Tuesday August 12, 2008

Transformations in the Repository Stack

Yesterday Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, spoke to the Red Island Repository Institute.  I twittered regarding a comment she made to the effect that content transformations should logically be moved farther down the repository stack.  Several people wrote to me to ask about it.  I'm afraid I have little more to add to her statement other than to point out that she offered Sun Honeycomb as evidence of the trend toward pushing those processes lower.  My understanding of her position is that it's logical to transform the data closer to where it lives rather than moving it out of storage and into the access application layer and then making the transformation.

Another interesting follow-on conversation involved the scope of Fedora and repositories in general.  Declan Fleming, Director of Information Technology at UC San Diego Libraries, questioned the broadness of scope and resulting complexity of Fedora.  This reminded me of a train of thought I'd been following prior to the RIRI- There's a great deal of overlap between the layers in a typical repository stack.  iRods,a storage layer, provides functionality covered by Fedora, the repository layer, which provides functionality provided by Fez, the access layer.  This is a simple example that got me thinking about where specific functions should occur.  Of course, these layers weren't designed solely to interact with one another and shouldn't be expected to integrate perfectly, but it's a useful exercise to consider the most logical location for processes. 

Tuesday May 06, 2008

MySQL Remains Open Source

It's very encouraging to see that Sun does understand Open Source and has announced that MySQL will remain open. This is a follow-on from a couple of weeks ago when Sun broke the news that it would begin releasing features for MySQL Enterprise only available to paying customers.  The whole affair makes it even more significant that Postgres has been pretty adamant about not selling.  For a moment, it seemed as though Sun forgot how to build a reasonable community and business model around an Open Source product.  Let's hope they don't forget again.  Giving Oracle a run for it's money in the enterprise market can only benefit consumers.

Saturday May 03, 2008

Cognitive Surplus

A brilliant meme from Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo.  He answers the question of where people find the time for knowledge collection and dissemination a la Wikipedia.   He also does a pretty convincing job of explaining that the shift from purely consumptive media behavior to bidirectional engagement with media is a one way trip.

Thursday May 01, 2008

Capturing Campus Data

I sat in on a session with a local Information Architecture consultant yesterday that rekindled my interest in capturing data generated by the university.  I asked how we might expose our deep web content without overwhelming users not interested in that content.  Really, though, the problem starts much farther back.

We have an excellent GIS collection in addition to numeric data with which I am not as familiar, but we haven't, to my knowledge, engaged campus data producers in any large-scale fashion.  Presently, it's unclear to me that we'd know what to do with the data regarding preservation, access, organization, and intellectual property concerns.  Still farther back, I don't know that we've thought about building business cases to sell the services and facilities the Libraries could offer data producers.  It seems likely that  data producers will need strong business cases to incentivize the submission process.  

In our experience with the National Digital Information and Preservation Program it's clear that preservation motivates some but is often little motivation for others and is frequently too remote an issue to induce real action.  Certainly, the more demanding the process is for data producers, the more motivation they would need.  Building business cases to address producer needs is an important step.  I think that diversifying the benefits is equally important.

In addition to preservation, access could be a key carrot to lure potential submitters.   Reading Peter Brantley's thoughts on design beyond the interface inspired some dreamy thoughts about hiding preservation motives behind shiny access interfaces.  While this might not work for Mathematics or Chemistry, it could work for Design, Architecture, Art, or others.  

See White Paper: Behind a Law School's Decision to Implement an Institutional Repository for an interesting read on building business cases for institutional repositories.