The FRBR Blog just posted up a thing on Fran Miksa. Follow the links and listen to him speak! I listened to him for quite awhile as my cataloging professor. Miksa is still the most coherent organizational theoritician I've ever heard (or read). For those who do not know, his father was an amateur mathematician, who worked for the phone company during the day and worked on magic squares at night (sounds very super-heroey, doesn't it?). Incidentally, his name was also Francis. Makes for some confusion at UT Austin, where the elder Miksa's papers are housed at the Center for American History.
Anyway, Fran Miksa's daughter Shawne is also a cataloging professor, at the University of North Texas. You can see the progression here? A family of like-minded people.
Miksa takes organizational theory to places that few catalogers dare to tread. I remember him talking about FRBR, not understanding half of what he said, but his passion for reform was palpable. It was one of the only times I've ever been excited about FRBR. He was also the first person I knew to condone subjective cataloging. One student in particular in my class would constantly ask "is this right?" whenever she made a decision about her cataloging. Finally Miksa told her that she should stop comparing herself to Job; God wouldn't strike her down just for making a call how whether to put in an added author or not. I believe that Miksa was also a seminarian.
Anyway, go listen to him. It's nice to see that Miksa is still getting the recognition that he truly deserves.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
Medieval manuscripts and born-digital
Do you read Cataloging and Classification Quarterly? Well, I do. Sometimes there are really interesting articles like Joy Humphrey's this quarter--"Manuscripts and Metadata: Descriptive metadata in three manuscript catalogs: DigCIM, MALVINE, and Digital Scriptorium." (whew! long title, eh?)
Anyway, Humphrey makes an interesting point at the very beginning of the article about how difficult it is to digitize medieval manuscripts, and not just because they're old. Handwritten manuscripts are as valuable to researchers for their physical elements as for their content. Did the creator use different fonts, are there different authors within the manuscript, what kind of paper did they use, etc. etc. But when you digitize the manuscript and put it online, some or all of that data can get lost. There is simply no substitute for looking at the manuscript in person, if you're not as interested in content as you are in the item itself.
Which made me think a lot about born-digital materials, and how we may never see this kind of interest in the "who, what, where and why" of digital objects as we do in antiquities. I mean, most of the interest is in the content of born-digital objects, not their construction. We really care about construction when we're trying to access or migrate or emulate it. There aren't a lot of historians yet who say "remember when we were using LISP codes? Man, who were those guys? What kind of computers did they use?" There are some, but not a lot. Who will that breed of historian be? The ones who do digital archaeology and write papers about the look and feel of php databases, and who the creator was and what we can glean about them from their personal stamp on the information contained in the database. As databases and other born-digital objects become more and more the product of a community action, will the creator fall by the wayside? Will this type of diplomatics even be possible anymore?
Anyway, Humphrey makes an interesting point at the very beginning of the article about how difficult it is to digitize medieval manuscripts, and not just because they're old. Handwritten manuscripts are as valuable to researchers for their physical elements as for their content. Did the creator use different fonts, are there different authors within the manuscript, what kind of paper did they use, etc. etc. But when you digitize the manuscript and put it online, some or all of that data can get lost. There is simply no substitute for looking at the manuscript in person, if you're not as interested in content as you are in the item itself.
Which made me think a lot about born-digital materials, and how we may never see this kind of interest in the "who, what, where and why" of digital objects as we do in antiquities. I mean, most of the interest is in the content of born-digital objects, not their construction. We really care about construction when we're trying to access or migrate or emulate it. There aren't a lot of historians yet who say "remember when we were using LISP codes? Man, who were those guys? What kind of computers did they use?" There are some, but not a lot. Who will that breed of historian be? The ones who do digital archaeology and write papers about the look and feel of php databases, and who the creator was and what we can glean about them from their personal stamp on the information contained in the database. As databases and other born-digital objects become more and more the product of a community action, will the creator fall by the wayside? Will this type of diplomatics even be possible anymore?
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Horizon 7.4.1
"SirsiDynix would like our Horizon customers to know that we are committed to supporting our Horizon , Horizon Information Portal and Web Reporter products well into the future. We will continue to provide maintenance releases for these products for the next 4-6 years."
Yes, 7.4.1 is officially released. I guess that in October they started beta testing, which I think I heard about, and since all problems were resolved without incident, it's time to go full-bore with the update. And that's all it is; an update. Nothing fancy, just bug fixes, mostly. Although in addition to 7.4.1, there's a new portal, too. HIP 3.09/4.13. Which needs Java webstart. Have I ever talked about how much I dislike java? And yet here we go, using MORE of it. I know it's not Java's fault, and it used to be good, but seriously, it's not that reliable now and I always have one computer here that needs environmental variables manually changed in order to run Horizon successfully with Java. Lame. Of course, since Horizon uses Java 1.4.2, I suppose it's not like you have to use the newest version of Java or anything.
This post is a little ramble-y, but since there's literally no feedback from the listserv right now, I don't know what other people think about it. Only myself. I assume this update will fix some things and leave a lot of other things unfixed. Par for the course with most software companies.
Yes, 7.4.1 is officially released. I guess that in October they started beta testing, which I think I heard about, and since all problems were resolved without incident, it's time to go full-bore with the update. And that's all it is; an update. Nothing fancy, just bug fixes, mostly. Although in addition to 7.4.1, there's a new portal, too. HIP 3.09/4.13. Which needs Java webstart. Have I ever talked about how much I dislike java? And yet here we go, using MORE of it. I know it's not Java's fault, and it used to be good, but seriously, it's not that reliable now and I always have one computer here that needs environmental variables manually changed in order to run Horizon successfully with Java. Lame. Of course, since Horizon uses Java 1.4.2, I suppose it's not like you have to use the newest version of Java or anything.
This post is a little ramble-y, but since there's literally no feedback from the listserv right now, I don't know what other people think about it. Only myself. I assume this update will fix some things and leave a lot of other things unfixed. Par for the course with most software companies.
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