Last week I attended the annual Access conference, this time in Vancouver with the theme “The Library is Open”. It’s always an overstimulating conference, but this year I was made drunk with the confluence of fresh thoughts about things I care about more and more, the intersections of the presentations with things I’ve been thinking about in other contexts, and the engaging personalities. And there was beer. For a politically naive introvert, it was too much too quick. This posting is a preliminary and personal attempt sort it all out.

It started with Hackfest, where the geeks get together to spend a day coding up some interesting project from the list of submitted ideas, or from their own fertile and over-caffeinated brains. I had put in an idea for a personal digital archive, called “Spalatum” after the Roman fortress/palace that formed the matrix for the medieval city of Split in Croatia. When the Roman architects moved out and stopped maintaining the place, the locals moved in and kept the town going in their own way, subdividing the Roman buildings or putting up small houses against the old walls. Diocletian’s mausoleum became the cathedral. In the same way, I want a digital archive that can continue to be used and preserved by non-techie heirs after the geek who built it is gone. My idea wasn’t taken up by any of the groups (but I mean to get back to it). I worked on a Linked Open Data project, playing with the Silk Workbench application to enhance RDF data by matching fields with an external SPARQL-enabled source like dbpedia. It was fun and we learned a lot about Silk but didn’t get very far with our data.

That evening a bunch of the hackers went out to dinner at a Japanese/Korean place, then headed off to find some good beer. On the way we picked up Bess Sadler, who had (typically) found a medieval reenactment operation nearby and spent the last hour playing with swords.

Bess (photo: BigD)

Bess is a talented developer, and surrenders to laughter more completely than anyone I know: always a welcome addition. We ended up at the Steamworks Brewery and I talked with Bess and the dangerous-looking Nick Ruest, black locks spreading in all directions, gorgeously tattooed up one arm. We talked about working conditions at our various institutions. The passion that keeps us interested in the stuff we do isn’t always nourished in the workplace, unfortunately.

Ended up in the hospitality suite to taste a selection of craft beers, as prescribed by the magisterial man-mountain of San Diego.

The conference proper opened the next morning with the keynote by Jon Beasley-Murray of UBC. He started with Borges’ vision of the infinite library and the fertility and sufficiency of the library as a public good. He developed this into a call to the barricades to defend the commons against corporate encroachment, holding that the domination of formerly open online space by closed systems like Apple’s and Facebook’s is precisely parallel to the early modern enclosures like the Highland clearances. (The displaced Highlanders came to Canada: what new lands will the refugees from Facebook colonize? Diaspora may be aptly named indeed.) He put it in Marxist terms: what the corporations are doing is “primitive accumulation”, which he preferred to call “accumulation through dispossession” (to avoid the implication that it only happened in the distant past). Their wealth derives directly from the resources which they have seize from the public domain for their own use. A roomful of librarians was on his side the whole way: information wants to be free, after all. He encouraged us to engage in “massive projects of common productivity” such as Wikipedia. I wondered wimpishly whether the leftist framing of the question would attach it to polarizing issues in right-leaning Alberta (where talk about protecting the commons from corporate exploitation is likely to be seen by the establishment as a coded attack on the oil industry), and asked a question about whether the idea could be framed in a non-partisan way. Beasley-Murray helpfully put it in terms of the university’s role in fostering social critique, regardless of party. “There are no saints here”: everyone is subject to critical investigation.

I was therefore thinking about democracy when the next presentation started. This was Jer Thorp’s dazzling tour through the data visualizations he does for the New York Times and some outside projects such as the 9/11 memorial. This talk was emotionally fraught for me, since it was the David Binkley Lecture, in honour of my brother Dave, who died in 2005. The idea was Gary Gibson’s, and each year the lecture is generously supported by Gibson Library Connections; my only contribution was to suggest that it be used to bring in a speaker from outside the library world. Dave was a regular at Access in the early days, and after I came into the library biz he and I overlapped at a few Accesses. (I treasure the time he came to a symposium in Edmonton on the future of the ILS, and he was being introduced as my brother for a change.)

The visualizations were dazzling and joyful. One was an aggregation of tweets that include the phrase “good morning”, represented as bouncing blocks on a rotating globe. You see the wave of pogoing cubes advance around the planet, following the sun, as people wake up and tweet. Another, more elaborate one was Cascade: a real-time tracker of social-media responses to NYT articles — not just tweets but also url-compressions and decompressions — represented in three dimensions. The most moving visualizations, though, were the ones that brought things down to the personal level. The first was a visualization of your movements based on the GPS data that iPhones were found to have been storing; the other was a timeline of NYT articles against which you could map the phases of your life (childhood, college, marriage, etc.), creating links to stories that were important to you. Thorp described the transition from irritation at another big-brother intrusion into his privacy with the iPhone scandal, to fascination with reliving a year of his life via the GPS traces. He called it “embodied history”. He and others set up a site where you can upload your trace (openpaths.cc) and make it available as a dataset to researchers if you choose. From the default position of “that’s too private to share” he moved to “under some circumstances, I’ll share that, even though it’s private”.

