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- John Howard, ASU now, moving to be head librarian at City U. Dublin
- Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Conference
- Bob Downs, The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia U.
- Steve Morris, North Carolina State University Library
- Bruce Wilson, Oak Ridge National Laboratories
- Kenneth Casey, National Oceanographic Data Center (NOAA)
June, 2009
- DL.ORG Working Group meeting
- Bram vander Werf, Europeana
- John did accept the head librarian job in Dublin. They are very much already a Fedora shop there, and John is one of our biggest supporters; he will be a head librarian who had done serious programming, recently even. I asked him to make an effort to help Susan Schreibman out at the Digital Humanities Observatory project in Ireland and I had already introduced him to Don Gouley, my old friend who works for her. He has done a lot of work with faculty projects and Fedora in a library setting. Note that John was at Harvard before ASU and has roots with Dale Flecker and Mackenzie Smith.
- Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Conference I was asked to give a presentation at this meeting by Ruth Duerr, after she attended the webinar that I did. She coordinates a preservation and archiving track for the group and I led off that track in the conference. This community is not so aware of repository issues, much more grid oriented, but they are getting into OAIS thinking in a big way. There definitely is the beginning of an awareness that repositories are a different way to think about things.
- Bob Downs, The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia U. Chatted with Bob about Fedora and introduced him to the concept of scholars workbenches. They use VITAL and he was really going on about the problems of taking in stuff that had already been done. A nice guy and one of our long-running users/
- Steve Morris, North Carolina State University Library Steve is leading an effort to create a GIS archive for the state of North Carolina that is local government-oriented rather than academic. They are considering using Fedora for this. I offered to come down and talk to them if they got interested.
- Bruce Wilson, Oak Ridge National Laboratories Bruce works at Oak Ridge but also has an appointment in the School of Information at U. of Tenn. He is also the Co-PI of the other Datanet project, DataONE. He is also the boss of Jerry Pan who we did a letter of support for. He is very interested in Fedora for a variety of things. I offered to come see them too, if I could hit both Oak Ridge and U. Tenn.
- Kenneth Casey, National Oceanographic Data Center (NOAA) When I went to talk to NOAA with the guy from Sun, we talked to a group of IT contractors that work for NOAA. Kenneth actually works for the group at NOAA who is charged with doing the data archiving. He was both unaware of the IT group meeting and pretty much of Fedora in general. He was very interested. I offered to come back for another visit with other people that he would put together but he said he needed to build up the idea around there. I will definitely be following up.
June, 2009
- DL.ORG Working Group meeting This was quite an experience, that is for sure! Their (the Italians who run the show; 3 of the committee are all from the CNR) idea of architecture and interoperability is all about making web services of all kinds work together, not about content interoperability. I did manage to get the to concentrate on working on the services that read from and write to repositories, I think. I really don't feel technically qualified to be in this effort, if this effort is really worth is at this time. We need to talk.
- Bram vander Werf, Europeanna Europeanna is a harvesting project that is creating OAI-based access to digital cultural resources across the EU. They are not really a potential repository users as they just aggregate and enhance metadata, which they give back. Apparently, they are very much a power to be reckoned with when it comes to EU funding for cultural heritage projects. Bram is the technical director from the business world. More about him in the Rob Sanderson entry below.
- Rob Sanderson, U. of Liverpool now, moving to LANL Rob has been working on Cheshire at the U. of Liverpool for many years and has been involved with the ORE effort as well. I had never met Rob before, he is a great guy and lots of fun. He, Bram (above) and I were staying in the same hotel and had dinner and drinks togther each night. None of us could really figure out exactly what the group was about, and all agreed that the meeting was a surreal experience. I made a remark that what we really need for interoperability is a global system of persistent identifiers for digital objects that is as solid and boring as domain name addresses. Rob really got into the idea and seems to be running with it. Bram also offered resources to get involved and we talked about what organizations is would take around the world to get involved. This really began as a conversation over drinks but could turn itno something. For the record, Rob is going to work at LANL for Herbert in August and will be dropping off the working group.Rob Sanderson, U. of Liverpool now, moving to LANL
- David Hon, Goddard Space Flight Center David was at the Goddard presentation, and he got really intrigued with the idea of the Scholars Workbench community group. If I understood correctly, he is a contractor working for another part of Goddard (not the library). He is very interested in applying the concept to the Planetary Misson projects that NASA is starting up. These are multi-year projects that combine research and creative speculation, creating lots of information in collaborative activities. He is going to make a connection to get me together with Bob Hozon, the guy at NASA who is putting together the proposals for these planetary missions.
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