Not (unfortunately) the Society for Creative Anachronism, but the Strategic Content Alliance, which is only interested in library & information world domination, despite the scary name.
Not the most relevant of days for us but as always I found a couple of intersting sessions.
E-books observatory is always of interest - they are colecting so much data that every presentation/discussion brings up fresh perspective. Today's examples: students spend almost half their time in an ebook looking at the cover. Can you judge an ebook by its cover? They very rarrely use inay of the platform features or interactivity. This may be a chicken and egg scario - they are unfamiliar with these so don't use them, and increased usage may make them more comfortable with using them.
The BBC MemoryShare & CenturyShare sites are interesting concepts - for example we have archived audiocassettes of memories of people working in the printing industry (many libraries must have similar), something like this which puts them on a timeline and in context could bring out the content much more effectively.
Showing posts with label SCA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SCA. Show all posts
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
SCA Home Nations Forum
The second of the Edinburgh fora had it's focus on standards (which I participated in), and another strand on licensing.
Their was an interesting viewpoint from Alastair Dunning based on experiences with the JISC digitisation projects, that standards could no longer be dictated, given the rate of change in the information environment. Although not exactly a riposte, I agreed more with the approach from Dennis Nicholson and Paul Ells and the CDDA, that standards have to built into the project, which includes training and maintenance costs.
Interestingly one of Paul's comments was about how difficult it was to recruit appropriatly trained people - as someone who has come to this more from the library and cataloguing standards perspective, I can empathise with this. Interviewing recent library school graduates over the past few years has been an illuminating experience in that regards. As well as the technical standards, metadata creation & analysis has to be considered e.g. I've seen digitised photograph collections where this was very much lacking.
There wil always be a pool of standards for projects to choose from but the important thing is for creators to be strictly consistent in their application - your original may be superseded but then you have a better chance of migrating without data loss. Additionally once you can map a standard you can create crosswalks and gateways for interoperability.
On the larger scale, there needs to be a framework for organisations who promote standards to better collaborate.
ETA: This meeting has been extensively blogged, complete with presentation at the SCA blog
Their was an interesting viewpoint from Alastair Dunning based on experiences with the JISC digitisation projects, that standards could no longer be dictated, given the rate of change in the information environment. Although not exactly a riposte, I agreed more with the approach from Dennis Nicholson and Paul Ells and the CDDA, that standards have to built into the project, which includes training and maintenance costs.
Interestingly one of Paul's comments was about how difficult it was to recruit appropriatly trained people - as someone who has come to this more from the library and cataloguing standards perspective, I can empathise with this. Interviewing recent library school graduates over the past few years has been an illuminating experience in that regards. As well as the technical standards, metadata creation & analysis has to be considered e.g. I've seen digitised photograph collections where this was very much lacking.
There wil always be a pool of standards for projects to choose from but the important thing is for creators to be strictly consistent in their application - your original may be superseded but then you have a better chance of migrating without data loss. Additionally once you can map a standard you can create crosswalks and gateways for interoperability.
On the larger scale, there needs to be a framework for organisations who promote standards to better collaborate.
ETA: This meeting has been extensively blogged, complete with presentation at the SCA blog
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