I’m deep in the thick of the chapter I’m writing on issues of preservation for digital scholarship, and am feeling fairly acutely the extent to which these issues have not been on my radar before now, so I need to ask for your help, particularly the digital librarians among you.

While there are a number of extremely important reports that have been published around these issues of late (see, for instance, the Blue Ribbon Task Force interim report, “Sustaining the Digital Investment,” the MITH white paper “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use”, and the ARL report, “Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century”, among others), I’m focusing the chapter around a few particular projects of which I could really use a deeper sense.

What I’m looking for is critical accounts of the histories of the histories of projects such as TEI, COinS, DOI, and LOCKSS, accounts that both convey the development and administration of the programs as well as any lingering issues with which the projects need to contend. I’ve found some basic stuff about each project, but if there are particularly good resources out there, I’d love to hear about them!

[Ed: Just critical accounts of the histories of the projects, not critical accounts of the histories of the histories. Not enough coffee yet...]

Otherwise, anyone might know what’s on your mind.

There’s a fantastic series of tweets in my Twitter stream right now, from folks commenting on the new Facebook terms of service, which indicates that anything a user adds to their account is not only the property of Facebook while the account is active, but remains their property even if removed from the server, and even if the account is deactivated. Two of my favorite tweets:

My new TOS: Anything you think while reading this blog, or after reading this blog, or while contemplating once upon a time having read this blog, becomes my property.

What’s your new TOS?

[UPDATE, 12.32 pm: Amanda French has posted a fantastic comparison of the terms of service of Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter -- and it appears the outrage is well-deserved.]

Having blogged my excitement about the public beta of DEVONthink 2, and trying to get myself re-organized for my winter break projects, I spent much of yesterday poking around in my various databases, thinking about how the data I access frequently is organized and trying to imagine better workflows. Over the last year or so, I’ve adopted a number of software packages and systems, and I figured I’d share some of what I’ve been using.

First off, of course, is DEVONthink itself, which I’ve been using to organize my reading notes, pdfs, and other bits of research data. I’ve also, as I noted, been using Bookends as my reference manager; it’s a little costy, but nowhere near so much as EndNote, and far, far friendlier.

This summer, for a whole series of reasons, I found myself getting a little paranoid about data security, and it suddenly occurred to me that not only had I not changed my primary passwords recently enough, but that I was reusing passwords in far too many places. The problem is, though, that I’m far too stupid to be able to remember as many passwords as I’d need to keep things really secure. Enter 1Password, a program that generates strong passwords and securely stores them for you. It also synchronizes beautifully with the iPhone, so that you need never be without that data.

Synchronizing data across computers, however, has been a challenge I’ve been trying to deal with for a while now. For the last several years, I’ve been using ChronoSync to synchronize data between my home machine and my USB drive, and then between my USB drive and my office machine, and so forth. Though ChronoSync is a dream, my system was still mildly awkward — heaven help me if I forget to sync before leaving one machine, or before starting to use the other. MobileMe’s Back to My Mac feature, which allows you to access any of your computers from any other, has gotten me out of a couple of jams, but it’s too slow to be ideal, and it’s not as automated as I’d like.

So yesterday I started tinkering with DropBox, which brings together cloud storage and automatic synchronization across multiple computers. I installed the application and dropped my databases in the dropbox, and then today installed the application on my office machine, which downloaded the contents of my dropbox. Any changes I make on one machine will automatically transfer to the other. (And DropBox uses SSL for all data transport and encrypts all files with AES-256, though the truly paranoid might want to create an encrypted disk image within the dropbox.)

Now to put those databases to work…

I’m still running pretty much a day behind—meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:

The Chronicle reported yesterday that the ACLS had released a report, “Our Cultural Commonwealth,” examining the state of “cyberinfrastructure” in the humanities and social sciences, arguing—unsurprisingly, perhaps—that these “softer” areas of the academy have a long way to go in order to catch up with the levels of development and support available to the hard sciences. Among their recommendations is one near and dear to my heart: “Encourage digital scholarship.”

