While clearing out old lists of post inspirations, I ran across a post on Commonplace.net that still gets my brain going:

At my place of work, my desk is in close proximity to our two catalogers.  The conversations that ensue about cataloging standards, MARC, and such are often interesting, and occasionally stray into realms so esoteric that it becomes a challenge to keep up with the thread of conversation.

My rare contribution usually boils down to “I am an agnostic as to what standards are used, but the basic storage and retrieval of cataloging information should be as granular and relational as can be achieved.”

By granular, I mean that information should be divided into small, well-defined chunks.  When an author is listed as “Smith, John, 1947-” I cringe a little.  Dividing the author’s first and last (and middle) names into separate fields makes a world of sense, especially when you encounter authors with multiple middle or last names (or both).  Instead, MARC relegates the name into one string.  This also creates problems with cultural differences in how given and family names are presented.

Another problem is that this information exists separately in each bibliographic record.  If our data storage systems were to store author/creator information in a relational manner, we could have one record for “Smith, John, 1947-”.  This would make it much easier in the unfortunate circumstance that the author becomes “Smith, John, 1947-2010″.

Most library software uses granular and relational database methods for the storage of circulation and acquisitions information.  It is our bibliographic information that is stuck in an inefficient rut.

The strongest argument I can think of for changing this is that is is very easy to create scripts and use software to put together small pieces of information to create an easy-to-understand string; it is much, much harder to take that string and break it into well-defined and usable chunks in order to use the information in new ways.

The future of data is not so much everyone using the same specific standards, but using standards that can be compared and used in ways that are compatible.  We can easily build MARC records from a granular relational database; cataloging need not change how it views and edits records (not much, at least), but the current methods are holding libraries back.

Open Data : It’s About Interoperability, not Property is a post on Common Knowledge that does a great job at not only explaining why Open Data is such a powerful idea, but also why it is so complex, as well:

“There are three interlocking dimensions to interoperability in data: legal, technical, and semantic. By legal, we mean the contractual and intellectual property rights associated with the data; by technical, the standard systems (especially the computer languages) in which the data is published; and by semantic, the actual meaning of the data itself – what it describes, and how it relates to the broader world.

Each of these dimensions is complex on its own. Taken together, the three represent unsolvable complexity….”

Brett Bonfield has a great post, actually more of a long essay or article, on open source library software projects.  W-E-B-S-I-T-E, Find Out What It Means To Me (great title, but certainly more limited than the post’s topic) covers a wide range of software, the reasons people use (or don’t use) them, and the status of several of the larger projects that currently exist.

There is a lot of information in the post, and links for further exploration.  This just made my recommended reading list.

It’s called the Millennial Disc, and it is being marketed as a 1,000 year storage for digital information.

Before we run out and buy a stack of these for our archives, I would simply ask:

How many years before some aspect of this technology – the 5″ 12cm digital storage disc, the disc formatting, the communication channel between the drive and the computer – becomes obsolete?

This is not meant to be a snarky or rhetorical question.  The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has been dealing with those very issues:  extracting an obsolete data format from an obsolete storage media using restored obsolete equipment.  If the team didn’t have a couple of original machines, and a technician who understood how they worked, the images would be incredibly difficult (approaching impossible) to recover.  And this is going back only 43 years.

I used to use CD-ROM, CD-RW, and later the DVD variants, for most of my data exchange.  Now it is cheaper, easier, and faster to simply use a USB flash drive.  I don’t expect the 5″ 12cm disk to be around longer than 5 or 10 years.  Neither should libraries.

Any archival storage should utilize high-quality, durable storage material.  There should be a regular, ongoing evaluation as to when the storage media should be replaced.  Always keep some old equipment (with old software) around to ensure your ability to convert.

found via LISNews

Sugar is the desktop environment developed for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, and it is now available as an open-source download through the Sugar Labs project.  This could be a fantastic way to keep older computers useful and current.