From Thorp’s talk and others over the next two days I learned of lots of exciting new tools that I want to master, or master more fully:

• Processing and processing.js
• Google Refine
• Google Fusion Tables
• Silk
• MINT
• D3

They all have to do with data normalization and visualization. They make me long to become a data wizard, able to make datasets dance the way Thorp does. The point, though, is to make data tell true stories. It took me back to palaeography classes with Father Leonard Boyle (later Prefect of the Vatican Library). The duty of the philologist, Father Boyle said, was to make an ancient document speak as fully and as truthfully as possible about the context in which it was created. There was an ethic involved: the relationship between me and a medieval scribe whose every pen-stroke I could trace but about whom I knew nothing else was real, and I owed the same respect for his or her personhood that I owed anyone I met on the street. The new technologies are just as capable of telling compelling lies as compelling truths, and they are therefore covered by the same scholarly and personal (and librarianly) ethic.

Real Face of White Australia

I felt a similar sense of responsibility in the “Real Face of White Australia” project, which I read about a couple of weeks ago on Tim Sherratt’s blog (note to future Access organizers: get this guy!) It starts from scans of immigration documents for mostly Chinese or Indian workers who came to Australia in the late 19th or early 20th century (the age of the “White Australia” policy) and were subject to restrictions on their travel. The documents include photographs; Sherratt’s inspiration was to use open-source facial recognition software to crop the faces out of the scanned documents and present them as a waterfall, with more faces appearing no matter how far you scroll down, each linked to the source document so you can find out about the individual. It zooms you from the macro level of political criticism of the racist policy down to the micro level of individual stories, and back again through the sheer accumulation of cases.

How seductive the tools are! Thorp showed us visualizations that cost him half an hour, which I would be obnoxiously proud to present after a month’s solid work. Inspired by Thorp and by a Hackfest project, I managed to make a little progress using Google Refine and Google Fusion to come up with a GIS visualization based on the 1926 volume of the Henderson city directory for Edmonton. Building on work Tricia Williams (now Jenkins) did for us some years ago, I had a dataset of names and street addresses roughly parsed from the raw OCR text of the directories. Out of 30,000 entries, 11,000 were parsable from the OCR. They were grouped by city block and projected onto the current Google map of Edmonton. At first a jumble of red dots show the blob of built-up areas; as you zoom in they resolve into individual dots, which in turn represent groups of identifiable individuals living on the same street: people with names and occupations, more or less truthfully represented in the Directory, and equally or less truthfully represented in my dataset, with all its OCR errors and parsing errors. The Murphy family, Arthur and Emily, are there, a year before the launching of the Famous Five appeal that established that women are “persons” under Canadian law.

That evening in my room I wanted to follow up on an email exchange with my younger brother with a link to one of our grandfather’s articles, from the book that was recently digitized by Internet Archive through the generosity of Rick Prelinger. I found that I couldn’t get access: the Selected Papers had been placed in the Lending Library collection and was flagged as unavailable for borrowing. Rick spotted my mournful tweet and worked his contacts at IA to have it fixed within a couple of hours.

The piece I wanted was “History for a Democracy”, given as a closing keynote at the Minnesota Historical Society’s conference in 1937. Binkley criticizes the doctrinaire historical projects of the fascists and the communists:

Now it is the weakness of this kind of history — whether it be written for the church, the nation, the communist society, the fascist state, or even the federal democracy itself — that it stands at the mercy of objective criticism. The faithful following of the technique of historical investigation may at any time overturn elements of the story that stand as essentials in the use that is being made of it. Objective investigation may prove that the world was not created in 4004 B.C.; that the most important developments on the European scene were not the special experience of any one nation, but were shared in common by many peoples; and that the continuity alleged to be found in the life of a nation from the remote past to the present day is illusory or incidental. The communist interpretation of social evolution and political events may not be sustainable in the light of an objective criticism of the evidence, and the fascist or nazi interpretations may also go to pieces under criticism. Nor is the historical interpretation which has nourished the spirit of democracy immune. The bold conceptions of Freeman and Stubbs on early German democracy have already been relegated to the junk heap of discarded historical syntheses.

If we undertake deliberately to nourish our own institutions on a history of this kind, made to order for this purpose, we may find ourselves confronted with the tragic dilemma that the mission of our history cannot be served without abandoning the scientific historical method itself. And this would be particularly fatal to democracy, because democracy more than any other kind of government needs to sustain free investigation and criticism of everything. A myth that will not stand criticism must ultimately be protected by force. And an interpretation of history that one is not permitted to doubt and criticize becomes ipso facto an interpretation that one cannot sustain and prove.

