Article Review Assignment

Ribbon Cutting and Ephemera

Stephen Griffin. (July/August 2005) Funding for Digital Libraries Research Past and Present. D-Lib Magazine v 11 Number 7/8

Stephen M. Griffin in Funding for Digital Libraries Research Past and Present provides a history of the various phases of the Interagency Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) and its funding structures, as well as a survey of various successes and failures over its ten-year history. As Program Director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Griffin grounds the familiar tale of the Internet’s exponential growth in terms of government investment, starting with the development of secure communications networks through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and continuing with the NSF’s own net-based schemes to facilitate parallel computing in the solution of grand challenge problems (those problems, usually within physics, biology or engineering, beyond the computational capability of a single machine.) (Wikipedia) Familiar sites, such as Yahoo’s keyword-based search engine have academic origins in Stanford. At the same university, an alternate search engine called BackRub using web-links as a ranking mechanism was developed with DLI project funding; this endeavor is better known today as Google. Even the on-line magazine from which this article is taken, DLib—founded by DARPA in 1995—is a product of government investment in the Internet.

Beginning in 1994, the first phase of the Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI-1) was exclusively oriented towards IT research. The NSF and DARPA were joined by NASA to collaboratively fund six programs at Carnegie Mellon, Santa Barbara, Michigan, Illinois, Stanford and Berkeley at a rate of one million per year over a four-year period. Projects focused on now familiar subjects such as metadata, intelligent agents, GIS positioning, and digital video libraries. From the beginning, pre-existing funding structures influenced the presentation and organization of projects. Reports were organized to comply with Federal High Performance Computing Program (HPCC) requirements.

In its second phase, which lasted from 1998-2002, the DLI expanded its mandate to include more immediately recognizable facets of library operations such as content development and usability studies. Agencies such as the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities added their financial support. Anticipating the importance of digital resources to their own missions, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Smithsonian Institution joined planning meetings. Two separate competitions lead to the sponsorship of about 50 projects approximately $8-10 million per year for five years.

McMillan (1999) sees this late involvement of traditional library institutions as a critical problem in the definition and development of digital libraries, “Computer scientists have an unfortunate tendency to limit DLs primarily to repositories of information.” Citing a conflict between this research-oriented definition and service oriented or institutional definitions of the library, Borgman (1999) recalls that “sometimes other research projects were simply relabeled ‘digital libraries’ adding to the confusion.”

The expanded scope also posed logistical problems. Griffin posits that if post-modern interdisciplinary collaboration the between the arts and sciences--such as the Perseus Project—is accelerated by the digital age, it also faces stiff challenges from academic departments’ insular social environments. Similarly the goal of international cooperation, already well established within the scientific community, conflicted with the NSF’s own mandate towards domestic investment and hence its departmental funding structure. As a result, proposals presented to the DLI were often amalgamations of domestic and overseas projects. Harmonized calls for proposals were developed in partnership with the United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which lead to further collaborations with Germany, the EU, Asia and Africa. These cooperative projects facilitate international standardization not only in terms of information architecture but also in the representation of information. Griffin comments “Otherwise the future global information environment would likely be a larger version of the current one, characterized by increasingly abundant data of many types, chaotic in representation and organization, unstable over time, uneven in quality, and difficult to find, retrieve, and put to productive use.” Elsewhere he asserts that making allowances for adjustments to project mandates as new technologies arise is essential to the planning of future initiatives. Beyond the digitization of images and book-like materials, three-dimensional modeling is an essential element of such projects as the Digital Michelangelo and the Digital Morphology Project. A unique process synchronizing musical notation with actual musical performances is the basis of Variations. The combination of interdisciplinary and international cooperation combined with new digital technology can most clearly be seen in fields such as archeology; Scholars now share a global library of digital facsimiles.

For such a multi-faceted pursuit, Griffin is largely positive in his evaluation. But before evaluation can begin, a larger problem involves determining the appropriate metrics for success. In the same way that digital library is a problematically divided between two opposing paradigms, the Digital Libraries Initiative itself refers both a funding structure and a wide range of intellectual endeavors. Immediate or long-term financial returns, the production of new knowledge within a given academic field, popular media coverage, or use by the general public can all be used as yardsticks. Nevertheless, eight years into its mandate, reports that digital libraries are “just beginning to move from research to practice” combined with calls for the development of an “evaluation infrastructure” (Borgman, 2003) are hardly reassuring.

