It was announced today within the Archon forum that Archon and the Archivists’ Toolkit will be integrated in order to combine the best features of both. I will be watching this project with much interest. I have tried both applications, and I have a definite preference for Archon. I sincerely hope that this strengthens Archon, rather than weakening it.

I can think of strengths that could be gained from this integration. A GUI could be a nice addition. The folder view in Archivists’ Toolkit is nice as well. I also hope that these development efforts will also lead to a new platform that supports union catalogs from the outset.

There are dangers in the combined efforts as well, in my opinion. I  hope that the nice, clean PHP code used in Archon doesn’t get mucked up with some sort of integration with Java, which I hate with a passion. I think using a great deal of Java would slow development and reduce the ability of many to do customization. Did I mention that I hate Java? I also hope that development isn’t stymied due to a lack of competition. Competition is always good, even when it’s between open source products. I also hope that Chris Prom’s influence on the project is undiminished. Chris’ two American Archivist articles on the EAD Cookbook and user interactions with finding aids set up a solid research foundation for the entire Archon project. Without his research, the project would not have been as good as what it is.

Still, this project holds promise, and I think the outcome will probably be good for archivists.

I often work with genealogists who are looking for information about their Baptist forebears. Back in March, I spoke at a Second Saturday Workshop in Frankfort, Kentucky that was jointly sponsored by the Kentucky Genealogical Society and the Kentucky Historical Society. Below is a brief handout that I created for the occasion. It offers a few tips about finding and using Baptist church records for genealogical research.

Are you thinking of starting a video conversion project? If so, you may be interested in taking a look at the newest release of an older video conversion tool.

Handbrake has been around for quite some time. It is a free and open source video conversion tool that is available for Windows, Apple, and Linux. In previous releases, Handbrake was merely a DVD ripper that many people used to convert DVDs for use on their iPods, PSPs, or cell phones.

I have used it before, but I never really considered it a good candidate for use in an archives because it just converted DVDs. However, the latest version (0.9.3) of the software makes it an ideal solution for using in an archives, because it now supports video format conversion. In other words, Handbrake will allow you to convert videos between formats. Their developers state on the wiki that “HandBrake can accept almost any sort of video file you can throw at it, although with exotic fare, things can sometimes be a little rough around the edges.” It is able to encode videos as MP4, MKV, M4V, OGM, and AVI.

Handbrake also includes a nice set of presets for encoding to devices like iPhones, iPods, and gaming consoles. Do you want to add an iPod friendly copy of some historical video you’ve converted to DVD to your institutional repository? You don’t want to take the time to learn what all of the different audio and video encoding options are? That’s not a problem, because Handbrake has them baked right in.

One other nice feature Handbrake offers is a command-line interface. What this effectively means is that with just a little bit of script-fu and a spare workstation, you can convert a whole mess of video files. Of course, you could also do this the easy way, because the graphical interface has a nice queue available as well.

This morning’s Twitter outage illustrates the reason that social media archiving is needed. Notice also in the article updates that both Live Journal and Facebook were having problems as well.  No one knows when this type of outage could be catastrophic and result in substantial data loss. And that can happen. Even organizations that generally take data preservation seriously are susceptible to data loss and serious downtime. For example, LFPL was pouring water out of their servers just yesterday.

Now, today’s outage appears to be caused by a denial-of-service attack, so data loss will probably be minimal. But other types of digital catastrophes can cause data loss, and the data lost may be culturally and sociologically significant.

By the way, if anyone needs ideas for what to do while Twitter is down, here’s a few suggestions. They beat working on a Twitter archiving app right now. Can’t connect to the API.

