Disruptive Library Technology Jester

I’ve been a fan of Getting Things Done as a technique for managing projects, but it was only recently that I settled on OmniFocus as the “trusted system” collecting all of my next actions. One of the things I like about OmniFocus — as a rich, Mac-only application — is its ability to hold links to messages from Mail.app as notes for each action. This occurs, for instance, when you use the “Clippings” function of OmniFocus to create a new action based on the message that you are currently viewing in Mail.app. (There are other ways to do it, such as the method described by Adam Sneller.)

One of the things I find myself doing is creating actions in a “Waiting” context based on e-mail messages I’ve just sent. Initially, I’d just create the action via the OmniFocus Quick Entry window. But I found myself needing to refer back to the message I sent when the person I’m waiting on doesn’t come through. So I started clicking and dragging the message from the Sent mailbox to the action. But to do that I’d have to click into the Sent mailbox and have the Mail.app and the OmniFocus windows set up just right. Or I’d have to follow a select-sent-mailbox, select-message, OmniFocus-quick-entry-with-clipping, select-Inbox, select-next-message workflow. And that took time and effort. So I’ve created an AppleScript ditty that does the work of creating a hyperlink on the clipboard of the last sent message. The results can then be pasted into any RTF-aware application, including OmniFocus.

My place of work is looking to acquire educational videos in a digital form with an eye towards long-term preservation. At this point we receive a physical form (preferably DVD, but sometimes VHS) and digitize it to a very lossy access format (RealMedia, in this case). With this change, we would get a preservation-worthy digital copy from the producer/distributor and forego the physical version.

There is quite a lot written on preserving video, but I wanted to distill the requirements down into statements that vendors could reasonably provide today. I think these are pretty sound requirements, but I’m looking for feedback. In particular, I’m not quite sure how to handle the transfer of closed caption text from the publisher/distributor; suggestions are welcome.

Wired magazine published a brief story and online photo gallery of the book scanning and print-on-demand projects at the Internet Archive. It is a fascinating glimpse into their vision and processes. Included below are cropped thumbnails and part of the text captions that accompanied the pictures in the Wired online gallery.

The book to be scanned sits in front of a technician underneath a V-shaped glass platter. Two opposing cameras angled at each page take photos of the book. On screen is the multipage view that the operator uses to verify the quality of the scans and the book’s pagination.

Stu Hicks, one of OhioLINK’s systems engineers, told the OhioLINK staff last night about a new program at Microsoft called DreamSpark. Through this program, post-secondary students around the world who are attending accredited schools or universities can download some of Microsoft’s big developer and designer tools free of charge. At the time and place this post is being written, the list of software is:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Developers Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
• Visual C# 2005 Express Edition

On the ImageLib mailing list, Rob Lancefield (Manager of Museum Information Services for Wesleyan University) posted a link to the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines (UPDIG) for image creators. The introduction says: “These 12 guidelines — provided as a Quick Guide plus an in-depth Complete Guide — aim to clarify the issues affecting accurate reproduction and management of digital image files. Although they largely reflect a photographer’s perspective, anyone working with digital images should find them useful…. This document, prepared by the UPDIG working group, represents the industry consensus as of September 2007.” The listed members of UPDIG leads one to believe that this is a professional photography group. One thing in the introduction to the guidelines caught my eye, though:

The chapter on archiving now has a discussion of JPEG as an archival format.