Who's Doing What in the History of Computing in Academia
The material that I have added regarding cataloging
digital archives is in bold and underlined!!!! C. Lam Nguyen
Universities and Colleges
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Berkley Office for the
History of Science and Technology - Under Library Catalogs, just
basic listing of Journals and Newspapers using name, author, year, etc. There
is a link on this page to a Washington.edu webpage that has a link to a
history of science and technology database, but this database requires
authorization. It might be
worth asking for access.
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Cornell University Department of
Science & Technology Studies - Nothing really in the way
of cataloging?just the website for the department.
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Edinburgh
Science and Technology Studies
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Managing
Product Information on the World Wide Web - Information about digital
libraries and how to manage a site with online information. Also includes
information of how to handle multimedia files to be incorporated into the
digital library by using a software product developed by the team. They?re
working on a organizational tool that helps designers bookmark information
to product information. Using Java, they?re developing a client/server
browser app that lets users organize web links graphically and in folders.
One of the nice things about this is that people can share their links
in an effort to create a ?virtual office?. Too bad the link to the
product doesn?t work.
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Navigational Aid for the History of
Science, Technology and the Environment
Digital library and a project developed to look handle the problem
of putting technical resources and archives online. The link is to the
proposal and description of the project, but no prototype of the project
exists yet. Something to looking in the future.All
that?s here is the proposal, but we might be able to gain some information
from them about how they plan to catalog their items in the future.
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Georgia Institute of Technology School
of History, Technology, and Society
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Harvard History
of Science Homepage
for the department. Has good links (under Links page) though.
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Harvard Center for Literary
and Cultural Studies Homepage, nothing useful
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Lancaster
Centre for Science Studies & Science Policy Homepage,
still under construction, nothing useful.
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MIT Program in Science,
Technology and Society Homepage,
nothing useful
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MIT
Technology and Policy Program Homepage, nothing useful, but browsing
around I found a link to this article: http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/0,1643,500281550-500442561-502858535-0,00.html
The article talks about a joint effort between top libraries to offer a
reference service online to find information on the Internet. Just
something I found interesting.
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DSpace: Durable Digital Documents
Digital library site. Lets people contribute to the website with access
and version control and allows outsiders to view the documents in storage.
Maybe good for the archives from BBN and interview transcripts. Again,
this is only a description of the project and no work is seen on the web
currently. This project is more of a repository than a catalog,
but the faq (http://web.mit.edu/dspace/about_us/faqs/index.html)
has some interesting sections that I?ve cut and paste here (there is a
lot of good information on issues related to digital archiving, but I?ve
mostly pasted things that relate to cataloging):
My school/institution wants what you are creating, how do I get it?
Please do let us know of your interest by sending a message to Eric
Celeste at efc@mit.edu
. At this early stage we really have nothing ready to share, but we are
very interested in distributing our work as broadly as possible as it matures.
How
does this relate to Barton?
Barton is the catalog of resources acquired by the MIT Libraries
from publishers and authors worldwide. Barton also includes references
to digital material licensed by MIT Libraries and to some electronic material
on the net that our librarians feel is of particular importance to our
community. DSpace contains actual documents created by MIT faculty and
researchers, as well as the "metadata" which describes those documents.
Barton may well acquire links to documents which reside in DSpace, but
the mission of Barton as a "catalog" is quite distinct from that of DSpace
as a "repository".
Will we "catalog" all the submissions and put them into Barton?
While some documents in DSpace will certainly be cataloged in Barton,
we don't expect that such inclusion in Barton will ever be universal. However,
the MIT Libraries is working on a separate track to build a more unified
environment for searching which would help researchers discover material
from a number of sources, from Barton to DSpace to many of our licensed
databases.
Who owns the metadata you house in this repository?
The general problem of rights management, including the metadata
ownership, is very complex and will be the subject of intense study during
the project. If metadata is created by DSpace, then presumably it is "owned"
by the MIT Libraries. Otherwise it is our intent to let authors retain
as much ownership as is practical of the DSpace content.
Will I have to describe/index my own material?
Maybe. Metatdata is a tricky thing. Different communities have different
vocabularies and standards for describing and indexing their materials.
