I’ve been exploring the Soundcloud a bit today. I’ve been following them on Twitter but haven’t had a chance to venture inside yet. Seems like a pretty good arangement. The server is situated in Berlin which is different from the usual U.S. based sites and therefore might attract a broader listener base.

The free account provides 2 hours of free time to host your music, DJ sets, work in progress, loops, and other sounds that you might want to share with the cloud. I’ve just now put up a few of my older tracks on Soundcloud; I’ve still got bits and pieces of things on Noisehead, MySpace, CD Baby but there are a couple of tracks here that I don’t think I’ve put up anywhere else.

The Jam, for example, is an interesting one that I haven’t listened to for quite a while. I remember recording it though. It’s an improvisatory exercise finding inspiration from within itself. Kind of an overlapping musical narrative that continuosly feeds off of each musical thread suggesting new directions as the piece proceeds. I like it. Hope you’ll give it a listen and maybe leave me a comment or two.

“But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice orFirefox. … This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software.”

Lost in the Cloud
By JONATHAN ZITTRAIN

Zittrain is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It and will be a keynote speaker at the AALL conference which I’ll be attending over the next few days in Washington, DC.

I happened on this mention of a couple of interviews with Char Booth on Tame The Web and thought I’d take a look. Booth had recently released/published Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University which I had seen and duly added to my delicious links but haven’t had time to read. But after listening/reading these interviews very much looking forward to doing that now.

In the interview with Dan Freeman at ALA TechSource she had this to say about her research report:

“What started as a user research initiative to understand local technology and library cultures at Ohio University developed over the space of a year or so into its current form, an in-depth case study of our survey findings on students and emerging technologies as a framework for analyzing the current climate of technology development in libraries in general. The book also offers a lot of practical advice about how librarians can use homegrown survey methodology to investigate their local users in order to integrate more usefully into their campus communities and create a better response in terms of emerging services.“

This interview is a nice quick walk through Booth’s research report.

Ellie Collier’s interview at In The Library With a Lead Pipe is really great! Both audio and transcript are available so a nice two brain hemisphere listening and reading experience.

This interview touches on her research report but it’s also exploring Booth’s passion and approach to research and librarianship. Here are a few things that resonated with me:

• “The librarians [at Ohio University] are extraordinary. They let people drag cots in there. And when we all graduate we burn copies of our thesis in front of the library and it’s this crazy revelry. It just really instilled this idea of a research culture and libraries supporting students and I’ve never forgotten that. It’s what I aspire to.“
• “I just realized that I had not been taught enough about teaching to be a librarian. I think that’s an endemic problem in library education. We’re not taught to be educators even though that’s what we are.“
• “It’s local research findings, but it’s couched in this language of how to research your own institution to understand what it’s trying to tell you about what it needs from its library, not just in terms of technology, or this kind of minimum insight into the students that you’re serving … It’s about really getting a handle on the culture in which you exist because that’s the culture that you serve and it’s different than any other library culture on the planet because that’s the way it works.“
• “When you work with emerging technology in libraries or in higher education or wherever, you’ve got to be able to switch gears when things don’t work right. We’re all treading new ground, not only in the technologies that we’re using, but like I said with the specific institutional cultures, different types of IT relationships.“
• “I’ve talked a lot about different types of working cultures and how I really think it’s very important to try actively to enjoy your job and to create a positive working culture at the place that you find yourself … why go to work at a place that doesn’t feel good to go to work at? It doesn’t make sense to me.“

Booth has a lot of great ideas and I found her interview very inspiring and well worth exploring. She blogs at Info-mational and you may also be interested in her guest blog post form last year on Tame The Web, the Library Student Bill of Rights.

“XC’s architecture is based upon aggregating metadata, and we are
building a robust platform that will perform this aggregation, called
the XC Metadata Services Toolkit (MST). This open source software will
support metadata from scholarly databases as well as from library catalogs and repositories. We believe that this is a much more promising direction for future discovery interfaces than relying upon metasearch technology, although the two approaches may need to be used alongside each other in the shorter term. We just don’t see a promising future in continuing to develop new software that uses metasearch technology.“

Responses so far include discussion of Serials Solutions new Summon search, how IR’s will factor into the mix, and normalization and gathering of metadata. As usual, Jonathan Rochkind raises good points and interesting questions to consider.

