Statement of Competency H
In which I discuss current information and communication technologies, and other related technologies, as they effect the resources and uses of libraries and other types of information providing entities.
LISSTEN Board meeting
February 11, 2007,
Off Campus Pub, Fullerton
Until Summer of 2007, LISSTEN held board meetings on or in the vicinity of the CSU Fullerton campus, but now even these meetings are held on-line by means of Elluminate software.
Photo Vlasta Radan, 2007.
In the Fall of 2005, I took an on-line seminar in Medieval Manuscripts and Incunabula. Throughout the class, we were encouraged to use on-line resources in addition to traditional research in a library. At first, I was amazed at the sheer mass of available information, but, as I become more familiar with the resources, I become frustrated with the limitations of the information.
On the one hand, it was fascinating, sitting in dusty Riverside, CA, to leaf through the precious documents in the far away British Library. On the other hand, unless one studies the aspects of most popular interests – little pictures and handwriting – there is not much depth to the information provided. The seminar required us to look at the whole book – writing and binding in addition to illustrations -- but available sources usually did not record binding or would have digitalized only illustrated pages, or only samples of handwritten pages. Most of images ware displayed away from the context either of the text or the volume.
At that stage of digitalization, the majority of the projects were focused on text (bringing it or in HTML or OCR format) or on images. The digital capture of images was, in 2005, quite a novelty and variations in image quality were huge. There is no surprise that the archival community was not particularly overwhelmed with the offered possibilities. They could understand the advantages in the area of accessibility, but the technology created more problems than solutions for any issues of long term preservation. In addition to that, any digitalization project required substantial human and financial resources, which most institutions dealing with archival material did not have.
After waking up from the early dreams of a paperless society, we now understand that the digital technology will not be able to replace the originals. However, as the technology develops, and in particularly when bundled with the possibilities of the Internet, it could prove very advantageous for archives. One of the possibilities, explored by some of repositories, notably the Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress, is to make use of social sites, not only as promotional tools, but as the way to engage the public in the process of cataloging the collections. There is much photographic material in each institution that needs basic research and indexing. The Library of Congress put some of its photographic collections on Flickr photo-sharing site, and invited the public to post the comments and tag the images. A similar idea is behind the Smithsonian Photography Initiative that issued the similar invitation for the public to “contribute keywords to describe the Smithsonian’s photographs.” Also, by uploading their images on Flickr, the Library of Congress opens to the public collections that would otherwise be closed for access due the need for processing.
In addition to tagging, social or file sharing sites have incredible capabilities to disseminate information. As I show in my EVIDENCE 1 to this competency, it is possible to disseminate information with minimal cost and knowledge of technology. A number of my classmates from the Archives and Manuscript class expressed a desire to learn more about a visit to the California State Archives and the information gathered there. I used Flickr as the way to deliver the information. The particular advantage of social and file sharing web sites is that they provide a user-friendly interface and software that make delivery of the information quick and easy. What was before a tiresome job of resizing image files so that they could be sent via e-mail, is now done by uploading software which creates and uploads four different sizes of files. The end-user can download from the site the image size that is most suitable for his purpose – large file for printing, small file for display on the web.
The most difficult thing with digital technology is the mental switch in the delivery as the well as visual perception of information. Things that are translated from one medium to another without re-conceptualization simply do not work. There are attempts to make experience of reading and leafing through e-books or multiple page documents similar to the same activity with the real books. However, every medium – clay tablet, scroll, codex, computer screen – have its own rules and visual vocabulary. Consider the evolution of movies. At first they were actually called moving pictures! At the beginning, movies were little more than filmed theater or animated series of photo tricks. It took some time for cinematography to develop and for us to learn how to enjoy it.
My EVIDENCE 2 shows my attempt to translate the traditional newsletter form of the student newsletter to a web format. The same way the early printers imitated manuscript books, this web-newsletter draws visual references to the traditional newspaper. However it takes advantages of web technology by using each page as a reference point rather than a fixed set of information. The problem is that the creator of information needs to understand the technology of delivery, i.e., dissemination of information in order to take maximum advantage of it.
One of the common problems with the delivery of information on the Internet is that the visual rendering of files depends on the user’s computer. The size of font, appearance of images and graphics depends on version and type of browser. There are ways around it, but it is time consuming and requires extensive web-development knowledge. The new generation of web-development software, like Flash, tries to solve that problem by encapsulating all the information in one file and delivering it as one unit. As I show in my EVIDENCE 3a and EVIDENCE 3b to this competency, this type of web site enables complete freedom in graphics, animation and types of fonts. This particular software works like a cartoon animation, where information is presented through sequence of frames. Things could be present throughout the presentation (and therefore appearing as they are static) or be introduced at any point. However, the main quality of the software is that it can combine various media – graphics, sound, photographs, movies, standard HTML and CSS and various programming languages – in one package which can even carry its own player to open and run the file.
As computers, digital technology and the Internet develop, their use is not as prohibitively expensive as it was a decade ago. There are many technological resources that could be used in library and archival environment. Whether or not this resource will be used to its best advantage, depends only on the imagination and the technological proficiency of the information professionals.
This web site was developed to satisfy the graduation requirements for
the School for Library and Information Science at San Jose State University California
Text, design, and digital imaging by Vlasta Radan