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July, 2009
- Arizona State University visitLibrary ASU has been one of our longest running users but I really didn't know how they were using Fedora so this was interesting. They don't do any digitizing of their own collections, they work with faculty projects. They have worked on a variety of things, science and humanities, including a big GIS centered project. I don't know what will happen when John leaves. One strong interest that we talked about is in creating an XML editing service that create and manage XML datastreams for a variety of metadata standards. Also, one of their programmers made the point that DSpace's developer community was largely built by developers who were interested in the top of the stack, the user interface related stuff, which Fedora doesn't have. I think that maybe we could use the SWAT team idea to organize developers for Fedora around higher level apps and utilities (like the XML thing) that would feed more developers into the community. Some of them might become interested in on the core.
- Keith Kintigh, ASU and Archeoinformatics I spent the afternoon with Keith and his crew, which includes library folks; this is one of those faculty projects. They had been moving towards using a relational database for their persistent store and using Fedora for something else that wasn't quite clear. It seemed as if they wanted to use Fedora but weren't sure why. I think that I helped them understand that an XML-based approach would be better for durability, then they could extract any number of SQL databases from that data for analysis.Keith Kintigh, ASU and Archeoinformatics
- John Howard, ASU now, moving to be head librarian at City U. Dublin 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.
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- 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 to the content owners. 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.
- Katherine Kott I think that we may have Katherine Kott's participation in the Scholars Workbench community. She would be perfect. I still need to find out if Tom Cramer will see that she has time for it; they have had serious layoffs at Stanford. I'm working on it.
- 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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