One Big Library.

Hi.

2011 was the first year in many (since 2002?) that I didn't go to at least 8-10 concerts. I'm not sure what happened. It was a busy work year with a job change; some of my favorite bands play larger halls now, and we don't enjoy those shows as much anymore; we moved just far enough away from the Rock and Roll Hotel that shows I would've gone to because they were so close I now think twice about. I also miss a lot of shows that occur on Friday nights; a few years ago I made an exception to my observance to see a show (two of our favorite bands, actually) and I enjoyed the show a lot less than I'd have expected because of it. Possibly, seeing Wild Flag's terrific set at the Black Cat on March 11, arriving home late still wound up from the show, and watching twitter explode with Japanese friends' earthquake tweets as it all happened lowered my excitement for live music.

Probably the most interesting aspect of listening to music in 2011 was, just like Ed notes for himself, streaming really worked for me for the first time with rdio. I'm an unabashed fan; I love having the equivalent of what napster provided at its peak but in an affordable, convenient, and much more reliable service. I've almost entirely stopped purchasing cds; the only time I will now is to pick up a rarity or perhaps a favorite recording direct from an artist at their shows. My favorite rdio strategy is to find classic jazz recordings not yet in my collection by searching "Rudy Van Gelder". Every single one I've found is a true classic, and I didn't own or even know several of them before rdio showed up. It's also meant I've spent a lot more time with older music from every era and less new music. When a motif or harmony in a new song by someone you are just getting your head around reminds you of something from 30 years ago that you can look up with just a few tap tap taps it's easy to forget to go back to the new stuff.

Anyway. There were several new recordings in 2011 that I spent plenty of time with: my favorites, not in order:

• C'mon by Low
• Wild Flag
• David Comes to Life by Fucked Up
• The Deep Field by Joan as Police Woman
• w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs

Other candidates that I just don't know well yet are the new St. Vincent, and Wye Oak, which I like so far, and... um... hold on, I have to look up this obscure 70s track M. and I can't remember the chorus for... no wait that's not it... oh you get the picture.

Last week I attended code4lib north at McMaster University in Hamilton. It had the great vibe of the best code4lib events: low key, great mix of old and new friends, and an intense exchange of ideas tempered by ready access to serious beverages. @adr and @ruebot did a great job putting it all together, in a great space in the libraries there.

I gave a talk called "WWIC? Library Linked Data as a Customer Service Medium". You can find the slides at slideshare and the video of the talk archived in McMaster's repository or just watch the video here:

In the talk I try to merge lessons from Paul Ford's WWIC paradigm for what the web is about with the basic tenets of publishing Linked Data by Tim Berners-Lee. My premise is that Linked Data is great, but without adding the appropriately-tuned community feedback mechanisms that make great communities on the web work, it falls short of the potential the web has to offer.

To demonstrate this argument I took downloads the last three years of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in the MARC format, serialized them into JSON on disk, storing the resulting files (one file per subject heading) in a directory under version control with mercurial, with each of the 2009, 2010, and 2011 revisions of MeSH loaded in turn, with changes recorded in mercurial and tagged for each year. Then I created brought up a Django project using django-hgwebproxy, which publishes cloneable mercurial repositories through Django's friendly admin view infrastructure.

To me, this demonstrated the potential for simple ways to:

• put a vocabulary online as linked data
• back the vocabulary with version control to provide access to its history
• use a modern web framework's url router to enable cool URIs to the vocabulary's concepts
• expose the version history to the web in a human-friendly UI
• expose the version history to anyone who wants to clone or fork the vocabulary using version control tools
• mix in feedback mechanisms like commenting, voting, etc.

...and in enabling all that, it offers the potential to take Linked Data from a read-only mechanism great for following your nose to cool stuff toward a read-write model integrating technical and human mechanisms for exchanging opinions and expertise about the data itself.

I think.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

Our Man In Abiko is publishing a book about people's experiences with the disastrous earthquake in Japan last week. Here's mine:

My Twitter app exploded with news of the earthquake when I was about to go to sleep late last Thursday night. I studied Japanese in college, and was just in Tokyo a few months ago for a professional engagement. I’m a librarian, and a software developer, and an avid Twitter user. Having connected with Japanese professional colleagues on that recent trip, I’d also connected with many of them on Twitter. Within minutes, it seemed like everybody I know using Twitter in Japan was tweeting — "not again", "it's still going", "this is a bad one" -- so I knew how serious it was. Feeling helpless, I offered a simple「気をつけて」and watched the NHK web feed all night in horror like many other people.

I can’t comprehend the horrible loss of life, culture, livelihoods, and infrastructure any more than anyone else. As a librarian, though, I can turn aside from the tsunami videos and look at photos of spilled library shelves collected by Japanese librarians at http://togetter.com/li/110820 and it hits home, hard. Like they explain on the “savelibrary” wiki (http://www45.atwiki.jp/savelibrary/, see also hashtag #jishinlib), saving lives comes first, but when reconstruction begins, libraries will be as crucial as ever, and libraries suffered great damage like everything else.

At my job I work on a project at the Library of Congress to collect the archive of all public tweets donated by Twitter to the Library. Later this year we hope to make access to this archive available to researchers. Maybe it will be a valuable resource to someone studying terrible events like the earthquake and tsunami. Long before that, though, librarians throughout Japan will be back to work serving their communities just like before, having gone through the same hardships as everyone else, and responding in the way they know best, by helping people to connect with information and with other people. It’s a lot to ask when so many people have lost so much and face pressing needs for survival, but if you have the ability, please consider stopping by your local library to see if there’s anything you can do to help.

