Just back from SXSW, and my batteries are recharged. A few snaps by PhotoMatt tell all. Below are my notes from the Book Culture talk that Kevin Smokler, Ben Brown and I did.

Book Culture

• Malcolm X Papers at The New York Public Library.
• Half of all the web sites created in 1998 are now gone.
• 320 Million with a new one being added every 4 seconds.
• Library of Congress houses some 125 million items.

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass. It is easy for historians to trace the creative process for print; find the collection and look at it.

Page One, Page Two, Page Three, Page Four.

Cory Doctrow

What happens to his manuscripts? How will we read them in the future?
Do we preserve is printed book, the online version, or both? Are they different objects?
Will we want to preserve his blog and bookmarks too?
How about his CPU?

How Can We Preserve our Digital Cultural Heritage?

• Individual collectors.
• Distributed efforts.
• Broad collations.
• Note to authors and publishers: preservation begins with production.

Preservation Efforts that are Underway

Neil Young and The Grateful Dead

In 1990 Neil Young hired an audio engineer, a video engineer and an archivist to begin work on creating an archival/asset management system for Young’s work. It was supposed to be a three-month project, but 13 years later they are still working. The Grateful Dead has an archive, called the Vault, which generates $10 to $13 million a year. It 26 member staff includes an archivist.

Science publisher Elsevier and The Royal Library of the Netherlands

The KB will receive digital copies of all Elsevier journals made available on its web platform, ScienceDirect, which are approximately 1,500 journals covering all areas of science, technology and medicine, and exceeding 7 TB of data.

National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP)

Back today after a trip to Austin for SXSW, and one day in Phoenix for PLA. It was the perfect trip. Two photos (one of Tantek, Jeffrey and Josh, and another of Carrie, Jeffrey, Jessica, Billy and Tantek) seemed worthy of posting. Had I a photo for every fondly remembered experience, my sysadmin might be upset.

Upon arrival in Phoenix, we were blindfolded (security purposes only) and escorted to International Lemurzone HQ where we supped on manicotti topped with Lemurzone red sauce. Strawberry shortcake, freshly whipped cream, and the perfect cup of coffee followed.

The hospitality was topped only by the company: Lindsay, Mark Newhouse, six dogs, and four cats. I am only sad that the evening was cut short by our 11PM flight home.

Notes from my PLA talk, Sticky Sites on a Shoestring, are here.

The book is done; just shipped the last chapter. A few revisions wait for my attention. Then production begins.

Here is a little something from Web Design on a Shoestring, Chapter 5. The Design: Looking Good With Less. I am looking for inspiring stories about CMS on the cheap. Please contact me if you have any.

Typography as a Three-Step Facelift

Imagine this scenario. You have just started a new job as an in house web designer, and the first thing your boss wants you to do is clean up the web site. She has given you a week and no money to do it. This is not to be a complete redesign; that will come later when you have a little more cash. You just need to give it a facelift.

Assume that your cluttered site was created three years ago. While it is fine as the boss’s nephew’s first web site, it makes your company look amateurish and out of touch.

Start with the typography, and use it to define your style, simplify your color scheme, and clean up the visual lines in your site. Think about the variety of typefaces, how consistently each typeface is being used, and the placement of text on the screen. Ask yourself how you might change these three typographical elements — variety, consistent use and placement — to eliminate visual clutter and to improve the site. This analysis begins three-step facelift that will inexpensively add elegance and style to what every design you are trying to improve. Your boss will wish her Botox treatment had been as successful and pain free.

1. The Careful Variety of Typefaces

The least expensive way to create uniformity and hierarchy is to select two or three good typefaces. Try to select typefaces that together create strong visual contrast, and that look good on a computer screen.

2. The Consistent Use of Typefaces

Once you have selected your typefaces, write a quick visual style guide that will dictate how each of the typefaces will be used. This guide should prescribe a set of rules that cover elements like headlines, site-wide navigation, body copy, links and call-outs. You will undoubtedly go back and make changes to these rules as you begin implementation. That is fine; just be sure to update your style guide.

3. Creating Clean Lines by Placing Text

When you lay text out on the screen, make sure that you use clean lines. The alignment of each text area should be strong, and should relate visually to other text areas on the page. Clean placement costs no more than sloppy placement, but it adds tremendously to the integrity of your design.

