Shibboleth article

In an article in Ariadne Simon McLeish describes the experience of Shibboleth installation in a Higher Education environment, and suggests ways to make this experience more user-friendly.

1 + 1 > 2--or Gather locally, share globally

Two developing web-based systems have a potential to produce an incredible synergy.

1. Social bookmarking for academics:
   • CiteULike: Richard Cameron designed an built it in November 2004 and has run privately since then. camster@citeulike.org
     
   • Connotea: from Nature Publishing
     
   • biologging: Alf Eaton's community website for biomedical researchers. This one has other features but works best with HubMed (it's a really cool alternative interface to NLM's PubMed
     
   This kind of system offers an amazing arena for scholars to share and develop language for describing and locating work in their own areas of study. [I'll spare you the long winded description of theoretical models of contextualization as a social process in the construction of meaning. Trust me, this is amazing.]
   
   A major limitation of these services is that they do not easily capture bibliographic information about the references collected (author, title, sources, date, etc.). All of this information is invaluable for the more sophisticated search needs of academics. I might want, for example, to view only those articles written before 1999. Also, getting a bunch of links to articles on a web page is only half the battle. Eventually I'll want to use the citations in a paper. I'll need that bibliographic information.
   
   Also, if I attempt to share citation links online I run smack into the old 'appropriate copy' problem. Maybe I point to a version of the article that's on the publisher's web site but your only access is via Academic Search Premier.
   
   
2. Latent OpenURLs
   OpenURLs can, in theory solve both problems. They can capture that bibliographic data in a rule-governed format that makes harvesting bibliographic information a relatively straightforward process. And they include an element that refers to a link resolver.
   
   Unfortunately, as they are most often generated now, OpenURLs bind the bibliographic information with identification of a specific link resolving systems that cannot, by definition, be relevant or useful to all readers. That is, to use OpenURLs I have to find a way to make them point to the right link resolver for different readers.
   
   Latent OpenURLs come to the rescue. They provide a means for embedding metadata via OpenURL specs in regular HTML code without specifying the particular link resolving system to be called upon. Instead a reader's browser can, for example, use a bookmarklet or browser extension with a very simple java script to call the appropriate link resolver from a Latent OpenURL. (This is misleadingly simple. See Daniel Chudnov et al's article on this in issue 43 issue of Ariadne (April 2005) for a full discussion.)

So the social bookmarking manages intellectual access to the resources while Latent OpenURLs provide seamless/transparent linkage to the appropriate version of the resource cited.

Simputer --first computer designed and manufactured in India

Another BBC story, this time about the Amida Simputer, a handheld computing device that was launched today. It was designed in India and manufacturing of it was supported by the Indian government. I remember reading about this a number of years ago and then nothing.

The basic version of the device ncludes:

• monochrome screen
• 206 MHz processor
• 64 MB memory
• microphone
• speaker
• battery that lasts for 6 hours or more
  

Costs around $250 and is intended to bring the Internet to India's rural population. It runs on Linux and can handle handwriting in Hindi and Kannada. How cool is that.

Read about their view of universal access.

Ultra-thin clients--light and cheap

BBC has a story today about an ultra-thin client product developed by a not-for-profit company, Ndiyo.

"The sub-£100 box, called Nivo, runs on open-source software and is known as a "thin client". Several can be linked up to a central "brain", or server.

Thin clients are not new, but advances have made them more user-friendly."
(£100 is about $190 today)

The product is called NIVO (Network In Video Out). It's a small device (12 X 8 X 2 cm or 4.75 X 3.15 X .75 inches) and that encases just a little more than ports for ethernet, monitor, keyboard & mouse. The next upgrade is planned to add sound and local USB ports. The more distant goal is to make NIVO a chip that goes in a monitor.

Ndiyo's vision for a networking architecture that it becoms "more affordable and sustainable, especially for the developing world." Have a look at their vision/presentation of the product.

Rise of blogs in academia?

"PH.Dotcom
What if professors could lecture 24-7? Blog culture invades academia."

From the Village Voice.

Forget wireless

It's not WAN, it's not LAN, it's HAN!

RedTacton is a new Human Area Networking technology that uses the surface of the human body as a safe, high speed network transmission path.

I can't tell if this is real or a send up.

Coincidence?

We're likely to roll out Windows XP for staff workstations in the next week or two.
Today I found two postings that might be related:

• New Windows operating system should be available on Monday
• Dilbert

RSS feeds for Connotea --a social bookmarking project

Connotea provides RSS feeds for individual accounts. If you want to see an example, I have put a number of citations in my Connotea account and the feed is http://www.connotea.org/rss/user/smwoodson.

