IST Data Services Blog

Mike Ellis, frequent presenter at Museums and the Web, recently published a note on the MCN list describing a Mashed Museum day that was recently held in the UK.

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Dear MCN

I thought you might be interested to see a brief(ish) video I hacked
together following the MCG “Mashed Museum” day which happened on the
18th June, the day before the UK Museums on the Web Conference.

See http://blip.tv/file/1029060

Further coverage continues at www.mashedmuseum.org.uk

Cheers!

Mike

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They’ve also set up a Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/mashedmuseum. From here, there are several other links that might take you in some interesting directions! For instance, check out the hoard.it prototype at http://feeds.boxuk.com/museums/.

At Educause’s “Advanced CAMP” (Campus Architecture and Middleware Planning) this week the sharpest lesson I learned is how little is solved in the problem space addressed by this year’s CAMP meeting: “Registering, Discovering, and Using Distributed Services in Academia.” Bob Morgan from Univ. of Washington put this in context right up front: though the organizers of the conference like to call the group “Advanced CAMP” Bob thought a more fitting name would be “Advance CAMP” — a group of IT architects seeking solutions at the edge of what is known and/or possible in EDU-space. I presented on what we’ve been hearing at Project Bamboo workshops (my presentation will be coming to the conference wiki soon).

For me the most interesting topic was service discovery, and the take-away from Thursday’s break-out discussion on that topic is that it’s more natural for central-IT providers to think about mechanics of finding a URI for and method of engagement with a known-to-exist service in a defined domain than the broader discovery question, “I want to do X, is there a service out there that’ll do it for me so I don’t have to code it up myself?” (That last is closer to the question a scholar of the type engaged with Project Bamboo might ask, and so is the question in which I’m most immediately interested.) Despite the scattered focus there were interesting suggestions in this space. A few of them: visualizations of services mapped from RDF graphs describing service relationships to each other (Loretta Auvil of SEASR showed some examples); a “bring back gopher” suggestion (with tongue only gently implanted in cheek, from Ken Klingenstein of U. Colorado @ Boulder), with a scholarly-domain flavored partitioning to replace the geographic / institutional partitions that characterized gopher back in the day; the idea (from Mark Morgan of University of Virginia) that assertion of identity might provide an appropriate context for discovery in a bounded space (leading me to think that maybe that’s one way PB can begin to understand the “Facebook for Scholars” types of suggestions we’re hearing at our workshops). The question of how to provide incentive to digital resource providers (be they providers of source material or of applications that find, analyze, manipulate, organize, or annotate it) to attach useful metadata to their contributions to the digital commons remains a cultural question that is central to success of discovery across ‘the usual borders’ but can’t be solved wholly by technologists.

Other thoughts worth sharing:

• “Not Invented Here” (NIH) syndrome appeared to have left the building for attendees at Advanced CAMP: everyone who presented expressed strong interest in not reinventing wheels, in building off of common components and services.
• Users learn semantics more readily than syntax, e.g., as Mark Morgan observed based on his experience with the Genesis II grid-computing project, “double click” has easily- and broadly-understood implications in a world modeled as a file system.
• Tracking digital artifacts as they replicate and morph across the internet is a hard problem that universities — with interest in provenance and chains of credit — will have a great deal of incentive to solve, and it’s probably worth looking at Disney and WGBH’s DAM initiative to see how this problem is being addressed in other spaces (Robert Clark of Duke and Michael Pelikan of Penn State Univ. were principal contributors to these discussions).
• Cross-border licensing and privacy challenges are something to keep a very close eye on: with European laws on the books or in the works that may disallow certain PII (personally identifiable information) to be stored on U.S. servers due to lax privacy laws, everything from federated service-composition to cross-border participation on wikis may be affected in ways that require serious modification and mitigation to projects in which Berkeley participates (thanks to Ken Klingerman of U. of WA and Mary Beth Lavagnino of Indiana University for presenting on topics of privacy and policy).

On the “juicy news” front, we learned from Jens Haeusser of University of British Columbia that USC has joined the Kuali Student Systems effort at the founder level. And Nigel Watling of Microsoft provided some guarded pre-announcements about a plot brewing in Redmond to offer outsourced ESB (cf. biztalk.net) … your services (and the data they carry) linked together on a Microsoft-run bus … and you thought Google Apps was scary! Nigel was a nice fellow, but there was plenty of nervous laughter when he told us that “Microsoft is absolutely committed to open standards” and that the company now understands that if its products are not based on open standards they’re “not relevant.” In response to skepticism about the advisability of putting confidential information out in the cloud, Nigel was less than convincing — assertions like “it’s out in the cloud already … people are now more tolerant of personal information out in the cloud” weren’t the kind of responses likely to satisfy this audience.