Here’s a link to their Downloads page.  Documentation and Community Support can be found on their Wiki.

found viae Stephen’s Lighthouse

This post will contain just a couple of links, but there is a wealth of information on the other end of each:

• 101 Great Free Sites and Downloads You’ve Probably Never Heard Of has been put together by PC World.  I will bet you have heard of at least a few of these, and I would recommend using this as a starting point in your search for resources and applications (i.e. if you see something helpful, look for other resources that provide the same… PC World sometimes skips great resources for simply new and flashy resources).  found via ResourceShelf
• 30+ Places to Find Creative Commons Media is a post on the SitePoint blog, which is a great resource for web developers.  This list is fairly focused, but many people forget about the treasure trove that is Creative Commons when they look for pictures, sound or other media resources.

Evernote is an online service that serves an interesting purpose:  it allows you to indicate digital items that you wish to remember, it stores them, and then makes the entire collection searchable.

Or more specifically, you can have it remember all your blog posts, tweets, iPhone items (photographs, etc.), typed notes, e-mails… whatever you tell it to store.  Everything gets indexed in their database, and will be there for you to retrieve at whatever time you wish to do so.

Right now this is simply a neat idea, and assuming that it works as smoothly as it’s description, a good way of archiving the wide varieties of communication and digital storage we use in our daily lives.  However, I think it is more than that… I suspect that this is the social leading edge of what is becoming more and more necessary in the digital age: the necessity of having some sort of structure to the hodge-podge of data that accumulates like peanut shells in a sports bar.

Another way of viewing this is that it is similar to the ideas behind the Semantic Web.  This isn’t a perfect match, of course, but the ability to match up commonalities between different chunks of data is the goal in each of these endeavors.  Understand that the amount and variation of the data is not going to be reduced in the years to come… we are going to need tools like this just to keep abreast of the tide of information that we will encounter.

Watch for other companies to address this idea; I will likely wait for something that can reside on my own server space (perhaps syncing indexes with others for greater effect), and preferably open source, rather than trust that this or some other cloud will achieve permanence.

found via the Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian

The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies is a British site “established by Jane Hart as a place to keep track of learning trends, technologies and tools.”

Most impressive, at first glance, are the lists of free tools and resources:

• 25 Tools every learning professional should have in their toolbox – and all for free!
• 100+ Free Website to find out about anything and everything.
• 100+ Language Learning Websites.
• Top Tools for Learning 2009.

Although the focus of the site is education, most of what is featured can benefit both library staff and patrons.

found via MLxperience

Terry Reese has released an updated version of MarcEdit 5.1, and there are a few interesting additions:

• Improved support for Enterprise users (large organizations).
• Multiple Z39.50 querying capabilities.
• Tutorials hosted on YouTube.
• Improved UTF-8 loading (as in Faster).
• ‡biblios.net proof of concept Plug-in.

It sounds like a great program just got even better!

found via Catalogablog

Had to do some research on free Genogram software, and thought I’d share a couple of programs here.

Genograms are essentially family trees with metadata about relationships between people.  The software does a great job with making family trees, and the metadata can be whatever one wishes to add to it.

For a Windows-only software program that is free and transferable (but not open source), I recommend WinGeno.

An online Java-based program that does a good job is Progeny’s Pedigree Chart Tool.

It’s a post that is months old, but the information is just as useful:  Swiss Army Librarian has a guide for Using Firefox on Our Public Computers.

If you have computers that restore themselves to a pre-determined state upon reboot, I also recommend Zotero so that people can organize their research (though power users should customize their own version of FirefoxPortable.

found via the Innovative User’s Group (thanks Gus Calderon!)

Karen Coombs has a post on the Library Web Chic blog about getting feedback for a problem she was having with Drupal, an open source content management system.

She points out, and rightly so, the fallacies that techies run into when working with software.  There is an expectation that if you are comfortable working with software, that you are an “expert”.  There is also an expectation that you can find the answer to any question in the documentation.

Most anyone can work with most of this software.  There is a lot to learn, but if you are patient and willing to fail (and try again), you will be rewarded with the ability to install, configure and run software that will make your life (and your library/organization/family/etc.) much more fulfilling.  Just remember the patience – on everyone’s part.

I thought I’d try something new and summarize the software that I use on a regular basis.  I have been thinking about this, as I have recently switched from one software program to another in a couple of areas, and have been thinking about the evolution of the programs I have used over the years.  This may become an annual (or occasional) update, or this may be the only installment.  I also note which items have Portable Apps alternatives, as I use these a great deal.