My friend Robbie Sagers addressed the topic of social media preservation in a post on Justin Taylor’s excellent blog today. In light of Robbie’s post, I thought I would point out a poster on Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation that was presented at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries back in 2007. Some of the more interesting data from the poster includes:

• Over 43 percent of the respondents attempt some self archiving of their blogs
• Nearly 71 percent of the respondents believed that their blogs should be archived
• Nearly 50 percent of respondents believed that preserving the audio and video embedded in a blog was important
• Over 30 percent of respondents believed that archives and libraries had an obligation to preserve blogs in general

I just found out about ArchivePress, and I cannot wait to see how this develops. Basically, ArchivePress hopes to be a tool to be used for preserving weblogs. It will be built on WordPress. I’ve been waiting for something like this to come along ever since I posted this and this back in 2007 — when I had delusions of grandeur about building something similar.

Today, one of my colleagues found the following in an August 10, 1805 entry in the Minutes of the Elkhorn (KY) Association of Baptists (Volume 1) which we have in our manuscript collection.

Quere from Glen’s Creek. Is it right for Baptists to join in an assembly at Barbecues on the 4th of July? Answered No.

I may have some repenting to do

I’ve been behind on my blog reading (and posting) lately. School and family crises  will do that. I just read John Blyberg’s post on the Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians. I found the whole post thought provoking, but I especially enjoyed the bullet points of things librarians must do under the Preservation of the Library section. My favorite was “Endorse procedures only if they guide librarians or users to excellence.”

This is the list of things they fill compelled to do at Darien. Are there things that you, personally, would add or eliminate from the list?

Today’s mythological monday creature is the Gorgon. You may read Topsell’s description of this fearsome creature here.

This new series of posts will take simply quote peculiar sections of Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-Footed Beasts. Some of the work deals with mythological creatures, such as Satyrs, and most of my posts will do likewise. However, today’s post deals with an ever pertinent and interesting topic, ridding your horse of lice.

They be like Geese Lice, but somewhat bigger, they will breed most about the ears, neck, and tail, and over all the body. THe comve of poverty, and the Horse will be alwayes rubbing, and scratching, and will eat his meat, and not prosper withal, and with rubbing he will break all his mane and tail. The cure, according to Martin, is thus; Anoint the place with Sope and Quicksilver, well mingled together, and to a pound of Sope, put half an ounce of Quicksilver.

That’s right folks. There’s no cure for lice like a mixture of soap and mercury.

I’ve been working with DSpace recently, and I am amazed with the power of this wonderful repository system. It is an incredible platform for long term preservation, access, and dissemination of content. It has incredible OAI and indexing abilities. It is well developed, well funded, and well … well, let’s just say I can’t heap enough praise on it. I think it’s the best repository system available, bar none.

The version of DSpace with which I’ve been working is 1.5. Version 2.0 is currently in development. I don’t know what chanes are in order for this next major release, but I know that it needs a good dose of web 2.0 in version 2.0. What do I mean? I mean that DSpace should become more user-centric. So, here’s my top 10 list of things that I think DSpace developers need to do in version 2.

