Information Playground

Repertoire Politics

I came across the phrase "repertoire politics" while reading the latest online copy of ON Magazine. The section that I was reading was called Philharmoniana (page 6). The article highlights a digital preservation effort that is currently happening at the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Library in Russia.

The library itself has been part of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Hall since 1882, and it contains over 150,000 items, such as musical scores, and concert programs. 

One of the rooms in the library has a card catalog made up of 155 drawers which contain roughly a quarter of a million index cards. These cards contain detailed notes and information about every concert that has been held in the hall since 1921! These details include:

• works that were performed
• name of the composer
• orchestra
• name of the conductor
• names of any soloists
• time it took to perform a piece
• name of the musicologist (who often gave a pre-concert lecture)

The card catalogue section of the library is known as Philharmoniana. Digital curators at the library are choosing to digitally preserve the Philharmoniana first. Allowing these notecards to be viewed online opens the door for more researchers to understand St. Petersburg history through the lens of the performances that occurred at its great hall. This brings me back to the introduction of the term "repertoire politics", which is defined in the article as follows:

'the concert information scrupulously entered into the catalogs will allow scholars to analyze the shifts in musical preferences, trends, and tendencies -- known as "repertoire politics" in the world of classical concerts -- from season to season and over the course of nearly a century.

This unique knowledge base will also satisfy the curiosity of music lovers who seek to know who was conducting what and when, who were the famous soloists invited to Russia, and what music was performed during the 900-day siege of Leningrad in World War II.'

Currently 10,000 cards from 17 drawers have been digitized onto a CLARiiON AX4 as part of a grant made available from the EMC Heritage Trust Project, a project that provides funds to safeguard cultural resources around the world.

One more note of interest: the author of the article, Dr. Ludmilla Leibman, is the Executive Director of the Educational Bridge Project. The EBP's goal is to provide educational and artistic exchanges between Russia and America. This group has arranged for seven representatives from the leading educational and cultural organization in St. Petersburg to visit Boston area cultural sites during November of 2009.

Many of my co-workers are in St. Petersburg and in fact I visited the city in 2007 on business for EMC. One thing that I learned is that the city of St. Petersburg (founded in 1703) is actually younger than the city of Boston! I hope to learn more about St. Petersburg come November.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

From Blogs to Books

When I attended the World Innovation Forum in NYC last May, I listened as Paul Saffo of Stanford argued that the era of the "consumer economy" has ended, and a new economy is beginning that revolves around a new type of transaction:  individuals contribute unique content to corporations and get services in return (think of a transaction whereby you or I contribute a search string to google). My raw notes on Paul's speech are here, and Stu wrote up some commentary here.

Certainly the widespread growth of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook are evidence that something along those lines is definitely happening.

Bloggers contribute content that is typically based on their area of passion. Most of the posts I write, for example, revolve around one or more of the following: the building of software for the information storage industry; the culture in which these products are built;  corporate innovation and the process of driving ideas into a product; and new technologies and directions that I'd like to work on next.

Over the previous 12 months I have noticed that several bloggers in the storage industry, as well as co-workers of mine within EMC, have decided to take their area of passion and create content in book form. Tony Pearson of IBM wrote a "blook" and talked about it here. Blogger Tony Asaro has mentioned that he is currently writing a book about being a consultant. Blogger Dave Hitz released a book earlier this year. Dan Schawbel is a co-worker of mine that made the jump from blogger to author. Other co-workers of mine have been experimenting with e-book technology.

Last year I made up my mind to do the same. At the time I had been reading some very interesting and stimulating blog posts about innovation. I decided to test out the process of organizing my thoughts on innovation and putting them into book form.

I found the process of publishing a book to be fairly straightforward. It's not as easy as setting up a blog, but the concept is similar. In this post I'll be writing about my experiences with self-publishing (otherwise known as POD or print-on-demand).

If you're considering doing the same, here's my advice.

1. Consider Formatting Issues Before Writing

As a blogger, the writing was the easy part. I came up with about 16 chapters and wrote them in 16 different Word docs. It was similar to writing extended blogs (except that each chapter contained much more detail and content). However, when it came to issues like margins, fonts, page headers, or blank pages, I lacked experience. By the time I got to the end game (working with my publisher to turn a Microsoft Word document into a printable book) I spent ALL my time tweaking those items. I wished that I had made those decisions back at the beginning. Who can help with those sort of issues?  An editor.

