Education Delivery for the Information Disciplines

The National Library of Australia has issued a general invitation to a free talk in Canberra on "New Models of Education Provision and Delivery for the Information Disciplines" by Professor David Fenske, Drexel University, 28 July 2008.

I have appended the details of the forum. Normally I would provide a link to the web site for the initiative, but in this case I could not find one. Given that this is supposed to be an open "conversation" among information professionals hosted by UNSW, it is odd that I could not find details of it at the UNSW web site, or anywhere else.

New Models of Education Provision and Delivery for the Information Disciplines

Monday, 28 July 2008 at 11.00am

National Library of Australia Theatre

Professor David Fenske is the Isaac L. Auerbach Professor and Dean, The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, Philadelphia

Professor Fenske is visiting Australia to provide the keynote address at the I-Forum 3, a collaborative or open “conversation” among information professionals, educators and practitioners hosted by the University of New South Wales.

The I-Forums have been established to address a number of issues such as:

• Productivity and innovation in the Information Sector is hampered by less than optimal educational offerings in many locations.
• Divided efforts in many institutions with insufficient critical mass of researchers and educators means that Australia is not getting the best innovative minds to
• converge on problems that could affect Australia’s economic capability;
• Volatility in student enrolments and student retention patterns;
• Current administrative arrangements inhibit cross-disciplinary fertilization of ideas across all information fields;
• Rapidly changing industry requirements.

Professor Fenske will describe the route taken in some universities in the United States to resolve some of the problems identified above. In describing the experience of establishing the iSchool strategy, he will challenge us to to look at Australian education for information from the outside, unfettered by the confines of our everyday work or institutional affiliations.

You do not need to register for this event.

Please feel free to pass this notice on to other colleagues/divisions/organisations you think might be interested.

Dale Forrest | Assistant to Jan Fullerton, Director-General | National Library of Australia | Canberra ACT 2600

Information access in technical and scientific literature

The National Library of Australia runs an excellent series of free Digital Culture talks. The next is "Information access in technical and scientific literature: search and you may possibly find", 12.30, Friday 27 June 2008 at the National Library of Australia Theatre, Canberra:

The phenomenal success of web search engines such as Google is built on massive data redundancy, guiding users from simplistic queries to relevant information sources. For domains such as technical and scientific literature, however, this redundancy is severely limited, due to editorial controls on originality of content. Here there is a clear need to go beyond simple keyword search in order to service what are often complex information needs. In this talk I will present a frank and accessible account of text mining techniques developed to enhance information access, and abstract away from simple word sequences to syntactically and semantically richer representations of the information encoded in text.

Timothy Baldwin is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne. His research - funded by the ARC, NICTA, NTT, Google and others - encompasses computational and theoretical linguistics, text mining, text categorisation and information retrieval. He has given invited talks at various conferences, summer schools and universities worldwide, and is the author of over 100 journal and conference publications. He is currently on the editorial board of Computational Linguistics, a series editor for CSLI Publications, and a member of the Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative (DELPH-IN).


Timothy Baldwin will be introduced by Kent Fitch,
Programmer, IT Division, National Library of Australia
Time: 12.30 to 13.30
Date: Friday 27 June 2008
Venue: National Library of Australia Theatre
This is a free event

Bobby Graham
Web Content Manager
Web Publishing Branch, IT Division
National Library of Australia
www.nla.gov.au

Innovative Ideas Forum on Mobile Internet and Archives

The third annual Innovative Ideas Forum started at the National Library of Australia in Canberra this morning. This is a one day event for librarians and other information professionals. There is almost a full house in the NLA theatre. It is very pleasant to be able to just sit here and let someone else do the organizing, after last week's Open 2020 Summit.

The proceedings are being recorded and will be podcast by the NLA, along with copies of the speaker's slides next week.

The ideas forum is a curious blend of the old and the new. Demetrius of Phaleron, librarian at the ancient Great Library at Alexandria, would have felt at home at the NLA; it looks like a temple for books. If you look closely, some of what was on paper, such as catalogs and signs, have been replaced with electronic screens. But the operation and feeling remains the same. No doubt Demetrius would have attended forums on "papyrus 2.0". ;-)

The event was opened by Professor Gerard Goggin on Internet and Mobile Phone. He described broadband as a "totem" for the new government and asked what it might be used for and the role of wireless. Roger Clarke got a mention in recording the history of the Internet. Gerrard pointed out that scientists figured prominently, but activists should be mentioned. My recollection from around the early 1990s is that we deliberately clothed any social activism of the Internet in scientific language to make it politically palatable. Having, for example, someone who had been jailed for their political activism did not seem a good way to get the government onside.

Professor Goggin mentioned several Internet historians and activists. But he did not mention Carl Malamud's "Exploring the Internet : A Technical Travelogue" (1992), which was about trip around the world visiting Internet pioneers, including those in Australia. This book has a large effect on me. Much of what is advocated has happened. Some of open access to documents may be about to happen.

Professor Goggin asks for histories of how and when the Internet developed in different parts of the world. However, he proposes to approach this from that of the key figures involved. The problem with this is that the people saying things publicly in traditional forums were not necessarily the people actually key to the process. Many of the key strategists were not public figures, relying on others to put the message out. Also the technology was used, so that the work was done by loose online groups which did not necessarily have leaders or formal structure. Those involved in this process may not necessarily know who did what.

