http://thesecretmirror.com Mark A. Matienzo on archives, music, and more. Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:52:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en OCLC's Lorcan Dempsey makes a great point as usual in his post "Making tracks": In recent presentations, I have been suggesting that libraries will need to adopt more archival skills as they manage digital collections and think about provenance, evidential integrity, and context, and that they will also need to adopt ... http://thesecretmirror.com/archives/seriously-follow-our-lead After a little over two years processing, referencing, and cataloging, and hacking at AIP, I'm skipping up to the City That Never Sleeps to join Jay Datema, Josh Greenberg, and company in the NYPL Labs. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thrilled about this opportunity, and I'm ready ... http://thesecretmirror.com/mark/now-it-can-be-told The ICA's Committee of Best Practices and Standards released the first edition of the International Standard for Describing Functions (ISDF). Like much of ICA's other work in descriptive standards for archives, ISDF is designed to be used in conjunction with established standards such as ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF), as well as ... http://thesecretmirror.com/standards/ica-releases-isdf Amidst this week of notorious hoaxes, Google has launched Google Message Discovery as an enterprise-focused add on for its Google Apps platform. Google Message Discovery goes well beyond a simple and reliable e-mail backup system and provides three key features of interest to records managers: Content-addressable storage for electronic mail stored ... http://thesecretmirror.com/electronic-records/google-message-discovery Since I'm often required to hit the ground running at $MPOW on projects, I was a little concerned when I roped myself into assisting our photo archives with a Flickr project. The first goal was to get a subset of the photos uploaded, and quickly. Googling and poking around the ... http://thesecretmirror.com/code/easy-peasy-using-the-flickr-api-in-python ArchivesNext recently discussed Library Journal's annual list of "Movers and Shakers," pondering what a comparable list in the archival profession would look like. For those who don't know, the list recognizes "library advocates, community builders, 2.0 gurus, innovators, marketers, mentors, and problem solvers transforming libraries." After some rumination, ArchivesNext is ... http://thesecretmirror.com/archives/movin-and-shakin-in-the-archives-world OK, OK. A post about code4libcon 2008 is long overdue. The minor details: the weather was nice, food was decent, good beer was abundant, and live music was enjoyable. Onto the real meat... This time around, I felt like I got a whole lot more out of attending; I'm not sure ... http://thesecretmirror.com/conferences/code4libcon2008 I just discovered DataPortability.org through Peter Van Garderen's blog post about it. I was entirely surprised that I'd heard nary a peep about it. Some basic examination (running a WHOIS query on the domain) shows that it's still a fairly new project. I have to say, though, that I'm entirely ... http://thesecretmirror.com/archives/dataportabilityorg-and-the-dream-of-a-web-20-backup-system After more than a few late nights and long weekends, I'm proud to announce that I've completed my latest pet programming project. zgw.py is a lightweight Z39.50-Web gateway, written, naturally, in Python. None of this would be possible without the following Python modules: Aaron Lav's PyZ3950, the beast of burden; ... http://thesecretmirror.com/code/announcing-zgwpy I have no excuses for not updating this blog. I thought about forcing myself to comply some sort of resolution - you know, given the new year and all - but everyone knows how those turn out. Regardless, I have a whole backlog of things to post about, most notably ... http://thesecretmirror.com/code/no-excuses-to-the-power-of-infinity