I wish I could attend the Educause Western Regional Conference happening the week after next in SF, whose speaker list includes a number of folks I know personally.

It’s great to see more library catalogs with APIs, such as those documented in REST output from Huddersfield’s catalogue.

Congratulations to Roy Tennant on his new position at OCLC:

With OCLC I have an incredible opportunity to be active on a broader stage. OCLC is big enough to put libraries on the Internet map in a way that none of us could achieve alone. Open WorldCat is but one example of many. I will be working as a Senior Program Manager with the RLG Programs unit of OCLC Research and Programs. I will report to Jim Michalko, who in turn reports to Lorcan Dempsey. I have met virtually all of the top management team at OCLC and I’ve been very impressed. They know where things are heading and they’re determined to position libraries in a way that will do us the most good.

It’s a big loss for CDL — but I’m looking forward to seeing Roy’s influence at work on the larger playing field of OCLC.

I unintentionally deleted all my cookies in Firefox Argh. The interface should have prompted me that I was deleting all my cookies and not just the one I had highlighted. and deleting cookies — should be prompted!

The Citizendium editorial council email list is archived on the web — e.g., The Cz-editcouncil April 2007 Archive by thread

Any reason to use Shelfari instead of LibraryThing?

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the folks behind Zotero, is hiring. They are doing wonderful work — check out the following list if you have any interest in the intersection of history and digital technology You can find the listings at

http://chnm.gmu.edu/news/archives/job_openings_postdoc_.php

which I quote here:

February 08, 2007

Job Openings - Post-Doc, Digital History Associate, Summer Intern

The Center for History and New Media is growing, and we are currently looking to fill positions at several levels:

Post-Doc in History of Science & Technology and/or Digital History: This is a one-year position (with possible renewal) at the rank of Research Assistant Professor at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), which is closely affiliated with the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. A PhD or advanced ABD in History or a closely related field is required. We are especially interested in people with some or all of the following credentials, but they are not required for the position: 1. experience in digital history or digital libraries; 2. strong technical background in new technology and new media; 3. administrative and organizational experience; 4. background in the history of science, technology, and industry, broadly defined; 5. background in post-1945 U.S. history. Please send letter of application, CV or resume, and three letters of recommendation (or dossier) to chnm@gmu.edu or Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive MS 1E7, Fairfax, VA 22030. Electronic submissions encouraged. Please use subject line “Digital Historian.” We will begin considering applications 15 March 2006.

Digital History Associate: The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University is hiring two “Digital History Associates.” We are seeking energetic, well-organized people who take initiative and work well collaboratively. We are especially interested in people with some combination of research experience, administrative experience, and web development and programming experience. These exciting, grant-funded positions are particularly appropriate for someone with combined interest in history and technology, but the only specific requirements are a BA by June 1, 2007, and a demonstrated interest in both history and the web. Please apply for position #10384Z online at jobs.gmu.edu and attach both a resume and a cover letter. We will begin considering applications on 3/15/07 and continue until the positions are filled.

Summer Intern – Humanities Computing: The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University is seeking creative, energetic, well-rounded, and well-organized college/high school students for 8-12 week paid summer internships in 2007 at a leading digital humanities center. Ability to work in a team is very important. Strong grades are essential. Preference will be given to those with working knowledge of one or more of the following: web-database development in PHP and MySQL; JavaScript, XML, CSS, and other technologies critical for Firefox development; and command-line Linux system administration. This is an especially good opportunity for someone with a combined interest in computing and history. Please send resume and cover letter with subject line: “humanities computing internship” to chnm@gmu.edu. We will begin considering applications on 2/15/07 and will continue until the position is filled.

About CHNM: Since 1994, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has used digital media and computer technology to change the ways that people—scholars, students, and the general public—learn about and use the past. We do that by bringing together the most exciting and innovative digital media with the latest and best historical scholarship. We believe that serious scholarship and cutting edge multimedia can be combined to promote an inclusive and democratic understanding of the past as well as a broad historical literacy that fosters deep understanding of the most complex issues about the past and present. CHNM’s work has been internationally recognized for cutting-edge work in history and new media. Located in Fairfax, Virginia, CHNM is 15 miles from Washington, DC, and is accessible by public transportation.

There is a call for proposals for what promises to be a highly intriguing future-of-the-library conference on the Berkeley campus:

The LAUC-B 2007 Conference Planning Committee is seeking proposals for break-out sessions for the upcoming LAUC-B conference on the theme of “Academic Library 2.0″. The conference will be held November 2, 2007 at the Clark Kerr convention center in Berkeley, CA.