This distributed approach still applies to Internet development. As an example, a few weeks ago I was part of a process to tell the government that it was not a good idea to give each school child a laptop. Within 24 hours, a cabinet minister said this to the media. It is not clear who said what to who and for this form of political communication to work, the lines of communication need to remain unclear.

It was not clear in the 1990s that "the Internet" would be a success and their were many alternatives which were proposed, failed and forgotten. It is very much the case with the Internet and the web that the victors have written the history. The other forgotten histories are buried in electronic archives, yet to be dug up by Internet archaeologists.

Professor Goggin pointed out that exciting new developments in the use of mobile phones in developing nations do not get considered. He also said that exactly what would be done with broadband on mobiles in Australia was not yet clear.

The commons approach then got a mention (of which Creative Commons is an example). He argued that the commons approach to mobiles has not been explored. This is relevant to broadband development in Australia, as the Australian Government recently cancelled the Opel contract to build a wireless broadband network in regional Australia. The government has no viable strategy to replace that network. A commons approach may help solve a looming political problem for the government. The opposition could get political traction around the perception that regional Australia is missing out on broadband access.

At question time I asked if historians needed to adopt analytical techniques to discover the history of the Internet. I suggested reading what people wrote in old fashioned paper books is not the way to do it. Also reading Wired magazine is not the way to do it (described by my technical colleagues as "The Dolly magazine of the computer industry"). The Internet Archive and others have kept records which can be analyzed to see who said what first. Professor Goggin replied that both approaches were needed. He was working on an analytical analysis of how Australian youth use mobiles, but it was also important to look at what historians say about topic.

Next there was Kris Carpenter Negulescu from the Internet Archive. She started off pointing out that the archive has more than just copies of old web pages, with books, music and video. Alos the use of the archive for research was emphasized, with "content as infrastructure" and "examination of primary data". She mentioned challenge with archives linking together with APIs. One aspect of interest was the risk of patent which risk the use of common approaches, such as a US company patenting the us of a thumbnail of a web page next to a reference to it. As an expert witness I have used the Internet Archive to check the prior art for such patents.

One interesting development was the use of Zotero in place of End Notes to keep research references. Mellon is funding an extension to this to allow a social network of researchers to exchange their references in a closed group or publicly.

Also it is interesting that data can in the archives can have analysis. An example Kris gave was of the use of the term "Cube Farm" to refer to an open plan office with low partitions. In passing she mentioned that Herman Miller was horrified that his idea of a more comfortable more flexible office layout turned into the confined cube farm.

Kris pointed out that the trend in research funding in the USA was to require the researchers to plan for sustaining the results of their work beyond the end of the funding. In Australia there has been some limited discussion of doing this, with researchers having to put their data in an institutional repository and pay for its upkeep.

Secure Web Collaboration Across Government and Industry

The March Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting, today discussed government use of web based collaboration, including for sensitive matters at Cabinet level.

Brian Stonebridge, Department Finance and Deregulation
Topic 1: GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies

Brian Stonebridge talked about how to invest in ICT facilities which did not need to be kept adding to respond to government policy. The particular example was GovDex. A five nation collaboration workspace was demonstrated. This provides support for meetings between governments. Another example was support for the Australian Government ICT Standrads Group. One hot topic this is being used for is to establish the Australian Government position on OOXML (a position has been decided, but not released). Another demonstration was for communicating to new graduate staff. GovDex is secured to IN-CONFIDENCE level of security (PROTECTED cabinet level security and video is planned for GovDex 2).

My first thought was that the tools demonstrated would appear primitive to a group of teenagers organizing their social lives: Surely the Australian Government has something more advanced? Some of the discussion seemed very quaint and last century, for example pointing out that not all graduates may be working in Canberra and the Internet could be used to contact them. In the 21st Century the assumption that staff would be in a particular city, seems an odd one. I would have thought that a 21st century organization would make no assumptions as to where in the world there staff were working from. But the use of such tools need to be learned and also the government's security and public policy issues are difficult ones which most users do not face.

AGIMO is taking a gradual approach of fitting the tools into the usual bureaucratic processes. Ultimately this approach will not work: the processes will need to be changed to improve productivity. The main value of GovDex and similar tools will ultimately come from facilitating the change in these processes.

While I have been a registered GovDex user for some time (they let government consultants in), this talk was still very useful for me. I had the impression that GovDex was just for computer projects. Brian pointed out it can be used for any government project which needs secure collaboration. An example of this is that in the morning I was asked how a wiki could be provided to support the Australian Government's Review of the National Innovation System. My immediate reaction was to say "you can't do that, bureaucrats are not allowed to use wikis" (altought I teach them how to in an ANU course). But GovDex should be ideal for this providing the needed collaboration, but within a structure which supports the needs of government policy development.

Michele Huston, National Library of Australia
Topic 2: Wikis at work

Michele Huston talked about how wikis work in practice, with people initially experimenting and then settling down to organize their information. She discussed problems with the technology, including the editor. She suggested the simple editor has advantages in encouraging people to use simple designs (and at least having to work with wiki markup).

She pointed out a wiki is not intended as an archive, publishing work flow, secure documents or for blogging. These should rightly be done with other tools, although they can be interfaced.

National Folk Festival

Greetings from the National Folk Festival in Canberra. The National Library of Australia is providing an internet cafe and WiFi alongside the union concert (with Senator Lundy comparing). Apart from the music there are displays with an ecological theme. One was from ANZSES with solar energy displays.

