WebWise 2011 Conference, Baltimore, MD, USA, March 9 to 11, 02011

The WebWise 2011 conference is coming to Baltimore, Maryland, USA and runs between March 9 and 11, 02011. This annual conference is sponsored by the United States government funding agency the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The theme of this year's conference is "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in Education, Learning, and Research". This is one of the few conferences in its category for which no fee is required; pre-registration to reserve a spot at the conference, however, is necessary.

Update for April 16, 02011: Archived Webcasts from the pre-conference and conference sessions are available at http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/webwise/110309/.

RockMelt Web browser invite on its way

Information Today's NewsBreaks features an article by Jill O'Neill titled "Hallmarks of the New RockMelt Browser—Efficiency and Integration" (November 22, 02010). Turns out you can receive an invite if you connect to the RockMelt Inc. Web site through your Facebook account. When I made the connection, I got a response saying "Your spot is reserved. We'll email your invite in the next few days." The developers of RockMelt are Tim Howe and Eric Vishria. RockMelt is based on Google's open source Chromium framework that Google also used to create its Google Chrome browser.

Globe and Mail series "Canada: Our Time to Lead" about the future of the Internet

The Globe and Mail newspaper is publishing and offering online access to its content around a series called "Canada: Our Time to Lead". One of the eight discussions focuses on the future of the Internet and Canada's role in directing that future. Right now the future, according to the article on November 13, 02010 about the Koobface malware by Russian hackers (the link is to Symantec's description of this worm), looks pretty bleak indeed because the potential exists for it to no longer be free in both content and access thanks to the United Nations International Telecommunications Union which some UN members such as Russia are pushing to take over governance of the Internet. The Globe and Mail is inviting Canadian politicians to step up to cybercrime playing field and to take a leadership role in helping to slow down these criminal activities. The Globe and Mail also wants your opinions on what Canada and Canadians can do to ensure to a free and open Internet into the future.

Call For Papers: "Electronic Records to Born-Digital Archives: Evolution in Theory and Practice", Archivaria #72, Fall 02011

As announced on the ARCAN-L mailing list (02010 09 13):

Call For Papers: "Electronic Records to Born-Digital Archives: Evolution in Theory and Practice"

Archivaria #72, Fall 02011

Archivists have dealt with digitally-created records for over 35 years. During this time, the archival profession has made significant progress towards establishing bodies of knowledge and expertise in their management. This sector of the profession has evolved continually in response to changes in technology, society, mandates, and expectations. The time is right to reflect on and critically examine this evolution in theory and practice with an eye towards future professional obligations and possibilities.

Accordingly, Archivaria #72 (Fall 2011) will be devoted to exploring the theme of  "Electronic Records to Born-Digital Archives: Evolution in Theory and Practice". Mark A. Matienzo, Digital Archivist at Manuscripts and Archives in the Yale University Library, will serve as Guest Editor of this special issue.

Contributions to this special issue should address changes in theory and practice related to electronic records and born-digital archives. ...

Deadline for expressions of interest:

Expressions of interest consisting of an abstract of the proposed article (300-500 words) must be received by the Guest Editor by 1 November 2010.

Please feel free to direct questions related to this special issue to
the Guest Editor:

Mark A. Matienzo at mark@matienzo.org or +1 734-834-4334

Submission guidelines:

Final submissions should follow the "Advice to Authors of Submissions
to Archivaria" at:

http://www.archivists.ca/content/advice-authors-submissions-archivaria

Deadline for complete manuscripts:

Complete manuscripts are due 1 March 2011.

New issue of open access journal LIBER Quarterly (Vol. 20, No. 1, 02010)

A new issue of the open access journal LIBER Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (02010) is available. LIBER is the acronym for the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche or Association of European Research Libraries. This issue includes an article titled "User Collaboration for Improving Access to Historical Texts" by Clemens Neudecker and Asaf Tzadok in which they discuss the work of the 02008-02012 IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) project, one of whose goals is "to develop tools that help improve OCR results for historical printed texts, specifically those works published before the industrial production of books from the middle of the 19th century. ... The IMPACT project will specifically develop a tool that supports collaborative correction and validation of OCR results and a tool to allow user involvement in building historical dictionaries which can be used to validate word recognition." 

Call for Papers, Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference, February 02011

Quoting from the announcement on various mailing lists (02010 09 07):

The Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference has begun to accept program proposals for the 2011 conference in Austin, Texas.Pre-Conferences are scheduled to be held on 27 February 2011 and the regular conference begins the morning of 28 February and runs through mid-day on 2 March.

