Data mash-ups and the future of mapping

Interesting JISC report published last month.  The Summary says (in part):

"This TechWatch report describes the context for the changes that are taking place and explains why the education community needs to understand the issues around how to open up data, how to create mash-ups that do not compromise accuracy and quality and how to deal with issues such as privacy and working with commercial and non-profit third parties. It also shows how data mash-ups in education and research are part of an emerging, richer information environment with greater integration of mobile applications, sensor platforms,e-science, mixed reality, and semantic, machine-computable data and speculates on how this is likely to develop in the future."

Full report (in optimised pdf format) from here.

Arcadia Lecturer honoured by Electronic Freedom Foundation

James Boyle, who was the first Arcadia Lecturer, has been given a Pioneer Award by the EFF.  The awards were established in 1992 to "recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology".  The award will be presented at a ceremony in San Francisco on November 8 hosted by Cory Doctorow, who you may remember, gave an Arcadia Seminar in 2009.

Introduction ...

I'm Ed Chamberlain, the first fellow for Michaelmas 2010. Whilst I've posted on this blog quite frequently, this is my time doing so as an actual fellow! I've spent the first two weeks of my fellowship investigating digitisation-on-demand services at the University Library, with a view to scoping a potential future service.

The aim would be to offer readers digital delivery of print only material, on demand through the library catalogue.

The project may sound a bit woolly at first, after all libraries have been doing digitisation en-mass for mainstream material and rare stuff for some time, but a reader-driven approach covers a number of areas that have an impact on the future of libraries.

By no means the smallest is that of copyright. In looking for automated solutions to copyright assessment I'm currently taking a look at the wonderful copyright calculator API developed by the Open Knowledge foundation. I'll also be looking to highlight some of the problems that copyright legislation raises for libraries wanting to innovate with new digital services.

Later on I'll be looking and quick wins in non-destructive digitisation of bound material and print-on-demand, hoping to learn from the experiences of those already deploying these services.

Whats interesting for myself, as a Systems Librarian, is that there are no major technical challenges here, its arguably as much about changes in work flow and culture as anything. At the heart of it all is the concept of placing choice over the material digitised firmly in the hands of the reader, rather than a Librarian.

More info about my project can be found on the Arcadia project site, as well as a bit of bio blurb.

Project Highlights for the coming academic year

An outline of what's in the pipeline.

FELLOWSHIPS AND PROJECTS

We will have eight Fellows over the course of the year. The first, Ed Chamberlain, is already beavering away on "Digitisation-on-Demand in academic research libraries". We will have two Fellows working on a radical re-engineering of the info-skills curriculum to make it fit for purpose in a networked scholarly environment, and two working on using technology to support the work of a busy teaching library. And Isla Kuhn will be working on designing a one-day symposium on health-related information (see below for more information).

SEMINARS

We have three interesting speakers booked for the Michaelmas Term.

On November 2 Professor Richard Susskind will talk about "The End of Lawyers?" He is one of the world's leading experts on the impact of information technology on the legal profession and has been an adviser to the Lord Chancellor's Department on IT systems for supporting the administration of justice. Given that librarianship is also an established profession that is being profoundly affected by information technology we thought it would be interesting to hear about his experience with his own profession.

More details at http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/27313

On November 16 Dr Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing at the Public Library of Science (PLoS) will talk about "Re-engineering the Scholarly Journal". Open Access publishing will be one of the key areas of interest to the academic community in the coming decades and PLoS is a fascinating and successful enterprise in this area. Given that it's on our doorstep, it seemed like a good idea to hear about PLoS's experience so far and their thoughts about the future.

More details at: http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/27157

On Devember 7 Simon Andrewes will give a talk on the subject of "Changing BBC News: the cultural, managerial and editorial challenges of adapting to a digital environment". Given that adjusting to the needs of a digital environment poses major problems for any established and successful organisation, we were looking for a speaker who could speak from experience. Simon Andrewes was formerly Head of Newsroom development at BBC News and is currently leading a project to deliver and implement a set of online tools to help BBC Journalism collaborate and share more effectively.

More details at: http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/27548

OTHER EVENTS

The Arcadia Lecture: April 2011

The Arcadia Lecture will be given in April 2011 by Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, and the only publisher who can command the attention of Linux-kernel geeks. Tim has built O'Reilly Media into a leading publisher of computing-related books and a major conference-organising organisation on leading-edge technology issues. He is credited with coining the phrase 'Web 2.0' and is widely recognised as one of the world's most influential commentators on technology issues.

International symposium: health information in a digital world

In 2011 we plan to host a major one-day symposium on how online information and search is impacting on health care. As part of her Arcadia Fellowship, Isla Kuhn, will be working on this. The symposium will focus on most (though perhaps not all: a day may be a long time in politics, but it's just a blink in an academic timescale) of the following areas:

Patients

Practitioners

Researchers

Policy-makers

Mass media

Technology

More details will be available as we have them.

OTHER PROJECTS

Specification and development of an iPhone/Android App

We plan to devote some resources to the development of an original, library-related smartphone App. If you're interested in helping imagine and specify an App, please email me (jjn1 at cam).

The Arcadia Project Book

We will be crowdsourcing a book based largely -- but not exclusively -- on reports by Arcadia Fellows, using an approach pioneered by the Dan Cohen, last year's Arcadia Lecturer.

Future scenarios for academic librarians

From Phil Davis, writing on the Scholarly Kitchen blog.