One of the more unusual acts, is the House Howlers, an a cappella singing group made up of journalists from the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, including Karen Middleton. They sing satirical songs about politicians.

Innovative Ideas Forum, Canberra, 10 April 2008

The National Library of Australia is holding another of their excellent free Innovative Ideas Forums, 10 April 2008 :

Innovative Ideas Forum
Program

Morning - chair Monica Berko

9.00am Welcome

9.10am Professor Gerard Goggin (Professor of Digital Communication, University of New South Wales)

Topic: The Internet and the Mobile Phone: Histories, Possibilities, Challenges

10.00am Kris Carpenter Negulescu ( Internet Archive )
Topic: Digital Services and Online Research: The Future of Who does What and For Whom
Today institutions around the globe struggle with the daunting task of archiving and maintaining for future generations a record of the Web –the social, economic, cultural and scientific heritage of nations, states/provinces, academic disciplines, and other communities of interests—and with the large-scale digitization of traditional materials. How can/should current policies, partnerships and best practices, allocation of funds and/or research investments shape the future of digital services, i.e. what is provided, who is a provider, and for which audiences? This talk attempts to explore the current trends and considerations that could hold the most influence over this future.

10.50-11.20 Morning tea

11.20am Richard Walis (TALIS)
Topic: Beyond Web 2.0 -The Continuing Journey
Is Web 2.0/Library 2.0 just about rounded corners on your web site, links to Amazon, sharing tags with your fellow patrons, and the Library Director’s blog? These developments have led to a welcome opening up of libraries, their systems, and the minds of the librarians that run them.
Have we reached a destination on a road of innovation or are these just symptoms of the journey? The benefits of what we are seeing are in general localised to individual libraries or services. It is only with the open sharing of the data produced by Web 2.0 features such as tagging, and building on the semantic relationships between library data, social networking add-ons, and other rich data sources across institutions, that the real benefits of Web 2.0 be realised - by then we will be utilizing Semantic Web technologies and probably be calling it Web 3.0.

LUNCH 12.10pm - 1.25pm

Afternoon - chair Margy Burn

1.25pm - 1.35pm Introduction to rapid prototyping for innovation projects at the NLA - Warwick Cathro

1.35pm - 2.20pm Steve McPhillips and Mark Triggs (National Library) - VuFind.
Alison Dellit (National Library) - NLA's single business prototype.
Library systems operate in a significantly different environment than they did a decade ago. New technologies, new ways of thinking about information discovery and greater competition in the information space mean users have rapidly changing expectations of search services. This creates an uncertain environment for system development. In this presentation, we will discuss some of the National Library's experiences with using prototyping and rapid development techniques to build resource discovery systems that are more responsive to users' needs. We will look at the National Library's new catalogue prototype, which uses VuFind; and the "single business prototype”.
Douglas Elford (National Library) - What is the MediaPedia?

2.20pm - 3.00pm Stewart Wallace (Dictionary of Sydney)
Topic: Modelling and deploying urban history - Terms, Entities, Factoids, Graphs.
The Dictionary of Sydney is building a digital repository of text and multimedia related to Sydney's history. The repository is designed to facilitate a variety of deployments including web, mobile, RSS etc. In seeking the best method for connecting all these resources to Sydney's urban history, the Dictionary is developing an accompanying semantic model of Terms, Entities and 'Factoids' to create an extensible web of digital connections

3.00-3.30pm Afternoon tea

3.30pm - 4.00pm Julien Masanès (Director of the European Archive Foundation )
Topic: Next Generation web archiving methods
Julien will talk about the Living Web Archives (LiWA) project, a three-year project funded by the European Union. This project will carry Web archiving beyond the current approach, characterized by static snapshots, to one that fully accounts for the dynamics and interrelations of Web content. The result of LiWA's work will be a set of next generation Web archiving methods and tools making possible the creation and long-term usability of high-quality Web archives. Aspects of the project's research will focus on providing for the capture of the hidden Web, the filtering out of unwanted content through spam and trap detection, and addressing the temporal incoherence inherent in current Web capture methods and tools. The research will also address the rapid semantic and technological evolution of the Web in order to promote the long-term viability of Web archives.

4.00 - 430pm Gordon Mohr ( Chief Technologist for the Internet Archive's Web Archive )
Topic:Challenges on the horizon
The pace of innovation on the web demands constant attention from those who seek to record the discourse of the early 21st century. Gordon will speculate about these trends and how the Internet Archive is adapting its own techniques and constantly innovating to create tools to keep pace with these changes.

Web collaboration for government

The March Web Standards Group meeting in Canberra features talks on the use of web technology for online collaboration in government agencies. Recommended:

March Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting

RSVP for this event below. 28 people have registered

Date: Thursday 27 March, 2008

Event Details

Time: 2.30 pm - 4.50 pm
Where: NLA Theatre, lower ground floor, National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Parkes, ACT 2600
Cost: Free

First speaker: Brian Stonebridge, Department Finance and Deregulation
Topic 1: GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies

Brian Stonebridge is Director of the Collaborative Services Team in the Department of Finance and Deregulation. He has worked for a number of years to develop collaborative tools aimed at promoting a more harmonised approach to the delivery of government services. Brian is also active in the standards space and participates in a range of international standards fora. He represents Australia at the United Nations Committee for the Facilitation of Commerce and Trade.