In defending the role of history and free inquiry in a democracy, he zooms down to the personal level, both for the content and for the practice of history:

It took us several generations to build up the corpus of published material, to make the critical studies, to collect the bibliographies, to organize the knowledge from which our present historical writing is documented. Our Ph.D.’s move sure-footed through this material. If I want to work on the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, I know where to look for the material, and I can begin where the last scholar left off. But if I want to write the history of my family, or of the school district in which my son is going to school, I find nothing prepared for me. It will take us several generations to adapt and complete the documentary equipment for the writing of family and local history. It took us several generations also to train the army of scholars in the tradition of the craft. It may well take us several generations to train every man to be his own historian.

More and more, I think “democracy” is the word I’m looking for as the foundation of the values I want to buttress with my work.

The final day of the most powerful. First was Heather Piwowar, who is working to establish the evidence base for the benefits of the open-data model in scholarly communication. She grounded the need for peer review of scientific papers on the same principles as collaboration in open-source software development: 50% of published papers contain errors in their use of data, and 5-10% of those errors affect the research outcomes. Linus’ law applies: only if the data is available for review can those errors be corrected. The current model of on-request sharing doesn’t work: many researchers report that they’ve had requests denied, and the young and the productive are disproportionately represented in that group. On the other hand, the science done on the basis of reused datasets increases the return on the investment in the original research. Her current project is to track 1000 randomly-selected datasets (100 each from 10 repositories) through the published literature. The roles she proposes for libraries including hosting repositories and also advocating and educating among faculty, publishers and the public. It was great to see the solid evidence she’s gathering to back up our intuitions about the value of open access.

During the introduction of the next panel I was diverted by Brian Owen’s trivia question about the “Dukes of URL”, Dave’s band which played at the 1996 Access conference.

Nick (photo: BigD)

There was a correction from the floor: Owen had referred to 1996 as the first Access, but it was only the first in Vancouver, third of that ilk. I’ve wanted for a long time to assemble a history of the conference, and a couple of years ago I started gathering links and asking for materials; Art Rhyno sent me some early programs, which I still have. I let the project languish but now seemed like a good time to restart it. A wiki! No, a Google Doc! I started one and shared it out to a new Google Group “Access Conference History” (join us!), and lent only half an ear to the following session on Evergreen as I and Nick Ruest and others filled in the chronology of the conference since 1994, identified surviving conference websites and excavated others from the Wayback Machine, linked to Flickr sets and blog postings, and sketched in a few memories of specific conferences. Shared editing of a Google Doc is incredibly exciting for the immediate visibility of the collaboration: new text from other collaborators crawls across the screen in the paragraph above the one you’re writing, new coloured cursors appear as people join in. By the end of the session we had a solid framework.

The next session dealt with proprietary and open-source software. Bess Sadler described the Hydra community and what makes it work. The strength of the collaboration depends on building trust by, paradoxically, limiting the areas where trust is needed. If we have software tests, we know without trusting whether a given commit broke a given feature (and Hydra’s rule is “no code without tests”). Uncertainty is reduced, and the team can get on with building without wasting time and emotional energy assigning blame. I live with too much uncertainty (of my own devising, given my lousy documentation habits); I need to make Bess’s approach work in our environment.

The closing keynote was Andrea Reimer, a city councilor in Vancouver and sponsor of the city’s open data initiative. She’s in the middle of an election campaign and was a little late because a debate ran overtime; fortunately the conference program was running a little late as well.

Reimer’s talk took us back to the theme of democracy. Her principles: all people are equal; all people have the ability to reason. She allowed a 3% rule: in every hundred people, three are assholes who need to be worked around, but the rest, however much you disagree with them, are at least open to reason. From this it follows that people can make good decisions, and therefore democracy can work; but the public good depends on giving people good information on which to base those decisions. (This took me back to a photo Eric Hellman took at the Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington last year: a smiling woman carrying a sign that read “Librarians for Informed Opinions”. It’s the best brief statement I’ve seen of the role of libraries in a democracy. If you know who she was, please let me know!) Reimer described the process she and a few others initiated to start Vancouver’s open data initiative. It was the flagship for this movement among Canadian cities. Edmonton is now right up there among the leaders, I’m proud to say. I recently attended an organizational meeting for the Edmonton Pipelines project, which is bringing together GIS-based research in the Edmonton area, including the city’s open-data folks. They’re data pipelines: it’s about “maps and narratives for dense urban spaces”. The library is providing scans of historical maps, which we hope to have georeferenced and mounted in the Hypercities platform.

I was stirred to get up and ask another political question (what’s got into me?), or rather the same question: how can we carry this commitment across partisan boundaries in these polarized times — when the preponderance of dangerously uninformed opinions are on the right, across the divide from us? Reimer’s response was wonderful: I’m not religious, but if I had a religion, it would be the Age of Reason. Except for that 3%, we’re all open to rational argument and we just have to keep making the case on the best foundations we can.