It's a little late for this but it's one of those if-I-don't I'll-regret-it posts. 2010 was a terrific year for music for me. Many of my favorite artists released excellent new records, and I was able to see most them live. Retribution Gospel Choir, The National, Spoon, The Books, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene. I also made it to a number of other great shows: Doc Watson, Caetano Veloso, Plants and Animals, Neil Young and Bert Jansch, Land of Talk, Joan as Police Woman, a second show by The National in Royal Oak. Chris Lightcap put out a new record with Craig Taborn (first saw him 20 (!) years ago in Ann Arbor) that I'm enjoying as much as the previous two and even the Wall Street Journal saw fit to plug it. Some additional records I really enjoyed in 2010 were the latest Sharon Jones, Tallest Man on Earth, and Jamie Lidell.

But I think I can summarize the year with a little something you can enjoy along with me. Spoon's Transference was maybe my favorite record of the year, and everything I love about it and about my favorite song on the record "Is Love Forever?" and about Spoon the band as a whole is articulated concisely by Max Goldblatt:

Spoon "Is Love Forever?" from Max Goldblatt on Vimeo.

Now do you understand? Good, I knew you would.

That was a real highlight, as well as having a quick chat with Joan and later with the bassist from RGC after their shows, both of whom were gracious and friendly after tearing up their respective stages with all the energy and passion you could hope to expect from a live performance of music you really love.

Then I thought the highlight of the year was going to be seeing Caetano Veloso play my favorite song on my birthday (actually it was the next show after this):

Right. Hard to top that.

But then I saw מארש דונדורמה. That's Marsh Dondurma for the non-Hebrew-enabled among you. "Marsh Dondurma" is an Israeli marching band, in the spirit of the Hungry March Band, but infused with all the diverse musical strands you might expect from a band based in Jerusalem. You can read about them on mcclatchydc.com, Jerusalem Post, and Israelity. But you have you see and hear Marsh Dondurma for yourself to understand why every Shabbos we now prepare dinner chopping and slicing and dancing and singing along with them and their three excellent albums. You can buy the first two Marsh Dondurma albums on CDBaby, and you can listen to the new one on their site (hopefully it will be available in the states sometime soon, each is better than the ones before, and the first one is great to begin with).

This is what it looks like when Marsh Dondurma puts on a show in Jerusalem.

This mob flashed a few weeks before our trip to Israel, a few steps from where we stayed during that trip. I didn't see them out in the open like that, though, when I saw them it was in the basement music store a few blocks from there, horns and percussion spilling out onto the street along with folks of all ages and sizes packed in the store up the stairs and into the steps outside, dancing because you couldn't help but move. But aside from arranged appearances like that one and others they've done in many locations including in North America a few times, apparently it's not surprising to find them playing impromptu shows like this:

Good music makes me sing along, it makes me remember a time or a place or a person or an event, it evokes emotions, it moves me and makes me move. Great music makes me want to play music.

I want to abandon my career and start a marching band. I can play a little bit of drums, and I used to play clarinet a little in eighth grade, but you've got to start somewhere, right? Who's with me?

Seriously. LET'S START A MARCHING BAND.

This is what I'm talking about:

And this:

If I knew how I'd put on a marching band festival on the national mall every year and invite them and Hungry March and Rebirth and Batala and it'd be a hell of a party.

In case you're wondering the name is a take on "maras dondurmasi" (sp?), which I think refers to this unique Turkish approach to ice cream sales:

So if the new marching band fails I'll just move to Turkey and offer myself up as an apprentice to one of these guys.

Happy 2011!

Next week I'll be speaking at an event about metadata infrastructure on the topic of "Linking Library Data in the Web." It's always best to lead with a demo so I'm hacking on Ed's linkypedia django application as a way to understand and explain what we're doing well and and we're not doing well in libraries to connect our data together. My sense is that we're doing an amazing job of connecting our stuff together except for that "last mile" of the web, the humble link.

Because most of what I learned about linked data on the web I learned through years of watching over Ed's shoulder (virtually and, more recently, actually), linkypedia seemed like a great place to explore this proposition. It took longer than I expected to get my head around what linkypedia actually does - it's a bit of a mind hack. linkypedia tells you which pages in wikipedia link to sites you care about. You tell it about the site you care about (eg "my library's web site") and it crawls through wikipedia looking for links to your site. It's a valuable addition to what your users and web usage logs and crawlers and bots might otherwise tell you about your site because it reflects, in a subjective yet tangible way, how others consider some aspect of your site to be instrumental in telling some distinct story from the one you're telling yourself.

If you haven't tried linkypedia yet, go check out Ed's. Click around a bit and you'll get the idea quickly.

Because the way it tells you about how others value your site is by showing you how they're linking to it, it gives us another bit of useful information: who else is doing something online that helps wikipedia tell a story I care about? I set up a fork in github and added a screen that shows this directly:

This tells you that the Pablo Picasso wikipedia page links back out to the Modern, the Met, the National Gallery, and Yale's Gallery. It also tells you that there's an LCCN for the authority record for Picasso. This is all evident and nicely organized on the wikipedia page itself, for the most part, but seeing it extracted here gives me as a librarian a clear picture of some other things we could be doing in libraries.

I hope to actually draw those pictures and post those soon. In the meantime linkypedia does a lot more than what I've described, and if you're the kind of person who would be reading this blog and still reading this post you'll probably want to take a closer look. A good starting point is what Ed's written on his weblog about it.