Welcome President Obama!

Sproul Plaza, University of California, Berkeley, January 20, 2009

OKAPI welcomes a new era of transparency and accountability in government.  The recently-launched whitehouse.gov will prioritize communication, transparency and participation.

Now Accepting Contributions to Curiosity Box

We are now actively soliciting contributions to The Curiosity Box, an online exhibition featuring the prized research and teaching resources of UC Berkeley scholars. The Curiosity Box is an OKAPI research project exploring issues around open licensing and resource sharing. We hope to engage and learn from campus scholars in sharing their work with the public. By focusing on a single contribution, we aim to sidestep what scholars cannot or do not want to share.

During this initial phase (March through May 2007), we ask participating UC Berkeley scholars to share a prized research or teaching resource under public domain or Creative Commons non-commercial attribution licensing, which specifies that others may re-use the resource for non-commercial purposes if they credit the author/creator.

We welcome and encourage the submission of a broad range of content and multimedia formats. We are not targeting journal articles, although they are welcome if eligible. We would be especially delighted to publish resources and information that exist nowhere else except in the minds and personal hard drives of campus scholars. We will provide comprehensive data capture and digitization services for each participant.

Following are examples of content we would welcome:

• An electron micrograph image of a new microbial species
• A mathematical proof
• The audio and score of an original piece of music
• A favorite lesson plan on plate tectonics
• Code for an advanced sorting algorithm
• Infrared aerial photography
• Architectural plans
• A mnemonic for basic economic principles
• A time-lapse sequence of traffic patterns
• A photo and transcription of a cuneiform tablet
• A “wacky” article that no one else would publish

What would you like to share? If you are UC Berkeley faculty or a postdoctoral campus scholar and would like to participate, please contact Noah Wittman at wittman [at] berkeley [dot] edu.

NY Times Article points to archive quandary

History, Digitized (and Abridged)

Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times

By KATIE HAFNER

Published: March 10, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/business/yourmoney/11archive.html?ex=1331355600&en=ac8d2f50c8dfc12d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Dr. Julian Richards. Lecture outline, Monday 12 Feb 2007

As part of Dr. Julian Richards’ visit to the SF Bay Area, he will give a public lecture DATE: Feb. 12, 2007
TIME: 4-6 p.m.
LOCATION: Kroeber Hall Gifford Room 221
The e-journal Internet Archaeology and ADS (Archaeology Data Services) digital archive have recently celebrated their tenth anniversaries. This paper will assess the opportunities offered by e-publication as well as the challenges of digital preservation, based on the first ten years. However, the web continues to evolve and I will also consider how the Semantic Web and other technologies which make up the future vision for the Internet may change the study of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage over the next ten years.

As the volume of information grows, ‘finding things’ on the Web remains a key challenge. Recent research conducted by ADS on behalf of the UK’s Common Information Environment shows the potential of a innovative ‘Point and browse’ approach to overcome the problems associated with the traditional ‘Type and hope’ approach as represented by Google and other search engines. However, we also need to provide deeper access to rich content and to develop methods for data mining as promulgated under various eScience initiatives. In the US these frameworks have been described as cyber-infrastructures; whilst in the UK the term ‘Virtual Research Environment’, or VRE, has been adopted. Access to grey literature is another area that needs to be tackled, and might be developed as community-based distributed resources analogous to Wikipedia and Flickr.

Dr Richards’ paper will reflect on the ethical and intellectual context of new
information flows brought about such technological changes.

* A reception will be held in the Faculty Lounge (219) of Kroeber Hall
following the lecture.

Announcing the Visit of Julian Richards, Feb 9-16, 2007

It is our pleasure to welcome Dr. Julian Richards to the S.F. Bay Area as the guest of the Dept of Anthropology, U.C. Berkeley Feb 9-16, 2oo7. Dr. Richards is Co-Director of Internet Archaeology, an electronic journal developed in York, and Director of the Archaeology Data Service, the national digital data archive for archaeological research. He is a partner in the EC-funded CHIRON and EPOCH networks. He is also an accomplished specialist in the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon and Viking Age England.

