Re: [CODE4LIB] agile methodologies
Depending on the project, we use use cases or user studies. We've just completed collecting users studies for a new project and used them to create a system gap analysis, in preparation for creating a design document. Leslie -- Leslie Johnston Digital Media Project Coordinator Office of Strategic Initiatives Library of Congress 202-707-2801 lesl...@loc.gov >>> susan teague-rector 11/18/2009 9:44 AM >>> Anyone using agile methodologies for Web applications / projects - particularly user stories to define requirements for Web projects? Thanks, Susan Susan Teague-Rector Web Applications Manager VCU Libraries
Re: [CODE4LIB] "code 4 museums"
Hey Ethan, I worked for a number of museums before moving into Library work. I've built web apps on top of museum collections before. You might want to get on the Museum Computer Network email list: http://www.mcn.edu/resources/index.asp?subkey=80 There are a lot of folks in the museum community who are working with FOSS for various aspects of their operations. A museum collection management system is not unlike an ILS in many ways — it's not just a catalog, but manages the business operations of the museum related to their collections: aquisition, insurance, conservation records, location tracking, exhibition and publication histories, shipping, etc. The museum vendor market is very similar to the library ILS market — it's opening up to open source development, but isn't as far along in terms of multiple options. A LOT of smaller museums develop their own databases on top of FileMaker, Access, MS-SQL, etc, because vendor systems can be much more expensive that what you quote for PastPerfect. As to standards, there are some open data structure standards making their through the museum community. The community got into Dublin Core very early. Now there's the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), the CIDOC Categories,VRA Core, etc. There are a lot of guidelines and vocabularies. Check out http://www.mcn.edu/groups/index.asp?subkey=987 CHIN maintains resources about standards at http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/Standards/index.html . Leslie -- Leslie Johnston Digital Media Project Coordinator Office of Strategic Initiatives Library of Congress 202-707-2801 lesl...@loc.gov >>> Ethan Gruber 4/14/2009 3:12 PM >>> Hi all, I've been a software developer in a research library for several years, and I have worked with objects typically viewed as museum collections to a large degree (particularly ancient coins and eighteenth century European sheet music). Since I'm from a library and am familiar with library technological standards as far as metadata practices and software applications go, I tend to apply library standards toward the museum collections I have been in contact with--which involves Encoded Archival Description for metadata, opensource applications like tomcat, cocoon, and lucene/solr. My knowledge of museum practices is fairly limited, but I have noticed that many museums have tended to adopt proprietary databases to describe their collections. I feel museums tend to lag behind their library counterparts with respect to the adoption of opensource frameworks and open standards, but if you think about it, museums are scarcely different than many archives/special collections libraries in content and organization. I'm thinking of PastPerfect in particular. It's quite common in the museum world and costs almost $1000 per license. I'm wondering if anyone else on code4lib actually works for a museum or has first-hand experience in providing access to museum collections and has noticed the same general differences between libraries and museums that I have. Ethan Gruber University of Virginia Library
Re: [CODE4LIB] Code4Lib Logo?
I also volunteer Roy for this. The key to working with a professional is in identiyfing the design "program" — what the organization's "story" is, who its community is, and who you want to get your message to with the branding, as well as identifying what uses the logo will be used for — print, promotional items (t-shirts, hats, temporary tatoos, whatever), online — which has on effect on the deliverables, e.g. file sizes and formats. Leslie >>> Ed Summers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 9/21/2008 11:41 AM >>> How about we allow anyone to submit ideas, and use some of the $$ like Roy suggested to get a professional one from someone--and then we vote on all of them? I nominate Roy for coordinating the pro-design, and the vote :-) //Ed
Re: [CODE4LIB] Open Source Institutional Repository Software?
Agreed that you need a label for the function/tool/platform. I have been in many discussions that went around and around on the word "repository." Some folks liked it because it was a reasonably generic term for a class of tool that had some physical association with a place where things are stored/saved. Some folks hated it because, well, who knows what the heck a repository is, and how do you explain it to people who have no clue what it might be or how it would be of use to them? Often these discussions ended up with a desire to come up with a name for the public facing service so we never had to tell anyone what a repo was but could tell them to use "Edgar" or whatever to add or find collections. Not that coming up with a name is any easier... Just as I was leaving UVA 4 months ago we started to internally refer to "Library managed content" for digital materials of all sorts that were under local control. It successfully draws a circle around a class of activities — managing and delivering collections housed in the local environment, but again, it draws a line between those collections and the majority of the Library's digital content — ejournals and databases. The distinction between local and remote should be transparent to users so, again, not so useful on the public-facing side. Very useful on the administrative side, though. Leslie >>> Jonathan Rochkind <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 8/21/2008 5:22 PM >>> I agreewholeheartedly with "there is no digital library, it's just the library". And just the library increasingly has not only it's collections but it's services digital and online (is digital reference part of the 'digital library'? can you have a 'digital library' without online reference? Forget it, it's just the library, but that library better be increasingly digital if it wants to survive. ) But of course, you still need some name for this class of software intended to be a platform for your digital stuff, possibly with preservation, possibly with workflow built in, possibly not. But it's a platform to hold your digital stuff. One of my local colleagues says "digital shelves", which sounds good to me. "Digital library" I don't like for the reasons Leslie mentioned, and because I've always been confused as to why the "library" in "digital library" is understood to just be talking about _stuff_, about collections, , when we all work in libraries and know a library is more than just it's collections! "Institutional repository", talk about jargon, and yeah, it's not clear to me _why_ we'd draw such a distinction between digital copies of our own institutional output, and digital copies of other stuff. But if we did need such a special name for our own institution's output, didn't we already have the word "archives" for that? What's the point of all these new jargony phrases? They seem only to serve to seperate off certain organizational activities and collections in their own silos, when they ought to be integrated into a "single business" model instead. Jonathan Leslie Johnston wrote: > I have grown to really dislike the phrase "digital library." > > In my last job most folks referred to "The DL" when they meant the > digital collection repository (NOT an IR, but a repo for digitized > library collections). Some of us kept making the point that "digital > library" meant not just digitized physical collections, but databases > and ejournals and licensed digital images and GIS data and faculty > publications and born-digital scholarship and so on. And even if we > used the phrase more inclusively, it seemed silly to semantically > segregate that content from the physical collections just because it was > digital. > > There is no digital library — it's just the library. > > Leslie > > -- > Leslie Johnston > Digital Media Project Coordinator > Office of Strategic Initiatives > Library of Congress > 202-707-2801 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- Jonathan Rochkind Digital Services Software Engineer The Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Re: [CODE4LIB] Open Source Institutional Repository Software?
I have grown to really dislike the phrase "digital library." In my last job most folks referred to "The DL" when they meant the digital collection repository (NOT an IR, but a repo for digitized library collections). Some of us kept making the point that "digital library" meant not just digitized physical collections, but databases and ejournals and licensed digital images and GIS data and faculty publications and born-digital scholarship and so on. And even if we used the phrase more inclusively, it seemed silly to semantically segregate that content from the physical collections just because it was digital. There is no digital library — it's just the library. Leslie -- Leslie Johnston Digital Media Project Coordinator Office of Strategic Initiatives Library of Congress 202-707-2801 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
