[SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July

[Ronald Mak]

Back when I was designing and building information management systems for
NASA, I investigated something called the Dublin Core metadata standard for
creating and maintaining online descriptions of multimedia material. (Google
it or or see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core). It's used by
libraries. There are front-end search and query apps that understand this
metadata standard. (I decided the standard was overkill for the Martian data
I was managing.)
 
I believe the CHM archives use the Dublin Core, but I'm not sure.
 
-- Ron


  _____  

From: scc_active-bounces at computerhistory.org
[mailto:scc_active-bounces at computerhistory.org] On Behalf Of Henry Gladney
Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 6:24 AM
To: Tim Shoppa
Cc: scc_active at computerhistory.org
Subject: Re: [SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July


In saying "you've always pushed hard for formalizing the software collection
process," you express a misunderstanding.  I'm looking for something
else--the ability of repositories and scholars to share stuff in those
particular cases in which they want to share, and to annotate by links that
show "interesting" relationships of stuff as well as other metadata, sharing
those annotations without confusing them with the original materials.  In
this, "share" might or might not involve copying.

To achieve this without limiting what any institution or individual is able
to do and also to support building on other people's similar work requires
that certain aspects of metadata follow common conventions.  I.e., it helps
immensely to have common methods/representations for how metadata is linked
to data and other metadata.  E.g., a reason that you can productively use
any library in the world is that the libraries use common conventions for
their catalogues and for library-annotations on the spines of books.

Another way of saying the same thing is that a museum collection is useful
only if it is a great deal more than a pile of stuff collected into a single
room.  

Your "loose coalition" would not work without shared language among its
members.  An example of shared language might be a common way of identifying
works so that anybody can clearly see which are identical and which are
different, and also which different ones are related to each other.

Best wishes, Henry

H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.     http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/   (408)867-3933



On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 05:37, Tim Shoppa <shoppa at trailing-edge.com> wrote:


Henry Gladney <hgladney at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is because I am disappointed that CHM some time ago quit credible
> interest in preserving software, which I regard as of commensurate
> importance to the areas that it is investing in.  This happened
> notwithstanding the fact that there are clear ways of achieving this
> relatively inexpensively and the efforts of the now-suspended volunteer
> Software Preservation Group.


A couple years ago the SPG at CHM sponsored "The Attic and the Parlor",
which made it clear to me that they appreciate the loose and broad
coalition of individuals and corporations and institutions that
preserve software.

I also got to hear some of the difficulties (esp. legal ones) and triumphs
(CHM's then-new software curator's results) of doing this in the CHM
framework.

Henry, it seems you've always pushed hard for formalizing the software
collection process through the CHM. I've come to the realization that the
base
of interesting software "in the wild" is tremendously huge and often
extremely specialized. I think a loose coalition of software archives
and archivists, both professional and non-professional, is the right
solution
at this point.

Tim.



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