Brian will talk about the opportunities for government agencies to use GovDex. GovDex is a resource developed to facilitate business process collaboration across policy portfolios and administrative jurisdictions. GovDex promotes effective and efficient information sharing, providing governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that government agencies can use to assemble and deploy information services on their different technology platforms.

Second speaker: Michele Huston, National Library of Australia
Topic 2: Wikis at work

Michele Huston is the Director of Web Publishing at the National Library of Australia. Her group undertakes web design for the main web site, authoring support for staff and develops the interfaces for complex web-based systems for the management and delivery of the Library's collections. Michele has been working with the Internet for 15 years and is particularly interested in exploring ways that the Library can benefit from popular Internet applications. In addition to the wiki project that is the topic of this presentation, she has championed a collaboration that allows Flickr users to add photos to Picture Australia and a new catalogue that includes book reviews from Amazon and allows Library card holders to leave comments.

Michele will talk about her experience implementing a wiki at the National Library of Australia. This talk may be of interest to you if you are considering incorporating a wiki at your work place to support various forms of collaborative activity. This is not a talk about the process of implementing a wiki, but is a case study on using a wiki to support the Library's extensive and varied collaboration activities. This wiki exercise did not start with a value proposition explained in business terms nor the assumption that users knew precisely what they wanted out of these tools. The wiki experience was a learning experience both for IT support and for the users. Michele is lucky enough to work at an organisation that isn't afraid of making a few (educational) mistakes!

Web collaboration for government

The March Web Standards Group meeting in Canberra features talks on the use of web technology for online collaboration in government agencies.The first talk features GovDex, a tool specifically developed for Australian Government ICT projects, and the second: the use of wikis in organizations. Recommended:

March Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting

RSVP for this event below. 28 people have registered

Date: Thursday 27 March, 2008

Event Details

Time: 2.30 pm - 4.50 pm
Where: NLA Theatre, lower ground floor, National Library of Australia, Parkes Place, Parkes, ACT 2600
Cost: Free

First speaker: Brian Stonebridge, Department Finance and Deregulation
Topic 1: GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies

Brian Stonebridge is Director of the Collaborative Services Team in the Department of Finance and Deregulation. He has worked for a number of years to develop collaborative tools aimed at promoting a more harmonised approach to the delivery of government services. Brian is also active in the standards space and participates in a range of international standards fora. He represents Australia at the United Nations Committee for the Facilitation of Commerce and Trade.

Brian will talk about the opportunities for government agencies to use GovDex. GovDex is a resource developed to facilitate business process collaboration across policy portfolios and administrative jurisdictions. GovDex promotes effective and efficient information sharing, providing governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that government agencies can use to assemble and deploy information services on their different technology platforms.

Second speaker: Michele Huston, National Library of Australia
Topic 2: Wikis at work

Michele Huston is the Director of Web Publishing at the National Library of Australia. Her group undertakes web design for the main web site, authoring support for staff and develops the interfaces for complex web-based systems for the management and delivery of the Library's collections. Michele has been working with the Internet for 15 years and is particularly interested in exploring ways that the Library can benefit from popular Internet applications. In addition to the wiki project that is the topic of this presentation, she has championed a collaboration that allows Flickr users to add photos to Picture Australia and a new catalogue that includes book reviews from Amazon and allows Library card holders to leave comments.

Michele will talk about her experience implementing a wiki at the National Library of Australia. This talk may be of interest to you if you are considering incorporating a wiki at your work place to support various forms of collaborative activity. This is not a talk about the process of implementing a wiki, but is a case study on using a wiki to support the Library's extensive and varied collaboration activities. This wiki exercise did not start with a value proposition explained in business terms nor the assumption that users knew precisely what they wanted out of these tools. The wiki experience was a learning experience both for IT support and for the users. Michele is lucky enough to work at an organisation that isn't afraid of making a few (educational) mistakes!

Copyright and the Internet Archive, Canberra, 3 April 2008

Matthew Rimmer will be giving a free talk in Canberra, 3 April 2008, in the National Library's Digital Culture talk series on copyright law and the Internet Archive . Recommended:

Back to the future: copyright law, Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine

Dr Matthew Rimmer

Internet Archive provides free 'universal access to human knowledge' to researchers, historians, scholars and the general public. Their delightfully named Wayback Machine provides access to websites that have been significantly altered or may no longer exist. Notwithstanding this altruistic endeavour, Internet Archive has been embroiled in a number of policy debates over copyright law over the extension of copyright term, 'orphan' works, take-down notices, digital locks and large-scale digitisation projects. The Internet Archive has also been involved in litigation as a plaintiff, a defendant, and an amicus curiae (a friend of the court). In the light of such policy debate and litigation, there is a need to reform digital copyright laws so that digital libraries such as Internet Archive can flourish - without fear of disruption from copyright owners.

Dr Matthew Rimmer is a senior lecturer and the director of Higher Degree Research at the ANU College of Law, and an associate director of the Australian Centre for Intellectual Property in Agriculture (ACIPA). He holds a BA (Hons) and a University Medal in literature, and a LLB (Hons) from the Australian National University, and a PhD in law from the University of New South Wales. Rimmer is a member of the Copyright and Intellectual Property Advisory Group of the Australian Library and Information Association, and a director of the Australian Digital Alliance.