The report, Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025,” sponsored by ACRL, provides nine likely, high-impact scenarios for the future of higher education and the supporting role of librarians. Understanding that universities and their academic libraries take time to adapt to change, the purpose of this study was to start preparing for the likely — or inevitable — future. These scenarios involve:

1. A breaking of the textbook monopoly — creating flexible content that allow pieces to be assembled and allow feedback from users.

2. “I see what you see” — large touch screens that allow for collaborations.

3. “Write here with me” — automated mobile devices that allow students to collect and reference work.

4. Bridging the scholar/practitioner divide — open access publishing and open peer review

5. Stultifying of scholarship — the antithesis of #4 where the current status quo is maintained and strengthened.

6. Everyone is a non-traditional student — moving beyond the 4-year resident college experience.

7. Meet the new freshman class — preparing for the digital divide between in-coming tech-savy students and students with need of remedial technological training.

8. Increasing threat of cybercrime — as campuses lock down their technology, online privacy and intellectual freedom are compromised.

9. “This class brought to you by . . . ” — disaggregated education provided by corporate sponsors.

Enola Gay and digital preservation

Interesting blog post by Danny Bradbury, who made a documentary a few years ago about the cultural history of the nuclear weapons programme. One of the most interesting interviews he had was with Martin Harwit who had been director of the National Air and Space museum in Washington, DC, but was rudely ousted in 1995.

Harwit had attempted to mount an exhibition showcasing the Enola Gay, which was the B52 airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. As part of that exhibition, he tried to ask whether the bombing was justified. His approach called down a rain of fire. He was blasted for historical revisionism by the politically powerful veteran community, and the board had little opportunity but to let him go.

The spectre of the Enola Gay's public display caused a tussle before Harwit's moral inquiry even began. The exhibition was mounted because 1995 was the 50-year anniversary of the bombing, and veterans were anxious to see the plane exhibited that year.

Archivists had other ideas. They wanted the job done properly. They knew that in 500 years, when historians examined the aircraft, they might ask an array of arcane, academic questions. For example, what materials were the alloys in specific engine parts comprised of? Investigating minute details such as these and acquiring or rebuilding complex parts for complete veracity takes a great deal of time and effort. They may not have been interesting for veterans who wanted to see their bird fly one last time, but skimping on such tasks for short-term satisfaction puts the whole archival endeavour at risk.

The more I think about the quandary facing archivists preparing the Enola Gay exhibit, the more I worry about our digital existence. Increasingly, our lives are articulated digitally. We share our experiences with others online, and carry out more of our transactions in binary form. The amount of information that we create is accelerating exponentially. "Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created," said Google CEO Eric Schimdt recently. "We [now] create five exabytes every two days."

Archiving this stuff is going to be really difficult, in a way that the Enola Gay's archivists couldn't begin to imagine. For one thing, there's the physical media involved. Information may become increasingly stored in the cloud, but it must still be held on physical media, in some data centre somewhere.

Estimates for the longevity of this physical media vary, but all of them point to instability; eventually, data storage decays. It turns out that tape, which is increasingly becoming an archival medium rather than a backup one, is particularly prone to damage because of the way that robotic tape libraries work. In order to access the information that we store today centuries hence, we'll need media that stands the test of time.

New Masters course in Knowledge and Networks

Cathy Davidson at Duke University is designing an intriguing Masters course and has put the outline proposal on the Web for commenting.

Current topic headings are:

Attention: What are the new ways that we pay attention in a digital era? How do we need to change our concepts and practices of attention for a new era? How do we learn and practice new forms of attention in a digital age?
Participation: How do we encourage meaningful interaction and participation? What is its purpose on a cultural, social, or civic level?
Collaboration: Collaboration can simply reconfirm consensus, acting more as peer pressure than a lever to truly original thinking. HASTAC has cultivated the methodology of “collaboration by difference” to inspire meaningful ways of working together.
Network awareness: How we both thrive as creative individuals and understand our contribution within a network of others? How do you gain a sense of what that extended network is and what it can do?
Global Consciousness: How does the World Wide Web change our responsibilities in and to the world we live in?
Civic Responsibility: How we can be good citizens of the Internet when we are off line, working towards real goals in our communities and using the community practices of sharing, customizing, and contributing online towards responsible civic action off line?
Design: How is information conveyed differently, effectively, and beautifully in diverse digital forms? How do we understand and practice the elements of good design as part of our communication and interactive practices?
Narrative, Storytelling: How do narrative elements shape the information we wish to convey, helping it to have force in a world of competing information?
Procedural Literacy: What are the new tactics and strategies of interactive games, where the multimedia narrative forms changes because of our success or failure?
Critical consumption of information: Without a filter (editors, experts, and professionals), much information on the Internet can be inaccurate, deceptive, or inadequate. How do we learn to be critical? What are the standards of credibility?
Digital Divides, Digital Participation: What divisions still remain in digital culture? Who is included and who excluded? How do basic aspects of economics and culture dictate not only who participates in the digital age but how we participate?
Ethics: What are the new moral imperatives of our interconnected age?
Advocacy: How do we turn collaborative, procedural thinking on line into activism in the real world?
Preservation: What are the requirements for preserving the digital world we are creating? Paper lasts. Platforms change.
Sustainability: What are the metrics for sustainability in a world where we live on more kilowatts than ever before? How do we protect the environment in a plugged-in era?
Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning: Alvin Toffler has said that, in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in one’s tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn.

Thanks to John Connell for the link.

This is an interesting venture, and it has some useful echoes for us -- especially given that we will have two Arcadia Fellows in the Easter Term working on designing a new curriculum for information skills.