Here they are:

• Operating Systems : Windows XP is still my primary day-to-day system at home, on my notebook, and at work.  I use Ubuntu linux on a regular basis (I am set up to dual-boot both at home and on my notebook computer), but haven’t yet made the jump.  Yet.  I use Mac OS-X (Leopard) occasionally on my wife’s computer (usually when setting something up for her).
• Web Browsers : Firefox (PortableApps) is my preferred browser (and has been since it was at version 0.6 or so).  I occasionally use Google Chrome, which is definitely faster, but my habitual use of certain add-ons (see below) keeps me from getting comfortable.  I use Internet Explorer 7 when I want to run Windows Update.  My only complaints are occasional memory hog problems with Firefox.
• Firefox Add-Ons : Zotero, Groowe Search Toolbar, Web Developer Toolbar, Operator, Cooliris, Add to Search Bar.  Learn them, use them, love them.
• E-Mail : Thunderbird (PortableApps) is my primary e-mail client, although I feel it needs a good updating (version 3, anyone?).  I use Microsoft Outlook 2003 at work, mainly because we use the calendar features quite a bit.  An add-on that makes Outlook worth using, however, is Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards).  If you use Outlook, get Xobni – you will not be disappointed.  I am eagerly awaiting a Thunderbird version.
• Office Suites : I recently switched to Go-Oo from OpenOffice 3 (PortableApps).  It wasn’t too hard of a change, as it is an implementation of OpenOffice with some very intelligent add-ons and configuration.  It is very smooth and easy to use, and hasn’t given me any problems yet.  I still use Microsoft Office 2003 at work, but am rapidly switching to Go-Oo for everything but Access.  Even that may change, as MS Access lacks some desired report functionality that exists in the Sun Report Builder.
• Text Editors : I recently switched from SciTE to Notepad++ (PortableApp) when I needed better control over the encoding of the text.  Both are excellent for editing HTML and CSS, as well as editing a variety of text files.
• Web Design : I primarily use a text editor (see above), but when I want something more powerful, I use Amaya, or sometimes Aptana.  If you need a basic WYSIWYG designer, I recommend Komposer (PortableApps).  I use FileZilla (PortableApps) as my FTP client.
• Photo Software : I currently use IrfanView, but suspect that this may change in the near future, as my needs are changing.
• Online Software : I use WordPress for blogging; Gregarius as a blog reader; Gallery for photo storage and viewing; I am trying out OpenGoo for online applications (calendar, tasks, contacts, basic word processing); OpenBiblio for my church’s ILS; Scriblio and Drupal for OPAC replacements (just playing around with them); and TextPattern as a Content Managment System.
• Security : ZoneAlarm firewall; AVG Free anti-virus; Clean-Up!; and HijackThis.
• CD Authoring : I switched from CDBurnerXP to InfraRecorder (PortableApps) earlier this year.  I haven’t tried the newest version of CDBurnerXP, so there may be some switching back in the future.
• Odds and Ends : 7-Zip (PortableApps) for compressing and decompressing all sorts of files; PDF Creator; MarcEdit.

If you are looking for a common thread, there is this:  all of these, except for two of the operating systems, and the software on my work PC, don’t cost anything.  Much of it is Open Source (of which I am an advocate).  You can do a lot with an internet-connected computer, a sub-$100 per year web hosting service, and some trial-and-error experimentation.

I hope this list helps to inform, and perhaps even connects someone else with software that I have grown to enjoy using for everyday tasks.  It has been interesting to see just how much software becomes part of my daily routines, and how much value I get from the above programs.

OpenDocument.XML.org is, as the name might suggest, a website devoted to the new standard document file format. These formats have been making news over the past year or so because of the issue of archiving data files and having the ability to access them when the software and/or software company that created the format no longer exists.

OpenDocument files are available for any software company to incorporate into their products, and are based on a combination of xml and file compression. An interesting trick: take an open document file, change the extention to .zip, then open using whatever program is convenient for you to do so.

You will see the components of the file stored as separate files within the zipped folder. These are mostly .xml files, but if you have images in your document, these will be stored as their own image files. There is even a .png thumbnail of the first page of the document.

The site is mostly for people who are developers or at least very curious about OpenDocument, but it is worth your while to check out the “Learn More” link and read about the generalities of the specification.

from OSDir