Carr's Big Switch redux

I'm about 1/2 done with Big Switch, and its good.

Carr's thesis is that information services (hardware and software) are now and increasingly operating on the scale of the electrical power utilities. Just as companies don't generally create their own power, they now no longer need their own IT depts. As network access speeds and reliability approach that available on one's own computer, the network itself becomes one big machine. He's look at and past things like Amazon's EC2 "elastic computing cloud" that allows companies to use Amazon's computers (H&S) as if they were their own. Another example is 3Tera's AppLogic, a cloud computing platform.The customer pays for the computing power consumed when they consume it--just like we pay for electricity. Wow!

Carr briefly highlight large-scale consequences of the electrical gridon society and suggests that similarly large-scale effects will follow from the utilitization of computing. I think he's right. Consider the consequences of large-scale, utility-style cloud computing on digital preservation. If say higher education institutions outsource their computing utility-style to global third-party providers, then preservation of the digital content (an oxymoron; what we mean is curation of digital content over time via migrations) also moves to the third party. There the scale is much larger, part of the ongoing access to content, and costs to individual institutions is amortized across the aggregate of all the institutions using the third party computing utility. In short, indiviual institutions (here colleges and universities) need not themselves directly work to preserve their digital content. They have out-sourced it to their computing utility. It (digital curation--my prefered phrase for digital preservation) still has to be done but not repeatedly at a local (say we call it--retail) level. There are many trust issues here, but then most of us trust our utilities now for water and power.

Things RDA

http://ac.bslw.com/community/blog/category/rda/

a blog on RDA from backstage folks; a good list of links to RDA materials.

Among the best:

1. http://www.rda-jsc.org/rda.html – The RDA page on the Joint Steering Committee website.

2. http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm – The registered RDA elements and vocabularies.

3. http://tsig.wikispaces.com/Pre-conference+2009+presentation+materials – CLA power points and other materials from Montreal Pre-conference.

The Law of Linked Data

http://www.mkbergman.com/837/the-law-of-linked-data/

Mike Bergman at AI3 blogs about the Law of Linked Data. "The Linked Data Law: the value of a linked data network is proportional to the square of the number of links between data objects."

He argues that linking (meaningfully) the existing nodes on the 'net produces network effects for the semantic web. He makes a nice analogy with Metcalfe’s law, which "states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.

Bergman thinks a good marshal would deliver law and order to linked data and the semantic enterprise. What would the good marshal do? Well, he doesn't say beyond "deliver law and order." What the hell does that mean? OK, aside from that the piece is worth reading and it links to more good reading, too. Are footnotes the original linked data?

Report on Large-Scale Digitization of Manuscript Collections

Extending the Reach of Southern Sources Proceeding to Large-Scale Digitization of Manuscript Collections: Final Grant Report / Prepared by the Southern Historical Collection University Library The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation


I like the questionnaire/decision matrix and though it here applies to questions of what should be prioritized for digitization, it could be modified to capture metadata relevant to what should be prioritized for digital preservation. See Appendix G, page 57 for the questionnaire.

http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/archivalmassdigitization/Extending_the_Reach.pdf