Life is a Mystery

Don't Download This Song

I've become a fan of YouTube, even following the whole LG15 controversy. Yeah, I know. Still, every once in a while I run across something worth smiling about. Here's one from Weird Al that you should all watch: a commentary on copyright. Very sweet.

Talk

OK, one more note about re-imagines what an online conversation can be. I am stunned at what Tim and his team have accomplished in less than one year, and the kind of creativity behind the new Talk feature is a great example of the dynamic ideas inspired by really thinking about how to serve a community.

Mary has been working on an Open Source Religious Education site idea. I don't know that conversations had been part of the idea, but if we were to implement them, I think the Talk model could be very exciting.

Dream of Fields

Yesterday I got a chance to check in on LibraryThing for the first time in a few months. I was impressed with how much progress the site has made, not only in terms of users (over 60,000) and content (almost 5M records), but also in terms of services. There is now a way to collapse editions of titles together (a kind of communal FRBR), to sign up for an organization account (in case you want to catalog your school library with LT), to query LT via web services APIs (like the thingTitle), to join groups (like librarians who use LT). LT started out as a very simple proposition (we'll keep your list of books and allow you to share that list with other users of LT) focussed on attracting a community. It attracted the community, and continues to. Now it is learning from that community in order to understand what it should become.

I feel that we too often feel we have to specify a service, understand all the functional requirements, survey the community, get it right the first time. This leads to the "if we build it will they come". The "it" becomes really big, and the "coming" becomes really important. What if we built just enough to get them to start coming? If we fail, "they" don't show up, we try something else. If "they" come, we wait for them to demand services, to tell us what should come next, to help us understand the functional requirements. We build for the community that grows. More of an "if they come then we build it model," or as a colleague put it today, a "dream of fields."

I have no idea if LT really evolved this way, I'd love to know. But it sure feels like it has. I think we need to learn to evolve library systems in similarly iterative ways. I fear we will miss the boat otherwise.

Documenting Internet2

Dharma and Beth have published an article about Documenting Internet2 in RLG DigiNews. I spent quite a bit of effort on this project last year and found web crawling for content much more reasonable an approach than I'd expected. This year we are giving Archive-It (from the Internet Archive and RLG) a go for similar crawling. The article is an effective summary of the project.

Day Dreaming

Do you have an idea for an application you wish someone would write? Here's a new idea: MyDreamApp is a contest in which the winner will have their idea turned into a real application. Kind of American Idolish, this could be fun from the idea-generation perspective or from the voting-em-out perspective. I wonder what will come of it.

Circuit City Challenges DMCA

Here's a high profile company offering a service that clearly violates DMCA, and about time! Ars Technica reports that Circuit City offers to duplicate DVDs for various purposes from backup to reformatting data for other devices. To make this work they have to rip the DVD's, circumventing the encryption present on the discs. How long will this last?

Welcome MacBook

Apple released the MacBook this week. It is the little sib to the MacBook Pro that was introduced a few months back. Alex and I stopped in at the Rosedale Apple store and took a look. What a nice machine! It is amazing to me that all Mac laptops now sport built in iSight cameras and FrontRow remote controls. So many cool things to do with these. The MacBook is not only on sale (and my sister has already bought one!), it has also been disassembled and reviewed already.

RadioActive

Wow, this could work. I know that when I'm walking I like to try to reach friends or family with my cellphone. But sometimes I just hold off thinking, "it is dinnertime there" or "I don't really have anything to say." What if, instead, I were to drop in on an ongoing family discussion, hear the updates and advice from siblings and parents, leave my own 2 cents worth, then check out. I think I might do this, even daily! The RadioActive project at the MIT Medial Lab is setting out to create a tool like this. What a great idea!

Docushare at U Rochester Libraries

I just saw a really neat little demo of U Rochester's Libraries Staff Web. It turns out they've implemented their whole staff web as a Xerox Docushare site. This enables not only sharing completed documents, but also sharing the editorial and creation side of documents (something you can't really see without logging in). I was particularly struck by the image sharing this system made possible.

