I’m very proud to announce that the Harvard Library Innovation Lab (which I co-direct) has launched what we think is a useful and appealing way to browse books at scale. This is timed to coincide with the launch today of the Digital Public Library of America. (Congrats, DPLA!!!)

StackLife (nee ShelfLife) shows you a visualization of books on a scrollable shelf, which we turn sideways so you can read the spines. It always shows you books in a context, on the ground that no book stands alone. You can shift the context instantly, so that you can (for example) see a work on a shelf with all the other books classified under any of the categories professional cataloguers have assigned to it.

We also heatmap the books according to various usage metrics (“StackScore”), so you can get a sense of the work’s community relevance.

There are lots more features, and lots more to come.

We’ve released two versions today.

StackLife DPLA mashes up the books in the Digital Public Library of America’s collection (from the Biodiversity Heritage Library) with books from The Internet Archive‘s Open Library and the Hathi Trust. These are all online, accessible books, so you can just click and read them. There are 1.7M in the StackLife DPLA metacollection. (Development was funded in part by a Sprint grant from the DPLA. Thank you, DPLA!)

StackLife Harvard lets you browse the 12.3M books and other items in the Harvard Library systems 73 libraries and off-campus repository. This is much less about reading online (unfortunately) than about researching what’s available.

Here are some links:

StackLife DPLA: http://stacklife-dpla.law.harvard.edu
StackLife Harvard: http://stacklife.law.harvard.edu
The DPLA press release: http://library.harvard.edu/stacklife-browse-read-digital
The DPLA version FAQ: http://stacklife-dpla.law.harvard.edu/#faq/

The StackLife team has worked long and hard on this. We’re pretty durn proud:

Annie Cain
Paul Deschner
Kim Dulin
Jeff Goldenson
Matthew Phillips
Caleb Troughton

4 Comments »

I put this video together as the opener of the first in a series of public conversations Harvard is holding about the future of libraries and of the Harvard Library system.

3 Comments »

The Harvard Library Lab, which issues grants for library innovation at the University, is holding a forum in which all the projects get 5 mins to introduce themselves. (The names prefacing these blurbs are of the presenters, who are not always the project leads or developers.)

Sebastian Diaz: Slideshow generator. Makes it easy to create slideshows out of images from image repositories. It initially is using the VIA repository. You can search by keyword, select the slides, set the delay between slides, and publish it. It’s intended for classroom use, or, of course, for anyone.

Sebastian Diaz: Enhanced Social Tagging for Classifiation and Current Awareness. It’s currently under development. (The code is at Github.) It enables the merging of tag sets that use different vocabularies without having to define a dictionary ahead of time. The tool produces a filter, “and you aggregate based on that filter,” renaming tags (or associating them?) based on the filter. People can make their own aggregated feed out of these multiple tag sets. It’s a form of behavior-driven development.

Sebastian Diaz: Deposit@Harvard. This tool eases the process of adding open access material to open access repositories, including Harvard DASH. This is an issue because not all repositories have the same APIs or metadata definitions.

Abigail Bourdeaux: The Copyright and Fair Use Tool: An interactive workflow tool for those trying to determine the copyright status, and fair use status, of materials, particularly for use in the classroom. (It has not yet begun coding.)

Abigail Bourdeaux: Online Digital Atlas Viewer. This is a viewer designed specifically for viewing historical atlases online. These atlases may have overlap from page to page, may switch scales, etc. ODAV will help to reconcile maps through Open Layers, to overlap and scale them seamlessly. (It has not yet begun coding.)

Marc MGee and Dave Siegel: Enhanced Catalog Searching with Geospatial Technology. They’re working on ways to spatially search information in the Harvard Library system. They’re using PRESTO Web Services tools. They’ve taken 1,700 MARC records and sent them to Metacarta, a geocoding company. Metacarta assigns lat/long to words it’s extracted from text. They then put markers on a map to show docs relevant to those places.

Bobbi Fox: Library Application Collaboration Development Tools and Resources: How we can better coordinate library innovation at Harvard. They’ve reactivated the ABCD Library discussion group, which has been a “roaring success.” They’ve also been talking with groups all across the library system about what would help. They’re also coordinating with the new University CTO. From the small group discussions they’ve confirmed that everyone wants simple and convenient ways to keep up with the various projects, but we tend to disagree about what “simple and convenient” means :) Also, it’s clear we need to work get over the cultural barriers against sharing what we’re doing. Most people are not all that excited about centrally provided services such as bug tracking or source code management.

Justin Daost, Chris Erdmann: Wolbach User Experience Lab. The center for astrophysics got a Microsoft Surface, which interacts with objects near its surface via infrared cameras. They’ve been working with Microsoft Research to see how it could be use in the Library. Microsoft also connected them with Andy van Dam at Brown U. where they’re working on the Garibaldi Project, a way of browsing a set of related content. They’ve been working on the LADS project that lets people scroll through a timeline, zoom in on high res images (without using much memory), click on hotspots that display related metadata, etc. They are using this to give access to special collections. Also, they created an interface to enable librarians to update it easily.