2. Hire an editor

This is the advice that StorageZilla gave me and it was advice that I followed.  However, my work with an editor mainly revolved around content and grammar. My editor did provide some extra services for me: changed the font from Arial to Times New Roman, and added some section headers. But I didn't consider margins (which vary based on the final "size" of the book), I didn't consider the impact of inserting diagrams and how that intersects with the margins, and I didn't understand the strategy of when to leave some pages blank and when not to.

My foremost goal in hiring an editor was to ensure that the book was grammatically sound; an equally important goal would have been to ask more questions about formatting early on. 

Finally, an editor WIDENS the number of print-on-demand vendors that you might quality for. Some vendors don't care about the inside of your book; some of them most definitely do.

3. Choosing a Print-On-Demand Company

I did quite a bit of googling to research my options for turning my manuscript into book form. By far the most common name I ran into was Lulu.com (in fact, this is the company that TonyP used).

It seemed pretty easy: send LuLu your finished manuscript, slap a stock cover on it, and start selling.

My editor, however, recommended another option: Booklocker.com.  Booklocker.com actually reads the manuscript. And then they reject 90% of what comes in. From what I can see there were two important aspects that helped my manuscript gain acceptance from Booklocker.com: (1) my manuscript was grammatically sound, and (2) I already have an internet presence (this blog, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc). For bloggers, item #2 is typically not an issue, which is why I recommend Booklocker.com for those of us that want to turn blogs into books.

What's more, Booklocker.com has a great contract: give them a small fee, they'll start selling your book, and you can terminate the contract whenever you want.  The author always retains full rights to the book.

4. Front and Back Cover Artwork

After my manuscript was accepted by Booklocker.com and we went back and forth on the formatting issues, I was presented the option of either (a) submitting my own cover artwork, or (b) hiring their contractor to come up with a cover that matched the theme of my book (high-tech innovation).

Submitting artwork is tricky (for me) because the width of the book affects the width of the "spine" part of the cover. When you add in the fact that I had trouble drawing stick figures in elementary school, the contracting decision was a no-brainer for me. Booklocker.com's contractor was very accommodating, and I was pleased with the end result (I've attached it to the end of this post).

5. Listing it on the Internet

The last thing Booklocker.com needed from me was the description and author information. They created a dedicated page that describes the book and allows it to be purchased. They also take care of getting it out to the other major sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and provide instructions on how to update the book descriptions on those sites as well.

That's it. That's all it takes. What's it like to get that first printed copy of the book? Pretty cool. Booklocker.com sends you the first copy (before listing it) in order to give it a final look-over.

I'd be interested to hear from other bloggers who have done the same, or perhaps used a different service. Drop me a line if any of you have questions about the path I went down.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

Innovate With Influence Description and Cover (below)

Quarterly Results and All-Hands

I just walked back across the street from attending the EMC quarterly employee meeting (which typically covers the financial results). I also was able to hear the latest news about the Data Domain acquisition. When I showed up for the free BBQ I was pleased to see that EMC had hired a couple of local ice cream trucks (I had seconds).

As far as the quarterly results go, the main thing that I took from the financial numbers was the quarter-over-quarter sequential revenue growth. Not only was this encouraging, but even more encouraging was the fact that the 2H09 guidance calls for more growth. That was nice to hear. Couple that with the fact that the aggressive stance on curbing expenses is still in place all the way through 2010 and therefore the bottom line for the company should only continue to get better.

And oh yes, the 5% across-the-board pay reduction will be reversed at the beginning of next year, as planned.

As far as the news about the Data Domain acquisition, a live feed had been set up between the EMC employees in MA and the DD team in CA. There was a lot that was said in the next 30 minutes but here are the items that I found most interesting.