CDBaby is a good place to find new music but sometimes it’s hard to find stuff that you really like. I’d heard about a Canadian band called Drums and Wires which I’d actually discovered accidentally via Beef Donut on the CBC 3 website.

These guys are great!: Joel Klaverkamp (laptop, keys and vocals); Jason Banman (drums, samples, vocals); Matthew Lawrence (percussion); and Mark Penner (guitars). The music is a fantastic upbeat groove, with nice electronic flavouring, and solid riffs.

So back to CDBaby. D&W have released their new disc which you should go order right now! And so I go to CDB to order my copy. But, you know I don’t wanna just buy one disc. It seems inefficient somehow. So I started looking around to see what else might be worth grabbing.

This is when I stumbled upon another great ‘love at first listen band’: 2=3. This L.A. band released their six song EP in 2006 that is, well: too short! This is a truly rewarding disc which will instantly become a regular in your player. Just can’t get enough.

There’s an interesting mix of musical interactions going on here with a very relaxed groove that I bet would be awesome to experience live. I can hear the extended jams that are just begging to burst out of this EP. The musicians are: Cepheus Strachan aka Psi-Phi (guitars, vocals); Rey Thorne (bass, keys, vocals); and Dustin Prince (drums). There’s not much info available on the band nor the individuals involved, although it is difficult to get good results searching for 2=3.

Prince shows up on a few bands including another L.A. band called Lobate Scarp which sounds progressively promising.

Looking around for more info and hope to hear more from both of these great bands. Thank you CDBaby!!

He also mentions some great “Exciting New Technological Tools“: XC Metadata Toolkit; biblios.net; and Version Control of Metadata.

He is right when he says the cataloguing process is indeed deeply flawed. It’s firmly rooted in descriptions of the book and other printed documents and as such is antiquated and offers little that provides any real control over the current digital environment.

I also agree that RDA is turning out to be a bit of a bust or better still a bit of a beast. But I think it is a necessary step and at least an attempt to try and bring the cataloguing process into the 21st century instead of continuing to languish somewhere in the 19th. It seems RDA will not be the solution that some might expect but it is perhaps, and optimistically, a step in the right direction. Its development process too has also been deeply flawed and it really should be provided as an open access product for all to use not a for profit venture an approach that will surely be its ultimate downfall.

This fact that Rochkind raises is very important, “… the de-professionalization and general decimation of most cataloguing departments have left us seriously deprived of talent and time to work on updating and reinvigorating our practices.” Not sure how we are to deal with this dilemma. He does not paint a rosy picture to be sure, but I remain surprisingly optimistic.

Cataloguers rule(s)!

Making these determinations is challenging to say the least.  It’s hard to really get the structure of this massive document.  Remember this is the first time we’ve had an opportunity to see the whole RDA document. And it was delayed for months, finally released as a gaggle of pdf files.  These are extremely difficult to work with and/or print (which I have avoided preferring instead to work with it online).  Wrapping my head around this is starting to make me kinda crazy.

Where’s the electronic version?  Where’s the ability to chart your path through this document according to the needs of the particular cataloguer?  Where’s RDA?  These 1,000 pages, or however many there are, are not RDA.  And for certain this is not a final draft!  There is so much that still needs to be done:  proofreading, rule reference correction, and most importantly vetting of the conceptual structure and presentation. Why wasn’t the review period extended so the constituencies had more time to try and do this? And the time that was alloted ran over the holiday period. Nice. Thanks.

It’s not ready. It needs more time. Why rush through this? I feel like I’m picking away at a scab and at this rate it’s never going to heal. OK, maybe I’m over reacting … but I don’t think I’m alone.

“So, where are these commands, anyway?”

How Linux Works

So cycling in this morning I was trying to remind myself why I wanted to use Linux in the first place.  Is it solving problems or creating them?  Should I install an Apache server?  Create Ruby-on-Rails executables?  Early days.  It’ll come to me I’m sure.