Andy Wilson: QR Codes in the Library: This project would put QR in the stacks that would load onto a mobile device research guides relevant to that area of the stacks. They will spend the fall semester gathering more usage data before going to full implementation; they want to make sure people will actually use it.

Skip Kendall and Andrea Goethals: Zone 1 Rescue Repository: 1. Working with faculty members to look at their own personal archive (personal papers, etc.), and to think about policy recommendations. 2. The Rescue Repository is a place to put content the final destination of which is not yet known.; it’s a type of staging area, for use by anyone at Harvard, with very low barriers to getting content in. People can nominate content for long-term preservation. Content can be exported into other repositories. It will be open source software. (MIT is collaborating on this project).

Carli Spina and Kim Dulin: Library Analytics Toolkit: An open source, highly configurable dashboard for viewing library statistics. It will be configurable for individuals, departments, entire libraries, etc. By having it in similar formats, libraries will be able to compare their data. It will be widget-based and extensible, drawing data from standard data collectors, and will be built on existing dashboards (e.g. NCSU, Brown U., and the Watson Library at the Met). It is at the wireframe stage.

Cheryl McGrath: Interactive Carrel Seating App: Currently getting a carrel requires a bunch of paperwork and staff time. People have a wide variety of requests: Near a bathroom, in sunlight, no glare at sunset, are there crumbs in it, etc. This open source app lets users browse and search, and reserve the carrel. Carrel users can also post msgs to one another. The team thinks this app may save 5 weeks of labor for a staff member per year.

Library Innovation Podcasts: That’s my project: http://librarylab.law.harvard.edu/blog/category/podcast/

Chip Goines: DRS Access for Mobil Devices: Creating an API to enable mobile devices to locate items in a “page-turned digital research” object, returning info about that particular page. [pdf]

Kimberly Hall: The Connected Scholar: “Building ideas and exploring sources within an online culture of attribution.” It lets researchers track what they’re looking at/copying/jotting down, and enables collaboration in the management of information resources. This should help scholars see where their ideas are coming from, to better understand their creative process.” It should also help students develop the habit of attributing sources. Students will be able to see their research process through the tool.

Reinhard Engels: Highbrow: A textual annotation browser that displays the density of references to a text. E.g., you can plot the Biblical references in Aquinas, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Maimonides. (Augustine is more interested in Psalms than Aquinas was, and no one is interested in Mark.) You can zoom in on the line chart until you get to the actual text. The source text preferably should have a clear coordinate system (e.g., chapter and verse, or numbered lines of poetry). In working with Dante references, Reinhard has hit scaling issues: one set of commentators has almost 300,000 annotations. So, he slices them by century, or by various other facets. Or you can browse by line and see how many annotations there, and what they are. He’s now working interactive annotations, enabling students and researchers to enter annotations.

Tom Dawson: Yana: “an open source template for scholarly journals to develop mobile apps.” “Yana” is Sanskrit for “vehicle.”) “The goal of the Yana project is to provide a light-weight, modular, open source template within which open acccess publishers can develop their own mobile applications.” The aim is to make it easier for journals to do open access publishing on mobiles.

I talked about LibraryCloud, and Matt Phillips did a demo. LibraryCloud is an open library metadata server. It’s coming along well.

James Burns, Jesse Shapins: extraMUROS. The aim is to provide a multimedia library without walls. It will bring together collections from all over and let users browse and search, curate in their own fashion, and be able to publish collections. James and Jesse show an early build of their browser that lets you quickly scan multiple collections. (Very cool.) You can drag objects into a scratch space — either collections or individual items. It can look at the items you’re choosing in order to refine your search. There’s a map view that is also very cool. It even has a 3D view (No, no glasses required :) And a timeline view.

Q: Will you fund non-tech-heavy proposals?
A: Yes!

Q: Could these be sources of revenue for the Library?
A: Nope. It’s open source for the greater good of libraries.

Be the first to comment »

From a press release:

Harvard will share its access to the super high-speed Internet2 Network connection with Boston and Cambridge schools, granting all 148 public schools in the two cities use of the most advanced networking consortium in the world.

In addition, Cisco is contributing Cisco TelePresence equipment to the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School enabling the students and teachers to connect with people around the globe. This interactive collaboration tool will put them at the forefront of teaching and learning. Raytheon BBN Technologies, an advanced networking research company, has donated the networking equipment that provides connectivity to Cambridge.

Yay. And not just for the immediate benefits. Get the kids hooked on what the Net can be, and they’ll grow up thinking that that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

1 Comment »

Stuart Shieber, one of Harvard’s Open Access ringleaders, has started a blog on that topic. He says it’ll be occasional — maybe per week, not per day — and it promises to be reflective and important to those who care about making more of the world’s research and knowledge available to, well, the world. (Stuart is the director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication, and was one of the important voices in the push for Harvard’s open access initiatives.)

[Tags: open_access stuart_shieber harvard everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Be the first to comment »

Harvard is rescinding Google’s permission to scan its libraries’ books because Harvard thinks the settlement deal between Google and the publishers (which I blogged about enthusiastically here) is too restrictive. According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Harvard’s library guy, Robert Darnton, said:

“the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.” He also expressed concern about the quality of the scanned books, which “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations, and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research.”

