Posterous: CMS for simple web publishing via email
"Posterous is the easy way to get content online using e-mail. You can e-mail content of just about any type (such as rich text, photos, music, video, Word/Powerpoint/Excel/PDF documents, and zip archives) to us. We will post it online in the most web-friendly format, then reply with a public URL that can be forwarded or shared with friends. Account creation is never required, but if a user does create an account, posts from your various e-mail addresses (work, home, and mobile phone) can all be integrated into one blog."
(Posterous, Inc.)
Fig.1 Susie Blackmon's Posterous weblog [available at: http://susieblackmon.com/].
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
From Digital Libraries to Knowledge Commons
"Digital Libraries began as systems whose goal was to simulate the operation of traditional libraries for books and other text documents in digital form. Significant developments have been made since then, and Digital Libraries are now on their way to becoming 'Knowledge Commons'. These are pervasive systems at the centre of intellectual activity, facilitating communication and collaboration among scientists or the general public and synthesizing distributed multimedia documents, sensor data, and other information.
Digital Libraries represent the confluence of a variety of technical areas both within the field of informatics (eg data management and information retrieval), and outside it (eg library sciences and sociology). Early Digital Library efforts mostly focused on bridging some of the gaps between the constituent fields, defining `digital library functionality', and integrating solutions from each field into systems that support such functionality. These have resulted in several successful systems: researchers, educators, students and members of other communities now continuously search Digital Libraries for information as part of their daily routines, decision-making processes, or entertainment.
Most current Digital Library systems share certain characteristics. They are content-centric, motivated by the need to organize and provide access to data and information. They concentrate on storage-centric functionality, mainly offering static storage and retrieval of information. They are specialized systems, built from scratch and tailored to the particular needs and characteristics of the data and users of their target environment, with little provision for generalization. They tend to operate in isolation, limiting the opportunities for large-scale analysis and global-scale information availability. Finally, they concentrate on material that is traditionally found in libraries, mostly related to cultural heritage. Hence, despite the undisputed advantages that current Digital Library systems offer compared to the pre-1990s era, the above restrictions limit the role that Digital Libraries can play in Knowledge Societies, which will serve as important educational nuclei in the future.
Together with the general community, the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries has initiated a long journey from current Digital Libraries towards the vision of 'Knowledge Commons'. These will be environments that will impose no conceptual, logical, physical, temporal or personal borders or barriers on content. They will be the universal knowledge repositories and communication conduits of the future, common vehicles by which everyone will access, analyse, evaluate, enhance and exchange all forms of information. They will be indispensable tools in the daily personal and professional lives of people, allowing everyone to advance their knowledge, professions and roles in society. They will be accessible at any time and from anywhere, and will offer a user-friendly, multi-modal, efficient and effective interaction and exploration environment.
Achieving this requires significant changes to be made to past development strategies, which shaped the functionality, operational environment and other aspects of Digital Libraries. Knowledge Commons will have different characteristics. They will be person-centric, motivated by needs to provide novel, sophisticated, and personalized experiences to users. They will concentrate on communication and collaboration functionality, facilitating intellectual interactions on themes that are pertinent to their contents, with storage and retrieval being only a small part of such functionality. They will remain specialized systems that will nevertheless be built on top of widely-available, industrial-strength, generic management systems, offering all typically required functionality. In general, they will be managed by globally distributed systems, through which information sources across the world will exchange and integrate their contents. Finally, they will be characterized by universality of information and application, serving all applications and comprehensively managing all forms of content."
(Yannis Ioannidis)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Preserving the Knowledge Commons
"when scholars use systems of reference to link one work to another, they establish and exercise underlying fabrics of trust. These fabrics serve to tie researchers to other researchers, teachers to students, and creators to users over time and place into durable and productive scholarly communities. The linked works represent the common pools of knowledge - the knowledge commons - over which members of these communities labor to produce new knowledge. And the links work, the trust endures, and the commons nourishes the intellectual life if and only if cited material is preserved so that, when a link is made, the reader is able to check the reference at the other end."
(Donald J. Waters)
[1] Waters, D. J. (2006). Preserving the Knowledge Commons. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, MIT Press.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
"Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible."
(The Internet Archive)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
A naïve ontology for concepts of time and space for searching and learning
"User-oriented digital information search environments call for flexible information access interfaces that may interact with a dynamically changing searcher view in capturing a variety of media. Optimal use of conventional libraries and bibliographic databases requires a general understanding of the knowledge structure of the collection domain (Hsieh-Yee 1993; Pennanen & Vakkari 2003). Novice searchers without such understanding, however, can seek the help of librarians and intermediaries when they get lost in search processes.
Increasing numbers of digital libraries and online resources on the Internet provide potential users with opportunities to access and interact with these resources directly from offices and homes. Such trends seem to offer searchers useful information access environments for a variety of information resources. However, in such environments, novice searchers are forced to seek the information they need without the help of librarians or other intermediaries. In reality, many novice users of digital libraries do not have a general understanding of the knowledge structure of the digital collections held by these libraries. Eventually they may give up pursuing their information needs when they get lost during search processes or obtain unsatisfactory search results.
This research project seeks to find a way to overcome such limitations of existing information access interfaces developed for traditional libraries and bibliographic information services. Specifically, we explore a qualitative research method for eliciting the knowledge structure of novice searchers and patterns of its modification in their search and learn processes, and build on it a naïve ontology for time and space."
(Makiko Miwa & Noriko Kando, 2007)
Hsieh-Yee, I. (1993). Effects of search experience and subject knowledge on the search tactics of novice and experienced searchers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 27(3), 117-120.
Miwa, M. and Kando, N. (2007). "A naïve ontology for concepts of time and space for searching and learning" Information Research, 12(2), paper 296 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-2/paper296.html]
Pennanen, M. & Vakkari, P. (2003). Students' conceptual structure, search process and outcome while preparing a research proposal. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 54(8), 759-770.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
