Thursday, November 09, 2006
DLF: Aquifer, flat worlds, and more
As I expected, there were lots of interesting events at the DLF conference in Boston today. I'll split it into two posts: JHOVE2 and everything else. This is the "everything else" part.
I only caught the tail end of the keynote address by Anurag Acharya, the founder of Google Scholar. He's quite a good speaker, though the sound system wasn't cooperating very well.
The Developers' Forum Panel, on networked storage, discussed the preservation of resources on the Internet. This is an unpredictable phenomenon; some things may disappear forever, but more and more is being saved somewhere. One of the speakers, Clay Shirky, wryly noted that while it's very difficult to get hold of a book he published about ten years ago, all of his Usenet rants from that time are still preserved for anyone to read.
Session 7 included presentations of a couple of Harvard Library projects I've worked on, Virtual Collections and a project to harvest a large set of our own images from VIA for ARTstor. My name was on the latter, though I had nothing to do with the presentation. This session also included a discussion of a project called SUSHI, which deals with usage statistics. (I expected it to mean a wrapper for raw and somewhat fishy data.) The speakers were periodically upstaged by a mouse -- the carbon-based lifeform, that is -- which kept running around the front of the hall and occasionally into the audience.
Skipping over the JHOVE2 BOF session, which I'll give a post of its own, the last item I attended was a BOF session on "DLF Implementation Guidelines for Shareable MODS, DLF Aquifer Metadata Working Group." I went in knowing a pretty good amount about MODS, which is an XML schema for descriptive metadata, but nothing about Aquifer, which is a DLF project to promote distributed digital library content. MODS isn't quite as anarchic as PREMIS, but it does have lots of options, and the session was about Aquifer's work to recommend a set of best practices, specifically for shareable MODS records describing digitally archived objects. This is something I want to learn more about.