His visit to Berkeley will focus on the digital archiving and dissemination of cultural heritage management and archaeological research. He has a full program of lectures and workshops open to the public, summarized below:

Monday 12 Feb 4pm, Kroeber Hall, Gifford Room (2nd floor): Lecture and discussion “Digital archaeology: electronic publication, data mining and the Semantic Web”. Reception to follow. Open to the public.
Wednesday 14 Feb 2-5pm, 2251 College Building, room 101. Workshop: “Best practices in the digital recording, archiving, preservation and diseemination of archaeological research”. Open to the public.

Thursday 15 Feb, 1-4pm, Officers Club, San Francisco Presidio: Workshop: “Standards of practice and practicing standards: Preserving Cultural Heritage, one bit at a time“. Open to the public, but please contact Ruth Tringham or Michael Ashley first.

Dr. Richards is also available by appointment for individual consultation on Monday, 12 Feb 10-12, and Wednesday Feb 14, 10-12. Please contact Ruth Tringham.

Scholar’s Box: The Next Six Months

I’m pleased to announce our plans for the next six months of the Scholar’s Box project.

SUMMARY
We will carry out three major activities in the next six months. The Scholar’s Web will pilot tools and services to help faculty integrate digital resources into their teaching. The Curiosity Box will solicit resources and feedback on services from a broad range of faculty across the UC Berkeley campus. Remixing Çatalhöyük will provide a model for engaging students in inquiry-based learning and educational outreach.

THE SCHOLAR’S WEB
Making it easy to create, use and share online teaching collections
We will pilot technologies and services to help faculty integrate digital resources into their teaching. We will work closely with the UC Berkeley Anthropology department and IT services (CIO, IST, ETS) in testing a drag-n’drop web publishing system and comprehensive digitization and digital asset management services.

THE CURIOSITY BOX
Gathering prized resources and feedback from diverse scholars
We will ask dozens of campus scholars from across campus to share with the public a prized research or teaching resource under open creative commons licensing. This exercise will introduce faculty to our services and provide us with valuable feedback. We will mount a web exhibition featuring all contributions.

REMIXING ÇATALHÖYÜK
Providing an innovative model for teaching with digital collections
We will work closely with Anthropology professor Ruth Tringham to construct a teaching collection from her vast archive of research materials documenting the remains of a 9000 year-old Neolithic human settlement located in modern-day Turkey. Remixing Çatalhöyük will feature themed collections and an archive of student “remixes.” This resource will serve as a national model for inquiry-based teaching and engaging students and campus scholars in outreach and education efforts.

For more information on each of the above projects, please visit the Scholar’s Box project page.

OKAPI Playlist

Don’t miss the OKAPI Playlist, which contains links to organizations, articles, and web resources supporting university faculty and students in using digital technologies for public knowledge sharing:

http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/104036

Cataloging Nineveh Images

 

This week we made progress with the cataloging of digital materials from the Expedition to Nineveh Project.  I met with Sherry Macgregor and exchanged a copy of the catalog of digital items as well as a template to fill in with descriptions of the images.  Over the next few weeks she will work closely with David Stronach, leader of the Berkeley excavations at Nineveh in the 1980’s, to provide the appropriate metadata for each of the items in the catalog.  She also informed me of many more images from the project which we can scan over the next few weeks.

Welcome to Okapi!

Welcome to the OKAPI blog!

Open Knowledge and the Public Interest (OKAPI) is a team of creative and technical professionals and UC Berkeley faculty who are focused on bringing together people, tools and ideas to improve public scholarship on the UC Berkeley campus. Learn more about OKAPI.

This blog is intentended for colleagues near and far who have an interest in our work. We will be posting weekly announcements and encourage you to subscribe to our feed, share your comments, or email us your thoughts. We greatly appreciate your feedback.

The OKAPI team (Noah, Michael, Liz, & Lizzy)