Take the three elements — careful variety of typefaces, the consistent use of those typefaces, and the clean lines via typeface placement — and start cutting.

Did you know that MGM studio executives almost cut the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz? They felt that it made the movie drag. Sort of reminds me of what committee culture can do to web sites.

My mom introduced Acrostic Poetry to her third graders today using the names of my family members. This is from her lesson plan:


Sings nicely
Understands children and music
Sister to Carrie
Animal lover of Deogee
Nice person

Clever librarian
Artistic illustrator
Remembers everything
Respects people
Ice cream lover
Excellent friend

Nice father
Interested in motorcycles
Commercial writer
Kayak lover

Jazz  lover
Awesome ability at singing
Nice teacher
Excellent reader
Terrific mother

Runs with his dog
Actor in Studio City
Loves California
Prefers pizza
Hears the Pacific Ocean

New shoes for fall. The images are from T. Watson Greig’s Ladies’ Dress Shoes of the Nineteenth Century, courtesy of The New York Public Library. Much more very soon.

A must read for Veteran’s Day: Ghost Soldiers; The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides. This is the story of the rescue of some 500 American and Allied POWs, those few survivors of the Bataan Death March, from the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines.

Macromedia Contribute is now available for download. Finally I can talk about this new software. Contribute is not a CMS, but it does quite a bit of what a CMS does , and it is only $99.00 a pop.

This GUI allows non-technical people to author content by typing and draging text and images into what looks an awful lot like a web browser.

The software is based on Dreamweaver, so the HTML that Contribute generates is as pretty as Dreamweaver MX’s mark-up. But you can also drag Word and Excel files into the interface, and Contribute will clean that markup as you drag. Dreamweaver templates have been incorporated into this new product, so you can limit editable areas on your pages.

Contribute also has a versioning system, so you can roll back if your content people do something bad to your site.

Macromedia’s latest is important not only for what it does, but for what it says about the industry. The price point suggests that Macromedia sees the writing on the wall, and knows web developers will have to continue to do more with less. Contribute will be available for the PC in December, and for the Mac in 2003.

Roguelibrarian.net is down for a short time. Roguelibrarian.com is as fit as a fiddle. If you have messaged me at carrie at roguelibrarian.net, and the message has bounced, please redirect the note to my .com address. Sorry for the confusion. All will be well again soon.

"Somewhere there is a ten-year old who will be president one day. She has a web site now, and in 50 years we are going to want to look at it." What can we do to preserve our digital heritage?

I paraphrase Abby Smith, Council on Library and Information Resources, from a talk she gave at the Digital Library Federation meeting in Seattle last month. She was describing legislation that the U.S. Congress passed in December of 2000 establishing the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). NDIIPP charges the Librarian of Congress to lead a nationwide planning effort for the long-term preservation of digital content.

The plan is to develop a national strategy to collect, archive and preserve the burgeoning amounts of digital content, especially materials that are created only in digital formats, for current and future generations. No big.

See an abstract of Smith’s talk on the DLF Fall Forum 2002 Schedule. Pardon the scroll. For the full scoop on NDIIPP, skip right to the NDIIPP press releases.

A group of Information Architects from around the world have formed a new non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting the field of information architecture. It is called The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA).

AIfIA "serves to advance the design of shared information environments. We support a global community infrastructure that connects people, ideas, content, and tools. Through research, education, advocacy and community service, we promote excellence within our field and build bridges to related disciplines and organizations."

In more pressing news, I made the plunge and got acrylic nails. They are done in a tasteful French manicure at the moment, but I feel a serious case of airbrushing coming on. Maybe even a little rhinestone on the pinky finger. Who knows?

Soak up Code Red and related requests. Nothing else here, sorry.

That was the message visitors saw when they visited roguelibrarian.net. At first I thought that it was my DNS. The same day that the trouble began, I realized that I’d let my roguelibrarian.net domain name expire. I quickly paid the invoice, and kept the name without any hassle. But the code red page persisted.

The source of the matter was Joe Clark. You see, Joe and I are hosted by the same Luke Tymowski. When Joe’s new book, Building Accessible Websites, got slashdotted, down went his site, my site and the other sites hosted by Luke. Luke patched things up right quick, and we are all back in business.

Now, back to the book. Chapter 4 needs to go to the publisher on Monday.