An Interesting Talk: Peter Brantley and the DLF

I just came from a very interesting talk given to the U of M Library staff by Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation. There was so much in his talk that I won't do it justice. Here is a summary; before the time (and my memory) slips away I wanted to try and capture a few of the ideas and thoughts that he gave us. Peter was in town for the DLF Spring Forum and the Libraries took advantage of his presence and brought him to campus for his presentation and interaction with the staff. Like I said, it was a very engaging talk with lots to think about. Peter's blog, by the way, is something I've just added to my rss feeds; I'm going to want to continue to read what he's got to say.

If Peter's talk could be summarized in one image, it was of two people sitting on a subway in Japan. The older man on the right, well-dressed, was reading a book. The younger man on the left, equally well-dressed, but in a different fashion, was reading his mobile phone. (I wish I had the image, but didn't make note of the photographer in his presentation). Anyway, this gets to the gist of his presentation, or at least one very big facet, that information needs to operate in a mobile world and not tied to a desktop. Most of what people want and need is (and will continue to be) coming to them through mobile devices. (Actually, I did remember the photographer in Peter's presentation: Joi Ito. A quick search of the web found his Flickr site and a quick search through his photostream found the image: "Generation Gap." Oh, man, was this just an instructive little bit of learning on the value of Web 2.0!!) Here's the picture:



This brings to mind a second major point that Peter made: people come first. It's not all about the content, it's about the people: the kinds of information they need, how they're using it, where they're using it, etc.

I'm kind of doing a data dump here (I wish I had taken notes!) to get through other elements in Peter's talk. Excuse the randomness. He started out talking about the kind of scientific data that's out there and how this data is created, manipulated, analyzed, etc. All kinds of data are there, from space probes and satellites to remote sensing devices on Earth. From there he went on to talk about virtual worlds and moving images. With moving images (video) the bar is lower in terms of entering into that data, of accessing it, than it is with text, and yet it offers a very rich and rewarding experience. In the case of virtual worlds, what is happening here, in a way, is a big huge mash-up with stuff in the VR and stuff in the Real World, so that you could be having a virtual experience (in 3-D) that is pulling in stuff from real world data to create an even richer experience and the allowance (in the case of space data) to move through spaces that would be impossible in the real world.

There were a number of video clips that were part of Peter's presentation. One, which combined the power of mobile devices with networks, was the ability to use a mobile phone to take video of a place or event. The video clip he showed was of someone traveling on a bus through Beijing, filming Tiananmen Square. He pointed out how this could be a powerful tool for someone working on human rights issues, or reporters in the field who, without lots of video equipment (and personnel) could clandestinely film important events as part of reporting a story and how this could go to the web in real time.

Another clip that Peter showed was how someone could walk into a store and take a picture on their phone of a DVD cover (in this case "Finding Nemo") and then send that photograph to a site that would recognize the visual image of the cover on the DVD case (even if the photography was not optimum) and then throw an e-mail back to the user with all kinds of information about "Finding Nemo" including a clip on YouTube, purchasing information, and lots of other info. This demo of a virtual search engine was done using an Apple iPhone, again pointing out the power of the mobile device to provide a person with information at the point of need (it's all about putting people first). Interesting, Peter also noted that ATT had not provisioned its own infrastructure to handle the huge growth in web traffic that was flowing back and forth with each iPhone. Here's the video that Peter shared with us on this demo of a virtual search engine.



Another clip that Peter shared with us was a conceptual design for a Nokia device called Morph. Here's the shorter version of that video from YouTube:



There's a lot more that Peter shared with us. This just scratches the surface. But it gives you some idea of how he wanted us to think beyond the walls of our libraries and wrestle with concepts that put people first and don't get all wrapped up in our content creation and associated tasks such as metadata.

That's probably enough of a brain dump for the moment. If other things pop back into my mind from this morning's presentation I'll post them here.

Thing 5

Whoopee! It actually worked! I decided to have a little fun with Spell with Flickr, so plugged in the name of my blog, cut the html code that the application gave me, pasted it into my blog posting and here it is.

Error Message and Done with Thing 4

Well, I'm getting an error message on the Flickr site that says "Something appears to be wrong with the Blogger service. Please try again later." So I will try later. In the meantime, here's my picture from Paris of the BN. I'm going to look at the resources, but at this point I think I can consider myself basically done with Thing 4.

Before I quit, one other quick note. I noticed earlier that all my posting times were off, so I checked the settings and saw that it was set for Pacific time. I changed it to Central time, so all should be right in the world, time-wise.

