Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

1. Here's a great post from the Archivist of the United States (RSS/aotus_feed), where he uses the news that the Library of Congress is acquiring the digital archive of public tweets as a jumping off point for explaining the difference between the missions of the National Archives and the Library of Congress. And along the way, he showed an interesting historian's perspective on twitter:

( Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 )

2. If you are looking for fascinating new blogs, the C-SPAN video blog (RSS/cspan_video_feed) is a great entry point into their huge collection. (I just watched a baby turtle poop in a senator's hand!)

3. I really like this Book Spine Poetry that the Somers Library in New York put up on Flickr. A couple of my favorites, linked and transcribed here:

( Book Spine Poetry )

Yesterday, in the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives blog (tufts_dca), I talked about our newly-launched institutional repository, Tufts eScholarship. I'm very optimistic about the success of our IR, though there has been a lot of conversation in the IR world about what makes institutional repositories fail. The number one reason I'm optimistic about our IR: it's not what purists would call an institutional repository.

( I'd like to buy university digitization efforts a Coke and teach everyone how to work with each other: cut for length )

The decisions leading to this wonderful conjunction of circumstances all predate my presence here at the university by many years. I'm talking about this not to toot Tufts' horn, but to push this vital idea of collaboration. Even now, I see so many institutions in the repository space that have entirely orthogonal approaches within their own organizations. The people digitizing images aren't talking to the people digitizing texts aren't talking to the people dealing with digital records aren't talking to the people doing institutional repository. Sure, maybe you would never use the same software platform or workflow approaches for all of these efforts. But maybe you will. Maybe instead of getting six different perfect software packages, you will find something that is good enough for all of you, and uses only one license, a smaller number of technical support staff, and something which will continue to be supported by your university even if hard economic times make some of the digital collections look less important.

Heck, I'm looking at this entirely selfishly, and you should too. In tough economic times, digital archives might go by the wayside. Open access institutional repositories are still untested. But management of the university's digital records is never going to be unnecessary. Work with other people instead of merely alongside them, intertwine your jobs, and you will not just save your institution money and resources, but you will increase the number of ways in which you are vital. Job security FTW.

You know what I really love? ImageMagick.

I just started a process creating use JPEG images out of 4000 high-quality TIFFs. One line of bash, and now it will run for a while, and I can go do something else.

*loves*