We are encouraging proposals for the following program tracks:

Managing E-Resources in Libraries

Collection Development and Assessment

Workflow and Organizations

External and User Relationships

Emerging and Future Technologies

Scholarly Communication and Licensing

Library as Publisher

Please see the call for proposals on the Electronic Resources and Libraries website for more details:

http://www.electroniclibrarian.com/presenters/call-for-proposals

Proposals will be accepted through 15 November 2010 and early submissions will be given priority.

Lastly, registration has also opened for the conference so if you are interested in attending, please take advantage of early registration by clicking on the bright red registration button on the web site:

http://www.electroniclibrarian.com/

What Is the Big Idea? asks The Chronicle of Higher Education

For its 10th anniversary issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education solicited a series of short essays from scholars and illustrators, asking them to define a single "idea of the coming decade, and why?" You can read their provocative, compelling and exciting thoughts in "What's the Big Idea?".

Ten Thousand Year Blog now available through syndication at Newstex

My Ten Thousand Year Blog was approved for syndication through Newstex. The company has begun marketing it. Details on the blog are available at

http://www.newstex.com/publisher-search/Blogs/Samples/The-Ten-Thousand-Year-Blog

edUi 2010 Conference, November 02010, Charlottesville, VA, USA

If you're part of the Web design world, chances are you'll be angling for a chance to travel to Charlottesville, VA, USA, where the edUi 2010 Conference is being held on November 8 and 9, 02010 in the Omni Hotel. According to its About page,

Focusing on the universal methods and tools of user interface and interaction design as well as the unique challenges of producing websites and applications for large institutions, edUi is a perfect opportunity for web professionals at institutions of learning including: higher education, K-12 schools, libraries, museums, government, and local and regional businesses to develop skills and share ideas.

What Does an Electronic Records Archivist Do?

Find out in Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig's post, What Does an Electronic Records Archivist Do?, on The Bigger Picture blog at the Smithsonian Institution where she works as an electronic records archivist.

ACRL/IRIG Visual Literacy Standards blog

Quoting from the announcement on IMAGELIB (02010 07 15):

The ACRL/IRIG Visual Literacy Standards Task Force is working on Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. We have started a blog as a forum for discussion about visual literacy, and as a communication tool to provide information about the standards development process and progress. Please visit the blog here: http://acrlvislitstandards.wordpress.com/.

We would like to encourage broad community engagement in the Visual Literacy Standards development process, and invite you to participate in the blog discussions. Please feel welcome to comment on the blog, and invite others to do so as well. We appreciate all input.

According to a post on the blog on 02010 07 15, "We are defining visual literacy in the context of an interdisciplinary, information-literacy-based, higher education environment."

If you get it, share it, but why are there no sharing tools on the Social Media Club site?

The Social Media Club was founded in 2006 in San Francisco, California, USA, and there are now chapters around the world. The Social Media Club's tag line is "If you get it, share it." Well, I get it, but I'll be darned if I can figure out why the Social Media Club Web site has not a one social media sharing tool in sight.

Let's get visual with metadata standards

Jenn Riley, Indiana University, has a free, terrific PDF poster called Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe, supplemented with a metadata standard glossary, also available as a free PDF in poster or brochure formats.

Digital Humanities Now, a real-time, crowdsourced publication

According to the About page, Digital Humanities Now

"is a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention.

Digital Humanities Now is fully automated. It is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from this digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on this site, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions.

Digital Humanities Now was created by Dan Cohen, assisted by Jeremy Boggs, and is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University."

And it's "passively edited by 350 scholars and organizations in the digital humanities and related fields."

New British Columbia Archival Network Service Coordinator and e-mail address

I was awarded the contract by the Archives Association of British Columbia as its new British Columbia Archival Network Service Coordinator effective April 1, 2010. My main work under the contract is management of the MemoryBC database of archival descriptions submitted by archival institutions in the province. MemoryBC was official launched in November 2009 as part of BC Archives Week and is the rebranded successor to the British Columbia Archival Union List.

I've set up a new e-mail address on Gmail specifically for this work. The address is aabc.bcans@gmail.com. Please use this address rather than info@aabc.ca.