We had heard that David Suzuki was to address the Occupy Vancouver camp a couple of blocks away at 1:00, so after the conference closed several of us hurried over to hear him. A general assembly was starting when we arrived, and it was necessary to pass a motion to let Suzuki speak. We were therefore introduced to the remarkable rules of order of the Occupy movement. When we arrived various people were introducing themselves from the stage, using the amplified public address system. They spoke in short spurts, and the crowd repeated their words. This turned out to be the “human microphone”, and it was used whenever anyone needed to be heard, either from the stage or from the crowd. People responded to the proceedings with a set of gestures, whether registering votes or just responding to what was being said. Jazz-hands means agreement, thumbs-down disagreement, hands above the head with fingertips touching a point of order, and arms folded means a block: the blocker is prepared to leave the movement if the motion is passed. This triggers further discussion and even dividing the meeting into break-out groups, until consensus (set at 90%) is reached.

We were enthralled; “This is great!” I said to Geoff Harder, “We should use it in Library Council meetings!” The motion to allow Suzuki to speak was blocked by someone off to the left. Through the human mic we learned the objection was that this was an egalitarian movement, and no one should be allowed priority of speech for mere celebrity. The motion was reworded: Suzuki wasn’t being allowed to speak first at the meeting, the meeting was being suspended to allow him to speak according to his invitation. Another vote, another block. “Yeah,” said Geoff, “this is just like Library Council.” “Are you prepared to leave the movement over this?”, asked the moderator, and after more discussion the block was withdrawn. The motion passed, and Suzuki was allowed to speak to us.

He gave a great twenty-minute speech. I recorded it on my phone (and as my version of the human mic I’ve posted it on Facebook). Suzuki covered all the themes you’d expect on such an occasion: pro-environmental, anti-corporate, anti-globalization, anti-consumerist, pro-democracy, pro-biodiversity, taking the long-term view. And he touched on information as a social good:

For five years the prime minister of Canada has never acknowledged the reality of human-induced climate change, or that Canada is the industrialized nation most vulnerable to its impact; and now he’s cutting back on scientists in Environment Canada and research on climate, so that we don’t have to listen to the facts. (6:15)

A myth that will not stand criticism must ultimately be protected by force, but often subterfuge will do. There were jazz-hands all around, mine included. It was the social vision Reimer had given us, of involvement, discussion, consensus, rationality, but stripped of the technology: just people.

After the speech we grabbed some lunch, and I split off to go to MacLeod’s books, the insanely jumbled second-hand bookstore at W. Pender and Richards. Just the place to settle your nerves after an overstimulating day. I was there for a couple of hours.

Then, still with time to kill, I went to the Vancouver Public Library, which looks like the Coliseum reoccupied by information freaks (I saw serried ranks of sticky notes stuck to a second-floor office window, planning — what? An event, a collection, a website?). I found a desk with an electrical outlet and tried to sort out the relics, digital and physical, of the week: tweets, photos by and of me and others, a few emails and Facebook updates, the video I took of Suzuki, a panorama I’d made with my phone and posted to Occipital (who owns them? How long will they take care of it?), the flyer from the Occupy meeting, the hotel bill, the books, the presents for my family in Edmonton.

All these zooms to visualize:

• From the personal level to the community level and back again: as RCB proposed anchoring the project of history in expanding concentric circles rippling out from the individual, I want to see my digital work rooted in personal archiving practices that mesh with institutional and social movements
• From the past to the present to the future: recovering old stories, preserving present experience so the stories it can tell will still be heard in when I’m no longer there to hear them
• From information into action and back: guiding public policy with good information, in this age when we see how far wrong public policy can go when information is ignored or lost or hidden

I think those are the dimensions we work with.

We’ve been using BackupPC as our home backup system for the last year or so, and it’s done a great job. It runs under Ubuntu on the home server (an Eee box) and backs up the various family laptops to a RAID array composed of two 1tb USB drives. For offsite backup, we now have a couple more USB drives that receive weekly archives from BackupPC and are swapped to and from my office. For the first time, I feel like we’re doing a decent job taking care of the family digital jewels.

Recently I’ve been looking at the content we create and store on external services. We’re all on Facebook, my daughter and I have five active or at least non-defunct blogs between us, I tweet. Why not archive all that as well? The pleasure I’ve been getting from reading my grandparents’ papers will, for our posterity, depend on this stuff. Not to be morbid, but read last week’s New York Times article “Cyberspace When You’re Dead“. Personal digital archiving is important, and we need to learn to do it properly. The Internet Archive is sponsoring its second conference on the subject in a few weeks.

I’ve started with Twitter. This has forced me, finally, to write some Python, in order to use the OAuth libraries necessary to authenticate to the Twitter API since they turned off basic authentication last summer. Jeff Miller’s tutorial, which uses the Tweepy module, got me going. Once you’ve got the authentication working, the demo script allows you to publish tweets from the command line, which is cool, but… Trying to think of a use for it, my mind went back to BackupPC and the need to monitor its actions and notice when backups aren’t working. It sends email notifications, but why not get them in the Twitter flow as well? It’s the perfect place for short notices.