The theme of the conference encompasses, but is not limited to the following, as they relate to academic libraries:
* blogs and vlogs
* wikis
* podcasts
* RSS
* photo and videosharing: Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube
* social bookmarking
* tagging and folksonomies
* user-driven comment, rating, and recommender systems
* the “wisdom of crowds” and/or “radical trust”
* new user habits, behaviors, and expectations
* user-centered, socially-driven services
* user-created web content

Break-out sessions will be an hour and a half, and should engage their audiences with interactive components. The committee is particularly interested in proposals discussing practical projects, and in those offering hands-on experience to their audience.

To submit a proposal, complete the form at the following URL by April 1, 2007:

http://laucbconf07.wufoo.com/forms/laucb-2007-conf-cfp-academic-library-20/

You may submit more than one proposal, but please use a separate form for each proposal submitted.

Best wishes,
Karen Munro

Karen Munro
E-Learning Librarian
University of California, Berkeley
Doe/Moffitt Libraries
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
kmunro AT library.berkeley.edu
510-643-1636

I’m looking forward to reading Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in code : two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software. I remain optimistic about Chandler, a next-generation Personal Information Manager (PIM) integrating calendar, e-mail, contact management, task management, notes, and instant messaging, though it’s hard to do so after reading Joel Spolsky’s The Big Picture, a quasi-review of Dreaming in code.

Two words from the second half of Spotlight on Web 2.0 12-8-06 1-5-07 FridayLive! TLT Group Online Institute resonated with me:

• self-service
• disaggregation

In the session, I also learned about the course ETEC 527: Technologies for Instructional Delivery.

To dig deeper into digital humanities, I will read A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. I will note that there are so many great faculty at great faculty at the UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information Science studying scholarly work.

In doing some basic thinking about ERP at universities, I found the following references helpful:

• Enterprise resource planning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia provides a good generic summary.
• Open source ERP InfoWorld Analysis 2005-08-08 By Oliver Rist: Does open source help out in the ERP space? I would think so in the long term. But right now?
• PeopleSoft - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is a good overview of PeopleSoft

university context

• Enterprise Systems UCB Goes ERP: Berkeley’s Infrastructure Includes New Business Rules and Policies is useful for the Berkeley context.

As I try to sort through the hype of SOA, I found the following articles useful reads over the holidays:

• CIO Blogs - Is SOA Another Fake Path to IT Agility? . Yes, designing reusable services is not an easy process. I think that people need to learn how be discriminating “consumers” of services before they can become savvy “producers” Often they are trying to skip that first stage of learning.
• CIO Blogs - The Starting Point for SOA . It seems to make sense that portals could be as a good starting point for SOA implementations. Portals are easy to understand. You can do SOA implementations in steps.

A very good overview piece on enterprise architecture is A New Blueprint For The Enterprise - Enterprise Architecture - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005, an article on the connections among services and an event-driven model. I like the notion of an EA Zoning Board. The article is matched with a good piece on enterprise architects, who they are and do and what signs of good architects: WANTED: Enterprise Architects - - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005

It’s good to hear someone say that you can EA without an overarching business strategy: EA Without The Strategy - - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005.

EA On The Cheap - - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005 points out how to do things on the cheap — the most basic steps:

Doing enterprise architecture on the cheap means you have to forgo much of the planning and governance and focus instead on services and reusable integration. That may still mean investing in some developers who know Web services and buying some middleware to provide the integration glue that Web services lacks, but the CFO will be able to hold onto those old mainframes while watching IT become more responsive and quicker to deliver new capabilities from them.

what architects look for in other architects

Some quotes from: Master Builders - - CIO Magazine Mar 1,2005, in response to the question “What to look for in an architect?”:

• “Businesspeople tend to be extroverts, whereas 75 percent of IT people are introverts. You have to be able to relate to both.”
• “They need to have a passion for tying things together; they should be constantly thinking about the big picture.”
• “I would look for excitement and passion. If I ask them about a project they’ve worked on, I want them to say, ‘Oh yeah, you should have seen what we did,’ and then talk for the next 20 minutes. He didn’t just do it; he lived it.”
• “You can’t just talk a good game; you have to deliver. I would ask someone to give an example of a strategic project they’ve led that brought together business and IT. Get them to focus on the key attributes that made that project work. Also, they need to be able to speak strategically and know the right level of detail needed.”

CNI2006fall EDUCAUSE CONNECT has some good interviews to listen to get a feel for the national IT scene in higher education.

Mashups mix data into global service : Nature is a one-year old article on mashups in scientific computation:

Will 2006 be the year of the mashup? Originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks, the term now refers to websites that weave data from different sources into a new service. They are becoming increasingly popular, especially for plotting data on maps, covering anything from cafés offering wireless Internet access to traffic conditions. And advocates say they could fundamentally change many areas of science — if researchers can be persuaded to share their data.

I got to remember to check in on the webcasts in early March for this fascinating conference on the future of libraries: De Lange Conference VI Emerging Libraries De Lange Conference Rice University.