RFID Vulnerabilities

Wired ran an article this month about the vulnerabilities of RFID tags. Ed Vielmetti picked up on this in his blog and adds a few other useful resources. RFID has seemed quite cool for a while, though a bit intimidating on the big brother front. These concerns, though, raise a real question about how reliable RFID may be. The Wired article seems a bit alarmist to me, given that it focuses its libraries comments on an institution that decided not to implement RFID anyway. Are institutions that do move ahead doing so without "locking" tags and addressing these issues?

The New OPAC

Well, it seems to be happening. We are (finally) seeing a divorce between the Integrated Library System (ILS) and the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) we share with our patrons. The introduction of the new catalog at North Carolina State University powered by Endeca put the rest of us to shame. Our own vendor, Ex Libris has been planning a product called Primo since last year. Finally, a library vendor for whom I have a great deal of respect, TLC, has decided to broker both Endeca (they did this two years ago!) and a product called AquaBrowser.

While I've been talking about the end of the ILS as we know it, others have been acting! It is impressive to see how far they've come, and time for us to do our part to move this market along.

Google Q & A

You might be interested in tracking a new service from Google. Try a search for "population of minnesota" on Google today and you will see something new at the top of the results: an answer! Instead of pointing off to a web site, Google is putting factual answers at the top of the results for some searches. Give a few others a try ("who is jimmy carter"). More about this can be found at...

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/04/just-facts-fast.html

I don't think they sleep over there!

Visitors from Spain

We had a wonderful visit from a crew from Spain today. Gave an overview of our digital initiatives. This entry is part of a demonstration of UThink.

Reaching Back & Reaching Forward

I've been struck today by how long lasting programming technology can be and by how quickly it all changes.

Gary Fouty, a librarian in our science library, surprised me today when he revealed his talent for writing code. The beautiful thing was that he writes in Pascal, a language I left behind long ago, but one which, he reminded me, still serves awfully well and has a number of strengths. Gary has written a program to take search results in MARC form from our Aleph system and transform them into HTML for pasting into a blog, from which he delivers RSS feeds. Very graceful work. The results can be seen in the new books blog he manages.

The great thing for me is that following Gary's code led me back to Pascal, and a nice Pascal compiler for the Mac. Free Pascal (FPC) is a nifty Turbo Pascal compatible compiler for dozens of platforms including Windows, Linux, and Mac. There is even a detailed XCode Integration Kit that helps you use Apple's new coding tools with Pascal. Remember the good-ol-days of Inside Macintosh and its Pascal interface to the Mac toolbox?

Meanwhile the future is rushing at us full speed. A great article at Adaptive Path describes what they term Ajax (more commonly called "remote scripting"), the arrangement of tools and technique that make some of the coolest interfaces on the web tick (see Google Maps and Mail and a nifty map of Switzerland for examples). This model is turning the hurry up and wait paradigm of the web on its head. As the author concludes, "the challenges are for the designers of these applications: to forget what we think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of possibilities." Another nice article on this technique can be found at Apple (it even credits Microsoft!). It looks to be a very interesting year.

De Value of Passwords

One of my recurring arguments with auditors and some security staff revolves around how to secure passwords. They often push for a variety of measures, many of which I think are counterproductive and actually decrease any protection a password might offer. One of the worst offenses is the requirement to force a password change on users on some regular schedule. Last year I enjoyed a minor victory here at the U when I was able to convince the auditor, the head of network security, and the CIO that we didn't have to require 180 day auto-expiring passwords on machines with private data.

In documenting that case I pointed to a few articles including this PDF and a few ACM articles not available on the open web. Today I learned of a different article devaluing the password, that of a Microsoft security staff member arguing for long pass phrases instead: why you shouldn't be using passwords. I found this article on Slashdot which also included interesting comments and a link to an earlier story on the site.