I’ve recently returned from a great conference, Museums and the Web 2008, and wanted to share some highlights on DSBLOG. MW2008 was held in Montreal, April 9-12, and was attended by several hundred people from hundreds of institutions around the world. While the community is dominated by cultural heritage institutions, there is fairly good representation from science museums and archives. Sadly there were only a few natural history institutions present. The conference web site, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/, includes links to the papers presented through the list of speakers. The organizers encouraged online activity, and there was a fairly good amount of blogging and activity on Twitter and flickr. http://conference.archimuse.com/ is the ongoing home for this activity.

Thematically, there was much discussion about a set of familiar issues: how to engage the community, issues of authority and attribution, and the role and voice of museums and related institutions. Web 2.0 technologies figured prominently with several interesting experiments presented. Geospatial services and technologies also received a fair amount of attention. And a fair number of people are starting to work on different ways to aggregate large amounts of information and provide useful ways to search for, browse through, and understand or interpret content. One of the highlights here was a presentation by Michael Black (Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology) and Patrick Schmitz (IST-Data Services) on Delphi, the faceted browser and semantic corpus being developed for PAHMA. The combination of natural language processing, data mining, and semantic technologies is emerging as an important trend in the museum space.

Finally, I attended MW2008 in order to represent the OpenCollection project. We had a booth in the exhibits hall, right next to some of the larger vendors in the collections management systems market. The interest from this community and the response to our vision and goals was remarkable. In presentations as well as hallway conversations, the subject of open source solutions came up frequently. What makes an open source solution successful? What are the risks? What will make institution X comfortable enough to try open source solution Y? These discussions continued into the night.

All in all, Museums and the Web 2008 was an excellent conference. The level of discussion and engagement that included museum professionals and technical experts, public and private institutions and for-profit companies was very refreshing.

The Office of the CIO and Information Services and Technology are working with the UC Berkeley community to develop a campus strategy on how to use technology to best support collaborative work on campus, now and in the future.

You have an opportunity to shape this strategy and hence the future of collaborative technology used on campus. Today, we are pleased to release for your review the first draft of three sections of the upcoming Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy document.

We are intentionally releasing these first three sections of this strategy document at an early stage to elicit comments, feedback, and guidance from the campus community. We believe only through that method can we accurately represent the many collaborative practices and perspectives on the Berkeley campus. We would greatly appreciate any guidance, perspectives, corrections, or suggestions. We’re particularly looking for more guidance around the needs for collaborative technologies in research and teaching.

As of today, the final recommendations to be included in this strategy have not yet been written. We have made the decision to release these initial findings before the recommendations, in order to ensure that the recommendations reflect your feedback, and that of many others on campus, on this early stage draft of the document.

For more information

For more detailed information about this project, please see section II of the strategy document, “Introduction & Goals of the Strategy.”

If you have any questions, please contact Ian Crew, icrew@berkeley.edu.

Read the strategy

Section II-Introduction & Goals of the Strategy

Section III-Definition of Collaborative Tools for the purposes of this strategy

Section IV-Findings

Reviewer’s guide

We would greatly appreciate any response you might wish to offer. As you comment, you may wish to include:

• Your reactions to the data we’ve gathered
• Issues or data we’ve missed or omitted
• Your suggestions of additional issues the campus should consider
• An overview of the discussions or decisions taking place in your organization in these areas
• Your recommendations for strategic directions and next steps for the campus

We do realize that there is a great deal of information here. An outline of the first three sections of the complete strategy document, released today for your review and comment, appears below. If your time is limited and you can only focus on a single section of these findings, please focus on section IV.C, starting on page 50 of that section.

2. Introduction & Goals of the Strategy (PDF, 5 pages)
   1. Key Questions
   2. Background for this work
   3. Methodologies
3. Definition of Collaborative Tools for the purposes of this strategy (PDF, 4 pages)
   1. What is “collaboration”?
   2. Why is collaboration important?
   3. What are “collaborative tools”?
   4. What types of collaborative tools are available?
4. Findings (PDF, 74 pages. If you can only focus on a single section of these findings, please focus on section IV.C, starting on page 50.)
   1. What are the primary contexts of collaboration on the campus, and how do people use tools to facilitate them?
   2. What collaborative tools are campus IT providers currently providing or using?
   3. What are key campus needs?
   4. What are the services and service models being offered by external providers?
   5. What are the costs of campus services and alternative services?
   6. What are other peer institutions doing? Why?
   7. What are other policy, legal, etc. issues we need to be aware of?

After reviewing these sections, you may comment directly below, in the comments section of this blog post.  We may include quotes from any comment posted below in the report. If you’d like to be acknowledged for any quotes from your comments, please include your name, title, and organization in your comments. If you wish to submit a comment that will not be shared beyond the project team, send it to Ian Crew at icrew@berkeley.edu.

The deadline for comments on this draft of the strategy document is Friday, April 11, 2008. The complete strategy document, including recommendations, will be released for another round of comments in late April.

The first draft of the UC Berkeley Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy will be posted here shortly.  Stay tuned. See http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Spring2008/1189.html for more details.