One chronic problem facing digital libraries is a direct result of funding issues. Any search through DLI projects will reveal a large number of ribbon-cutters: collections of digital material, which despite grand intentions, remain only shells for further development. Griffin writes “In terms of the lifecycle for digital libraries projects, funding was generally limited to the ‘research and testbed/prototype building’ stage.” Two years after its launch, The International Children's Digital Library offers a scant 820 works. In theory, its multicultural and multilingual mandate gives the library a worldwide audience. In practice, the small collection offers only a few specific titles in any language other than English. Copyright restrictions—and a choice of clunky interfaces that only its parents could love—guarantee that scarcely anything offered would either delight or instruct a child propped against a computer screen. History and Politics Out Loud, part of the National Gallery of the Spoken Word, offers a piddling 104 streaming clips in RealAudio format. When a number of such projects are grouped together, as in the Library of Congresses’ American Memory site, the piecemeal nature of multiple incomplete sites makes locating materials difficult by any method. Keyword searches produce materials splayed over a variety of site domains. Browsing through the site leads to anomalies such as ten plays by Zora Neale Hurston available only as a series of high-resolution tiff files. Finding the dominant approach to organizing digital libraries “fraught with problems”, Dalbello (2004) writes:

In showcasing material through Web exhibits, the material is reduced to emblematic functions but, overall, is without a scholarly value because it is disconnected from its original collections. Even when these online collections are extensive, the display and retrieval mechanisms are too crude and the size of these collections are insufficient to serve the traditional scholarly purposes of sustained, rigorous, and systematic research.

Clearly funding for more thorough and exhaustive coverage of well-chosen specific fields is necessary as well as a clear feedback structure to evaluate an improve usability. But because digital libraries, as opposed to traditional libraries, are inevitably composed of small pieces of information that can be potentially grouped together in any number of ways, a more flexible knowledge management system is necessary to allow users to group information beyond the limited options created by their host portals.

These problems are compounded by the multiple audiences for any given project be they computer scientists, scholars, funding bodies, the press or the general public. Some projects appear primarily as demonstrations of a particular technological innovation or project architecture but lead to uneasy sensation that testbed creation has taken precedence over implementation. Despite public funding, many are limited to a specific academic clientele. Users of Variations 2 must be Indiana University students, faculty, and staff. The three dimensional models emerging from Digital Michelangelo are restricted to “published researchers who are currently affiliated with a university, company, or other major institution” and “scholars in museums or other cultural institutions.” Macintosh users cannot view the models available on Digimorph over the web. Despite promises of “globally distributed information-of-value accessible to large, diverse user populations desiring knowledge for many purposes” a number of the projects make good press—as the DLI-2 website attests—but in actual use fail any measure of utility. Even the highly praised Perseus Project demands that users read lengthy texts on a page-by-page or even paragraph-by-paragraph basis with no option to configure and print an extended work.

In his introduction, Griffin rehearses familiar paradoxes of exponential growth promising the potential for universal access—“The cost of components continues to plummet as capabilities increase by orders of magnitude, lowering the barriers to acquisition and operation of high performance computing and communications resources”—and ever increasing technological innovation, a “self-reinforcing cycle of technology advances and increasing public demand for more” which in effect limits access to the so-called early majority. At the launch of DLI-2 Schatz (1999) cites dire warnings from the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) report which exclaims that “the current Federal program is inadequate to start necessary new centers and research programs” and that “the end result is that critical problems are going unsolved and we are endangering the flow of ideas that have fueled the information economy.” While Griffin may claim “Digital content has become the driver for Internet growth” it is an open question whether or not he is in fact referring to digital content which the DLI provides.

Reference List

Borgman, C. (1999) What are digital libraries? Competing visions. Information Processing and Management: an International Journal archive v 35 p. 227 - 243

Borgman, C (2003, January 10) NSF report on DELOS Workshop on DL evaluation. Retrieved November 7, 2005 from http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/internationalprojects/ working_group_reports/evaluation.pdf

Dalbello, M. (2004) Institutional shaping of cultural memory: digital library as environment for textual transmission. Library Quarterly, v74 i3 p265(34)

Griffin S. (July/August 2005) Funding for Digital Libraries Research Past and Present. D-Lib Magazine v 11 Number 7/8 Retrieved October 17, 2005 from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/griffin/07griffin.html

Levoy M. (2005, September 1) The Digital Michelangelo Project Archive of 3D Models. Retrieved October 17, 2005, from http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/mich/
http://digimorph.org/index.phtml

Library of Congress (2004, January 7) The Zora Neal Hurston Plays. Retrieved October 17, 2005, from http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/znhhtml/znhhome.html

McMillan, G. (1999) Digital libraries support distributed education or put the library in digital library. American Library Association. Retrieved Nov 7 2005 from www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlevents/mcmillan99.pdf

Schatz, B. & Chen, H. (1999) Digital Libraries: Technological Advances and Social Impacts. IEEE Computer, Special Issue on Digital Libraries 32(2) p. 45-50.

