Tag Archives: Links

Highlight of the Fall NEMLA conference

Submitted by Joy Pile

On Friday Oct. 17, I attended the Fall conference of NEMLA (New England Chapter of the Music Library Association) which was held at Bennington College. Among the sessions given, was one that focused on a couple of projects the library helped to sponsor as part of a class. The most innovative of the two projects was one which resulted in the creation of a Lib2.0 book recommendation site – not unlike the one Mary Backus demonstrated in the brown bag session – with physical objects designed to highlight a book in the stacks. For more information, and photos of this very creative project go to <http://bookmarks.bennington.edu>.

Durable Digital Objects

Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation
is a provocative article that indicts research and repository librarians for not being aware of the scale of the problem and for not paying attention to existing research in other fields.

Abstract: Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information
producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and
programs that will be as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today.
Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users.
Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers would also avoid
burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available.
Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is
remarkable to outsiders. Why does their progress seem stalled? Ineffective collaboration across
disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for
this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

One-stop shopping

Submitted by Joe Antonioli

Information Technology at Tufts University has created an integrated suite of Web 2.0 technologies, communication tools for “for teaching, learning, research, and co-curricular activities.” This is a great example of access, support and marketing all in on space.

http://spark.uit.tufts.edu

The site gives the user a gateway to each technology. It also includes help documentation, examples and links to suggested uses. For instance, on the wiki page-

Wikis – Suggested Uses

A wiki is simply a web page or site that is fully editable from a browser using a very simple “mark-up” language. Its strength is that it allows small groups to add, revise, and edit web content, so it is a natural tool for most collaborative writing activities. Like a web site, it allows for non-linear linking of individual wiki pages. Whenever a wiki page is edited, a new version of the page is created with the old version being archived for the site editors’ reference.

  • Demonstrate the evolution of thought processes through the different versions of a wiki page.
  • Create a collaborative knowledge base that can be added to over time and across courses.
  • Helps small groups of students develop a project, collect ideas, papers, timelines, documents, datasets, and study results into a collective digital space.
  • Assists with small group problem-solving and brainstorming.

 What would Middlebury’s version of this service look like?