This Friday we will be meeting in the ISRL at 10:00am to do two test installs of new software for managing and presenting museum and cultural heritage collections.

Omeka
Omeka is a collaboration between the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Minnesota Historical Society. Omeka appears to be similar to open source blogging and wiki software - it’s easy to install, extensible with plugins and themes and offers easy dissemination through RSS feeds.

Be sure to check out the Showcase of existing Omeka project as well.

Open Collection
In contrast to Omeka, Open Collection is a “full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections” intended to provide an alternative to expensive proprietary systems such as The Museum System, Willoughby Systems, or Past Pefect. Like many of these systems, OC also includes a public access module that has been used to provide public access to collections information.

This week our focus will be on the installation, but I hope to revist these once they are up and running to see how they function, ease of use, strengths, weaknesses, etc.

We will be meeting Friday from 1:00 - 3:00 pm in the ISRL to
brainstorm a list of collaboration & productivity software. Mike will
be unable to join us, as he will be out of town. But we will be
sharing the list with him via email.

The purpose of this list is to get a sense of the range of software
that is out there which people might patch together to create
collaboration infrastructures, workflows, or other means of doing
things. We intend to have a focus on Web 2.0 type tools, but this is
not a strict limitation

The current starter list is:

google docs
skype
twitter
doodle
facebook
linked-in
37 signals (base camp, camp fire, backpack)
zoho
drupal
opencms
gyro (bug tracking)
citeseer
zotero
google scholar

a partial, minimal list of kinds of software to consider:

blogging software
wikis
version control systems
documents and software

We hope you’ll be able to join us!

I know I still owe you minutes from last meeting, but here’s the announcement for our next meeting. I don’t have time to make all the links live, sorry…

——

On Thursday from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm the Eclectic Design Research Group
(EDRG) will be meeting in the ISRL (LIS 340) to explore how interfaces
to digital libraries and institutional repositories are changing, and
to look at some of the more innovative ones. All are invited to attend
and participate.

Thanks to Matt Cordial, Dave Nichols, Jenn Miller, Jenny Benevento,
Richard Urban, and others, we have compiled a list of candidates to
look at in the meeting. Of course, this list is hardly complete, and
we will be unable to look at everything, so feel free to attend our
meeting and provide suggestions for what we should take a look at,
whether or not it already appears on this list. If you feel like
something is missing from the list, please email me.

The list is as follows:

==DL & IR Packages & Interfaces==

ICDL - International Children’s Digital Library:

http://www.icdlbooks.org/
ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/2003-02html/2003-02.html
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/428691
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~allisond/papers.html
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=druin
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pubs/tech-reports.shtml
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1017833.1017845

——-
Nines / Collex — Faceted search/browse built with Solr+Flare and Ruby on Rails:

http://nines.org/collex

——-
Libraryfind — Federated search in Ruby on Rails / Solr:

http://libraryfind.org/
http://search.library.oregonstate.edu/record/search (demo)

——-
Blacklight — yet another faceted RoR + Solr catalog.
(demo may be down)

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/blacklight.html

——-
Flamenco — Faceted image search.

http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html

——-
VuFind — yet another faceted view of the catalog.
(site may be down)

http://www.vufind.org/
http://www.vufind.org/demo/

——-
Koha:

http://www.koha.org/

———
LibraryThing:

http://www.librarything.com/

——-
NSDL:

http://nsdl.org/

——-
NCSU Libraries (North Carolina State University):

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/subjects/
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/searchcollection/

——-
Greenstone:

http://www.greenstone.org/

———
Dspace:

http://www.dspace.org/

———
Keystone:

http://www.indexdata.dk/keystone/

———
Shoestring:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6349025.html

———
MINDS:

http://minds.wisconsin.edu/

——
Bibapp:

http://code.google.com/p/bibapp/
https://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/5119
http://ewlarson.wendtlibrary.org/presentations/OR2007-BibApp.pdf

——-
Ravelry:

https://www.ravelry.com/account/login

——–
Fac-Back OSS OPAC (supplement):

http://code.google.com/p/fac-back-opac/
http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/oct07/Beccaria_Scott.shtml

——
Blake Archive:

http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/

——-
Endeca:

http://endeca.com/
http://endeca.com/technology/index.html
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/