[Tags: google libraries harvard copyright copyleft ]

2 Comments »

Harry Lewis is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, a former dean there, a Fellow at the Berkman Center, the author of a terrific book about Harvard (“Excellence without a Soul” …ouch!), the fiercest critic of what I’ve been researching recently, and a person I like a lot. He’s also a co-author of Blown to Bits (blog).

I say all this because Harry is teaching a course at Harvard called “Life, Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion,” which, by weird coincidence, is pretty much the subtitle of “Blown to Bits.” Until the enrollment period closes (probably pretty soon), you can watch a videos of the opening course session (requires the Real player). Harry was given title “Harvard College Professor” because of his excellence as a teacher.

O, if only open courseware were the default!

[Tags: berkman harvard harry_lewis open_courseware blown_to_bits ]

3 Comments »

Gene Koo and Eric Gordon are giving a Tuesday lunch talk on “Hub2: Creating Deliberative Publics through Virtual Worlds.” [I'm taking quick notes and will undoubtedly get some stuff wrong.]

Hub2 is a partnership with Boston (Harvard is sponsoring the project) to enhance the community participation process. It’d be good to have a platform for deliberative process. But land use discussions typically ahve their own technical jargon. And it can be hard to imagine what a place will be like when all you have is a 2D map. It’d be better to be working in 3D space, so you can see what t’d be like to move these trees over there, or widen the path, etc. Instead of having the community react — yes or no — to a design, why not have the community participate in the design?

Hub2 aims are providing a design process that is experiential, embodied, constructive. Hub2 heads towards “augmented deliberation”: Imagine, design, engage, activate (= IDEA). They’re using SecondLife for this. They hope citizens will use it as a design tool and come up with an affirmative vision of what they want. And because you can walk through the virtual space, you develop an informed opinion. Gene and Eric ask people to try out the space in various roles, e.g., a 33 yr old who walks her dog twice a day or as someone in a wheelchair.

The project has set up Boston Island in SecondLife and have the last name “bostonian.” They are using it for augmented deliberation about Harvard’s Honan Library Park development in north Allston, MA. Local residents get together, try out layouts, leave comments (in visual flags). Residents can access the site either at home or using the public access systems in the library; the libraries have Hub2 staff people there to help people with the system. (They have thought about the fact that they’re putting public records into a proprietary data format, but SL is the best choice.)

Over 60 teenagers have spent time on the system, along with about 30 other residents. That’s more than have participated in the traditional process.

Q: I’m glad you’re dealing with the digital divide issues. But this is a 1.2 acre park out of 350 that Harvard owns in Allston…
A: There will be more open spaces.

Q: Should we open this process up to the world?
A: It’s a local issue
A: Keeping it local builds consensus
A: Maybe. You’d want to make clear who is local and who isn’t. It might even help to defuse the situation in which the locals want a design that is impractical or reflects the needs of those who happened to have engaged in the process.

Q: Maybe you should be talking with SL about how to make the archives more open.
A: Yes. But our main goal is to improve the design process. [Someone on the irc chat points to a BBC piece on archiving virtual worlds.] [Tags: berkman secondlife boston harvard allston community_design ]

Be the first to comment »

The Harvard Law faculty has voted unanimously for an Open Access policy based on the one that the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a few months ago. Yay!

John Palfrey, Harvard Law’s new vice dean for library and information resources (and, of course, the soon-to-be-former exec dir of the Berkman Center) gets to implement this happy policy.

[Tags: open_access harvard libraries john_palfrey ]

6 Comments »

Brad Sucks came to Harvard this week and gave a performance-conversation and addressed the class I’m co-teaching with John Palfrey (blogged here and here). There were a few surprises.

What was not surprising was that Brad’s totally delightful, frank, and just a good guy.

First, he pronounces his last name (Turcotte) as Tur-COTT, not Tur-COAT. I stand corrected. Also, he likes his name written as “Brad Sucks,” not “BradSucks.” Sorry twice, Brad!

Second, especially during the class, I was struck by how different copyright looks to Brad than it looks to, well, lots of others. It’s not just that copyright protection looks to Brad like a limitation on how widely his music spreads and his musical career builds. Rather, it was how foreign copyright looks to him. From what he said, it seems like an imposition of an artificial construct place on top of the work.

Here’s what I think is happening, although I can’t say that this is what Brad is thinking. To people who think of music as a work, copyright looks like the natural boundary of their work, the ethical edge of their work itself. Others (Brad, maybe?) think of music not so much as a work as a shared experience, as a connection with listeners. For them, listening is co-creation. The work feels more like a performance to them. The concept of copyright doesn’t fit easily over such a view.

Third, Brad surprised both the class and the attendees at the performance-conversation with his claim that he is a “horrible capitalist” who gives his songs away for intensely practical reasons, not because he’s an anti-copyright activist.

Thanks for coming, Brad. And thanks for being so BradSucksy. [Tags: brad_sucks bradsucks copyright copyleft music harvard ]

1 Comment »