RSSMix.com Mix ID 10846

ATF Pick of the week: 12 March 2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:57:19 -0400

Thanks to my colleagues in Research for their informed commentary. Here’s the pick of the week. Ebooks What Ebooks?The Auricle February 21, 2010When is an ebook not an ebook? When it’s not downloaded to a portable e-reader device, says author Derek Morrison, who notes that some recent ebook usage studies have based their conclusions [...]

Pick of the week: ATF 9 March 2010

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:56:16 -0500

Basking in the afterglow of Undue Diligence, I’ve been at leisure to catch up on blog postings and email, which both include the always-informative Above the Fold. Here’s my pick for this week.Publishing: The Revolutionary FutureThe New York Review of Books March 11, 2010Crisis at the crossroads. Veteran publisher Jason Epstein offers a wide-ranging discussion [...]

New GestureWorks Tutorials & Educational Pricing

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:22:17 -0500

It’s been a busy week for the GestureWorks team. Our programmers have been developing a Flex-compatible version of GestureWorks, which we expect to release later this month. (We already provide the easiest way to author multitouch with Adobe Flash.) Be the first to know about our Flex release; follow GestureWorks on Twitter and Facebook.We’ve posted [...]

Focus and reframe: rights and unpublished materials

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:13:17 -0500

I’m using this blog posting to wrap together a bunch of ideas I’ll be presenting at a meeting tomorrow, Undue Diligence: Seeking Low-risk Strategies for Making Collections of Unpublished Materials More Accessible. Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner helped to reframe processing modern archival collections in More Product, Less Process. Similarly, Shifting Gears helped to recast [...]

Pick of the week: ATF 2 March 2010

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:10:38 -0500

Some of you may already be subscribers to Above The Fold (ATF) our weekly current awareness compilation and commentary. We just sent out the seventieth issue. Our objective in assembling the newsletter was to offer an information professionals view of issues from outside our domain that were worth your consideration and related to library, archive [...]

Over, Under, Around and Through

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:03:01 -0500

Our paper on obstacles that archivists experience with adopting Encoded Archival Description (and how to get around them) is out! Over Under Around and Through: Getting Around Barriers to EAD Implementation [pdf]. We are holding a webinar for the RLG Partnership tomorrow and I’ll share the link of the recorded session later. The paper covers [...]

A Toughness Test of the MT-50 Multitouch Table

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:33:21 -0500

So how tough is the MT-50 multitouch table? Just last week, we tried to find out. We conducted a few tests to see how the glass surface of the table in particular would hold up to some serious abuse. First, we dropped a 12-pound bowling ball onto the table from a height of 2 feet, [...]

A Look Inside the New and Improved MT-50 Multitouch Table

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:46:36 -0500

When we have visitors to our studio, we always like to show off the inside our MT-50 multitouch table. We’re very proud of the care and workmanship that goes into each custom-built table and we pride ourselves on using the best quality components we can find. We’ve decided to extend our inside tour to the [...]

GestureWorks Illustrations Show Up in Adobe Presentation, Unattributed

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:17:20 -0500

Last month, we blogged about the GestureWorks Open Source Gesture Library and released a series of illustrations showing all of our supported multitouch gestures. We released these illustrations using a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. We are happy to make these illustrations available to the community. We simply ask that when they are used, [...]

Multitouch Hardware A List of Supported Devices

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:25:33 -0500

2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for multitouch enabled screens, all-in-one PCs,laptops, and tablets. It seems like every week there is a new device.With the release of our GestureWorks multitouch framework for Adobe Flash, we’ve had to try and keep track of this expanding list of devices, all of which are compatible [...]

OCLC Research @ University of Calgary

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:13:14 -0500

As those of you who have listened to Tom Hickerson’s Distinguished Seminar Series lecture will know, the University of Calgary has embarked on an ambitious plan of integrating their libraries, archives and museums under a single administrative umbrella (Libraries & Cultural Resources or LCR). This convergence is catalyzed by a new building in the heart [...]

ExhibitFiles New Bits Feature

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:16:44 -0500

The ExhibitFiles Website is a community site for exhibit designers and developers. Almost three years ago now, Ideum worked with theAssociation of Science -Technology Centers and Independent Exhibitions to help design and develop the site. Created with funding from the National Science Foundation, the purpose of the site is share design practices and provide access [...]

Scholarly content and the cliff edge: the place of subject repositories

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:18:27 -0500

The famous (and famously reclusive) author J.D. Salinger died on 27 January this year, two days after the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns a day which is celebrated across Scotland and in many parts of the world. Salinger and Burns are of course connected, since the title of Salingers most famous novel, [...]

Next-Gen Harvesting

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:36:24 -0500

Metadata harvesting (collecting metadata from others and aggregating it in a collection) is not new. Although there are any number of ways to do this, the OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting is often used and has been around for years. It defines a small set of actions that allows anyone to discover what sets of [...]

Make it Multitouch Workshop at Museums and the Web Conference

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:54:29 -0500

For the second year in a row, Paul Lacey and I will be hosting a workshop entitled Make it Multitouch at the Museums and the Web conference.Normally, I try to avoid sequels and over the last few years I have delivered one-time workshops onRSS, mashups, and even online video editing. Multitouch is different. As emergent [...]