So, our server now has its own Twitter account. BackupPC provides hooks for scripts to run at different stages of its various processes. To send a tweet after a backup job, add this to the configuration file for a host:

$Conf{DumpPostUserCmd} = "/home/backuppc/bin/post.py backuppc: $client $type: $xferOK"

This will send a tweet in the form “backuppc: cheetah full: 1″ (where cheetah is the host, the backup was full, and it completed successfully – 0 indicates a problem).

The script post.py is based on Jeff Miller’s example. I modified it to compose the tweet by concatenating all the command line arguments (to avoid the use of quotation marks, which I couldn’t get BackupPC to handle properly no matter how I escaped them).

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import tweepy

CONSUMER_KEY = '*********************'
CONSUMER_SECRET = '*********************'
ACCESS_KEY = '*********************'
ACCESS_SECRET = '*********************'

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

# drop first arg, which has name of script
args = sys.argv
args.pop(0)
tweet = ""
for arg in args:
        if tweet != "":
                tweet += " "
        tweet += arg

api.update_status(tweet)

All for the thrill of seeing tweets like this:

The bibliographic manager Zotero lets you sync your collection to a remote server, which is handy when you work on more than one machine. They provide space for free which is plenty for my citations; but to sync the attachments (pdfs, web page snapshots, etc.), the 100mb of free file storage isn’t enough: I’ve got 95mb of stuff already. You can, however, sync the attachments to any WebDAV-accessible storage. I have a home Ubuntu server with RAID storage for the family digital treasures (we run a backup service for all the machines in the house using the excellent BackupPC package), so it made sense to use that. Here’s a quick list of the steps involved.

• Set up a Linux server. I’ve been using Ubuntu Netbook Edition on an Eee box for a couple of years with no complaints. Ours is pink; we call it “panther”. (You could probably do all this on a Mac or Windows machine that’s on all the time, if you prefer).
• Buy a couple of large USB drives and set them up as RAID 1 (or buy more and get more redundancy). Software RAID is easy to set up in Ubuntu. Mount the RAID array at e.g. /raidarray and create the directory which the WebDAV service will use as its home, e.g. /raidarray/webdav.
• Now that you’ve got some storage and a server, you need WebDAV. Install Apache, and add WebDAV capabilities to it. Make sure the Apache user has read/write permissions on the webdav directory.
• One of the points of using your own server is that you can encrypt your network traffic using a self-signed certificate, avoiding the significant cost of a real one. Set up a self-signed certificate in Apache.
• Now you need to make your server available on the Interwebs. If you use a cable or DSL service, you probably don’t have a fixed IP address, which makes you hard to find, since your provider may change your IP address frequently and unpredictably. The solution is dynamic DNS, which allows your to notify the DNS when its IP address changes. Set up a free account at DynDNS.com. You will also have to install a little package on your server that will check your current IP address periodically and report changes to DynDNS.
• Set up your router to direct incoming traffic on your chosen port to your server. The settings are probably under the games and applications tab of your router config interface. Choose a high port number (make the script kiddies work).
• Finally, put it all together: set up the virtual host in Apache that will serve your WebDAV repository. My virtual host configuration looks something like this, with service at https://mywebdav.dyndns.org:12345/webdav/ (not my real host), the RAID array mounted at /raidarray, and the certificate authority and other ancillary stuff in /var/www_dyndns:


<virtualhost *:12345>
ServerAdmin me@myemail.com
ServerName mywebdav.dyndns.org

<Location /webdav>
DAV On
AuthType Basic
AuthName "webdav"
AuthUserFile /var/www_dyndns/passwd.dav
Require valid-user
DavMinTimeout 600
</Location>
</virtualhost>


Restart Apache and you should be good to go. With your browser you can visit https://mywebdav.dyndns.org:12345/webdav and see the contents of your directory, after you accept the certificate and log in. You should also be able to mount that directory as a network drive from any client.

To use it for Zotero, create a directory named “zotero” in the “webdav” directory, and then go to the “Sync” tab in the Zotero preferences, turn on file syncing using WebDAV, and give it your address. Do the same in other machines you want to sync. As Zotero syncs, you’ll see the /raidarray/webdav/zotero directory fill up with .prop and .zip files.

Caveats and lessons learned:

• I found that the process that determines the current IP address timed out a lot due to load on DynDNS’s servers. I got around this by installing a script on my own website (where this blog is hosted at Dreamhost) for it to visit instead. Instructions were easy to find.
• Visiting your server using DynDNS from within your home network can be problematic. I couldn’t get it to work with my first router: requests would just hang. When that router died and I replaced it with a Cisco Valet, the problem went away.
• Your server will be unreachable during the interval between a change of IP address by your provider and the next update to DynDNS. This hasn’t been a problem for me yet.
• The self-signed certificate encrypts your traffic, but it creates a theoretical vulnerability to spoofing. Buy a real one if you’re worried. I wouldn’t use this to store sensitive personal information, though.
• If you have problems, check the Apache logs. The first thing to check is permissions: can Apache read and write to the Zotero directory?