Oren Sreebny’s Weblog: (CSG 2007) Thursday workshop on collaboration tools:

….we have a tremendous proliferation of new species of software appearing almost on a daily basis and combining and evolving at a very rapid rate, making it very difficult to figure out which ones we should engage with at an enterprise level, or even how to construct a meaningful taxonomy of these applications.

Some recent observations:

• There is an increasing disconnect between the IT capabilities available to individuals, especially cutting-edge innovative individuals (as well as “ordinary people”) and what the institution is providing.
• UCB IT needs to respond to both end-users and purveyors of enterprise computing hardware and services.
• Many, many of the tools of Web 2.0 can be used to support/enhance teaching and research. Of course, it takes some learning, reflection, and experimentation to do so.
• I’d like to learn more about Information Technology Infrastructure Library - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (ITIL).

Wondering what how to keep UC Berkeley competitive in an increasingly “flat world“, I found the essay Berkeley and braving the new flat world by Richard Newton (who just passed away at the much too young age of 55) heartening:

I believe we at Berkeley must simply double-down on our efforts to identify and bring the best and brightest here to Berkeley, as undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, visiting scholars and faculty, in a strategy I call “intellectual insourcing.” We must work harder than we ever have before to build upon and extend our regional lead as the most important cradle of discovery and innovation in the world by assembling a critical mass of talent right here in the Bay Area. Ultimately, I believe such a strategy is the most important way Berkeley Engineering can help create a sizeable “bump”—ideally a mountain—on this new flat world.

I’m rather sympathetic to the view that IT Architects Must Write Code — or at least should be capable of writing prototyping code.

I find A Conversation with Werner Vogels quite an inspiring picture of what we might be able to build at UC.

Rice University News & Media:

Rice University and IBM will collaborate on the development of an open-standards-based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will help higher education institutions tie together their increasingly diverse academic software applications. The collaboration is supported in part by IBM’s Shared University Research award program, created to exemplify the deep partnership between academia and the industry to explore research in areas essential to innovation. Through the award and software from the IBM Academic Initiative, IBM has donated IBM BladeCenter hardware technology, software for an SOA platform and related services valued at $700,000.

Bubble redux? Perspectives CNET News.com:

You won’t find the big ideas that ignited breakthrough developments during this phase. With all due respect to their inventors, mashups don’t represent the apex of Silicon Valley’s creative genius. The truly exciting stuff still waits over the horizon. That’s where things are going to get more interesting.

MIT to try Python for introductory CS course (AMK’s Journal):

Philosophically, the material tries to follow a “practice-theory-practice” model: First, a task is presented and students work on it. Then, students learn the theory that underlies the problem presented, and finally the students tackle the problem again, given these better techniques, Kaelbling said.

» Interested in learning how to develop mashups? Welcome to Mashup U. Online Between the Lines ZDNet.com:

My personal belief is that mashup style software development, as ecosytems go, will easily overtake most other software development ecosystems in number of developers and applications. To help acclerate that process, ZDNet, in conjunction with Mashup University (the event) now brings Mashup U directly to you, on your desktop at no cost to you.

The “circle of life” — NonCartoonist’s comment on “Interested in learning how to develop mashups? Welcome to Mashup U. Online” TalkBack on ZDNet:

So, should we not use mash ups because they are easy to design and then hard to work with? No. They are part of the normal development process. “Pieces parts” or “Frankenstein” systems (now called “mash ups”) typically break ground in a new area. Once the paradigm is established the “vertical solutions” that are easier to maintain move in and take over. Mash ups (or what ever their next “nom de querre” will be) move on to break new ground in a new area. It’s all part of the cirle of life…

Possible alternatives to jython:

• Jepp - Java Embedded Python
• JPype - Java to Python integration

Nelson’s Weblog: tech / bad / whySoapSucks:

As someone who bears some past responsibility for well used SOAP services (Google’s APIs for search and AdWords) let me say now I’d never choose to use SOAP and WSDL again. I was wrong.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Christopher Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, plans to relate cyberinfrastructure to learning technologies at his talk Teaching and Learning via Cyberinfrastructure on Nov 7, 2006. Much of the cyberinfrastructure discussion I’ve seen has focused on the research implications of this new tech-infrastructure. Will Dede help us think about the learning implications? The abstract for the talk is:

The National Science Foundation is evolving an ambitious vision of cyberinfrastructure–the integration of computing, data, networks, digitally enabled sensors, observatories, and experimental facilities. As the nation begins to actualize this vision, novel, powerful capabilities are emerging for educational simulation, visualization, and real-time data collection. Through cyberinfrastructure, students in any location could conduct sophisticated inquiry activities across barriers of distance and time, customizing their learning portals and participating in virtual communities. Instructors could use sophisticated methods of assessment based on real-time collection of information about individual student performance. What are the implications of this initiative for practice and policy today?