1. Make the easy stuff easy. – It’s easier to explain this by example. A few days ago, I was working on making a minor change to the user interface that would allow for streaming media. To make it work, I needed to be able to generate the URL for the primary bitstream. In short, there was no way to do this. Even though the URL is present in the default interface, there is no method for calling the URL on its own. At times, DSpace is SO object oriented, that it prevents system administrators from making minor tweaks such as this one. Giant blocks of code may be easier to maintain (I really don’t think they are), but they circumvent customization. Take a page from the scripting language developers: make the easy stuff easy.
2. Make the media stuff seamless. — It is a YouTube/Flickr/Amazoogle world. Embed or you’re dead. ‘Nuff said.
3. Make the waiting stuff apparent. — No one enjoys load screens and status bars, but everyone hates the alternative: not knowing whether the application is doing anything. A nice little status bar would ease users’ minds.
4. Make the U the basis for the UI. — This goes along with the previous two points, and the next point. Some aspects of the UIs for DSpace are just clunky and ugly. Whether I’m using the administrative interfaces, or the regular user interfaces, I find my eyes jumping all over the place to find stuff. The interface may be well-ordered, but it doesn’t feel like it is. Tasks could often be bundled in a way that would reduce the number of clicks for users (especially in the approval process under JSPUI). In some ways, the XMLUI setup is better with some themes, but there’s still much to be desired (like having a common administrative interface for XMLUI, instead of the Drupal-like changing of administrative UIs). Perhaps developers could take a page from Automattic’s recent development of the WordPress Administrative UI. They used Ball State’s Center for Media Design to drastically change the interface, and, well…it just works. UIUC’s Archon is another project that recently saw a beautiful interface redesign (public, not administrative).
5. Make the UI AJAXy. — Not for the cool effects, but to increase speed and usability for the short head of users that wrestle with the DSpace UIs on a daily basis. Yes, make provisions to increase accessibility for all. Yes, have alternatives for users who cannot use javascript effects. But please, please, please give users the same type of experience that they are used to with nearly every other website now. There are tons of javascript frameworks that make this sort of thing easy to implement. Might I suggest Scriptaculous?
6. Make the themes more available. — Someone should establish an XMLUI theme library. Perhaps there is one, but if so, I am not aware of it. Anyone could establish such a library, but I really think it would help those less fortunate potential adopters that don’t have entire teams of web designers and Java gurus.
7. Make the XML-based stuff database driven. — A couple examples are in order. First, the controlled vocabulary functionality should be in a database. IMO, there should be a way within DSpace to edit and add to controlled vocabularies. There’s not. One has to maintain a controlled vocabulary within a separate system, and then store the CV as XML.Second, the welcome message (I’m thinking of XMLUI here, but it may also be the case in JSPUI) should be in a database. In my opinion, if it’s content that can be changed by the user and is not binary data, it should be stored in a database. Items like welcome messages, sidebar content, and controlled vocabularies are all good candidates for treating in this way. I long for the day when XML will be treated merely as a transport format or medium for structural layout, rather than a storage format.
8. Make the batch process streamlined. — Anyone who has used the batch process knows what I’m talking about. It’s easier to rope goats than it is to use the DSpace batch uploader. The software should have a utility that allows a user to select a whole bunch of files which are automatically uploaded. The utility could also extract metadata from the files (Exif, IPTC, or whatever) to write to the database as the file’s descriptive or structural metadata. At present, one either has to manually package the files appropriately and write Dublin Core for each file to be batch uploaded, or create some sort of program that will package the files and write the Dublin Core. I know, it’s  a difficult thing to do. Still, if Flickr can do it  for Exif data, then it can be done.
9. Make the documentation readable. — I’ve seen worse, but I’ve seen much, much better as well. It would be nice if the documentation had a “How to do simple stuff” section that covered a lot of the really simple things one finds in the DSpace wiki — things like making adjustments to headers and footers. I believe that a lot of the questions that get asked repeatedly on the listserv would stop being asked if the official documentation addressed them clearly.
10. Make the mental switch to Rails. — DSpace has a certain musty, 1.0 kind of odor about it. As soon as you unzip it, this smell, tantamount to descending into your grandmother’s basement, wafts up from your computer. As you look around at it, you realize that it’s been around for a while. It’s reliable — like the old pedal driven Singer sewing machine in the corner of your grandmother’s basement — but it also feels a little antiquated. More and more, users are accustomed to web apps that have a 2.0 feel. We’re used to sites developed in things like PHP and Rails. We’re used to sites that give us a good user experience. DSpace needs to become that. It needs to transition. It needs to be more “Rails-ish.” I realize that the developers are probably not going to scrap the whole codebase and start over with a new framework and language. But Java can look like Rails, feel like Rails, and have a certain Rails kind of quality to it. However, it takes developers thinking like Rails guys (and gals). I hope this happens. If so, version 2.0 of DSpace could very well look and feel 2.0.

I use Firefox. It’s at version 3.x. I had an add-on that worked with previous versions of Firefox that would save information about a webpage into my Endnote library. Well, it broke. So, I hacked it.

Here’s a link to the Endnote add-on download page.

Here’s the hack instructions that I used.

Happy hacking. And researching. And writing.

