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.

I just updated my talks page. All of my energies are directed at the book. Book, book, book.

It is done. All of the data have been migrated to the new On-Lion. We took book lists that were in bad HTML, turned them into text files containing tab deliminated data, and then moved it all into the database. This was gnarly but fun. My eyes hurt.

On-Lion will be replaced in three days. Look at the old version while you have a chance. It really is some good ol’ 1996/1997 Web design. Some of my favorites are Go Wild! Read… and Read to Win: Team Up With Books. I will definitely back this up somewhere.

Now I need to make a text-only version of the site. Should be ok because all content is in a database!

And now… ice cream!

"When Martin Scorsese wanted to recreate the city’s 19th century tenements, bordellos, and saloons for his upcoming movie ‘The Gangs of New York,’ he sent his film producers to visit the archives of a neighborhood called Five Points. The collection contained over 850,000 items from the infamous slum — dishes, thimbles, combs, medicine bottles, and children’s toys — that documented the history of working-class life in lower Manhattan.

"A little over a year after the visit, the entire collection, except for 18 items that were on loan, was destroyed when debris smashed into the World Trade Center 6 building." — Mark Berkey-Gerard for the Gotham Gazette.

Surely, the loss of human life we experienced on September 11, 2002 can’t compare to this. There is no need to discuss the value of people over objects. The fact still remains that the the damage done to our material culture, including company histories, photograph negatives, musical scores, a portion of Helen Keller’s letters, leaves a gaping hole in our cultural record.