Which makes sense, because I put it there. The giant floating gold-foil-wrapped Easter bunnies, on the other hand, make no sense at all.

Augmented reality is very weird.

I’ve been playing with Layar‘s Hoppala Augmentation service (with a hat tip to Fiacre O’Duinn at Library Bazaar). Via the web interface I placed an object in an augmented reality layer: an Easter egg in the demo “Hoppala goes Easter” layer. Then I installed the iPhone app, found the right layer (search “Easter”), and strolled through the Quad on my way to the LRT. It looked like this:

It was distinctly bizarre to look through the little window into an alternate world where this huge red egg floated along the path beside me. Freaksville. And people give you odd looks when you walk around the Quad holding your phone out at eye level. When you explain, though, that you’re watching the giant floating Easter egg, and that the floating chocolate bunnies aren’t your fault, people leave you alone.

This was my first experience using an augmented reality app with live GPS positioning. I must say, it’s disappointing in an entirely predictable way. GPS on a phone is rough, and the accuracy of your position changes from moment to moment. That means the egg moves around a lot as you walk, and its position in the middle of the Quad is only approximate, because the app’s sense of your position is only approximate. When building an augmented reality application, you’ll have to take into account that your users may not see your stuff exactly where you want them to, and your stuff might shift unexpectedly instead of smoothly panning and zooming to match the viewer’s movements. I’ll have to give up my fantasy of neatly overlaying an historical image over the corresponding contemporary view, like this set from the National Library of Ireland, where the juxtaposition of past and present is so immediate it makes your heart ache. Or maybe there are ways for the app to work around the limitations of a phone’s GPS.

Anyway, if you’re around U of A and you have an iPhone or Android phone, go to the Quad and check out the egg. And the bunnies. Maybe they do something if you click them. Do you think I should click one? Maybe I should go back and click one.

Got me one of those Menotek floppy bluetooth keyboards, now that the iPhone supports it (in iOS4; kitteh not included). It takes some getting used to: I keep doubling letters. The iPhone’s autocorrection helps. We’ll see if this can be as useful as the old Palm folding keyboard, which was a wonderful keyboard; I could have transcribed War and Peace on it.

The University of Alberta added WorldCat Local to its web offerings a while ago, but for my own library use I’ve gone on using our old OPAC by default, for no other reasons than familiarity and inertia. Now, though, I’ve found a solid advantage that WorldCat Local offers to my personal workflow: fixed record-level URLs.

I was trying to solve the age-old problem of capturing a call number so that it will be easy to consult when I get to the stacks to pick up the book. The OPAC record is on the screen of my workstation, my iPhone is on my belt: how to bridge the gap? Emailing it to myself is tedious, copying and pasting into a note and then syncing even more so. Taking a picture with the iPhone’s camera may get the call number but it’s hard to include enough of the citation to show which item this is, if I’m fetching more than one.

The solution I want, which was inspired by a tweet by Lorcan Dempsey, is a QR code that gives me the URL of the record. That way when I need it I’ll have the full citation, the call number, everything. QR codes don’t appear in WorldCat Local or in the OPAC (like Huddersfield), but there’s Greasemonkey for that, specifically the “QR Code for Everything!” script (and probably others, I didn’t explore). I can pop up a QR code for any page I visit in Firefox on my workstation, grab it into the iPhone using the free i-nigma app (or one of the other QR-reading apps) to snap a picture of the QR code, and then easily consult the full record in the stacks.

The only problem with my default behavior is that the OPAC uses a session URL, which is meaningless once the session expires or when accessed from another device, so capturing it does me no good. WorldCat Local gives me a URL that doesn’t depend on the current session. That’s what I need: a cool URI that doesn’t change, at least across two devices and within the time-frame of my interest in a given book. I suppose I could customize the Greasemonkey script to use the OPAC’s permalink service before it generates the QR code, or we could enhance our unAPI service to provide a QR code as one of the options, but hell, WorldCat Local just works for this.

I wanted to embed a SIMILE Timeline into a WordPress posting, and it took longer than I expected to find a convenient way to do this without editing templates and such. There’s a nice plugin that does timelines for postings (WP SIMILE Timeline), but it doesn’t work for arbitrary timelines unconnected with the content of the blog itself. So, here’s a summary of a quick solution.

The requirement is to add some extra Javascript to a single posting (not for every posting, since that’s a fair amount of script to download needlessly), and to add onLoad and onResize handlers to the body tag. The easy solution: install the HiFi plugin, which does “Head & Foot Injection”. It allows you to specify some links you want to in the HTML head section, or at the end of the body section. It gives you a menu like this:

Those links will end up in the head for this posting.