==Resources for finding Interfaces==

LibLIme:

http://liblime.org/demos

——-
http://del.icio.us/tag/code4lib

==DL & IR Blog posts==

http://contentdivergent.wordpress.com/category/libraries-librarians/library-20/

http://www.mkbergman.com/?cat=11

http://plcmctech.wordpress.com/2006/07/11/25/

http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001619.html

==(Academic) Articles/Books==

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/mitchell/03mitchell.html

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/irbook/10/chap10.html

http://www.amazon.com/Interfaces-Digital-Libraries-Lecture-Computer/dp/3540002472?tag=particculturf-20

Unfortunately, most of the articles I’ve found are kind of old.

http://vw.indiana.edu/visual02/jcdl.html
* There’s a list of accepted papers that look like they might be interesting

http://www.springerlink.com/content/83ky4dqpg45cr20b/

Here’s an old one (undated), but it’s interesting:

http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~andi/libviewer/

==Code4Lib==

http://code4lib.org/
http://journal.code4lib.org/
http://del.icio.us/tag/code4lib

==JCDL Publications on DL Interfaces==

http://www.jcdl.org/past-event-conf.shtml

These are a mixed bag. Below are included most of the articles that
have to do with (at least some aspect of) interface design. Regarding
how interesting or useful they may be I make no promises.

JCDL 2007:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255303&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255200&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255293&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255178&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255304&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255257&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255225&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255307&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255199&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255239&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255308&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255258&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255177&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255226&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255175.1255192&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=36056742&CFTOKEN=34866767

JCDL 2006:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141756&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141757&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141793&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141795&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141844&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141856&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141869&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141875&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141753.1141877&coll=portal&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES492&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=DL&CFID=798309&CFTOKEN=77332738

==People==

Katy Borner:

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/research/index.html

In our last meeting we talked about Digital Storytelling, and we invited Professor Kate McDowell to take the lead in our discussions. We ended up talking about a number of issues, including:

• Definitions of digital storytelling:
  • What counts as digital storytelling? What does not?
  • How broad a definition of digital storytelling is possible? E.g., Youtube videos, discussion board posts, radio broadcasts, etc.?
  • What are meaningful possible boundaries for such a definition?
  • What do the people who call their work “digital storytelling” do? What do they consider to be “digital storytelling”?
• Digital storytelling as folklore:
  • Digital storytelling that is folklore; digital storytelling that is not folklore.
  • Patterns of dynamism and conservatism (Toelken) in digital storytelling.
• Examples of digital storytelling, especially digital artifacts specifically referred to by their creators as being digital storytelling
• A description of various dimentions of digital vs. traditional storytelling developed by Professor McDowell.
• Different conceptions of how to approach thinking about digital storytelling:
  • We noticed that there seemed to be some miscommunication going on between those of us who were used to thinking about digital storytelling from a design perspective, and those of us who were used to thinking about digital storytelling from a research or practice perspective.

Below I have included our original invitation, for those interested in our original plan.

Next week Thursday (4/10/2008) we will be holding an Eclectic Design
Research Group (EDRG) meeting from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm in the ISRL (LIS
room 340) on Digital Storytelling. Kate McDowell will be leading the
session, and you are all invited to attend. We can skype in people who
are interested in joining the discussion but are unable to be on
campus (it works ok). Our agenda is as follows:

Kate will present:
–How LEEP storytelling classes are currently taught, including
technology and performance philosophy
–The relative strengths of traditional and digital storytelling, and
how they can be complementary

Then we will be discussing the following stories/sites/topics/articles:

Definitions of Digital Storytelling:

–Center for Digital Storytelling
http://www.storycenter.org/,
especially their highlighted example story:
http://www.storycenter.org/momquicktime.html

–Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling
http://www.coe.uh.edu/digitalstorytelling/default.htm
especially their highlighted example story:
http://www.wmich.edu/pt3/ds/look.html

(with Matt Beth)
–Methods of digital storytelling communication (via LEEP):

e.g., real-time screen captures to distribute (or some other mechanism)

Research Papers:

McDowell, Kate. Distance and Presence: A Case Study of Performance
in Two Online Storytelling Courses. Forthcoming in Storytelling,
Self, Society, Sept 2008
* Please email me to obtain a copy of this document if you think you
might be able to attend - it is not for public consumption but can be
shared for the purposes of our discussion.