Code4Lib Journal Issue 9 now available

Issue 9 of the Code4Lib Journal has at least one article of interest to the archival community, quoting from the announcement on various mailing lists (02010 03 22):

Challenges in Sustainable Open Source: A Case Study Sibyl Schaefer
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2493

The Archivists’ Toolkit is a successful open source software package for archivists, originally developed with grant funding. The author, who formerly worked on the project at a participating institution, examines some of the challenges in making an open source project self-sustaining past grant funding. A consulting group hired by the project recommended that — like many successful open source projects — they rely on a collaborative volunteer community of users and developers. However, the project has had limited success fostering such a community. The author offers specific recommendations for the project going forward to gain market share and develop a collaborative user and development community, with more open governance.

Three other articles may be of broader interest as well to readers outside the usual audience:

Using Cloud Services for Library IT Infrastructure Erik Mitchell
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2510

Cloud computing comes in several different forms and this article documents how service, platform, and infrastructure forms of cloud computing have been used to serve library needs. Following an overview of these uses the article discusses the experience of one library in migrating IT infrastructure to a cloud environment and concludes with a model for assessing cloud computing.

Creating an Institutional Repository for State Government Digital Publications Meikiu Lo and Leah M. Thomas
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2563

In 2008, the Library of Virginia (LVA) selected the digital asset management system DigiTool to host a centralized collection of digital state government publications. The Virginia state digital repository targets three primary user groups: state agencies, depository libraries and the general public.
DigiTool’s ability to create depositor profiles for individual agencies to submit their publications, its integration with the Aleph ILS, and product support by ExLibris were primary factors in its selection. As a smaller institution, however, LVA lacked the internal resources to take full advantage of DigiTool’s full set of features. The process of cataloging a heterogenous collection of state documents also proved to be a challenge within DigiTool. This article takes a retrospective look at what worked, what did not, and what could have been done to improve the experience.

Wrangling Electronic Resources: A Few Good Tools Brandy Klug
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2634

There are several freely available tools today that fill the needs of librarians tasked with maintaining electronic resources, that assist with tasks such as editing MARC records and maintaining web sites that contain links to electronic resources. This article gives a tour of a few tools the author has found invaluable as an Electronic Resources Librarian.

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard

Wordnik Launches Smartwords Initiative as Open Standard according to this Information Today Newsbreaks from March 1, 02010. Version 1 of this standard, developed "with help from its first Smartwords partners, including The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, O'Reilly, Vook, Scribd, ibis reader, and the Internet Archive," is supposed to be released in the summer of 02010. More information is available on the Wordnik Blog about its Smartwords initiative under a post dated February 23, 02010.

Wordnik itself is I think the first online dictionary that fully engages the Web 2.0 environment. Tweets from Twitter that utilize a word you look up are displayed, along with all sorts of other contextual information, including individual comments and tags from registered users of Wordnik. Except for the fact that Wiktionary allows any registered user to directly add content about a word, I think Wordnik has one-upped Wiktionary. Wordnik claims in its FAQ that it will work with individuals to incorporate new words into its "giant databank of English!"

CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium, Feburary 02010, archived

The CHIN (Canadian Heritage Information Network) Digital Heritage Symposium, held February 4 and 5, 02010 at the University of British Columbia's newly renovated Museum of Anthropology (MOA), has been archived and is available to CHIN members through the Professional Exchange. During Museum Month in May the symposium proceedings will become available to the general public.

Source: The CHIN Digital Heritage Symposium: a popular success!, 02010 February 22

Smashing Magazine and the sound of design success

I'd come across Smashing Magazine before. It was launched in September 2006 and features lots of content about Web site design and development. Consider it essential reading if you're in this field.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) blogs

Since I've been doing some writing about Google, real-time and social search engines, I thought I'd list some of the Search Engine Optimization and search marketing blogs that offer useful content:

• Distilled Blog is from the London, England, partner of SEOmoz, which left the SEO business in February 2010.


• Patrick Gavin, Search Engine Optimization Blog. He used to be PatrickGavin.com, and now he's Searchengineoptimization.net.
  


• SearchCowboys.com is a European blog about search engine marketing and SEO.



• SEOChicks, the SEO Blog with Attitude. If it's attitude you want, you'll get lots of that here. The SEO Chicks was founded in 2007.


• SEOgadget is another UK SEO consulting company with a great blog.



• SEOmozBlog from SEOmoz in Seattle, Washington, says it left the SEO consulting business in February 2010, so perhaps this blog won't be around much longer. Check out their Recommended List of SEO Consultants, Experts, Firms & Service Providers.


• SEOptimise is a blog from a UK SEO consultancy firm.

If you know of other super-duper SEO blogs, please leave a comment and some reasons why they should be consulted.