TechEssence.info

Executive Summary

It can often be difficult to harness the collective knowledge of your staff. Each of your staff members has a tremendous amount of subject expertise that perhaps no one else on your staff has. Whether it is your Architecture Librarian or your Head Cataloger, it is essential that you find a way to collect the knowledge they have or risk losing it forever when that staff member leaves the library. Whether you are collecting best practices, policies, or resources used, it is important that these things are written out instead of depending on individual staff members to know them.

Wikis are the ideal tool for harnessing the collective intelligence. Wiki is Web-based, easy to set up, and allows people with little tech-savvy to add information. If you have a group of people who would benefit from sharing knowledge and ideas online, you may wish to consider a wiki for the project.

The term "digital preservation" gets thrown around a lot, usually in contexts designed to scare us about how little of it we're doing. Such discussions in my experience bog down quickly, because no two participants mean the same thing when they say "digital preservation."

So let's break it down into its component parts.

OPML stands for Outline Processing Markup Language. It is an XML language used for marking up multi-level lists—that is, outlines.

Its chief use currently is as an interchange format for blogrolls. Bloglines, for example, imports and exports blogrolls in OPML format.

So what would folks like to hear about? Name the three technologies or tech-related phenomena you would most like to see encapsulated here. We'll do our best to oblige you!

Technological change is rapid and constant. Yet our organizations now depend on technology to serve our clientele as they wish to and should be served. But choosing the technologies that will form the foundation of our future services from among the plethora available can be difficult and nerve-racking.

Part of what makes it so difficult is that no one can predict the future with any accuracy. However, we can identify criteria and strategies for making good decisions no matter what technological wonders come down the road.

I recently attended a symposium surrounding the topic of mass digitization, and this blog entry summarizes my person observations from the event.

On the topic of mass digitization I have a number of personal observations. First, like Tim O'Reilly, I have never considered a book to be sets of pages between covers. Books are containers, and libraries are not about books. Libraries are about what is inside the books. Books are merely manifestations of data, information, and knowledge. Yes, some books are special in and of themselves, but for the most part they are simply "content databases", not things to be treasured and hidden away in dark rooms. "Books are for use", and I write in my books all the time. A well-used book naturally opens up to the most important parts. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the book, a codex, as a technology. I make and bind my own notebooks. They are portable, durable, self-sustained, and last a good long time. At the same time digitized books offer a greater degree of utility than traditional books, as long as the digitized books are not limited by some sort of digital rights management system. Mass digitization will only increases the opportunities for this utility, and with these increases will also come increases in user expectations.

It's very easy to get caught up in the hype of whatever new technology is receiving mainstream press and funding. Often adopting a technology at this point is a good idea, but other times it's not. So how do you know what the right thing to do is?

Executive Summary

Open source software (OSS) is as much about "free" software as it is about a software development process. OSS is "free" but only as "free as a free kitten". There are costs associated with open source software but not the typical licensing fees associated with commercial software. OSS is also about a software development process -- a process very similar to the peer-review process in academia. Ideas and solutions are put forward, sets of peers examine the software, they recommend improvements, and the process begins anew.

Executive Summary

TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative, and it is used to markup literary documents such as poetry and prose. Through TEI it is possible to not only denote the descriptive aspects of works but the analytical aspects as well. Used to its fullest exstent, TEI provides the means for a great deal of textual analysis.

Executive Summary

TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative, and it is used to markup literary documents such as poetry and prose. Through TEI it is possible to not only denote the descriptive aspects of works but the analytical aspects as well. Used to its fullest exstent, TEI provides the means for a great deal of textual analysis.