Brain overload.
What is filling it up:
PBCore training materials, four videos of slideshow webinars.
Creative Commons Newsletter Jan – March 2010 is available.
Peter Jaszi’s commentary on UCLA re-starting their streaming videos.
Whew.
I really like computers. I like making them do things. I like being the boss around them. But I don’t always know enough to succeed at this. Still, there are a few good days. Like today, so far.
I got Greenstone Digital Library software running – smoothly – on my Mac. This involved multiple trips to the Terminal, which always freaks me out because I have No Idea what I’m doing with Unix. Still, it works. And I can build new collections. And I am happy.
My next goal is to take our netbook, which is currently running Windows XP (barf), and install Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix. I know there will be some obstacles, but right now I’m all excited.
A few photos from a sunset cruise Frans and I went on last weekend:
Waikiki and Diamond Head
Toes
Sails
Sunset
Today Sinclair Library (where I work – the music/audio/video library on campus) hosted a screening of Lawrence Lessig’s “Wireside Chat”, a lecture about open video and copyright reform and fair use. The lecture itself took place at Harvard Law School, where Lessig is a professor, but it was streamed live worldwise, via open-source codecs. We joined groups in Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico, the U.K., Frans, India, Canada, and the U.S. mainland to watch the lecture and participate in a question and answer session. It was Darn Cool.
I was one of the main organizers of the screening at our library, and it was a good learning experience. I worked with some of the publicity, getting announcements out to various mailing lists on campus and highlighting the event on Sinclair’s Facebook page. I helped plan the food, test the technology, and even figured out how to project the Twitter #wireside feed to the side of the main lecture so we could what people were saying and asking during the talk.
A few observations:
-There were some technical difficulties on the Harvard end. The video feed was pretty low-quality, even though as a “registered” venue we had access to a private, higher-quality feed. They also started late, which I think was connected to feed issues. We didn’t really mind (more time to eat and chat!) and really, I think it made a lot of us feel better – even HARVARD has problems sometimes!
-An awesome crew of helpers can definitely help make an event . . . well, awesome. I had three or four people helping me (student workers and other staff) whose competence I had complete trust in. And this made SUCH a difference. No running around like head-less chickens for us!
-This was the first event I’ve been at with a Twitter “backchannel” projected alongside the main show. Overall I really liked it, though I can see how it might get distracting if I got so involved in the backchannel conversation that I lost track of what was going on in the main talk. I was happy to have the chance to show a group of people at UH how this could work.
-The talk was great. Lots to think about, and lots more I need to learn about.
Things have been busy lately, but here are links to the latest publicity stuff for our video project at work:
Digitize This! (Honolulu Weekly).
Library Maintains Vital Visual Archive with SnapStream (case study by SnapStream, the company that makes the server we use for recording off-air)
It’s really small stuff, but it’s kind of cool.
If anyone reaches this page after reading the Honolulu Weekly article looking for more information, there are a few pages explaining the project at http://www.sinclair.hawaii.edu/video/streamingvideo.html, or you can email me at emilyea (at) hawaii (dot) edu.
Some photos I took in Chinatown sometime last week.
The espresso machine at Manifest, a bar Frans has become very fond of as a place to hang out and wait for me after work until I show up and the adventure begins:
Gold Gate Lounge sign:
Frans and Nuuanu Ave sign:
Shop display:
NYTimes article about museums REALLY using the Internet
“While only a handful of museums have successfully harnessed Web users to develop their collections, social-media platforms are starting to foster new kinds of interactions between Web audiences and museum curators long accustomed to working only with other experts.”
Lawrence Lessig:For the Love of Culture: Google, Copyright, and Our Future (The New Republic). I’ve been meaning to learn more about copyright reform possibilities and Creative Commons. I’ve already downloaded Lessig’s book Free Culture to my Droid – now I just need to read it.
Our video reformatting project makes it to the UH Blog! (But why did they un-capitalize “keiki hula”? They took the text directly from the page I made about the project, where it’s capitalized! Like it should be!)
Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blythe, 1766
Abigail Adams by Woody Holton.
My first biography of the year – I got interested in Abigail Adams because Frans watches the HBO John Adams documentary over and over, and I like it portrays the relationship between the two of them. That, and how Abigail is alway putting John in his place. Very good book, and I appreciated how Holton emphasizes how Abigail challenged the notion of coverture (the idea that a woman was legally/financially invisible once she married) by making investments, going into trade for a little while, and, towards the end of her life, making her own will. Also fascinating was the huge amount of correspondence going on between Abigail and John, as well as Abigail and her other relatives and many friends and acquaintances. Many of the letters between Abigail and John are available digitally on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Adams Family Papers Archive. I just picked up a copy of My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams – not sure if I’m going to have time to read the whole things right now, but I’ll definitely browse through it.
In the About Me box on my Facebook info page, I’ve written a single, short sentence: “I overanalyze.”
I don’t know if the over- part is true, but I certainly do feel like I’m constantly analyzing things, thinking about how things work, how people work, how interactions work and don’t work, how essential timing in the kitchen is and planning ahead is and making lists is. Okay, maybe I do overanalyze. But I like doing it, and I think I do save myself some time and effort, and at every traffic light on the way to work I always know the order of the lights so I’m never surprised when it’s my turn to go. And I can almost always tell Frans where his missing keys or wallet are.
Anyway (I promise, I’m going somewhere with this), I just started taking a course in the library science program with my staff tuition waiver. The course is called Systems Analysis for Information Management, and while the focus is on digital libraries, it also looks like we’re going to get a good introduction to systems analysis in general. I read the first two chapters of Systems Analysis for Librarians and Information Professionals, and got so excited by the introduction to systems analysis that I texted my dad, “I’m reading about systems analysis! And I like it!” His reply wasn’t quite so enthusiastic.
Maybe my dad is a little older and wiser than me. Or maybe I’ve just found my calling in life.
For the last six months I’ve been working on a project to digitize and stream old videos from the collection here at Sinclair. We finally have about 300 URLs linking to streaming videos in the catalog, and today the press release for the project came out! I’m pretty excited.
The 2010 Horizon Report is out. This is a yearly report by EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium that explores six areas of emerging technology that are likely to have a big effect on higher education in the next 1-5 years. It’s 40 pages long, has a very pretty picture on the front page, and is well worth reading.
Tomorrow Today Radio 4 and the British Museum are launching A History of the World in 100 Objects, a series of 100 programs, each focusing on one object in the British Museums’s collection. I will definitely be subscribing to the podcast. Via The History Blog.
In the Hawaii episode of No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain’s slightly addicting food and travel show, he visits a little place in Waikiki called Puka Dog. After watching this, Frans and I got all excited. We’d never BEEN to Puka Dog, never even heard of it! And Tony went there! And they have cool hot dogs that they stick in a toasted chunk of bread with a hole in it (“puka” means hole) and squeeze in delicious tropical sauces!
After a few weeks of meaning to go find the place, we finally got our butts in gear and biked into Waikiki for an evening of puka goodness. The store is right on Kuhio Avenue, not far from the International Marketplace. It has shiny, colorful signs. Nice clear menu. Cute tables. Cool Puka Dog coffee mugs. So far, so good. We got in line and ordered our puka dogs (veggie dog with mild garlic sauce and papaya relish for me, polish sausage with spicy garlic sauce, mango relish, and lilikoi mustard for Frans) and some lemonade, and sat down to wait for our glorious meal. Just like Tony had.
The food showed up, we each looked down at our dogs, took a big bite, and looked back up at each other, chewing cautiously. “The bread’s not that great.” “It’s actually kind of . . . bland.” “I’m not so sure about this sauce.” “Not the best veggie dog I’ve had.” “It’s the bread. The bread is awful.” That said, we finished the dogs in near-silence, with Frans eyeing the cheesesteak place across the street the whole time. We both wanted to like the puka dogs, but it wasn’t really working.
I think Frans actually enjoyed the food more than I did. He didn’t like the bread at all, but I was icked out by the whole thing. On our way back to our bikes we stopped to look at the Ono Cheesesteak menu and were surprised to find the four burly guys who had been in line in front of us at Puka Dog sitting happily around a table, munching on cheesesteak sandwiches. On real bread. One of them waved us over, holding up his sandwich. “You guys here too? This is what a real sandwich should look like.”
And a picture of stamps from Hong Kong, for kicks.
One document at a time: Small scale digitization projects (haven’t read it yet but seems quite relevant to my work).
Great selection of digital collections from University of Hawaii Library (hey, I work there! But not on these): Digital Archive Collections. Everything from Hawaiian language newspapers to old fire insurance maps of Honolulu to the 442nd RCT Japanese Veterans archive.
Technology Essentials 2010: WebJunction Online Conference. Free online conference Feb. 9-10, about technology and libraries.
A Gentle Introduction to GIS: free PDF and worksheets on using open source GIS software Quantum GIS. More info at The Map Room.
In November 2010, AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) and IASA (Int’l Association of Sound and Video Archives) will combine their annual conferences into one SUPER CONFERENCE in Philadelphia. Sign me up!
I’m not huge on New Years resolutions; I think fresh starts are more likely to take place on a random day rather than a day when they’re supposed to. Plus, the start of a new year should be a time for celebrating, not for feeling guilty about eating too much junk food or not exercising enough.
But I think this is a good time to look back at the books I’ve read over this past year. In January of this year I started my (now verging on epic) Books of 2009 list. I’m happy I decided to keep a list – this year was a huge year of adjustments and it’s interesting to see what I read as a way of coping with, exploring, or just escaping from some of the things I was dealing with. I’ll start a Books of 2010 list tomorrow, but for now, some reflections on what I read in 2009:
Commentary:
Whoa boy, that was a lot of fiction, especially short stories! I think I really needed it after three years in graduate school. I’m really happy that I read a significant amount of translated work, and work coming from outside the U.S. I loved Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series and wish there were ten or twenty more of them. It was especially fun to be just a book or two behind my dad the whole time he was going through the same series. I loved reading Chimamanda Adichie, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich. I hope I can get my hands on a copy of the final book in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy (used, preferably!).
And next year? I won’t say I’m tired of fiction (especially since there’s a pile of it still waiting to be read), but I do feel like it’s time to branch out. I’d like to start reading more histories and biographies, especially ones dealing with women’s experiences in different countries/times.
Whatever I do read, it’ll all go on the list.
Maybe epic is a bit of a stretch, but yesterday was certainly eventful in various ways. I’m planning to do the Great Aloha Run (again!) in February, and yesterday was the first morning of the free training clinic for the run. I showed up on a reasonably-cold-but-not-wet morning to warm up, run, and stretch with over 100 other people. Last year I trained with a group that did about half running and half walking; this year I’m in a faster group. It’s definitely more of a challenge, especially since the run up to Diamond Head Lookout we did yesterday was more hill than I’ve run on in months. I enjoyed it, though, and the scenery – especially that early in the morning – is just beautiful. Plus I totally dig taking off my running shoes and standing in the ocean afterwards, then sliding my slippers on and moseying into Starbucks for a short americano, a glass of water, and some well-deserved reading time.
After the running, and a small recovery nap, getting my mother-in-law packed up and off to the airport (we’ll see her again next week), and doing enough house cleaning to not feel too guilty about not doing any more, I made some tea and pulled out my DVDs. I hadn’t watched a movie, other than the Star Trek and documentaries Frans is constantly turning on for background noise, in weeks. Maybe months. I rarely have the patience to sit through an entire movie at once, let alone two in a row. But yesterday afternoon and evening, I watched FOUR MOVIES IN A ROW. A Good Year, then Girl with a Pearl Earring, then A Good Woman, then Love Actually. All of them reasonably cheesy and romantic, but all enjoyable in their own way.
And now, movie binge out of the way, I can get on with other things. Like the TWO WEEKS OF VACATION stretching out in front of me. Oooh boy.