Dr Rimmer will be introduced by Laura Simes, Copyright Advisor, National Library of Australia

Date: Thursday 3 April 2008
Time: 12.30 to 13.30
Venue: Library Theatre
This talk is free and open to everyone.

Bobby Graham
Web Content Manager
Web Publishing Branch, IT Division
National Library of Australia
Tel: +61 2 6262 1542
www.nla.gov.au

Open Journal, Conference and Book Publishing

Kevin Stranack from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), talked at the National Library of Australia today on open publishing. PKP are best known for their free open source Open Journal System (OJS) publishing software. But Kevin pointed out that they have produced other free software and do research on help academics communicate their work.

OJS is used around the world by universities, scientific societies and some commercial companies for producing academic journals (I used to set up the Australian Computer Society digital library). PKP have subsequently produced Open Conference Systems (OPCS) for doing the same thing for conferences and the Open Archives Harvester to collect together the indexes from such systems.

Most recently PKP have released an early beta of Lemon8-XML for converting Word Processing documents into neat XML formatted documents for publishing. This is more ambitious than systems such as the ANU Digital Scholars Workbench and USQ's Integrated Content Environment. Those systems will convert a word processing document which has been prepared using a supplied template which provides a preset structure for the document. PKP are aiming to be able to be able to work out the structure from the content of the document with no preset template. This would be very useful, if it could be done, but may prove impossible.

PKP are also planning to produce a system similar to OJS, but for the production of books. I asked Kevin about incorporating social networking for academic authors and he said there may be a small element of this in the book system. This would provide an author's workbench where the person preparing the book could keep their notes and involve collaborators.

Kevin showed some examples of OJS and OCS based publications, including some Australian ones. One which stood out is the The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning . Apart from the topic being of interest, the publishers practice what they advocate by providing the journal in audio format and a more accessible HTML, as well as the usual PDF. The audio appears to have been produced using text to speech software, but is of a much higher quality than the usual PC generated speech.

One area where it might be worth PKP applying their skills is to e-learning materials. There are some attempts to provide online directories of such materials, for example the Australian Government funded Learning Object Repository Network. However, these are isolated in their own separate repositories and mired in intellectual property issues. Using the open publishing approach to learning objects could make the much more widely used and turn e-learning from a hand crafting cottage industry into a real online innovation.

Another area for future research is to bring together the different types of publishing: journal papers, conferences, books and e-learning into one coherent whole. Ideally, the one tool should be able to be used to publish the same content, to suit these different formats.

PKP stand out by providing usable software backed by research and sustaining it over a long period. If you are thinking about doing academic publishing, or even commercial publishing, online then you should look at PKP's free tools.

How many webmasters does it take to change a light bulb or fix a tap handle?

The January meeting of the Web Standards Group in Canberra today featured discussion of light bulbs and the design of the tap handles in the National Library of Australia toilets.
Geoff Dibley talked about the design of search facilities for the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF). He was previously at Geoscience Australia and brought an insightfully analytical approach to the issue.

Geoff started by relating the problems of finding a specific sort of light bulb on a home shopping web site. It turned out that products for the sight had been categorized according to where they were located in a physical supermarket, which did not help the online shopper.

A little humor was injected by one audience member commenting they were from Customs, where "internal search" had a very different meaning from the web use of the term.

Paul Hagon, talked about the redesign and search analysis of Picture Australia's site. He started with a photo of the instructions above the tap handle in the toilets at the library. This is the same tap handle I photographed, commented to NLA about and used in my web design lectures at ANU, as an example of what not to do. The point of this, as Paul pointed out, the large set of instructions indicate that the interface needs to be made simpler: be it a tap handle or web search facility.

Paul had useful advice, backed up by statistics. Most users only enter one, two or three keywords for a search, they do not use advanced searches. The experts who ask for complex search facilities only make up a tiny fraction of users, make them a specialist search page, if you must. About a third of referrals come from public search engines, so make sure they can easily index your content. Items in the news suddenly become popular and you need to be able to direct readers to these. The topics may come from the international media, not just local.

One surprise was that one quarter of queries on the DAFF web site were about jobs. This is something agencies usually hide away in a sub menu, but perhaps need to make more prominent. It may also suggest that the Australian Government should take a more coordinated approach to providing job information.

ps: I asked Paul if his tap handle photo was indexed on Picture Australia. He said not yet, but may be in a few days as it is on Flicker and that is now included. But there are some tap handles already in the database.

Public Knowledge Project, 15 February 2008, Canberra

Recommended talk at the National Library of Australia, 15 February 2008, 12.30 pm in Canberra. Kevin Stranack is from the Public Knowledge Project at the Simon Fraser University, which produced the free Open Journal System publishing software which I used to set up the Australian Computer Society digital library:

It gives me pleasure to invite you to the next Digital Culture talk:
The Public Knowledge Project: Breaking Down the Barriers to Open Access
Kevin Stranack


Are you concerned about the spiraling costs of academic journals? Do you worry that access to critical research information is under threat? This presentation will describe the work of the Public Knowledge Project, and discuss some of the steps librarians and others in Canada, Australia, and other countries around the world are taking to confront the crisis in scholarly communication, and ensure that readers and authors remain connected.

A collaboration between the University of British Columbia, Stanford University, and Simon Fraser University's Library and Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, the Public Knowledge Project has grown from a small research project into a global, community-based, open access publishing alternative, providing free, open source software for hundreds of researchers, editors, software developers, and librarians.