The links are to the Timeline library, a local js file containing the configuration for the timeline we’re posting, and maybe a link to the css for that timeline. The local Javascript contains a call to a local XML file containing the events we ant to plot:

tl.loadXML("wp-content/2010/03/timeline-monet.xml", function(xml, url) {
    eventSource.loadXML(xml, url);
});

For convenience, I uploaded the js and xml as media files in the WordPress dashboard; but it threw an error when it tried to save the xml, so I uploaded that manually. I use the year/month directory structure for my uploads (Settings / Miscellaneous / “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”), so the uploaded timeline files end up in wp-content/2010/03.

The local Javascript contains functions onLoad and onResize, as in the Timeline examples. To get those to fire at the appropriate times, the Javascript ends by attaching them to the window’s onload and onresize events:

window.onload = onLoad;
window.onresize = onResize;

Adding those two lines was the only change I had to make to the SIMILE sample code.

Finally, the posting itself needs a div with the appropriate id:

<div id="tl" style="height: 300px;"></div>

And that’s it. Here’s a demo, using the “Life of Monet” example from the SIMILE Timeline site.

I pledged to do an Ada Lovelace Day posting last year, but things got busy and I missed it. This year is following the same pattern, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss it again, no matter how rough the resulting post has to be to get up before midnight.

Since the organizers of Ada Lovelace Day encourage participants to cast a wide net among women working in science and technology, I’m going to write about my grandmother Frances Williams Binkley (1899-1962). With her husband, Robert C. Binkley, she pioneered the use of microfilm for documentary reproduction in the 1930s.

Frances was born and grew up in Idaho (though she passed her first birthday in the silver town of Sandon, BC, so she’s an honorary Canadian as well). Her father was a bookkeeper. Having done well in high school, and with an ambition to be a journalist, she went to Leland Stanford Junior University in Oct. 1919. She was in the same incoming class as John Steinbeck, whom she knew socially. She took economics and history, and spent a summer at the marine research station. She was drawn into her future husband’s social circle through her work as a receptionist at the Hoover War Library (where he was employed as a reference librarian while working on his dissertation) and her membership in the History Club, and they were married in 1924. As far as I know her first camera was a Christmas present from Bob in 1926.

When Bob finished his dissertation he accepted a job at Washington Square College of NYU, and the two of them drove across the country in a Model T in the summer of 1927. They lived in the West Village for the next two years, and seem to have enjoyed the cosmopolitan delights of Prohibition-era Manhattan to the fullest. They both wanted to be writers, and attempted during this period to break into print with stories and articles, with moderate success. Their breakthrough came in 1929 with the publication of their joint book “What is Right with Marriage,” a contribution to the lively 1920s debate on modern marriage. This led to a certain amount of publicity, and the opportunity to write book reviews for the Saturday Review.

Bob’s advocacy of research into the problem of perishable paper, however, pulled them in a new direction. He had started working on this at Stanford, where his dissertation work required the use of newspapers from the First World War that were already crumbling due to their acidic wood pulp paper. He published an article in Scientific American in 1928, which led to the opportunity to attend the World Bibliographic Congress in Italy. This was the first conference of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). Bob and Frances accordingly spent the summer of 1929 in Rome. On their return, Bob was able to parlay his expertise in this area into an appointment as secretary of the newly-formed Joint Committee on Materials for Research. Within a year he was the chair. Now settled at Western Reserve University, he had funding and support to pursue various initiatives for the preservation and dissemination of historical materials. Frances was his partner in much of the work.

One of the first initiatives was a major microfilming project in early 1933. In preparation for a documentary history of America’s participation in the peace conference at Versailles, the Joint Committee funded the microfilming (on “filmslides” – the term “microfilm” wouldn’t be coined until a couple of years later) of the papers of John Foster Dulles at Columbia and of Colonel House at Yale. As far as I have found, this was only the second large-scale microfilm project in the North American library world (after the Library of Congress’s “Project A” in the late 1920s, which reproduced historical materials from European libraries relevant to American history). One aspect they wished to explore was the suitability of different films for reading by projection, as opposed to enlarging on paper. They had been experimenting for some time, involving Frances’s father William Irvin Williams in the work as well. Bob wrote to James Brown Scott in early January:

I shall, within the next few days, get some copying done at New Haven and in New York. Mrs. Binkley is my camera technologist and since we can secure her services for nothing, I am asking her to do the photographing. I have not purchased the photographic apparatus because a new model is to be out in the spring, one that would be much better for us and I can use my own personal equipment in the meantime. This means that the draft upon your funds will be very low at this stage, nothing more than travelling expenses to New Haven and New York for Mrs. Binkley and myself, and cost of films and developing.

As it turned out, Frances managed the copying in New York while Bob traveled to Yale. She wrote to Bob some time in January:

The film was on my desk the morning after I telegraphed — much quicker work than our first experience in getting film! Eastman here ask 6 1/2 cents — I couldn’t be bothered!

