notes & links

I’m taking a page from John’s book and keeping these notes here. Not so much because it is helpful for me today, but because in the future I may be able to be as efficient as John and Terry about getting these done at the conferences themselves.

I agree with Terry that it should be very interesting to see the reactions different people had to the same talks at Access. I’m only going to write about the talks I liked or talks I found useful (with perhaps one exception)

2nd session - Our Ontario: Yours to Recover (link to podcast)

Link to slides

Walter Lewis
Art Rhyno

This talk focused on one of the six services included in the Knowledge Ontario project, Our Ontario, which focuses on community content. They defined community content as all of that ephemeral content generated by community newspapers, newsletters, etc. that is captured by historical societies and community groups but is hard to access and sometimes disappears when people die, or move out of the community. So they are collecting a lot of stuff, in a lot of formats, with a lot of different kinds of metadata that needs to be attached.

They’re hoping that Lucene is the technology that will make the project happen underneath the presentation layer. This talk was notable in that it was the first time we heard the word “Lucene.” They described a variety of challenges: including stuff that’s really big, and stuff that’s really small, and bringing that stuff together in a coherent way. They also have to manage the metadata behind the scenes - and they have a lot of players and organizations participating. Sometimes they need to provide ways for those players to manage the data as well. So they have to consider their presentation layer, indexing layer and (for those institutions that need it) a content management layer.

What was interesting to me is that they’ve built in a lot of participatory features - like comments - so that users can add additional community information/knowledge to the objects and items included in this resource. They showed digital photographs that had been enhanced by user-provided content explaining where and when the photographs were taken, and identifying the people in the pictures. I have already found these examples to be a useful way to show non-library or non-technical audiences why these kinds of participatory features are useful and exciting for libraries and archives, even as they pose challenges of their own.