Today is also the final day in the summer institute on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UC San Diego, sponsored by (among other organizations), HASTAC.

I’m very much hoping to hear what comes out of that institute, and looking forward to seeing how the ACLS’s report is received…

One sure way to measure your network dependency is to live in a building in which broadband is included with your rent, and see how you respond when the Internet suddenly, completely, and inexplicably breaks.  And there is nothing you can do about it—no router you can reset, or DSL modem you can futz with, no customer service hotlines on which to hold.  There is only your apartment’s leasing and maintenance office, where you’ll be told, “uh, yeah—it’s broke.”

How many times do you turn to the computer to look something up, only to realize you can’t, before the aggravation really starts to kick in?

How long does it take before you pack up the laptop and head down to the coffee shop, the one with the open wi-fi?

How long before you start picking fights with roommates or family members?

How long before paralysis sets in, in which you feel it impossible to accomplish anything?

Just curious.

[UPDATE, 5.17.06, 11.00 am:  Yes, I changed the title of this post.  I’m so deranged by my lack of networked communication that I totally fumbled the support group reference.  And left the ball lying on the field for a full day.  What a maroon.]

I’ve spent much too much of this weekend wrestling with a series of thorny and utterly unnecessary technical problems related to various of my websites.  And I’m having a hard time making myself stop and do the things I actually need to be doing this weekend.  Like grading.  This is in no small part because dealing with these technical problems looks like work without really feeling like it, allowing me to spend hours and hours goofing off while still maintaining the appearance of productivity.

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I’ve nearly gotten through the copy-edited manuscript, which has been a pretty overwhelming and, at moments, frustrating task.  I’ve got six small queries yet to finish dealing with, three of which have to do with whether an emphasis appeared in the original text or if I added it when I quoted, and one of which similarly has to do with the use of an ellipsis in the original text.  All of this running-down of sources that I, in many cases, haven’t looked at in five years has produced a kind of paradoxical reaction in me:  on the one hand, I’m extraordinarily grateful for the web, and particularly for Google Print and for Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature, each of which has allowed me to see several original texts without having to go track the physical copies down in the library.  This seems to me the best of what these services can do:  they’ve allowed me to check the page numbers on citations, to check weird wording in quotes, and to find the pagination for articles in volumes.

But at one and the same time, I’m immensely frustrated by the texts that I can’t get ahold of this way.  Some of them are in my personal library—but I can’t get into the office until later this morning, and would like to be able to access that information now, because once I get into the office I’m going to have office-type crises to deal with.  Most of the texts that I don’t own are in the library, but my relationship to the idea of “going to the library” has dramatically changed in the age of the web; physically walking across campus to that building over there requires a kind of time-investment that I can’t make right now, and that seems particularly problematic when all I need to chase down are three references.

Perhaps this is merely laziness speaking, but in an age when I can access almost any information via this magic box on my desk, those bits I can’t get at rankle all the more.  I’ll always want to do my primary reading of print copies—at least until there’s been another major change in the technology, of course—but for this kind of reference-consultation, I want everything available, and now.

Follow these directions:

1. Call Governor Schwartzenegger: 916-445-2841 (they’re apparently accepting calls from anywhere).

2. Push: 2 (voice your opinion on legislation).

3. Push: 1 (gender-neutral marriage bill – Senate Bill 849).

4. And push: 1 to support marriage equality.

Of course, the conspiracy theorist in my brain has me convinced that all the 1 calls are being dumped, while the 2s are being carefully tallied.  But we’ll see…

Somebody somewhere apparently crossed the streams earlier today, and everything around here went kerflooey.  Not in Claremont, at least not as far as I know; I’ve been at school all day, where the energy crisis of some years ago resulted in our being outfitted with mondo generators that we move seamlessly to in time of blackout.  But my otherwise fabulous and enormously reliable hosting provider went down sometime in the 1.15 pm vicinity, and the site only just came up moments ago.

Sigh.  And I was having such a good blog day.