• DD's Frank Slootman comments on the fact that he had poached numerous EMC sales people over the years: "I was just borrowing them".
• Slootman also humorously wondered about EMC athletic talent after an EMC exec strained a muscle playing bocce. Note to Frank: don't worry dude, we've got game;>).
• I found it interesting that the new DD division is going to be "leading the charge" on EMC dedup offerings by actually assuming the authority on several existing EMC products (the exact products are yet to be agreed upon). I'm not sure I can remember an acquisition in which the new team immediately assumed this type of responsibility. In my particular case (Data General's CLARiiON product) we were told "execute your roadmap and don't worry about anything else". In DD's case it's "execute your roadmap AND help grow our other businesses as well.
• Technology-wise, there was discussion on whether or not Data Domain's software assets could be re-used within other EMC products, or if there would be some sort of push for "commonality of assets". At this point Frank Slootman pointed out that much of DD's secret sauce has to do with the enormous bandwidth capabilities of a DD box and that their technology has been purpose built for the quick and efficient dedup of data flowing over that pipe (without dropping or losing a single bit of data). These aspects of the technology don't necessarily equate to widely re-usable deduplication algorithms. This made sense to me.

All in all a good day of corporate news, good humor, and topped off with a little ice cream.

Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd

Content Management and XAM

When I started writing a paper last year about the advantages of using a technology like XAM for the long-term curation of digital artifacts, I was looking forward to hearing feedback on the recommendation.

Well, last week Craig Randall forwarded me an article highlighting the fact that others are arriving at the exact same conclusion on their own.

In the above-referenced article, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, who covers Enterprise Content Management technologies and practices, duly notes that the work the SNIA has done on the XAM proposal provides strong benefits in an ECM environment where document preservation is a paramount requirement.

The thrust of the article is that XAM is an excellent "contract" when it comes to an API between archival applications and storage systems. It has strong "longevity" characteristics when it comes to the ability to seamlessly migrate archived content from one system to another over the course of many years.

The article ends with a call for customers to add XAM to the list of request for proposals (RFPs) to content technology providers.

While Pelz-Sharpe focuses on the XAM benefit of "migration between storage devices", I'd also like to point out a few more XAM benefits that augment the point:

• XAM is defined for massively scalable object storage in a flat object space. Traditional archiving applications that use file systems often experience a high cost of ownership in regards to maintaining said file system. XAM devices offer the potential to hide file system storage nuances (if the XAM device uses a file system at all), and minimize or remove high administration burdens.
• In a similar vein, some archiving applications that utilize underlying file systems will store hard-coded absolute pathnames to content. This can result in a rigid, inflexible file system structure that is very difficult to change (or migrate). Archiving applications that use XAM must reference location-independent names instead. These names are known as XUIDs.
• Archiving applications often use databases as well as file systems. Content and its related metadata can become "split" between the DB and FS. This split increases the chance of losing the "unity" between a given piece of content and its related metadata. XAM technology acts as a "paper clip" which permanently binds these two (or more) items together.
• Many times archival applications need to specify retention periods. XAM has built in support for retention. When an archival applications stores content to a XAM device it can mandate the length of time that the device must prevent deletion (including an infinite amount of time).
• Finally, archival applications often have strong authenticity requirements. Customers may need to know that the originally ingested document has not been tampered with or altered in any way. Once again, XAM has built-in support for content time-stamping on ingest as well as restriction of alteration when it comes to content (this is known as "binding" in XAM-speak).

Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd

Digitizing Dickens

In my local newspaper this morning there was an article that caught my eye. There's a fairly significant digital archiving project occurring at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute to preserve some of the original works of English novelist Charles Dickens. This, of course, is interesting to me in the context of previous posts I've written about the digital preservation occurring at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in South Boston.

The George C. Gordon Library at WPI has a very significant selection of historical books and they invest a large amount of their time caring for and preserving the physical copies of old works.

So why go to the effort of digitally preserving Dickens' works when certainly most of his novels can be found online already?

Well the answer lies in the fact that the particular books at WPI's library are sequential portions of the entire novel. I looked up this announcement (from 2008) of the WPI Dickens digitization project and learned that the original release of his novels became available as a series of printed installments.  Once these serialized versions are digitized it will be the first time they'll be available on the web.

The importance of web-based access to the serial documents is highlighted in this quote by WPI professor Joel Bratin:

“Few scholars—and certainly very few readers—have previously had access to these rare serial parts, as they can be found in only a few collections worldwide,” Brattin says. “That’s unfortunate, as they reflect, more so than any other published text, the author’s original intentions as to wording, punctuation, and so on. Plus, by exploring these installments, readers are able to experience the novels—and a bit of Victorian London life—as their earliest readers did, complete with advertisements and with illustrations that are rarely reproduced in full in today’s paperback editions.”