I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes today, and I decided to make a pipe that would let you search Google Books. It’s simple, but effective. With a little work, one could probably use it to embed a Google Book search in a website or Facepage. If you’re really creative, you can tweak one to embed in your OPAC. Enjoy. If you find any nifty uses for it, let me know in a comment. I would be interested to hear about it.

Well, I successfully distanced myself from Assembla today and moved my stuff to Basecamp. I had two projects that I closed out. Neither used very much space. One used about 2MB, and the other used about 25. It was a brief headache for me. All of my workers were used to Assembla and will now have to get used to Basecamp. I will still have to find hosting for my SVN repo. In the end, though, it’s worth it to me. Basecamp costs more, but it has a solid reputation. You know what you’re getting from them up front. They don’t say one thing, then switch directions. They don’t lure you in with a really great offer, and then take that away when you are used to using them. Assembla does, and I would rather not give money to a company that makes such rash decisions without considering the consequences to users.

I’ve been using Assembla for some time, and it looks like that day has now come to an end. On Friday, Assembla announced that the feature that attracted me to it in the first place is now coming to an end. Assembla will no longer be offering free, private accounts to its users. One of the really nice benefits of Assembla was the ability to have free SVN repositories. I have two Assembla accounts, and I will probably close them both. While I realize that for them this decision may simply be a matter of cutting the dead weight, for me it eliminates them as a possible candidate as a vendor in the future because I believe that I cannot determine reliably whether or not they will make additional unfavorable changes while I am paying.  I realize that their rates are fairly reasonable, but in a sense, I feel betrayed by the changes in their terms of service. They have offered a product for free. People have used the product and are somewhat dependent upon it. Now Assembla holds these users over a barrell for the sake of exacting a measly $2 a month. I really wish they would have simply grandfathered in those who currently have free, private accounts with them.

I am sympathetic to Andy’s pleas that he has a family to feed and people to pay. I can understand that. These are difficult financial times, and people need to make money. Still, the reason that I decided to use Assembla at work and personally was because it was free. I didn’t abuse the system. I didn’t fill up a subversion repository with tons of data. And I was fully committed to buying a commercial space from them if I ever got to the point where I needed one. That has changed, now. I do not feel like I can trust their bait-and-switch style of business plan, and if I can’t trust a company’s business plan, I don’t feel like I can trust them with my data.

For a couple of years, speculation has been rampant about the future of Google’s plans for it’s Google Books service. Due to Google’s involvement in litigation over the issue of copyright infringement, all bets have been off as to how the service would actually develop to ensure that authors and publishers get compensated for their work. Today, the New York Times reported that the lawsuits concerning Google have now been settled. The article includes some vague details about a service that Google intends to offer to libraries, that should be of particular interest to readers of this blog.

I’ve noticed lately that librarians and archivists commonly use the abbreviation ETD to refer to electronic theses and dissertations. It is an abbreviation for plural words. The abbreviation often appears with an ’s’ at the end to denote its plurality. For example, Virginia Tech’s stellar ETD site is called “ETDs at VT.” Since the words represented by the abbreviation are plural, is the ’s’ really necessary. Should it not be “ETD at VT” ?

I am posting this just in case anyone has a similar problem. Here’s the deal. I’ve been running DSpace for my institution, and I set up script that would backup my database using pg_dump on a cron job. It was extremely inconsistent, mainly during the AM hours.

My command looked like this

pg_dump -f /PATH_TO_STORAGE/dspace_`date +%Y%m%d%k%M%S`.sql dspace

After troubleshooting it, I noticed that if I ran the command during the morning hours, I got the following error:


pg_dump: too many command-line arguments (first is "dspace")
Try "pg_dump --help" for more information.

So, I started tweaking the command. Basically, for some reason, pg_dump does not like the %k part of the command. When I changed it to the following, it seemed to work fine:

pg_dump -f /PATH_TO_STORAGE/dspace_`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`.sql dspace

I count it my great pleasure to work where I do. At the James P. Boyce Centennial Library, I have the distinct pleasure of being able to work with archives, various types of special collections, and technology. The job perfectly fits my personality type.