A peek inside the 100 multitouch table

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:12:39 -0500

We continue to see interest in the EM Spectrum multitouch exhibit that we developed with Adventure Science Center late last fall. The exhibit was featured on the popular Engadget blog and our video on YouTube just this week surpassed 40,000 views.Today, I posted a case study about this exhibit on the ExhibitFiles website, underSpace [...]

The Social Dimension: Interactive Exhibits for the Floor and Web at UVIC

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:38:07 -0500

At the end of March, I will be teaching a blended (online and in person) course for the Cultural Resource Management program at the University of Victoria (UVIC) in British Columbia. The course is entitled The Social Dimension: Interactive Exhibits for the Floor and Web. A blogged about this a few months ago, now I’m [...]

ORCID and ISNI: Author, Swineherd, Taxman, Alcohol Researcher

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:50:22 -0500

At recent meetings I attended in Washington D.C. there was significant hallway discussion about the Open Researcher Contributor Identification (ORCID) initiative. Given the science orientation of the meetings this initiative to resolve the problem of name ambiguity and attribution in scholarly publication was particularly welcomed. As you’ll see if you visit the ORCID site this [...]

GestureWorks 1.1 & Open Source Gesture Library

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:41:30 -0500

We’re excited to announce the release of GestureWorks 1.1 and our open source gesture library! Ideum first released GestureWorks back in December. We’ve recently implemented some performance enhancements in the latest version to further improve a software that was already the best multitouch development environment for Flash.Part of ensuring that GestureWorks continues to evolve as [...]

Greening ILL Practices study completed

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:47:30 -0500

In September I hired a firm of environmental impact consultants, California Environmental Associates, to conduct a three-month study of interlibrary loan processes, with an eye toward lowering the carbon footprint of resource sharing operations worldwide. Affordable best practices was our goal. OCLC Research and OCLC Delivery Services co-sponsored the study. Together,the consultants (Aarthi Ananthanarayanan and [...]

If I only

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:22:06 -0400

I was thinking about language again (as I often do, in a lackadaisical sort of way), and about language changes that have happened within my lifetime - how catch phrases and catch words rise, achieve ephemeral popularity, and then mostly fade away to become tomorrow’s curios. When I was at university in the mid-80s, ‘mega’ [...]

A suitable case for tweetment

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:00:54 -0400

On Wednesday last I attended a talk at Te Papa by Tee Morris about social media. Much of the stuff I was already familiar with - blogging, YouTube, Ning, Bebo, Facebook, Flickr and so on. As far as I know, I was the first person to use Flickr for collection images (glad to see the [...]

Pique condition

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:09:16 -0400

Via I can no longer remember where, this week I discovered the concept of eggcorns (something I had earlier mentally tagged as verbal mondegreens). Hours of endless fun for those who, like me, are easily amused by quote on quote unintended humour. When I don’t find it mildly irritating, that is.

Im back

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:07:21 -0500

So finally I get around to updating the blog. Why the long lay-off? Partly because with moving to a new job on the other side of the world - as far as you can go, without starting to come back - I’ve been preoccupied, and partly because my new job has taken me to a [...]

Sound of Museums Revisited

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 06:08:20 -0400

List Ev’ry ObjectList ev’ry objectSearch high and lowName, location, donor,And all you need to knowList ev’ry objectMake sure your schemeWill comply with Spectrum.It’s like a bad dream.A scheme that will listAll the stuff in the store.It would not be so badIf it weren’t such a bore.List ev’ry objectMake sure your schemeWill comply with SpectrumIt’s like [...]

Inside out

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:08:38 -0400

Insider or outsider? I’ve always felt that I am an outsider, but is that how I’m seen? Or am I really part of the museums establishment in Scotland? Though I never aimed to be or wanted to be, and though I can’t see myself as The Man, maybe that role is now mine. So we [...]

Leaving on a jet plane

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 13:33:05 -0500

I’ve been extremely dilatory about this blog since April last year. The intervening months have been a bit weird to be honest. I went with my family to visit my brother in New Zealand again (and hang the expense!) last summer*. While I was there I had an interview for a job. Since then, I’ve [...]

Thickipedia

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:17:55 -0400

I see that today’s (20th April 2007) featured article on Wikipedia is Yosemite National Park. So lots of morons are deleting the main article, seemingly unaware that being a wiki we can see the old versions anyway. Sigh.

Blogging the train from Merced to Martinez

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:41:37 -0400

The bus from Yosemite made good time and actually arrived at Merced Amtrak station early. The station itself is just a small building, and there’s no caf - but you can buy drinks and unhealthy snacks from a machine, so I naturally made use of them. The train was perfectly on time, but I did [...]

Yosemite Falls - and I dont

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:14:26 -0400

After two sunny days, today was more cloudy. Indeed it was snowing all day - just flurries, and nothing sticking. It didn’t seem to me to be cold enough for snow, but maybe I’m becoming acclimatised to Scotland. Certainly Yosemite Creek was full of slush formed from the spray from the fall, though with the [...]