Last week Susan Schreibman (recently of UMD) and David Kennedy (presently at UMD) visited NYPL Labs to share their experiences with operationalizing FEDORA as a digital collections management tool. Susan spoke mostly to the organizational challenges and successes and David spoke to the technical implementation and goals for the project. Their presentation was a reprise of the one they gave at CNI last year and it was clear and right to the point. Repositories are for “dipping in” and the more tools we can develop to make the “dipping” easier, the more use the collections will have.
Image may be NSFW.
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It was reassuring to hear that other libraries are tackling the issues around different layers of abstraction in the service of presenting repository materials for consumption by a non-technical audience.
Of course, we have all been worrying this for years and for years we have been doing the work manually by building stand alone applications to meet the needs and the peculiarities of our collections.
One of the key strategies in the UMD approach (so as to avoid the handcrafted work) was to model a set of presentation skins that could be employed agnostically to content in the repository. What was different about UMD’s approach was that the skins were incorporated into the data model and were a clever implementation of the disseminator features of FEDORA architecture.
This of course speaks to my obsession with multiple views on the same content.
A few months ago when we launched this site I wrote about visualizations and my frustration with graphical or taxonomic representations of half a million items. Certainly haven’t solved that one yet, but the more I see other folks grappling with this, the more hope I have that we will develop some really fantastic ways to expose implicit relationships within this large data set.
Recently I started to look at PicLens. It is not exceptionally exciting but it is a useful tool and it allows customization at the browser level – no heavy lifting. Josh has just put together a nice SIMILE layer on a medium-large bibliography. We are starting to do some serious work with Geodata which is pretty labor intensive but the results are very satisfying.
As we go forward it would be incredibly useful to have our colleagues weigh in on the kinds of taxonomies they have found useful for building visualizations/skins/layers/clothing. I find paper dolls irresistible. I know I’m not the only one.