One of the additional pleasures of working at this particular library is the name itself, for its namesake was possibly the greatest bibliophile in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention, James P. Boyce. He left his library to the institution, and I have the distinct pleasure of working with many of these books on a daily basis. I cannot do justice in describing either the breadth of his collection or the the physical beauty of the volumes he possessed. They are beyond remarkable, so I will not even sully their worth with my worthless banter. To appreciate them, one has to see them, feel them, and smell them. If you would like to do so, I invite you to stop by during our working hours.

Since this coming year marks the 150th anniversary of the establishment of Southern Seminary, I thought I would share here a brief account of Boyce’s love for books of all types. This particular quote was written by his daughter and is drawn from the biography that his colleague and best friend wrote of him.

His library was a source of great pride and enjoyment At one time it bade fair to be a remarkably large collection for a private individual Most of his books were bought before the war in after years he could buy little beyond those necessary for his studies and could seldom afford to indulge any longer in lovely bindings and rare editions I consider this one of the greatest tiials that loss of fortune brought upon him He still indulged himself occasionally but then only for our benefit At New Year he always presented each member of the family with either the complete edition of some author’s works or single works well bound and illustrated I have seen him sit for hours with a book catalogue in his hand marking the books he would like to buy and really seeming to get great enjoyment out of merely seeing what was to be had if he could afford it He was charmed to show his books to friends He and Colonel Durrett were constantly in each other’s libraries and often exchanged books I have heard him say that it caused him positive pain to see beautifully bound or illustrated books and not be able to possess them He seldom went down town without going to a book store where he could indulge himself in glancing over the new works He bought his theological books with a view to giving this part of his collection to the Seminary He was devoted to children’s books would read them with interest and was greatly given to making presents of them to his little namesakes and other child friends The last gift he gave was a book bought at Pan and sent to a little grand niece He gave his oldest daughter when a child the prettiest and the best books suitable to her age In fact she was really possessed of quite a little library when only a baby The Nightcap Stories Kollo Books Grimm’s Fairy Tales the Arabian Nights and even some French books were provided for her long before she had learned the alphabet He took great pains to have only good illustrations in a book he purchased believing in this way he might cultivate the taste for good drawing and painting.
– Memoir of James Petigru Boyce, D.D., LL.D. Late President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louiseville, Ky By John Albert Broadus

I’m not a huge Microsoft Word user, but when I do use Word, I like to keep versions of my documents. Back in the old days, before I did any coding, I would use multiple file names to accomplish this. What a nightmare! When I began writing a little code, a friend of mine turned me on to Subversion. It’s a great piece of software that allows me to maintain versions of my files without the hassle of multiple files and filenames. If you want to know more about it, Google it, or read the documentation at the site above.

When using Windows, I use a product called TortoiseSVN to keep track of my versioning of files. All this stuff is free, mind you. I have a site (ie. Subversion server) where I keep my code, and I also keep a number of my files there that pertain to the degree I’m pursuing. So, any papers I write go there. They’re versioned. They’re accessible from any web connected computer in the world. That is a very good thing, and I don’t know why more students don’t think of doing something like this. For that matter, I don’t know why Microsoft doesn’t think about doing something like this.

Just the other day, I found OfficeSVN. This neat little plugin adds a context menu for Microsoft Office products that allows you to commit the changes to your document (Word document, Excel Spreadsheet, etc.) without leaving the context of whatever Office product you’re using. It’s flat addictive, and I literally save my changes and commit my work every few minutes.

I cannot even begin to explain how helpful this little plugin is. Every graduate level student should seriously think about downloading these pieces of software and learning how to use them to maintain his or her files. I have no idea how many students I’ve heard despairing because they do not have backups and their computer blew up or their flash drive was misplaced. A system like this allows you to have both versioning (multiple versions of your files) and redundancy (your files located in multiple locations.)