The best descriptions and indicies are often a lot of effort, even for
the authors. Our plan is to make the submission as effortless as possible.
We hope that by creating different communities within DSpace, rich and
accurate descriptions and indicies will be made without requiring authors
to do all the work themselves.
Will there be any automated indexing?
We expect so. But we do not yet know what form it will take.
How truly searchable will this archive be?
We expect DSpace to incorporate its own searching facility and technology.
But DSpace will also be designed to share metadata with other services
which may provide their own paths to DSpace content. The experience of
our predecessors has shown that letting web crawling robots indiscriminately
walk entire collections does not work. Perhaps, through more controlled
collaborations, novel third party indexing schemes might be allowed in
to some large subset of the collection.
How do you intend to preserve data and documents in the face of changing
technologies and standards?
This is currently a research problem. We don't presume to know how
to solve it. What we intend to do is set policies to encourage people to
use standards and formats that have the best longevity, and widest acceptance.
As DSpace gains in stature, we hope to be able to influence the direction
of formats and standards towards greater longevity. Some communities need
functionality more than longevity for their materials. We intend to be
very up front with those communities: Some formats will not be able to
be migrated. Such items will be kept for historical record, and may require
emulation to fully utilize.
Charles
Babbage Institute CBI has a pretty good cataloging system in
place.They have searches that allow
you to go through their collections, but they catalog their material into
several different collections and each collection is a set of boxes.It?s
exactly the same as the printout that the CBI librarian sent you for the
materials that you requested.This
isn?t the best way to go about cataloging a digital archive, but it suits
their needs/boxed materials well.
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North
Carolina State University Program on Science, Technology & Society
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Pittsburgh History
and Philosophy of Science
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Princeton History
of Science - Homepage,
has a good list of links to other History of Science departments at other
universities though.
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Rensselaer Science
and Technology Studies - Homepage
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Santa
Cruz Program in the History of Consciousness -
Homepage
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Simon Fraser
Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology - Homepage
with links to several programs, none of which deal with digital archiving
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Stanford Program
in Science, Technology and Society - Homepage
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Science and Technology in the Making - Many
of the sites that are being built under this project are nice History of
xxxxx sites which we can definitely learn from. Many of these sites
are well-done and contain plenty of information on their topics.
The MouseSite and EVOnline are just two good examples.
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MouseSite
Site is devoted to the work at SRI by Douglas Engelbart. It also has
online version of archives and documents. Also includes place to send comments
and to review other's comments. Provide medium for a virtual community. A
very good site that we can learn from.
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Stanford and Silicon Valley Archives
Project
Project to host archives from Silicon Valley. Digital Library example.
Allows online searching and viewing of documents. The
site includes papers by important people in Silicon Valley as well as oral
histories. I found the oral histories pages very interesting.
They do have some good technical information, but most of the interviews
revolve around background events. I like the navigation of the oral
histories?important topics are listed in a navigation frame on the left,
so you can skip through parts that you?re not interested in. Here
is some information from the web page about preservation and access:
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Archives
are preserved records of the activities of organizations or individuals.
Without intervention, these records usually are dispersed, discarded, weeded,
or lost. Archival materials acquired by the Stanford and Silicon Valley
Archives Project are housed permanently in the Stanford University Libraries'
Department of
Special Collections and University Archives, where they are open to
scholarly researchers regardless of affiliation. They are cataloged by
professionally-trained staff and stored in acid-free containers in a secure
facility under environmentally controlled conditions. Special attention
is given to the long-term preservation needs of computer hardware and software,
as well as other forms of digital information. Library professionals with
special experience in manuscripts and archives are available to provide
assistance to researchers. Descriptive guides provide detailed information
about the collections. This information is accessible through Stanford's
electronic catalog and over the World Wide Web. In addition, the computerized
catalog of the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) provides on-line
bibliographic access to related collections at major research libraries
and archives across the country.
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Department of
Special Collections & University Archives
Department within Stanford university working with the Silicon Valley
Archive project. Maybe interesting to watch for future digital library
information or possible source for technology history archive. They
are using SGML for their finding aids. I tried to find out more about
the finding aids, but both links on the page
are dead.
Societies