RFID in hospitals--it's not just for packages anymore

The Klinikum Saarbrücken in Germany is launching a trial that will tag 1,000 people with plastic wristbands with embedded RFIDs.

Google Print and the Brits

From Susan: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp

"The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in England is the only place you are likely to find an Ethernet port that looks like a book. Built into the ancient bookcases dominating the oldest wing of the 402-year-old library, the brown plastic ports share shelf space with handwritten catalogues of the university’s medieval manuscripts and other materials."

Man, that's better than our plain black tags. I wonder who did their graphics.

And, by the way, yes, they do still have some of their books chained to the shelf. There's cognitive dissonance for you--Chained books and ethernet ports on the same shelf.

Telnet

Do you remember the good ol' days of control C, control O, control X and Control P?

http://www.diamondbackonline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/19/4264981e6163a

I used this in grad school. Univ of Michigan has since phased it out and moved to a web-based e-mail program that has something to do with a squirell. This is funny if you know the library professor (who went to school at Hopkins) and feeds a squirell named Bucky and leaves her office window so he can come in and eat when she's out.

Knuckle-heads at Intel stage scavenger hunt

The Chronicle reports that they made an offer on eBay of $10K for a copy of the issue of the issue of Electronics, where Moore published his famous 'law'. Some libraries have already lost their copies, some have had issues cut out of bound sets, while others are locking theirs up.

Intel's defense? "Mr. High, the Intel spokesman, says the company didn't know about other options for finding the journal..." Who do you think they asked? Another example of people thinking that if they know a lot about one thing they know a lot about everything. Arghhh.

Sue V reports that she got our copy from Gilman last Friday and it's now in the Cage.

Two interesting RFID stories

RFID: getting under your skin: http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/05/commentary/ontechnology/rfid/

RFID vulnerable to hacking: http://www.rfidgazette.org/security/

More with Google maps

Now you can get sattelite images. Check out this one

Jeekers, what's wrong with 'validation service'?

RLG has announced a service for checking the quality of your EAD encoding. They are calling it an "EAD Report Card".

They plan to make it open source so you can download to your desktop for faster analysis.

Connotea

Hey, give a look at Connotea. It's marketed as social bookmarking but seems a nice way to keep references (to materials that are available electronically) at hand any time you need them. You can see who else has linked to an article and, you can look at their tags and even exchange comments.

Here's the announcement in March's D-Lib In-Briefs

Social bookmarking articles

The April edition of D-Lib has two articles about social bookmarking and a brief editorial on "Personalized Information Organization". Looks very interesting.

In a msg to gcs-pcs, Tony Hammond, who one of the authors working on social bookmarking, writes:

These papers describe the current state of play with respect to the new crop of web-based bookmark managers - tools such as del.icio.us and Flickr are well-known exemplars of the genre. These papers describe how such tools can be specialized as web-based reference managers.... Bookmarked references can be shared with other users and can be publicly commented upon. In fact, whole discussion threads can be built up around individual bookmarked references. (The papers are set up as living examples with their own reference lists available online both for comment and further additions.) Import/export opportunities within Connotea include RSS and RIS - support for other formats is under development.

I love the idea that del.icio.us and Flickr are "well-known exemplars."

Latent OpenURLs -- standards are about to be proposed

Have a look at Eric Hellman (Openly Informatics) draft of a proposal developing standards for Latent OpenURLs at http://www.openly.com/openurlref/latent.html. The idea is to create a standard for embedding OpenURL metadata into plain HTML.

To make a Latent OpenURL in an HTML document, put an OpenURL into the "href" attribute of an HTML anchor ("a") tag with class (or maybe rel) attribute set to "Z3988" [the NISO OpenURL standard is Z39.88-2004 -- dump the punctuation and the year and you have Z3988]

This proposal grew out of a discussion on the gcs-pcs list about developing a bookmarklet for a simple appropriate-resolver prototype. Having a convention for embedding OpenURLs in plain HTML makes it easier to develop schemes (bookmarklets, plug ins, whatever) for activating the URL to call a link resover server. Should be of interest to publishers of various sorts.

It looks as if the folks on gcs-pcs are about ready to go public (goal is 1 May) so, if you want to get two cents in, or if you'd just like to get a clearer understanding of what this is all about. I recommend Eric's draft.

The 7% solution

"Just 7 percent of adults said they read blogs at least a few times per week, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll."

Now, don't you feel special?

Call me crazy but...

...it strikes me as an odd and ominous coincident that these two stories appeared on the same day:

1. French may have to buy compulsory biometric ID cards
   Plan for compulsary ID card could go into effect in 2007
   


2. LexisNexis data on 310,000 people feared stolen
   Databases had been breached 59 times using stolen passwords, firm say

I just feel there's a message in there that merits attention.