This reminds me of the digitization project at the JFK Library. Copies of JFK's speeches are widely available on the internet, but the original speeches that he hand-edited in his office are not. These originals clearly provide new insights to researchers.

The WPI effort uses scanners and OCR (optical character recognition) to join the scanned image together with metadata. Additional metadata is added by a WPI digital curator. The library is storing the documents as PDF/A, the archival form of PDF, which actually leaves out some of the PDF features that are not amenable to long-term archiving. The stories are being preserved along with color illustrations and will be text-searchable.

The newspaper article went on to state that WPI owns all but four of the serialized novels, and hopes to borrow the rest (and preserve them) from the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: SteveTodd

Inbox Blogging Fodder

It's day two of my return from a nearly two week vacation. I have to admit that yesterday was a painful return to reality after two weeks of camping, beach visits, fishing, and the arcades at Salisbury Beach (last beach in MA before crossing into New Hampshire). I tried out my new Ugly Stik fishing rod in the Merrimac River. I mainly used lures instead of bait because that new rod can cast a mile. I caught zero fish (my son caught some striper) but the old adage of "a bad day fishing" still holds true. We had a great time.

What's the best way to deal with the enormous amount of email that has to be filtered through on that first day? Well, a positive attitude helps. So as I filtered through the email I kept my eye out for some positive items that will make great blog fodder this summer. Here's what I came up with:

• Intern approved. I mentioned in a previous post that my business unit held an idea contest as a way of kick-starting our next development cycle. Some of the ideas put forth by my co-workers were so good that my VP suggested hiring an intern to start making progress on some of them. While I was away this person received an offer and his first day was yesterday. During the summer I plan on writing more about the ideas we are working on and the software we are building. Let me just say that when I look at the summer schedule that EMC puts together for their summer interns I'm jealous: free trips to Fenway park (Red Sox baseball) and Foxboro (New England Revolution soccer) are in the works!
• NYC Blogging Trip. Last spring BlogStu and I were invited to cover the World Innovation Forum in Times Square in New York City. What a great time.  Lo and behold both of us have been invited back to cover the World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall this October. Featured speaker?  Former US President Bill Clinton. How did Stu and I rise to the level of blogging proficiency to get invited to cover speeches by a former United States president? I have no clue. All I know is that it has something to do with deciding to push the "Publish" button for the first time.
• EMC 2009 Innovation Contest. Before leaving on vacation Craig Randall and I jointly submitted an idea related to Digital Curation (a topic of great interest to both he and I). I returned to find that the idea is high on the radar of EMC voters (top 1% of ideas) and has received many comments from EMC salespeople around the world about the market need for advanced digital curation solutions. The contest, currently in its third year, is extremely hot right now as EMC employees have already greatly exceeded the 900+ ideas submitted last year. I submitted 2-3 other ideas with other friends from EMC and they seem buried in the avalanche of submissions! Given the growing appreciation and awareness of the contest by EMC's worldwide workforce, there are lots of internal conversations happening about how to fairly judge and promote ideas.
• My Book on Innovation. One of the side projects I have been working on this year is a book that I have been writing about my experiences with innovation at large corporations (otherwise known as intrapreneurship). I found a publisher called Booklocker.com, and for any of you bloggers out there that are considering doing the same, drop me a line or a Twitter DM (@SteveTodd) and I will tell you about the experience (they're very good). I received an email from my publisher that the book is available on their website, as well as other sites such as Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com. Too cool! I've got to find some time to beef up the entries on sites like Amazon and BandN, and of course there will be plenty to blog about this summer in regards to the book!
• MIT DataSpace. My name is on a proposal from MIT to the US National Science Foundation. Professor Stuart Madnick dropped me a note to say that a decision on the approval of the grant will occur in August, and that members of the NSF will likely visit Cambridge in July to interview members of the team.
• The Acquisition. I learned about an EMC acquisition that occurred while I was gone. I'm looking forward to meeting new co-workers and learning yet another cool technology.

So after surviving Day 1 my Day 2 is looking a little rosier now that I get a good look at the things that are on my plate for the summer.

But somehow I still can't get that Ugly Stik off my mind......

Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd