The Emily Blog

The Moloka’i photos are still not posted.
The Makua camping photos are still not posted.

But here is something else for ya – not quite as beautiful, though hopefully mildly interesting. A student worker and I presented at the Technology, Colleges, and Community (TCC) conference earlier this evening. It was cool: it’s an online conference, so presentations are done through Elluminate, and there are people from all over the world interacting and discussing technology and learning. Our presentation was called Digitizing Moving Images: Saving Yesterday’s Videos for Tomorrow, and the slides are available on Slideshare. The audience was pretty small since 5pm in Hawai’i is midnight in Tokyo, late night on the U.S. mainland, and supersleepytime (5am?) in Europe. Still, it was fun, and everyone was supportive,

Ooh, Slideshare has an EMBED function!!

Yes, I DID just stop mid-sentence when I realized I could embed the presentation in this post. Have you seen UP? The Pixar film? You know how the dogs are all hunting that crazy bird through the jungles of South America, racing through bushes and around trees and over rocks and the all of a sudden SQUIRREL!!!! And the dogs all stop in their tracks? Yeah, sometimes I feel like that.

I REALLY want to post some pictures from our trip to Moloka’i last weekend but I’m going to be responsible and get these interesting-and-enlightening links posted first. But pictures will happen very soon.

First, Chris Lacinak at AVPreserve.Com just posted A Primer On Codecs for Moving Image and Sound Archives (PDF). Good reading.

Second, I want to read Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. I also want to read Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. I wish I had more time for reading.

Third, here is a link to the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative. Good resource.

Inspired by Aaron, I’m putting together a list of the open-source software I use, whether regularly or just on a tinkering basis. I’m trying to move towards using open-source more, but with my job requiring pretty intense Macintosh work, it’s a slow process.

(A note on the Mac thing: I grew up with Macintosh computers. I love using them. My MacBook makes me happy. But with the growth of iTunes, iPhones, iPads, iThis, iThat, I’m really wary of getting locked into a world that is defined by what Apple creates, and what Apple lets me use.)

Here’s the list. Not nearly as well-organized as Aaron’s, sorry:

• Open Office: Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations – heck, it even does databases! I use this pretty regularly at home for composing short documents and doing little budget-y spreadsheets. I’m interested in finding out how it would work with a most complex project like a long paper or book chapter. Runs on my Mac and the netbook.
• VLC: I love VLC because it can play pretty much any video or audio format you throw at it. I mostly use it for playback, though – I need to explore its editing/converting abilities more.
• WordPress: My blog’s built on it, I’ve used it for years, it’s easy and nice and free.
• Audacity: I don’t use it nearly as often as I did when I was studying in the linguistics department, but it’s a great audio editor. If we started doing podcast work at the library this would be my software of choice.
• Drupal: I barely know how to use this and am only mentioning it because I’m excited to learn more. Someday.
• Ubuntu: This is the Linux distribution I recently installed on our Acer netbook. It’s wonderful, and I find myself thinking, quite seriously, that I could probably get by now without my MacBook. It is, of course, running a whole lot of open-source software, but I won’t put that all on this list – it’s mostly the basic stuff that comes with Ubuntu.
• Gimp: This is probably the one I’ve been using the longest. I’m no pro at it but can use it to do all the basic Photoshop-type editing and graphic creation I need.

**Edit**

Forgot three!!

• Firefox: Use it regularly.
• Thunderbird: I use Thunderbird for email at work. Just looked up the URL and realized I can upgrade to 3.0. Here I go . . .
• Android: Linux-based mobile phone operating system. It runs my phone. It makes me happy.

(Wishing I was still HERE, drinking wine and eating guacamole on homemade bread on my parents’ back porch. With a cat.)

AIME attorney Arnold Lutzker has created a short primer on educational video streaming (part of the AIME vs. UCLA ruckus).

Glide offers 30GB of free storage space and supports all the operating systems and devices I use. Definitely going to check it out.

Dive Into Accessibility: 30 Days to a More Accessible Website. Really good; focuses on the question of “who benefits?” from improved accessibility.

The Berkman Center at Harvard offers a Creative Commons licensed course on Copyright for Librarians. I am currently feeling VERY overwhelmed by all the good resources out there.

I had a great time at the Unconferenz at Kapiolani Community College yesterday. I wasn’t really sure what to expect – it was the first conference I’d gone to that did the whole “unconference” thing, and I wasn’t very familiar with the tech community here in Hawaii, but ooh boy am I glad I went. It was good fun, I met good people, and there was even good food!

The conference venue was beautiful:

We showed up early to eat beignets (perfect little fried dough things) with lilikoi butter at the farmers market on campus, then got ourselves registered and started putting our names on mysterious pieces of paper with topics written on them. Within 45 minutes the organizers had the papers arranged on a time/room grid, and we had our conference schedule! I went to talks on software for photography, news and new media, blogging platforms, Android app development, and finally the use of social media in businesses. All fantastic, and all much more than just talks – they were conversations going on, often at lightening speed, bouncing around a roomful of intelligent and interested people with very diverse backgrounds. Very cool. Lunch gave me a little opportunity for netbook show and tell, along with some netbook envy:

(left: my netbook, running Ubuntu. Right: a 9″ Dell netbook running Mac OSX.)

It was a success. I learned a lot, met some of the “movers and shakers” in the tech community here in Hawaii, and joined TechHui, a Ning-based social networking site for local tech stuff. Not bad for the first Saturday of spring break!

Just discovered the 2009 Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States. It’s interesting. The average download speed in the U.S. is 5.1 mbps; in Hawai’i it’s 3.0 mbps. (Compare to South Korea, the fastest in the world, at 20.4 mbps).

A whole bunch of interesting things going on. Many involve computers/information systems. This morning I was thinking I should have done computer science as my undergrad degree. But then I was thinking I would’ve missed out on a whole lot of Russian, linguistic, and literature goodness. Variety is nice.

1. Got Ubuntu installed and running happily on our Acer AspireOne netbook (it can still boot into Windows too, ’cause I still need that for the TOEFL test grading I do once in a while for extra cash). I know I need more time to really see how I like it, but right now my thinking is “if Ubuntu can do everything I need, and more, and it’s free, and it’s open source, why buy another Mac when my current one dies?”. This last year has been one slow series of moves away from Apple products for me – first the Android phone instead of an iPhone, and now becoming totally smitten with the Ubuntu-tastic netbook while my MacBook sits on the shelf.

2. American Library Association Tech Source webinar on Metadata with Karen Coyle on April 1. I’m signed up. I’m diggin’ metadata these days.

3. The Unconferenz (oh! the Z at the end is like nails on a blackboard!) is coming to Kapiolani Community College this Saturday, March 20, 8am-4pm. Tech, Internet, T-shirt, and lunch, all for $25. Yes, I’m signed up.

4. Interesting New York Times article: Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit. Emory University recently acquired a huge collection of archival material from Salman Rushdie, including FOUR COMPUTERS. With drafts on them. Pretty cool, if you can get at the information in those old files (which it sounds like they could).

5. NiceREALLY GOOD post at The Book of Trogool on open source, open access, open standards . . . all those “opens”. Because yeah, open things are good. But do you really know what exactly you’re talking about? I don’t. Not all the time, at least.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.