The picture was taken while I was in Paris, about a week before Thanksgiving 2007. I went there to visit my younger son, who was doing a semester abroad. He was studying in Montpellier and came up on the train to meet me in Paris. A transit strike was going on while we were there, so it was interesting (to say the least) getting around the city (and to and from Montpellier) during the strike. The Metro wasn't running, or running sporadically, so we did a lot of walking. At the end of a long (but very fun) day we ended up at the BN. I was able to catch the last light of the day reflecting off the building. It was a great trip!

Thing 4 Option B

I'm having way too much fun with this which is why I'm spending more time on this at home as opposed to work. I just wouldn't get a whole lot done at work tinkering around the way I have. For the past hour or so I've created my own Flickr account and uploaded 200 images. One of the things I didn't catch is that the monthly display is limited to 200 images. When I was uploading the images I was paying attention to the other message I was getting from Flickr, i.e. that I was limited by the amount of monthly memory, 100MB. So I deleted some of the files for uploading to get it below the 100 meg limit; that left me with 219 images. But when I went to look at them all I got a message that some of my pictures would not be visible unless I deleted newer ones. I just left it as it was, figuring that the new month starts in a couple of days and maybe they'll become visible then. They did, after all, tell me that the photos hadn't been deleted; they just couldn't be seen (unless I wanted to upgrade to the premium version). I'll stick with the free version and just watch my monthly limits.

A few minutes later. . . I just went back to my Flickr account to pick out a pic to tag "23 Things On a Stick." When I did this the first time I forgot to add the quotation marks around the tag phrase so I ended up with the following tags: 23, Things, On, Stick. I went back and put the phrase in quotes to get it right. After that I changed the photo to "public" so that everyone can view it. At the moment its the only picture I've got marked that way, but I'm sure I'll change some of the others to "public" after a while. I just want to get the hang of working with this before I post a bunch of stuff to the world.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to post this to my blog. The instructions on Flickr are a little confusing, so I'll post this and come back when I've got things figured out.

Thing 4 Option A

It was too soon to quit for the night. I went back and looked at the exercise for Thing 4 and realized I was close to finishing the first option (I'm going to do the second option as well), so went back to Flickr and found an image from one of my earlier full text searches. I used the keywords Sherlock Holmes Minnesota and got 3 hits. Two were of the Centennial Showboat (site of last summer's production of "Sherlock's Last Case"), but the photo that caught my eye was one taken in my own library, of an item I helped acquire for the Holmes Collections. Its a photo of our Linus statue, with Linus as Sherlock Holmes. The photo is by Krista76, who lists her occupation as "rhetorician." Our Linus was part of the "Linus Blankets Saint Paul" (#72 in the order of things) tribute to native Charles Schulz. The statue was a gift to the Collections by The Saint Paul Foundation and the F. R. Bigelow Foundation in memory of Ronald M. Hubbs, former chairman of the Bigelow Foundation and an active Sherlockian. The Hubbs Family have been generous supporters of the Holmes Collections, providing a gift for cataloging the book collection (a project that took three years!). Ronald's son, George, was the first president of the Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections and his son, James (Jamie) served as a collection specialist for the Collection at the U of M for a number of years. So it was really neat to see Krista76's photo of "our" Linus!

At the Beginning of Thing 4

Some first impressions of Flickr. I took the tour of the site and pretty much decided that I need to back up my photos online. I've done this in the past by burning CDs, but those are starting to pile up and they really don't give you a way to organize and find what you're looking for. I've also got them backed up on two different external hard drives, but the same issues of organization and searching apply. So it looks like I'll set up an account, figure out what should be private and public and go from there.

I was intrigued by the St. John's/St. Ben's site and can see a possible application for photos I've taken of some past exhibits. We'll see about playing around with that a bit.

I did a search of photos with the keywords "Sherlock Holmes" (which made some sense as I'm responsible for one of the largest Holmes collections in the world). There were thousands of images, which I was able to cut down a bit by just searching the tags. Even then I had over 900 images. I looked at some of them as a slide show, but realized a bit into the show that it would be better to look at these at work, on a computer that has a little faster connection then my DSL at home. Still, it was interesting and I'll probably explore and search some more. It was also interesting to see photos that were clearly scanned from another (copyrighted) source, with no credit given for the original photographer or rights holder. Seems like there's a bit of an issue there.

I've been playing and exploring for a couple of hours at home, so I think I'll call it quits for the moment and pick it up tomorrow. Besides, I see that I've got 40 items in my RSS reader, so I'll check those out before logging off.