Kelleher, C. and R. Pausch. Lessons Learned from Designing a
Programming System to Support Middle School Girls Creating Animated
Stories. 2006 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric
Computing. [ieee pdf], linked from
http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/papers.html

Alison Druin’s Kidpad:
— http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/kidpad.shtml
— “KidPad: a design collaboration between children, technologists,
and educators”
—- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=258866&dl=ACM&coll=GUIDE

Brian Bailey’s Clover
— http://orchid.cs.uiuc.edu/projects/clover/index.html
— “Clover: Connecting technology and character education using
personally-constructed animated vignettes”
—- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1221400

— “Designing storytelling technologies to encouraging collaboration
between young children”
—- http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332502&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=58138146&CFTOKEN=33036891

We look forward to seeing you there!

The last meeting of the EDRG was a “show and tell” of various calendaring tools used by the attendees. Among the things we discussed were the affordances of Yahoo! Calendar, Google Calendar, Oracle Calendar (provided by UIUC CITES) as well as Apple’s iCal, Microsoft Outlook and Palm Desktop. (see also the EMacs Planner Mode).
Of course what we found is that each of us has our own preferences and work habits that define what calendars we’ve come to use. For users like Mike, calendars are essential to keeping life in order. The cost of a corrupted calendar may be hours of work repairing what was lost. This often leads us to “dance with the devil we know” rather than playfully seek tools that better fit the way we work.

The lack of standardization also inhibits us from exploring different calendar systems. A basic incompatibility we discovered was between Yahoo! (that imports/exports CSV and Outlook) and Google (which used the iCalendar (RFC 2445) standard). In order to move from one to the other I may need to depend on questionable scripts to move between the two.

The EDRG Calendar

What had kicked off this discussion was our desire to create a calendar to remind us of upcoming paper submission deadlines and conference dates. Ingbert had started doing this using the WordPress Links database (see the current sidebar). This gave us a quick way to link directly to papers and conferences. However, I found this wasn’t enough “in my way.” I don’t (and didn’t plan to start) use the EDRG site as a way to plan my work. But I do use my calendar that way. (or as Ingbert said later ” the calendar doesn’t tell me what to do, it gives me options.”). Having our list of paper deadlines in a portable calendar format seemed to be the way to go.

For the moment we’ve decided to use Google Calendar for this (and we’ve added a GCal widget to the sidebar). However there are a few needs this doesn’t meet. Clicking on one the items in the GCal widget takes you to Google - not to the site with the paper submission information. While we can enter anything we like in the Description field here, there is no way to “tag” events so that we can view them by a category (e.g. “full paper,” “short paper,” “poster,” etc.)

As an alternative I took a look at 30Boxes. Compared to Google Calendar, 30Boxes has an impressive array of ways to connect to other social networking sites already built in (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Vox, LiveJournal, etc). I can also connect with calendar Buddies, etc. 30Boxes also has a nice features, like for letting me add tags to events and a natural language entry (similar to Leopard. Just type “EDRG meeting Thursday at 3:00″ and it will add the right event). Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that 30Boxes supports collaboratively edited calendars (let me know if I missed something).

Next Meeting

Out next meeting will be on Thursday (Feb. 14, 2007) at 3:30 2:00 pm in the ISRL (340 GSLIS). We’ll continue to look at calendar systems such as Mozilla’s Sunbird/Lightening and the Chandler Project. Poking around I also stumbled on Zimbra which was recently acquired by Yahoo!.

Ingbert will also introduce a research statement he’s working on.

And here’s a little something called hCalendar microformat, based on iCal that lets you embed a structured event record within HTML. Add the hCal Greasemonkey script to Firefox to click and add events to your Google Calendar.

Additional Resources

• doodle.ch
  a nice application for coordinating meetings among a group. This has been extremely useful for coordinating meetings among people who work in different institutions and can’t do automatic calendar comparisons.
• Timebridge looks like a more robust application that allows you to connect Outlook or GCal so a confirmed time can be added.

For keeping up on GCal Developments, lifehacker is an indispensable resource.

• Supercharge GCal
• GCal from the Command Line
• Integrate Gmail and GCal
• Better GCal Greasemonkey script

[This is more or less a copy of an email invitation sent out to a wider audience than our normal meeting announcements are sent to.]

