Posts by paynter
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Arrgh – how did this get to be librarians vs others? It’s not a very productive way to go.
Agreed, but I think you brought it on yourself. You've made the argument that libraries / archives can't do this work (or a large part of it) because they lack certain skills; but these skills are actually part and parcel of the profession. I venture that many who work in libraries found this rather condescending and are trying politely to correct you.
I agree it's not productive.
And I agree with Simon that our existing institutions are neither resourced nor inclined to attempt the second point. They're already doing the first as well as they can, but it is always possible to do more (and it is hard and expensive).
Finally, let me say that if Simon can get this off the ground, then all power to him. I hope that my institution would be supportive.
Gordon
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Sacha,
Any detail on how you envisage doing that? Seems to be the area where contextualising adds value.
Nothing official, but we admire the British Library's UK Web Archive, and we use many of the same web archiving tools as BL (we have jointly developed the Web Curator Tool).
The UK Web Archive is a purely selective archive (i.e. each website captured separately) and we also have whole-of-domain harvests to present. However, the whole system is based on Wayback I am pretty sure we can interleave the selective and domain harvests.
I also expect tools that get us straight into archived web material without visiting an web archive will come into their own over the next few years. For example, browser plugins that provide access to the archived versions of any page you visit or archives that are designed to replace 404 Page Not Found content for obsolete websites.
Gordon
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Tamsin6,
With all due respect Russell, I don’t think that you understand completely what library and archive professionals do
Thanks Tamsin, I was going to make this point too.
Russel:
…means being plugged in to commercial services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, where people and resources are. There are places libraries don’t to tend go.
Facebook and Twitter are infested with Librarians (YouTube less so). And we’re doing all we can to add them to the collections, particularly now that they’re in scope of leal deposit.
But music has always been a business as well as an art, and there’s a case for have people from the business on board.
Yes, but that is also true of print. Libraries have been dealing with publishers since, well, for as long as there have been libraries. That part’s not new for us.
Putting aside our reputation as Luddites, it’s a bit hard to explain the National Library’s collecting goals around online, digital and audiovisual – especially since we have three separate sets of collections (General, Turnbull and Schools) with different purposes but plenty of overlap.Also, a lot of the work we do in these areas is currently not very visible. For example, we’re struggling to find the resources to capture the web, nevermind making what we have publicly accessible (though I hope we can make a bit more progress on social media sites in the coming year).
Gordon
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to paynter,
But having said that, Russell has a point: the Turnbull music people have different priorities (and limited resources). So if they haven't been in touch with Simon since the last time this we discussed this project, it seems reasonable to assume that they are not likely to undertake anything like it themselves.
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The project that Simon proposes is going to require a lot of interaction and winning of trust with music people – especially when it gets to the physical archive phase and you’re talking about master tapes getting handed over, or rights being granted for works to be made available online.
It still sounds like just what National Library people do, just applied to music rather than documentary heritage.
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Russell C,
The government has already brought the two big heritage archives – the National Library collection and Archives New Zealand – together by moving the library, previously its own government department, into the Department of Internal Affairs. I don’t know enough about the issues there to comment, but I haven’t really heard any cries of distress.
This is a topic in itself, and a difficult one for me to comment on as a National Library (now DIA) employee. However, looking at the big picture, the Library is undergoing several massive changes at the same time right now.
The obvious change is the integration with DIA and associated restructuring, which I expect to continue. I don't really think we've seen the effects of this yet, as we're still in the same financial year with few major changes to our activities, staff and processes. Next year will likely be very different, in ways we're only beginning to understand.
We also have a new National Librarian from an innovative institution.
At the same time, we're undertaking a building redevelopment and a massive reshaping of our public services. This has been accompanied by reviews of all our major directorates (the Alexander Turnbull Library is currently being restructured).
Finally, we're anticipating bug changes to our budget over the next few years as the Government seeks efficiencies in the public service.
For now, it is very difficult to say which of these factors will have the biggest impacts on the Library. I can say that our people have an awful lot of change to deal with, but are dedicated, professional and passionate, and will continue to try and deliver the best service they can.
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TV3 really has been slipping lately. Duncan Garner seems very bitter, and Deal or No Deal story was weird and insulting. Having watched TV1 lately though, we're still not ready to switch back.
Now that Seinfeld has started at 6PM on TV2 though, we're thinking we might try Prime news at 5:30. How much worse can it be?
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I have an aging iBook (a cool white one) and have installed NeoOffice for everyday word processing. I use MS Office at work, but I didn't think it was worth paying for at home. (I do find it a bit slow, but then, this is a 600Mhz G3 machine, so assume that isn't a software problem.)
Short version: It works fine.
It would not be a big deal to use it in schools.
As someone pointed out, if you are transferring documents where formatting is very important between NeoOffice and MS Office, then you will probably lose some detail. In my experience the OpenOffice spreadsheet works very well (I have noticed some oddities when making huge pivot tables, but I think that would be beyond most school applications).
I have Firefox installed, but I prefer Safari. We regularly use three sites that don't work with Safari, so for a school I'd recommend Firefox.
Anyway, I can't really imagine what people would see as lacking in NeoOffice. I can imagine the whole "doesn't save in Word format by default" issue will confuse people, but I can remember training up perfectly computer-illiterate people to sort this out during the great WordPerfect-to-MS-Works migrations of the nineties.
Gordon
Disclaimer: My other computer runs Debian. (In fact, my iBook used to run Debian.)
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What are the chances of Renaissance getting big enough to deal direct with Apple US, instead of going through Apple Australia? That could be a significant change, in terms of product price.