I have finished the copying & will go hard in the morning for a few re-takes & packing up. I shall leave some of the film (most of it, in fact) with the Fine Grain to mail home to me. Most of the work will be fine for projecting, but the illumination has not been good & there may be trouble with the enlargements.

The work went well and the House and Dulles papers were done by the end of January. Bob wrote to a friend at WRU:

The family morale is standing at a high level. Frances and Mr. Williams are becoming the photographic technicians and learning a whole bag of tricks which I begin to think seriously we must teach to the Graduate students. Frances went down with me to Yale and New York and together we photographed about 10,000 pages at Yale (House Papers), and 3,000 at New York. (Dulles Papers.)

After this first phase, they ordered a custom camera from Yale University Library’s photographic technician Ludwig (to be paid for by the Carnegie Endowment), and carried on to the second phase of the work. They were now confident that their work was a model others would follow, and started working on documentation of their techniques. Bob wrote to Scott in April:

I believe the filmslide technique gives us an opportunity to do this job with unprecedented thoroughness and efficiency, and to make of it an example of new methods. We can set up a system which will make most work of this type look like palaeographic copying alongside of photostats. As you know, I am studying the technical side for the Joint Committee, and Mrs. Binkley is writing a handbook or scholars’ guide. As long as she is working on that handbook this Peace Conference project gets her services for nothing because it is her guinea pig.

They applied these technologies in their home life as well. In August Frances composed a three-page acquisitions policy for their home library, which included copying certain categories of materials using the photographic equipment in the house. Among the surviving rolls of film are copies of the 19th-century papers of Frances’s Williams and Wheatley ancestors, for example.

After the success of this project, Bob was able to create a position on the payroll of the Joint Committee to do the work that Frances had been doing for just expenses. Having stretched the rules of nepotism about as far as they would go, Frances felt she could not take a salaried position from a committee that her husband chaired, so she dropped out of the day-to-day work. She continued to collaborate with Bob and develop her own expertise in photography. She published a couple of articles in trade journals on documentary photography, and contributed a chapter on “Copying Books and Manuscripts” to the 1937 Leica manual.

She also developed an interest in portrait photography. When she and Bob were living in New York City again while he taught for a year at Columbia in 1937-38, she studied photography with Rabinovitch. On their return to Cleveland she started to build a reputation as a portrait photographer. She won prizes in local competitions and had several clients.

Her life was thrown into confusion by Bob’s sudden death in April, 1940. With two young sons and her retired parents dependent on her, she needed to find work. She was disappointed that her contacts in the library and academic world did not enable her to find a position where she could continue the work for which Bob was much better known than she was. She took a B.Sc. in Library Science in 1940-41 (WRU waived the tuition in honor of Bob), and landed a job as Social Science Librarian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She worked there for the rest of her life. During this time she did her masters in history, using local history techniques that Bob had championed. Money was always tight, though, and she gave up photography, putting her energies into gardening instead. My father remembers driving with her to Denver to sell her Leica.

In collaboration with Bob, Frances contributed to the development of a new discipline in the area of documentary photography. She was content, it seems, to work in Bob’s shadow; there’s no indication of any resentment towards him, and they seem to have worked as full partners in their joint projects. She was, however, too self-effacing to become well known in the profession. John Steinbeck mentioned her and Bob in a letter to a friend in 1929: he evidently didn’t care for Bob, but felt that Frances was much smarter than people gave her credit for. Once she was on her own she built a new career, saw her two sons through to their Ph.D.s, and led her library through twenty years of growth.

This is a test of Wavr, the WordPress plugin for embedding Google Waves. You may not see anything if you don’t have a Wave account. It’s now working for me at least. (Two tricks were needed: make the wave public, and un-urlencode the + in the Wave id).

[wave id="googlewave.com!w+0tVPqpaUA" server="https://wave.google.com/wave/"]

If you have a Wave account, the grey box above is editable just like at the Wave site: you can add to the Wave by clicking on the bottom border of the current wave, or use the down-arrow at the right to select edit options. Wave itself is at https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252B0tVPqpaUA.1 ; I assume you can add yourself to it there. You should then be able to see live updates when you edit the Wave either in your Wave home page or here.

I’m noticing more and more things I can’t do on the web because of where I am. First it was Google’s hypercautious imposition of snippet view for items that are clearly in the public domain both in the US and in Canada, and Major League Baseball’s refusal to sell me access to online video of Toronto Blue Jays games because I’m in their blackout zone (which covers all of Canada). Then, during the presidential election, I found that that any link to a Daily Show sketch on an American blog was broken, because the Comedy Network has the rights in Canada: so I have to click over there and try and find the right bit (when will OpenURLs cover political satire?). Then I started to hear about Hulu – which you can’t get in Canada. Now Last.fm is going to start charging for access if you live outside the US, UK and Germany.

It appears that DRM isn’t just an individual problem; it also depends on the size of the market and the characteristics of the jurisdiction within which you live. The web does a lot to bring us together on an equal footing, but the purveyors of commercial content have figured out how to break up the market again.