. It’s a concise look at many of the advantages and problems with digitizing special collections and archives. Issues of preservation, access, original v. digitized copy, and even microfilm all make an appearance. It’s a good article to pass on to those who either believe that “everything” is already available online or who complain that the entire archives’ holdings aren’t already online.

Speaking of articles that may be of use to archivists and librarians, take a look at The New York Times article on why some twitter posts catch on, and some don’t. For those archives and libraries using Twitter for access and marketing, this article brings up some points to consider–especially in the realm of hashtags.

Finally in tech news, it seems like there is always something interesting and useful to share about one of Google’s products and today is no different. Take a look at Lifehacker’s seven more easy ways to integrate your google apps. I really enjoy things that make my life easier and these hacks definitely make it easier.

This Friday we’ll end with this fabulous video someone made using Neil Gaiman’s reading of “The Day the Saucers Came.” I love this poem, but I hope, dear readers, that this is not how your upcoming Valentine’s Day ends.

Have a wonderful weekend filled with good books, friends, and fun. And if you feel inspired to bake this weekend, you might want to try Joy the Baker’s recipe for whole wheat chocolate brown sugar sugar cookies. I’ll be back next week with more musing on technology, libraries, archives, and other stuff.

A Chrome and Android Kind of Friday

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you have a lovely weekend planned. Did anyone know that this Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday? I surely didn’t when I planned to have a dinner party this Sunday. But enough about how I’m thoroughly unaware of what is going on in professional sports and back to what I am aware of–fun technology stuff. This week has seen some very exciting announcements, like demos of tablets running on Android Honeycomb, and news of how technology and revolutions interact, as in Egypt. Since those two have been written about extensively over the last week, I’m not going to repeat it here. Instead, I want to share a few good articles about Chrome and Android. Allons-y!

A quick postscript to Wednesday’s post on not working 24/7 (aka please have a life), check out Lifehacker’s article, “Find time for your personal life”. Okay, now we can move on to today’s fun tech stuff.

First up, two useful Google Chrome articles: one for snoozing your emails, the other with helpful tips. First, I think the ability to snoonze your email sounds like a good way to build in quick reminders to do things. I’m going to set it up for my work email as there are just too many emails that come in each day and it is easy for things to get lost in the mess. I’ve tried to keep a zero inbox policy and only check my email at certain times each day, but it just doesn’t work with my job so I think the snooze button would help.

Also, if you use Chrome (and really, why wouldn’t you be using Chrome), you’ll want to check out Gizmodo’s Google Chrome cheat sheet: 10 tips and tricks. You are probably already employing many of these tips and tricks, but it is a good list to share with your not so tech savvy friends and patrons.

Onward to the Android fun. Lifehacker has a great explanation on how to use the new web based Android Market. Yay for easier to use market! Also, check out Gizmodo’s list of the best Android apps. I’m more in favor of developing for the mobile web than native apps, but there are some great native apps out there so give the list a glance.

Finally, not really Chrome or Android news/tips, but may be of interest to all those currently looking for employment: how to use Twitter to help you find a new job. Again, this would be a great article to share with people you know who are looking for a job, but haven’t discovered the wonders of Twitter for news and employment opportunities.

Because it is Friday, we have to end with a fun video. Here’s the trailer for Series 6 of Doctor Who. Enjoy!

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a relaxing weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more random tech news and library/archives fun.