[SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July

[Henry Gladney]

Dublin Core has long since been superceded, even for the limited kinds of
information it provides, e.g., by the Library of Congress defined Metadata
Encoding Standard which has been standardized by ISO.

It does nothing whatsoever about essentials such as serviceable identifiers
for saved objects, shareable linking, and dozens of other critical aspects.

Best wishes, Henry

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


On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 10:44, Ronald Mak <ron at apropos-logic.com> wrote:

>  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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