Category: 2005

RSS Technology Applied to Subscription Database Content

John Law (ProQuest Information & Learning) and Karen Schneider (LII) spoke about the wonderful world of RSS to a full room on the last day of the conference.

Alan Cornish – Systems Librarian, Washington State University Libraries Another take on the session… You should also check Karen’s earlier post. What’s a Native XML database exactly? Alan defines Native XML as a document storage and retrieval model where an XML doc is considered the basic unit of storage, the database is DTD or schema independent, and an XML-specific query language is used to manage, retrieve and display data. No relational databases or SQL here, kids. Alan gave a nice, brief overview of XML, DTDs and then introduced the software used for his project. Textml is XML server software from Ixiasoft. He also mentioned Cooktop – some freeware that actually worked as a pretty robust XML editor. Alan demoed how Textml works, showed query syntax and drew comparisons with SQL statements. Those of us used to SQL syntax (SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE keyword = things) This native XML stuff…

This morning Brad Eden of the University of Nevada gave us a very nice overview of 3-D Information Visualization. The concept of Information Visualization can be defined loosely in a number of ways, but basically boils down to the representation of nonspatial data as visual objects with easily perceived relationships and patterns. Information Visualization is becoming increasingly important in online communication and instruction. When we look at the ways our users are consuming information, increasingly by choice, they do so visually. Virtual collaborative spaces are springing up all over the Internet as is the use of multiplayer online games coupled with the use of avatars and other visual persona, landscapes and environments. Why? “Tell me and I’ll forget… Show me and I may remember… Involve me and I’ll understand.” Ancient Chinese Proverb Increasingly faculty is looking at ways of utilizing Information Visualization to represent traditional text based and flat structure…

Rebecca Dunkle, librarian at University of Michigan (UM), and Ben Bunnell from Google, spoke about UM’s experience working with Google, as they begin what will be roughly a 6-year project to digitize 7 million volumes at UM. (Abigail Potter, a recent grad of the Information School at Michigan, now working at NPR, who worked on the Google Project while still at UM was also on hand to answer questions). The general outlines of the project are familiar to most of us, having been presented previously: Google, as if by magic, since the technology is proprietary and they can’t tell us about it, is non-destructively digitizing the entire bound print collection at UM (and also portions of 4 other research libraries; New York Public Library, Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford) . The scanning is resulting in page images and OCR files, all up to agreed upon digital preservation standards that have been…

Much fun.

Streaming multimedia – why to do it, how to do it, what they do with it at the National Agricultural Library. If you missed this one, let me just say, you missed a good show. John Gladstone is a fun speaker, and, well, it was a talk about multimedia, so we got to watch a lot of movies. Updated link! The presentation slides are available at: http://mamajama.com/uo/lita.ppt That contains all the details he mentioned about technical pieces to put together your streaming capability for relatively low cost. I’ll just mention a few items from the talk which aren’t fully obvious from the slides. Basically, the rationale for doing streaming is (a) Everybody’s doing it and (b) Libraries potentially have better content to offer than Everybody. There is an explosion of multimedia content out there but much of it comes from the same big entertainment and web publishing companies — AOL, Yahoo…

The references in this piece to Illinois are my comments. The speakers never mentioned Illinois. Anne Donohue and Debbi Schaubman of the Michigan Library Consortium spoke today on the new developments at the Michigan eLibrary, commonly known as MeL. Begun as a gopher at the University of Michigan in 1993, the web site has gone through many phases and now has several important services for the people of Michigan. The newest are MeLCat, a statewide library catalog, and MeLDelivery, a statewide delivery service. MeL also has a new user-friendly design. Though I reside in Illinois, I have been using the Reference Desk at MeL for years; as a reference librarian I have answered numerous reference questions with its links to free web sources. I always look on the MeL Databases with envy; the Michigan State Library provides many more databases for its residents than the Illinois State Library and makes…

Rick Weingarten and Carrie Lowe from the ALA Washington Office presented on library and IT issues in the current political climate.

Alan Cornish walked us through indigenous XML, with an emphasis on digital collections.