Kevin will be introduced by Chris Foster, Director Monographs Branch, National Library of Australia

The speakerKevin Stranack is a librarian with the Public Knowledge Project at the Simon Fraser University Library. He works with editors, publishers, software developers, and librarians in their use of open source software for open access publishing, and is the author of "OJS in an Hour", "OCS in an Hour", "Getting Found, Staying Found", and other documents published by the Project. Kevin is a frequent presenter at library and information technology conferences, including the Canadian Library Association, the British Columbia Library Association, the Charleston Conference, Access, BCNet, NetSpeed, and others.

Date: Friday 15 February 2008
Time: 12.30 to 13.30
Venue: Library Theatre
This talk is free and open to everyone. ...

Bobby Graham
Web Content Manager
Web Publishing Branch, IT Division
National Library of Australia
www.nla.gov.au

Online journalism with Crikey.com founder

Crikey.com founder, Stephen Mayne, gave a talk on Online journalism and its impact on traditional media, 29 August 2007 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. He discussed how online journalism is changing traditional media and politics and if user-generated Web 2.0 content is journalism. An audio recording is available from the NLA web site (30 Mbytes).

Michele Huston, Director Web Publishing at NLA introduced the talk pointing out that early editions of Crikey.com are preserved in the NLA's Pandora archive.

Stephen talked about journalism as a noble profession on one hand and in the power of political office on the other. After being a journalist for a time Stephen said his job as a political spin doctor was to intimidate the journalists and distort the news. In response to this he set up crikey.com to get out as much information as possible. The Internet provides a deluge of information, raw, good and bad.

Stephen said that Crikey.com previously had Google AdSense advertisements which paid $1,000 a month and now sells its own web ads receiving $100,000 a month. Crikey.com advertises its issues on Google AdWords, spending $2,000 a month (their ads regularly appear on my web pages). Crikey now has 24 regular contributors, about 10 of whom are professionals journalists, with about half the content written by academic commentators and the like.

Stephen said Crikey provides a service in "join the dots" journalism, by pointing the reader to disparate sources to provide context and add value. Even so he argues that mainstream media in Australia is healthy and has a future. Radio is healthy. Free to Air TV is suffering and the quality of TV journalism is suffering. Newspapers are loosing advertising revenue to the web. Fairfax is diversifying to electronic and online media, with journalists filing online and then in print. The typical story is twice as long on the web version as the print edition of The Age. Online newpapers have more readers, but less revenue.

Stephen argues that the advertising model of quality investigative journalism is in decline and that in Australia the ABC's public funded model works well.

Stephen argues that Web 2.0 user generated content is not new. Letters to the editor and talkback radio are old forms of user generated journalism. Unfiltered anonymous online forums quickly generate into a mess. Bloggers don't break many major public stories. Due to compulsory voting, independent bloggers are unlikely to influence elections. The bloggers need a partnership with the conventional media to reach a mass market. Bloggs can also continue a public debate, in the place of declining public forums.

Stephen is skeptical of Google deciding what is good and what is not. He claimed that Crikey.com now pay for a higher ranking on Google. This is something Google are likely to deny, but I do wonder if my own web site's high Google ranking is due to my using so many Google services. He also said that many people do not understand that "sponsored links" are advertisements.

ABC came in for praise for their podcasts. Wikipedia came in for some criticism for the edit it yourself approach. Stephen said he was half contemplating running against the Treasurer at the next election.

I asked Stephen if the Internet had changed the political process, in the way that it is changing the way the administration of government is done (as illustrated by AGIMO's work wil web standards). He replied that the web was being used extensively for fundrasing in the USA and for recruiting people for campaigns. However, this answer missed the point of my question, which was about doing politics differently. What I had in mind was that the web could be used for formulating political positions, rather than just to help raise money to elect someone to go and sit in a room and talk about political positions.

Online journalism with Crikey.com, Canberra

Recommended:

National Library of Australia Digital Culture talk

The internet revolution has been the greatest structural shock to hit the mainstream media since the introduction of television. Crikey.com founder Stephen Mayne will assess how online journalism is fundamentally changing traditional media and whether any of the so-called 'user-generated content' of Web 2.0 should even be called journalism. Whilst some media companies are now embracing the internet as an opportunity and dominating the space, many are feeling seriously threatened. And with such an extraordinary fragmentation and proliferation of information in cyberspace, what is the role of libraries in recording journalism's traditional 'first draft of history approach' to the news as it unfolds?

Date: 29 August 2007
Time: 12.30 to 13.30
Venue: National Library of Australia Theatre
Entry: Free

The speaker, Stephen Mayne, will be introduced by Michele Huston, Director Web Publishing, National Library of Australia.

Bobby Graham
Web Content Manager
Web Publishing Branch, IT Division
National Library of Australia
Tel: +61 2 6262 1542

ABC Second Life island not attacked

According to Abigail Thomas, Head of Strategic Innovation & Development, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC island in Second Life was not damaged due to a cyber attack, as previously reported. There was a server error which caused problems with the site.

Abigail mentioned this at the start of her talk on "Technology and Media in 2020" at the National Library of Australia today.

One of the points she made that many of the new hot web applications sound very "lame" and uninteresting when described. You need to try the application and its social aspects to understand the impact. An example is Twitter.

Abigail pointed out that many of the examples of "new" web applications are not new at all. They existed on the Internet, but were only used by a few geeks before they had a slick web interface.

