Rogue Librarian

A few blogs focusing on digital preservation:

• The Ten Thousand Year Blog
• Digitization Blog
• UCSD Digital Library Planning Working Group (DLPWG)
• The Digital Archives

The Rogue Librarian runs on WordPress. The CSS layout for this design is based on Boredom by Topi Peltonen. The typeface in the masthead is JM Libris, and the tagline is set in Filosofia. The background art is taken from La Plante et ses Applications Ornementales, a selection of decoration and ornament compiled by Eugène Grasset as presented in the NYPL Digital Gallery.

Jeffrey and I had dinner with a web superstar who told us that we were both early bloggers. I had always though of myself as a Johnny-come-lately, but I was blogging by the end of 2000. The Wayback Machine has my first design which features my mother’s high school senior picture. She does not like the photograph, but I do. The CMS was one that I slapped together with ColdFusion and MS Access. I could not create something as cool and raw today. The garage band days of the web are gone, and the ensuing professionalism has taken some of the life out of what was once a punk rock medium. That was a lifetime ago.

Last week, someone asked me why I thought libraries are important. My answer normally runs along the lines of a successful democracy depending on an informed public, and public libraries being instrumental in keeping the public informed.

After seven years in the filed, that platitude only raises more questions. What about libraries that function in a setting other than a democratic one? Are they not valuable? Are libraries doing a good job of keeping people informed?

One of the functions of a research library is to collect for future generations. Who knows (or cares in a way) what kind of society or government our future readers will live in? We will still collect for the unborn. That seems important.

In my first stab at finding a better answer the question about the importance of libraries, I came upon Library Staff are Unsung Heroes by Greg Hill.

Democratic institutions depend on citizens being able to inform themselves on the issues. Societies that renew themselves through life-long learning are much healthier. There’s a thousand other reasons why libraries are important.

Last night ten elephants marched outside my bedroom window. They were traveling west from the Midtown Tunnel, across 34th Street to Madison Square Garden.

Reason number four for a year of silence: the NYPL Digital Gallery. Under the direction of Barbara Taranto, we have been working like mad to digitize 500,000 images from the collections of The New York Public Library, create metadata for each item, and build a Digital Asset Management System and publishing system. The first 275,000 images are now live. The remaining images will be published at regular intervals over the coming months, so it will pay to visit the site again and again.

A fine review by Sarah Boxer in The New York Times and our press release describe the intellectual piece. I’ll not write about what they cover so well, but I will share a few of my favorite searches: Manet, library, and Yiddish.

What you will not find covered in the literature for a spell is how we did it, but I’ll be speaking about the process at SXSW in a few days.

An FYI for geeks: the Digital Asset Management System is a homegrown labor of love with an Oracle back-end and ColdFusion web-based front-end. The publishing system is based on an extract from Oracle that is delivered via XML. This allowed us to have a heavily normalized repository database and a rather flat and fast public delivery. More on the use of XML later.

The third reasons for a year of silence is that I have been teaching a class at for the School of Information and Library Science at the Pratt Institute. The creative juice that had gone into writing for this site was directed at developing Projects in Digital Archives. I started the class last January and a few days later found out that there was a bun in the oven. What a year.

Today’s partial explanation for one year of silence is In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. When I left my job as Web Coordinator for NYPL’s The Branch Libraries to become Assistant Director for Technology for NYPL’s Digital Library Program it was in part to get this site out the door. This joint Digital Library Program and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture project is…

A sweeping narrative from the transatlantic slave trade to the Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbeans, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans. Told in historical texts, rare visual materials, and contemporary photo-journalism.

Each post this week will tell what I have been up to this last year and why there has been little time to write. Today’s reason, by far the most important, is that I had a baby girl in late September.

So David Hochman’s article in Sunday’s times gave me quite a chuckle.

Today’s parents - older, more established and socialized to voicing their emotions - may be uniquely equipped to document their children’s’ lives, but what they seem most likely to complain and marvel about is their own. The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption.

On Shoestring

A review of Shoestring at DMXzone put a nice spike in my amazon number.

I have posted a few of the tables from my book in MS Excel format:

• Table 5.1 A Sample Style Guide
• Table 5.2 Clip Art Guide
• Table 8.1 Worksheet for Keeping Track of Your Domain Names
• Table 8.2 Worksheet for Comparing Hosting Companies

Originally posted Monday October 20, 2003.

Enjoy the recently updated Web Design on a Shoestring web site where you will find a place to report bugs, links to book excerpts, banners and reviews.

The latest volume of Digital Documents Quarterly contains a critique of The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, The NDIIPP Plan: What’s Missing?

As I reported earlier LC is now accepting applications from institutions interested in becoming NDIIPP project partners. The applications deadline is just around the corner: November 12.