A Natural History of Unicorns

A Natural History of Unicorns: Smithsonian Collaborations in the World of Library, Archives, and Museums

View more presentations from Martin Kalfatovic. (tags: smithsonian)

That Martin Kalfatovic is one funny dude. As in funny ha ha.

Botanical humor

Botanical humor, originally uploaded by chrisfreeland2002.

The Case for Drupal--Why the Open Source CMS is Well-Suited for a Medical Academic Library

The Case for Drupal-- Why the Open Source CMS is Well-Suited for a Medical Academic Library from Paul Albert on Vimeo.

Grace at Obama's Inauguration

2009-01-20-dscn7946, originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic.

I heart America!

Chris the Cleaning Man

Chris the Cleaning Man, originally uploaded by nemanick.

Because sometimes you have to clean glassware with funny shaped things...

NYC from the air

2008-12-25-dscn7386, originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic.

Martin Kalfatovic takes the best Window Seat pix!

The Carmen Electra argument for Open Access

Rod Page is so frackin' brilliant it hurts:

Elsevier Challenge

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Web 2.0, IPR, and You

From http://www.web2rights.org.uk/

Recipe for handling rapid growth

while (true)
{
identify_and_fix_bottlenecks();
drink();
sleep();
notice_new_bottleneck();
}

This loop runs many times a day.

*from http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences

Chris Bizer, Eric Prud’hommeaux, Chimezie Ogbuji, Phil Brooks, Alexandre Passant, Tim Clark, Holger Stenzhorn

2 videos

Digital Libraries for Science: Botanicus and BHL

Presented at II Latin American Plants Initiative, Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 18 November 2008.

Digital Libraries for Science: Botanicus and the Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Proposition 8 Protesters in St. Louis

Proposition 8 Protesters in St. Louis, originally uploaded by chrisfreeland2002.

Today on the steps of the Old Courthouse, inside of which the historic Dred Scott case was heard in 1857, more than 1,000 people gathered in a nation-wide protest against California's Proposition 8. Speakers included local community organizers, leaders, and politicians: St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay spoke about equal rights for his 3 gay siblings, and Lewis Reed, the first African American President of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, described marriage equality as a personal issue for him, noting that not too long ago he would not have been able to marry his wife, who is white.

Lead locally by organizer Ed Reggi, the event was part of a national grass-roots movement organized through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The event was great on many levels, but more than anything I think it demonstrated the power of using social technologies to quickly and efficiently organize a "grassweb" effort - this was all planned and executed at a national scale, with participation from all 50 states, in less than a week!

BibApp: Find experts on campus… Promote their research… Archive their work

Bibapp - Find Campus Experts from Eric Larson on Vimeo.

From http://bibapp.org/about/

What are the benefits of BibApp?

For researchers, BibApp allows you to:

• Promote your research
• Find collaborators on campus
• Make your research more accessible
• Reuse your publication history in other applications

For research groups, departments, and schools, BibApp allows you to:

• Promote the range of research in your unit
• Understand the collaborations happening within your unit and others on campus
• Make the research of your unit more accessible

For librarians, BibApp allows you to:

• Better understand research happening in your departments
• Facilitate conversations about author rights with researchers
• Ease the population of your institutional or other repository
• Get a clearer picture of scholarly publishing trends on your campus

YARL: Yet Another Roomful of Librarians

YARL: Yet Another Roomful of Librarians, originally uploaded by chrisfreeland2002.

Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Scanning & Metadata meeting.

Starbucks Free Coffee on Election Day

Illegal? Not sure. I enjoyed the coffee, but it was no incentive to vote.

Add your pix to the Starbucks Election Coffee Flickr Group

I Voted

I Voted, originally uploaded by chrisfreeland2002.

And you should, too!

I'm in trouble with Sony

So a few weeks ago I grabbed a snippet of the TV show Designing Women broadcast on LifeTime, and posted it on YouTube. It was a funny bit about the high cost of membership to an exclusive club, where one of the characters envisioned holding her daughter's debutante/coming out party. The punchline was "for those prices, she ought to do more than just 'come out'...she ought to burst through a hoop of fire on Nancy Reagan's shoulders." I found the imagery hilarious, so I posted it.

And I did so with a purpose - I was curious just how long it would take before the copyright holder found this content, and what YouTube's mechanism for supressing this content would be. Turns out it took 51 days (originally uploaded 9/10/2008), and here's their explanation:
http://www.youtube.com/copynotice?video_id=mwCs460DfCo

Sony Pictures Entertainment has claimed some or all audio and visual content in your video Burst through a hoop of fire on Nancy Reagan's shoulders. This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification program.

Your video is no longer available because Sony Pictures Entertainment has chosen to block it.

Claim Details:

Copyright owner:	Sony Pictures Entertainment
Content claimed:	Some or all of the audio and visual content
Policy:	Block this content. Applies to these locations: Everywhere

Sony Pictures Entertainment claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the suspension of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide. If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorized to use the content at issue, you may file a counter notice. For more information on this process, please see: How do I file a counter notice?

Please also take a few minutes to visit our Help Center section on Policy and Copyright Guidelines, where you can learn more about copyright laws and our Video Identification Service.

Scribd Document: Unknown Mexico by Carl Lumholtz

Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2)

Internet Archive's new book viewer

Here's a sample that apparently only works in Firefox and Safari:



This is great! I love that IA has integrated a really usable book viewer into their offerings, and I'm intrigued by the fact that it's open source. Since BHL content is being scanned and served through Internet Archive, I could envision building the following enhancements into this viewer:

BHL+Flip Book (beta) Strawman

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Storage requirements for a Biblioburro: TIF vs. JPEG2000

Biblioburros, originally uploaded by chrisfreeland2002.

I gave a presentation recently and bemoaned the fact that I didn't have a metric for describing the number of open access books that had been scanned by the Biodiversity Heritage Library (22,000 at the time of the presentation). Is that the size of a book mobile? A small public library? A rare book reading room?? No one can give me a good metric for visualization.

Lo and behold, that very day (no joke) the NYTimes ran a story about Luis Soriano, a Columbian who loads up his "Biblioburro" - two burros carrying books - and takes them from village to village. A 10-legged bookmobile (8 on the burros, 2 on Luis), if you will. Luis has 4,800 books. So, finally, I had a metric for BHL...if 2 Biblioburros can carry 4,800 books, then for the sake of visualization I'll say that 1 Biblioburro can carry 2,400 books. BHL, to date, has scanned 9 Biblioburros of content! Woo hoo!

I gave another talk at the Biodiversity Informatics Standards (dubbed TDWG; don't ask) annual conference in Fremantle, Australia, on the advantages of JPEG2000 for use in natural history museums and libraries, given its superior compression technology over traditional JPEG. I took the Biblioburro concept a step further, and using metrics & averages from our scanning efforts, determined that 1 Biblioburro is carrying an average of 1,000,000 pages of literature, which equates to 24TB of RAW or TIF images, and only 2TB of JPEG2000 images, demonstrated here:



If you want to know which of these is easier to manage & maintain, just ask the donkey.

Here's the presentation, along with some other information about JPEG2000, including a plug for the supercool new open source JPEG2000 server, djatoka:

Using the JPEG2000 image format for storage and access in biodiversity collections.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bhl jpeg2000)