Some other interesting points were:

* Artificial intelligence will be used on-line.
* User generated content in real time and geo tagging,
* Your on-line activities will be recorded in your "life log",
* Each person will have multiple identities in different on-line worlds to preserve their privacy.

The questions were:

* How do we make money out of this?: How are the content creators compensated for their work, if all the content free and DIY? Abigail's answer was to work out how to integrate professional and user generated content. But it sounded like she was just going to let us rearrange the content from the ABC a little.

* How are professional journalists coping with integration of TV, radio and print: ABC staff now think about what they want to produce first, and the format (TV, radio, web).

* Tell us about ABC's second life island: Was an experiment. Started with an Four Corners program on TV and in second life, with discussion afterwards. Volunteers oversee DIY construction on part of the island.

But there will be some limitations to the future. One image of a phone shown on screen had on the bottom: "Available color: Jet black". While technology may expand our horizons, fashion will still dictate that black is the new black.

Capturing expert knowledge in Arnhem Land

Recommended free talk at National Library of Australia, in Canberra, 15 June 2007:

Please join us for the next in our Digital Culture series of talks:

Bidwern: capturing expert knowledge

Most scientific research is based on examining objects from a specific perspective. The danger in this approach is that some information, which might be considered non-relevant to the specific discipline, can be omitted. Researchers are good at capturing data and metadata in their field, but they might unwittingly neglect other usable data.

Bidwern is a tool that discovers and captures knowledge by using experts' field knowledge. It provides a way of bringing together research data from various sources and integrating them under one discovery system via implicit or explicit relationships.

Users can tag objects with appropriate metadata, for example Indigenous knowledge (ecoterms), language, mythology or geographic location, to trace and discover relationships. Bidwern uses standard metadata capture and access tools that make archiving the information easy.

Time: 12.30 to 13.30
Date: Friday, 15 June 2007
Venue: Library Theatre
Entry: Free
Speakers: Kim Mackenzie and Leo Monus
Introduced by Colin Webb, Director Web Archiving & Digital Preservation Branch,
National Library of Australia

This talk is open to the public.

Bidwern is an ARC eResearch Project for digital tools to document projects in Northern Australia:

A pilot project will use a selection of visual and audio data created by social and environmental scientists working with Indigenous communities on a major land management project across the western Arnhem Land Plateau.

The key innovations of the research will be to develop new methods for cataloging and preparing digital data for uploading to the DSpace digital repository at the Australian National University. Once in the repository, the data will be preserved for long term access by researchers and Indigenous communities in the western Arnhem Land Plateau.

From: Bidwern Project, ANU, 2006

See also my "Ten Canoes: From Samoa to Arafura Swamp".

Digital Culture - Technology and Media in 2020

Recommended:

Digital Culture Talk
National Library of Australia

Technology and Media in 2020
Speaker: Abigail Thomas

Time: 12.30 to 13.30
Date: Wednesday, 30 May 2007
Venue: Library Theatre, NLA
Entry: Free

• What will media and technology look like in 2020?
• Do the seeds lie in current trends like the desire for user generated content, creativity, always-on connections and on-demand content?
• Or should we look to science fiction to help us predict the future?
  

Biographical details: Abigail Thomas, Head, Strategic Innovation & Development, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Abigail Thomas has nine years’ experience within the digital and new media environment in the UK and Australia.

In her current role in the ABC’s new Innovation Division, Abigail is responsible for strategic research and development and the creation of innovative projects across the ABC which utilise new media platforms and technologies. This includes interactive television, video downloads and virtual worlds such as Second Life.

Abigail joined the ABC in 2000 and has had a number of different roles including responsibility for project managing the launch of ABC2, the ABC’s digital multichannel, overseeing audience and industry research in the new media space as well as providing policy and strategic advice on corporate issues.

Abigail also worked in the UK for the Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport as Head of Commercial and Digital Broadcasting, with responsibility for government policy on the development of digital broadcasting, at a time when digital TV had just been launched in the UK. Prior to that she undertook a visiting research fellowship for the UK Government, researching digital TV developments in a number of countries (UK, Europe, US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan) and comparing government, industry and academic perspectives on the future implications of digital broadcasting and its regulation.

Bobby Graham
BGRAHAM(a)la.gov.au
Web Content Manager
Web Publishing Branch, IT Division
National Library of Australia
Tel: +61 2 6262 1542
www.nla.gov.au

Previous talks in the Series:

• Second Life, 14 February 2007
• E-publishing in Australian Universities, 27 November 2006

Open Source at the National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia(NLA)'s "Information Technology Strategic Plan 2006-2009" mentions several open source products.

They are using Fedora (that is Fedora the digital repository system, not Fedora the Linux implementation):

"24 The Library has been experimenting with the open source software called "Fedora", and now proposes to use Fedora to undertake the basic management functions for digital material of all kinds. Fedora has the capability to provide a solution for the deposit model of acquiring digital content."

And Lucene:

"40 The Library has decided to replace Verity Ultraseek with Lucene, a high performance, full-featured and open source search engine with strong support for features like relevance ranking and clustering of search results. The Library has already deployed Lucene to index and search the PANDORA archive, and intends to use it to support searching of the Library's website, the archive of the Australian web domain, the database of Australian newspaper content, manuscript finding aids and oral history interview transcripts."