University of Indiana (2005, May 11) Variations 2 The University of Indiana Digital Music Library. Retrieved October 17, 2005, from http://www.dml.indiana.edu

Grand challenge problem (2005, 8 August) Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 17, 2005, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Challenge_problem




Sites Visited
The Digital Michelangelo Project: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich
Digital Morphology (Digimorph): http://www.digimorph.org
History and Politics Out Loud: http://www.hpol.org
International Children's Digital Library: http://www.icdlbooks.org
The National Gallery of the Spoken Word: http://www.ngsw.org
The Perseus Digital Library: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
Variations: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/variations

Project Profile: Plone

Many Hands, One Look, Two Directions?

Plone an open source Content Management System used for various applications utilizing multiple authors such as blogs, wikis, Internet or—most commonly—intranet sites, not only facilitates the work of many hands but is also the product of many hands. Yet the application at times also appears to be servant of its two very different masters: the cash-strapped newcomers for whom the product is intended and the international cadre of coding magi who create it.

In general a Content Management System, or CMS, ensures that the work of many different individuals maintain a consistent look and feel from page to page. Plone supports two different standards of Cascading Style Sheets. From a consumer’s point of view, Plone’s simple generic style enhances usability. From an institutional perspective, the emphasis on consistency facilitates delegation. In a library setting for example, this means the Internet page produced by Children’s Services uses the same formatting and style as the page uploaded by the Volunteer Coordinator. Beyond achieving consistency, CMSs allow both for remote contributions and for the virtual replication of organizational hierarchies. Each user or user group is assigned a role, which defines different areas for submission, permissions and approval mechanisms. Thus the technologically knowledgeable head of Children’s Services can directly upload pages from a far away conference or vet pages submitted department staff before making them visible to the public. The Volunteer Coordinator may have to wait for approval from a designated administrator. To facilitate this workflow, Plone utilizes metadata to define individual submissions as folders, documents, links, files, and images. Two types of designated content, events and news items, can even be uploaded for automatic release on a preprogrammed effective date.

Open source software “generally allows anybody to make a new version of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it.” (Wikipedia, 2005, October 1) The sheer scale of the Plone’s distributed development is facilitated by the hierarchical nature of object-oriented software. Limi has claimed core developers in 14 countries worldwide, each working on a small section of modular code. (2003, Feb 26) As a groupware application eager maximize its market, interoperability is a key concern. Versions of Plone are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. Pages can be viewed with most browsers including mobile phones. A growing Asian sector has made localization—the ability to use the software interface in one’s own language—and multilingual support a particular area of focus for Plone developers. The earliest version supported Japanese, Chinese and Korean. By 2004, Plone supported over 30 languages. (Carlson,2004) Jung reports bugs in the latest implementation of the international character set Unicode however. (2004) Confirming Raymond’s dictum "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (1998) a fix was posted soon after.

Besides being free, Plone’s primary attraction is out of the box functionality. On the release of Version 1.01 in 2003, eWeek declared it “quite possibly the most easily deployed server application we’ve ever seen, open source or commercial.” Many of Plone’s features are customizable without users having to learn the Zope Content Management Framework, the server software that makes it possible to run the other applications, or Python, their shared programming language. A host of separately developed function-specific plug-ins is also available. Because Plone in its current incarnation is primarily oriented towards text, the sites of even its most prestigious users—Oxfam America (http://www.oxfamamerica.org) Lufthansa (http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov )—tend to be primarily informational, low on graphics and budget conscious. The barebones simplicity of the basic Plone framework makes even fashion designer Vera Wang’s website (http://www.verawang.com) look somewhat homemade despite the implementation of Flash and customized programming.

The goals of ease of use and open customizable coding are sometimes in conflict however. Both the Plone FAQ (2004) and Meloni (2005) contain warnings of a steep learning curve. Even upgrading from Plone 2.0.5 to Plone 2.1 might require the services of a nearby technical wizard:

Create a blank Plone 2.1 site
Import the content into the new
site (either by using zexp import or by doing cut/paste (not copy!) from a
parallel instance)
Run the Recatalog CMF code from the portal_atct tool (not
required but recommended)
Enter the URL
YOUR_SITE_HERE/portal_atct/migrationFixCMFPortalTypes to invoke the fixing code.
It makes sure that a CMF based Document gets the portal type name "CMF Document"
After the CMF portal types have been fixed you can run the regular
ATContentTypes migration from the migration tab. (Limi, 2004)

Documentation, a primary weakness in the past, has mostly been solved through Andy McKay's Definitive Guide to Plone available online in PDF format, but Plone offers limited customer support other than contacting its pool of volunteer programmers. For the more technically minded, a common functional disadvantage has been a higher than average use of computing power and RAM in servers running Plone. Perhaps more worrisome are the separate development streams for Zope 3 and Plone—based on Zope 2—which Mattison (2003) dubs “The Plone Wars.”

