Week 2: Reading Notes

Apologies to all for posting later in the evening than the 9.30pm deadline. My right knee required a 3 hour appointment with the bone doctor today, requiring a brace to be worn 3 hours a day, and last night was a very necessary choir rehearsal, so this is my first chance after our soon-to-be-4-year-old son went to bed to look through these articles. I'll be better with timeliness next week.

As a preliminary note, I can say I really appreciated getting into the "meat and potatoes" of digital collections, text and image scanning and organization, including digital page imaging organization. One of the areas I need to read more on are the Digital Object Indentifier Systems, described in a surprisingly recent article. I promise more information for next week, but am very interested in reading about both things I have specific experience with, others I'm familiar with and things I'm happy to be exposed to.

Week 2: Muddiest Points

Having helped to create metadata records, which are very easily searchable (Chartres site), I'd like to learn more about the OAI Harvester described in Suleman & Fox's "Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries" and the current version of "The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting" referenced in it.

"An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries" was particularly appropriate as it used digital (or scanned versions of) photographs, relevant to both Chartres and the upcoming Notre-Dame, Paris image collections.

"Interoperability for Digital Objects and Repositories": interoperability is a fine concept and perhaps crucial to continued digital libraries and digital projects, but it would be good to have more recent examples of implementing it, post-1999.

I couldn't open Arms' 2nd chapter.

Muddiest Points: Week 1

Comment: I find the "Bunjee View" to be somewhat distracting, particularly with a with an image collection I was partially responsible for creating like Chartres: Cathedral of Notre-Dame (see bottom of page for link). Looking at this view of our site, which granted has 3400 images, I've noticed that they've made some real improvements since it was first added 2 or 3 years ago, and it can be helpful in finding, say, all images by one photographer (1,133 for me), or all manuscript pages, but multiple "filters" either get too confusing or it simply says that no images match all of the chosen filters. Promising, but still limited.

I can't say that I've ever seen or heard the word "instantiate" before the "Setting the Foundations of Digital Libraries" article. Had to look it up online, and understand it now, but I thought I had a pretty big vocabulary before.

I found the shorter "Dewey Meets Turing" article much less clear than "Setting the Foundations of Digital Libraries," though the latter was more technical. I guess my experience helping build the Chartres image collection has helped with general and somewhat specific knowledge of the general setup of and relationships between elements of digital library, digital library system and management system, if they are understood to represent say, the Chartres collection, the Digital Research Library, founded in 1998 to design and launch digital image and text collections to be used to aid instruction at Pitt, and it's management system of the University of Michigan system composed of a MySQL database and Perl programming language, transforming also our 300 dpi tif images into JPG 2000 format, viewable at 6 sizes per image. Somewhere, there is the Pitt Digital Library System, which is a collection of all of the digital resources There are still some things unclear about this article, such as some of the reference frameworks, but I understand it in general.

Issues and Strategies for Digitization video

Here's an interesting video I watched this evening. Not comprehensive, but informative, particularly from a European perspective.

http://videolectures.net/eswc06_frayling_isdpd/

A note on the Chartres image collection

I just posted the link to the University of Pittsburgh's Chartres Cathedral website, and I'll say a quick word or two about my involvement. Possibly the largest website devoted to a single building, 1,133 of the 3,399 images are large raw digital photographs I shot during a 2 week graduate residency at the cathedral in May 2005. Out of approx. 80 diagrams to explain the different parts of the cathedral, 20 are mine, including 7 interactive diagrams that attempt to both show and describe the complex Captial Frieze of the West Facade, 42 scenes and 100 figures on 20 captials across the 3 portals.

Feel free to explore it and comment here. To see my images, type Philip Maye into the search engine. The site's history and project team are given at the top right of the Chartres Cathedral on MEDART Website option from the homepage. 3,000 hours of my time over 2 years were given to this project, but feedback, particularly at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, this year and last, proves that a wide audience continues to use it.

Welcome to Digital Libraries at Pitt

This is just a note to get this blog started. Following posts will include my thoughts on Reading Assignments, Muddiest Points and the like. As soon as my desktop returns from computer repair, I'll post info on me, my interests, and my digital activities, including a major digital image collection for Pitt.