In the next meeting of the Eclectic Design Research Group we will be talking about Calendaring Software, and general issues surrounding how we are able to, and how we would like to, keep track of events, share calendars, etc. We thought that these issues might have a broader appeal to members of the GSLIS community than our meeting topics normally have, so we thought we’d make a broader announcement of our meeting than we normally do. So please feel free to stop on by, and join us:

Thursday, February 7, 2008
2 pm to 4 pm (or any period in between that you can make it)
ISRL Commons (Room 340)

As usual, our plans are flexible, so feel free to bring any ideas, questions, or concerns you may have to the meeting. Topics we intend to cover include:

• Evaluating existing calendaring systems, including (most of) the following:
  • Google Calendar
  • Chandler
  • iCal
  • Yahoo Calendar
  • Sunbird/Lightning
  • Others? Oracle? Outlook? Eudora? Feel free to suggest something.
• Practice adding events to the shared Google Calendar we have created for the EDRG
  • Use this as an exercise to see what functionality the calendar is good for, and what is missing that we desire or need.
  • We may try this out on other calendaring systems as well.
• Quick-and-dirty evaluations of the usability of installing, and sharing between different calendaring systems
• Take a look at various calendaring standards
  • Including a quick-and-dirty survey of how widely they are adopted, what kinds of sharing they afford, etc.
• We will also discuss what kind of content we want to include in the calendar.
  • Originally, we intended it to keep track of submission deadlines, but we are also looking to add local talks and presentations that might be of interest to group members, including casual members.
• Other related issues? Feel free to suggest some.

Toward the end of the meeting we will also discuss some other issues,
such as potential submissions to publication venues, e.g.:

• Invitation to Champaign I-School Students to submit to the Doctoral Consortium at DESRIST

In any case, if you are interested, feel free to stop by. We will be happy to have you join us, both for next meeting, and on a more regular basis if you find what we do interesting. We will be having at least one more meeting that will be of a more general appeal this semester: looking into practices, tools, and technologies which people use to maintain their bibliographic databases. If you can’t join us this week, hopefully you can join us then.

Note: We typically go out for dinner after the meeting–you are welcome to join us for this if you are interested, even if you cannot attend the meeting.

Our proposal, Mapping the Design Space of Design Education in iSchools, was accepted as a Wildcard Session at the iConference, the (nearly) annual iSchools conference. Wildcards are supposed to be an opportunity to try something new in a conference setting, which is an opportunity we are trying to take full advantage of.

To this end, we have set up some electronic infrastructure to support our planning activities, and hopefully to keep persistent the conversation we hope to begin during the conference. Currently, this infrastructure includes:

• Design Edcuation Wiki
• Design Ed Google Group

Please check it out, sign up for accounts, and feel free to add content and/or send messages. As we update the site, we will occasionally post here with news.

In general, what we are trying to accomplish is to have a brainstorming session where we apply techniques which we have found useful for the other kinds of design activities we engage in, and apply them to the topic of Design Education. We hope that by doing this we will both be able to identify the accent with iSchools bring to design endeavors, as well as ideas for how to teach design more effectively (or at all) in iSchools.

We just submitted a proposal for the iConference to organize a WildCard session about teaching design, design practice, and design thinking in iSchools. A copy of the proposal can be found here

Plan:

1. Setup Community Research & Design Blog
2. Send email requesting people to bring in issues to the group
3. Act on Second-Life ideas

Second Life Action Ideas

• Build a Second-Life Object that is an animation of a (statue) guy digging that says, “under construction”, and that comes with a location tracker (that is advertised, and the reason for including it given), that is openly copyable, and then look at where people do it, as a mini-research project for Richard
• Building a Second-Life Object that covers what you’re building in cloth, so nobody can see it, and then have a grand unveiling/grand opening

Stuff we want to accomplish:

• Encourage people to bring problems
• Talk more about mashup ideas
• Test-run the mashup tutorial materials
• Campus Webmasters web mashup brownbag
• Using the entrepreneurial design class as research opportunity — explore research methods, papers?
• SSD (Socio-technical Systems Design) Conference / laboratory / workshop
• ECSCW deadline
• Collaborative Design/Research by Blog
• Get Dan a PhD
• IRB boilerplate and form generator
• Help Richard develop small, intensive projects that are components or build together in order to help him start working toward his long-term, extended dissertation goals.
• Dedicated Research Communities who are defensive about what they do?
• Institutional structures get in the way of rapid research methods
• The holistic approach to understanding rapid research methods, and doing them
• Institutional Alsheimers versus assumed oral/practiced memory with no physical trace

• Second Life GPS?

I updated the Upcoming Deadlines links. I also created a new page:

Conferences of Interest

Check it out, add conferences I’ve forgotten, etc.

Ingbert