Despite the anarchic idyll suggested by Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, open source does not necessarily imply an ad hoc organizational structure. Five years after Alan Runyan, Alexander Limi, and Vidar Andersen began the project in 1999, the Plone Foundation was formed to handle communications, promotions, solicit funds and maintain legal ownership of code, trademarks, and domain names. The Foundation includes a Board of Directors as well an Executive Director who manages operations. Corporate sponsorship is provided by Computer Associates, whose business includes the installation, support and customization of various open source applications to its corporate clientele. Plone’s development team organizes Plone sprints, usually weeklong conventions of their loosely organized virtual developers’ community. Typically, developers are grouped into pairs—one is usually a senior programmer—to tackle one aspect of the sprint’s selected challenge. The recent Vancouver Sprint focused on bug testing for the upcoming release of Plone 2.1. The Vienna sprint in September looked at means of more fully integrating multimedia and RSS feeds. Besides bragging rights, participant programmers garner favor in the growing market for teaching and customization of open source software.

Just in case out of the box does not work.



Reference List

Burton, J. Davis, G., & Everitt, P. (2004, September 13) Plone Foundation FAQs Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://plone.org/foundation/faq

Carlson, K. (2004, December 22) An open-source solution for Content Management: The open-source arena now has its own world-class content-management system. InformationWeek

Jung, A. (2004) Just a minor unicode nightmare with Plone 2.0 Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://zopyx.com/Members/ajung/Articles/a_unicode_nightmare

Limi, A. (2004, December 18) Plone FAQ. Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://plone.org/documentation/faq?full=1

Limi, A. (2003, Feb 26) Why Plone? An Intranet Point of View Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://plone.org/about/articles/plone-intranet

McKay, A. (2005, May 16) The definitive guide to Plone. Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://plone.org/documentation/manual/definitive-guide/definitive_guide_to_plone.pdf

Mattison D. (2003, April) Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone wars: wiki as a PIM and collaborative content tool Searcher Vol. 11 No. 4 Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr03/mattison.shtml

Meloni, J. Plone content management essentials. Indianapolis, Ind.: Sams, 2005.

Open-source software (2005, October 1) Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open_source_model

Plone (CMS) (2005, 28 September) Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plone_(CMS)

Plone Sprints. (2005, August 14) Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plone_Sprints
http://plone.org/events/sprints/multimedia/

Rapoza J.(2004, March 29) Plone improves usability, flexibility. eWeek Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1557819,00.asp

Raymond E. (1998) The Cathedral and the Bazaar. First Monday Retrieved October 1, 2005, from http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/raymond


Websites:

Lufthansa http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/LH_COM?ctest=15655049891

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Oxfam America http://www.oxfamamerica.org

Vera Wang http://www.verawang.com

Picture Trial

One of the reasons I chose this template, at least until I can develop some way of more fully personalizing it, was that it seemed the most suited to the late seventies aesthetic I seem to be so drawn towards.

To that end, a bunch of supercool folk looking for trouble.

Hi ! I’m Brent Cehan.

I’m a Masters student in the LIS steam at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. I am an Associate of the Ontario College of Art (1989) and a Bachelor of Arts in the English Specialist Degree Program at Victoria College (2001). I have worked at the Toronto Reference Library for the past 15-years. I currently work in the Special Collections Centre as a manuscript and gallery assistant--we have done shows on the Group of Seven, the Festival of Festivals and have a show on Animals coming up--and at Answerline the Toronto Public Library’s central information service.

This is my fifteenth course at FIS. Course number sixteen is Library Advocacy.

As a visual artist, I’ve been a guest performer/speaker at Guelph, Concordia and the University of Western Ontario. I’ve also contributed to Fuse magazine and exhibited at Mercer Union Gallery. I have also been a grants juror for both the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

Most of my computer background has been oriented towards graphic arts so I’m really excited, albeit overwhelmed, by the course material. Still, I look at this as an excellent opportunity to develop some useful technical skills. Even at this late stage in the game, I have not thrown up a web page or managed a database. Even Excel has been out of my day-to-day activities.

Nevertheless, I’ve just finished printing out all the web-based readings for the course. (I’ve found it best to survey the whole before I get to the individual pieces: usually that extra hour one needs to get the assignment done is hiding in the “quiet time” before the course gets rolling.)

Cheers,

Brent