R. David Lankes

August 28, 2005

Story Starters Prototype

Hi all. I’ve put the StoryStarters prototype online to play with. Note it doesn’t play too well with Internet Explorer for Windows. Click here to see a streaming video overview. Or go right to the prototype.

A few notes about the prototype:

We are in the process of implementing the “real” system. Consider it a working model. There are a few things you need to know before you start playing with it:

Assume all data will be lost when we put up the real system. You never know…it might still be there, just don’t assume it.
There are known bugs using Internet Explorer for Windows. It has been tested on Firefox Mac and Windows and Safari.
If you find bugs (and you probably will), let me know at my e-mail. I can’t promise we’ll fix them, as this is just the prototype, but it is still very useful to know.

August 28, 2005

What I’ve done with My Summer Vacation

It has been a busy month at the Institute with all of us traveling and moving in different directions before the start of the semester. I thought it would be useful to recap some of the recent projects I’ve been working on and where they are headed. Some of this information is just an update to previous posts on my blog, some is new. Sorry if it is repetitive, but it helps me put it all in one place.

My projects have revolved around two threads…credibility and digital reference. There are three major projects here:

• Reference Extract: A digital reference search engine
• Story Starters: building a blogging community of answers and questions, and
• IKE: the Inductive Knowledge Engine

Let me break them down:
Continue reading “What I’ve done with My Summer Vacation”

August 19, 2005

Working Hard

Sorry I have been quiet for a while. I’ve been very busy preparing for a MacArthur presentation next week. I’ve been building the Story Starters site…and having a fun time in source code. The basics of the site are done and almost ready for public play (on the “reference implementation at least). We’ll need to do some re-writing and cleaning up (not good to do database design while you are also figuring out the feature set).
It is also becoming clear to me how Story Starters is going to become the next version of QABuilder – OpenQA.

I hope to have a site up for folks to look at end of next week.

August 8, 2005

Archives Online

I’ve put a lot of the news from my former RSS feed on the blog to browse. I’ll put up some more intelligent navigation to the older information soon.

August 4, 2005March 3, 2016

Digital and Information Trends on the Library Landscape

“Digital and Information Trends on the Library Landscape,” AASTO RAC, Wilmington, NC. Presented changes in libraries as a result of a changing technology landscape.

Abstract: A discussion of the changing role of libraries in industry from external information providers, to organization wide repositories.
Slides: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/Presentations/2005/AASHTO.pdf

August 4, 2005

“Digital and Information Trends on the Library Landscape,” AASTO RAC, Wilmington, NC

200508041219 Slides from the presentation are now available here. A discussion of the changing role of libraries in industry from external information providers, to organization wide repositories.

August 3, 2005

End of a Busy Month

Well, yesterday I finished up a working demo site of Story Starters for the National Science Digital Library. Doing that and teaching kept me too busy to blog. My plan is to make a more general and scalable demo for the world. Hopefully I can have that up by the end of the week. My intention is to also tie in Reference Extract.

Right now in Reference Extract you can search digital reference knowledge-bases and then extend your search to cited references.Like this:

DR Archives –> Cited Searches

No imagine, chaining more specific searches together, so now we can add blogs in Story Starters:

Blogs –> DR Archives –> Cited Searches

Making this capability generic, a local library could add their archives, and then extend to Reference Extract:

My Library –> DR Archives –> Cited Search

And one could continue to add more links:

My Library –> DR Archive –> Cited Search –> Google

The idea would be to make a general utility to tie these searches together in a seamless interface and allow any interface mix and match (and collapse) these chains based on a given user interface. So a library could go:

My Library –> Cited Search –> Google

etc.

Just an idea. Off to start the Story Starter site.

July 26, 2005

IST 759

Sorry for the silence, but I am in the middle of IST 759, the capstone course for SU’s Certificate of Advanced Studies in Digital libraries. It is turning out to be a great class. 8 students hanging out in a lab working on PHP code all day…at least it is fun for me.

July 13, 2005

Thank you Bob Martin

Bob Martin ends his term as director of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (see link here IMLS: What’s New: Current). Bob did an amazing job of not only building IMLS, but really driving forward libraries and museums. The field is better because of his service and vision.

Thanks again Bob.

July 12, 2005

Story Starters

We’re in the process of developing a service called “Story Starters.” It is sort of a fun idea that grew out of an immediate need. The immediate need was a way to connect Blogs with our QABuilder software. Where we’ve ended up (for now) is a general blog starting service. A person or organization posts some list of items they want to be blogged about, and from within blogging software (WordPress to start with), can browse lists and pick the ones they want to blog about. The resulting blog entries are then aggregated and sent back to the posting agent…read more to see why this might be useful.
Continue reading “Story Starters”