Also they are working with IIPC on some tools:

"25 The Library is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) which comprises 11 national libraries with experience in digital archiving, together with the Internet Archive. The IIPC is working collaboratively to develop open source software specifically designed for the large-scale archiving of websites and the development of common archiving formats and protocols. The Library will upgrade the software component that manages the PANDORA archive in order to use these new tools."

IIPC have an assortment of open source tools listed:

• Heritrix, archiving web crawler, from the Internet Archive
• DeepArc, to export the database content to XML
• Web Curator Tool (WCT), for web harvesting
• BAT (BnFArcTools), API for ARC, DAT and CDX files
• NutchWAX (Nutch with Web Archive eXtensions), indexing web archives
• WERA (WEb aRchive Access), web archive search and navigation
• Xinq (XML INQuire), a search and browse for XML

The NLA "IT Architecture Project Report", March 2007, has a section on the "Open Source Development Model":

"The Library's current policy (last articulated in the 2005-2008 Strategic Plan) is:

• to base the development of services on solutions that are available in the marketplace ...

The following changes are proposed to this policy:

• To evaluate open source solutions on equal terms with solutions available in the marketplace through a rational costing process; and
• to return in-house developed software to the public domain. ..."

Also "service-oriented" gets a mention.

Innovative Ideas Forum, Canberra

On Monday I am going along to the Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia:

The purpose of the forum is to provide an opportunity for librarians and others working on projects or programs that enhance the national information infrastructure to share information about innovative new ideas, developments and trends in providing access to information to all Australians. Services and projects contributing to the national information infrastructure include shared portal services, subject gateways, federated discovery services, collaborative projects to increase online access to content, and federated authentication services.

That might sound a bit dull to non-librarians, but the speakers include some of the revolutionaries who helped get Australia (and the world) on the Internet. The web has started to demolish print publishing (and soak up its advertising revenue). The academic sounding topics presented here may decide who gets billions of dollars to be made in the next few years as podcasting replaces radio and TV broadcasting.

Tomorrow during the conference I will try and do a "live" update from the library. Anyone with a question for a speaker can email it to me.

ps: I wrote this with the Writely on-line word processor, recently acquired by Google.

Program (the abstracts are also available):

Monday 3 April 2006

Morning

9.00am Welcome by Dr Warwick Cathro

Future trends in information discovery and delivery. (Richard Springhall, Yahoo!7 )

9.30am Trends in integrated library management system developments. (Jeroen Reiniers, Endeavor Information Systems)

10.00am Dis-integrating the integrated library information management system. (Lloyd Sokvitne, State Library of Tasmania) (abstract)

10.30-11.00 Morning tea

11.00am (chair: Tony Boston) What's in A Name? Issues in Identification. (Geoff Huston, Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre ) (abstract)

11.30am DART: Dataset acquisition, accessibility and annotation e-research technologies. (Andrew Treloar, Monash University) (abstract)

12.00pm Next generation networks and advanced communication services - expanding the reach and interactivity of cultural institutions. (George McLaughlin, AARNET) (abstract)
LUNCH 12.30pm - 1.15pm
Afternoon

1.15pm (chair: Mark Corbould) NLA Strategic Directions. (Warwick Cathro, NLA)

2.00pm Extending Digital Libraries Infrastructure to support eResearch. (Jane Hunter, University of Queensland) (abstract)

2.30pm Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. (Maggie Exon, Curtin University)

3.00-3.30 Afternoon tea

3.30pm (chair: Warwick Cathro) Creative Commons. (Brian Fitzgerald, Queensland University of Technology)

4.00pm National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance. (Aaron Corn, Sydney Conservatorium) (abstract)

4.30pm Australian Social Science Data Archives. (Sophie Holloway, Australian National University) (abstract)

Tuesday 4 April 2006

Morning

9.00am (chair: Heidi Pritchard)
The Learning Federation. (Alan Bevan, CEO) (abstract)

9.30am
EdNA Online's shared information services architecture and the delivery of education-related resources. (Pru Mitchell and Gus Singh, EdNA Online) (abstract)

10.00am
Domesticated and feral - sharing resources created by expert resource developers and enthusiastic classroom teachers, while ensuring quality. (Kevin O'Gorman, Centre for Learning Innovation) (abstract)

10.30-11.00 Morning tea

11.00am (chair: Helen Kon)
Learning content for cultural institutions, in digital publishing and workflow design. (Greg Styles, Blended Learning International) (abstract)

11.30am
Connecting people to information through the VOCED database. (Miriam Saunders, National Centre for Vocational Education Research) (abstract)

12.00pm
Vrroom: the virtual reading room of the National Archives of Australia. (Beatrice Barnett, National Archives) (abstract)
LUNCH 12.30pm - 1.30pm
Afternoon

1.30pm (chair: Margy Burn)
NLA services to support education and research. (Tony Boston, NLA) (abstract)

2.00pm
Gateway to Australian educational research: new products & services from the Australian Council For Educational Research (ACER). (Sue Clarke and Tine Grimston, Australian Council for Educational Research) (abstract)

2.30pm
A proposal for a national catalogue and resource sharing service for people with a print disability. (Donna Runner, Deakin University) (abstract)

3.00-3.30 Afternoon tea

3.30pm (chair: Warwick Cathro)
Information Management in action: profiling research with a create once and re-use approach to digital repositories and administrative systems. (Simon Porter and Eve Young, Melbourne University) (abstract)

4.00pm
Developing a national film and television resource centre for education. (Mike Lynch, Screenrights) (abstract)