Experience from Catalhoyuk 2007: CatDV to Portfolio

In July 2007, during our season of Remediated Places project at Çatalhöyük, Steve Mills and I decided for a number of reasons to create an Extensis Portfolio catalog for the assets of the project. I had already created a catalog for the video assets using SquareBox CatDV, which is a great tool for indexing and creating videoclips and taking them straight into Final Cut Pro editing. But there are disadvantages. Steve couldn’t see or contribute to the clips because he did not own a Windows version of CatDV and moreover, we didn’t have the funds to purchase the client/server version which would be essential for our transatlantic post-season collaboration. Finally there are some disadvantages of CatDV that I mention below in regard to user fields that I find annoying, compared to the versatility of Extensis Portfiolio.

Meanwhile, Michael Ashley and the Media Vault Project are going great guns developing the use of the cross-platform client/server basis of Extensis Portfolio at UC Berkeley. Steve’s audio files had been kept in an MS Excel spreadsheet format and he was eager to have the information in a database along with the audio files themselves.

So we decided to create a catalog linked to both audio and video files of our merged assets. An alternative would have been Filemaker Pro which also enables this kind of linking. However, we chose Portfolio because of our hoped-for collaboration with the Media Vault Project since our project is embedded in the Çatalhöyük project which has been chosen as one of the MVP’s pilot projects.
We have posted the path by which we travelled technically from CatDV to Portfolio in a posting on the Remediated Places blog

OKAPI Participation in Media Vault Program

OKAPI member Michael Ashley has taken on the role of solutions architect for the new Media Vault Program (MVP), a proof-of-concept project that will provide UC Berkeley digital collection owners with digital asset management and archiving services. The MVP pilot is currently working with three of the FIPSE Scholars Box digital collections. Noah Wittman will work with the MVP team to ensure that the MVP approach to archiving and sharing collections incorporates models and tools from the Scholar’s Box project.

More about MVP:
http://mvp.berkeley.edu/default.htm

More about OKAPI participation in MVP:
http://mvp.berkeley.edu/partners/okapi/

Brown Bag Presentation: Building Digital Collections for Campus Scholarship and K-12 Education

TITLE: Building Digital Collections for Campus Scholarship and K-12 Education
SPEAKER: Noah Wittman
DATE: 12 pm Wednesday, July 18
LOCATION: Room 101A, 2195 Hearst St.

KEYWORDS: Digitization, Digital Asset Management, Licensing, Metadata, Creative Commons, OAI-PMH, Dublin Core, Second Life, Remixing, Çatalhöyük, Curiosity Box, OKAPI, Themed Collections, Exhibitions, Extensis Portfolio, ccHost, Scholar’s Box, FIPSE, Calisphere, Anthropology, Translation/Localization, K-12, Web 2.0, Open Source

DESCRIPTION: Noah Wittman will share progress on the US Department of Education Scholar’s Box project, describing diverse technologies, practices, and models for building digital collections. In particular, Noah will discuss recent efforts to (1) pilot digital asset management tools and services for the UC Berkeley Anthropology Department and (2) develop teaching collections and an online exhibition featuring archaeological research materials—more than 75,000 photos, videos, and articles–describing Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement located in modern-day Turkey.

Learn more about the Scholar’s Box project:
http://okapi.wordpress.com/projects/fipse-the-scholars-box/

Presentation_Slides(PDF) 2MB

Presentation Slides (PDF) 20 MB  (Better Quality Images)

Open Repositories Meeting Notes, San Antonio 2007

The 2007 Open Repositories Conference took place in San Antonio, Texas, January 23-26. This was a compelling meeting on the important topic of repositories and digital preservation. Over 350 people participated in the user groups, workshops, presentations and poster sessions.

Photograph © Ryan “Zieak” McFarland.

Attached as PDF please find my notes on some of the key talks. Open Repository Notes by Michael Ashley

From their site,

Repositories increasingly play a pivotal role in the emerging information landscape. With its theme of “Achieving Interoperability in an Open World”, OR07 will create an opportunity to explore the challenges faced by user communities and others in today’s world.

During the three-and-a-half day conference, Open Repositories 2007 will continue the very successful format of Open User Group meetings for DSpace, Fedora, and Eprints, followed by general conference sessions that cover cross-cutting and overarching issues.

The many repository platforms available today are changing the nature of scholarly communication. Institutions such as universities, research laboratories, publishers, libraries, and commercial organizations are creating innovative repository-based systems that address the entire lifecycle of information—from supporting the creation and management of digital content, to enabling use, re-use, and interconnection of information, to ultimately ensuring long-term preservation and archiving.

For more information, or to browse the list of accepted presentations, posters, and speakers, see the conference program.