I have a question about the archiving of RAW files.

One of the commenters, Damon Lynch, provided some insight to a collection of best practices (“DPBestFlow”) developed by the Library of Congress (an organization that I trust when it comes to the process of archiving materials). [He also linked to a Free Software tool he wrote to quickly download and backup photos from your digital camera, Rapid Photo Downloader.]

Just your daily photo of Rowan.

The DPBestFlow site introduces me to a file format that I was previously unaware of, DNG, or Digital Negative. The DNG format, created by Adobe, is a ‘universal’ RAW format with an open (ie: not patent encumbered) specification. This is in stark contrast to the slew of proprietary formats that are camera maker specific (closed formats that might include encrypted portions) such as NEF (Nikon’s) or CRW/CR2 (Canon’s).

There was even an initiative to garner wider adoption of open standard RAW formats back in 2005 started by Juergen Specht called OpenRAW (Wikipedia).

Now, I am a huge proponent of open formats and standards (obviously?) but my question really is:

• Is it worth it?
• Should I convert all of my Nikon RAW files to DNG?
• If I do, should I save the original NEF files “just in case?”

Also, why am I not simply reading the many discussions already had on this topic? Because I want to get the uniquely free software view on the issue.

Thoughts?

Now, as you imagine, as a crazy happy new dad, I’ve been taking a lot of photos. And I’ve been especially good about making sure they are all backed up. I have them on my laptop, my external RAID array, and now on my in a different state colo’d server.

But, since that D3100 is a DSLR I’ve been playing around with RAW images, and those can be pretty big. So far, just since I got this camera around November 30th I have about 17 gigs of photos already. My harddrive, which is an SSD, is going to fill up soon enough and it would be full now if I had imported all of my previous photos from my previous camera(s).

So, I’ve been looking for a smart way of dealing with large photo collections where part of it is on my laptop and part is ‘archived’ on an external harddrive or in the cloud or wherever.

What I see as a perfect work-flow for this is:

1. Take photos with camera
2. Import photos to Photo Management Software on your laptop
3. Process, tag, export, publish, etc
4. Repeat 1-3 many times
5. Use a ton of your computer’s harddrive space
6. Archive all photos except the last 60 gig/3 months (whatever) to an external harddrive, or nfs share, or cloud storage, etc
7. The Photo Management Software knows where those photos are, their metadata, and has a small thumbnail for them as placeholders in the timeline

The killer feature here is the Archive button. Admittedly, Google revolutionized webmail with that button (while getting tons of other things wrong with GMail*), who is going to revolutionize photo management with it?

Do any photo management applications out there do this without having to do stupid painful things like this (which makes me remove photos from one library and add them to a ‘backup library’ where I can’t see them all in the same Shotwell session).

* Like non-threaded email, non-standard IMAP server, etc

So, regarding the transfer of leadership: I’ll admit, I had someone in mind the whole time that I thought should take the reigns of the Michigan LoCo, but I wanted to make sure the team felt the same way. Luckily, Craig Maloney, one of the most active members of the LoCo (and also host of Open Metalcast and cohost of Lococast.net), has been helping lead the IRC meetings (ok ok, sometimes he leads them himself) and planning events for some time now. Everyone in the LoCo likes Craig.

So, last night, as my last duty of leader of the Michigan LoCo, I appointed Craig Maloney (snap-l) as the new leader of the Michigan LoCo. Long live the leader!

Please join me in celebrating Craig’s new position within the team and the undoubtedly great direction this will take the LoCo.

Because of my complicated history with CC, I did a quick interview to reintroduce myself to the CC community.

Some things that might be of interest to the Ubuntu community is the project that I am working on initially, LRMI. The Learning Resources Metadata Initiative is a project to create a vocabulary to describe educational materials (type, audience, assessment metrics, copyright license, etc) with the hope of submitting it to Schema.org for inclusion. If you are interested in metadata/web standards, please take a look; we’re looking for great individuals for the Technical Working Group.

If you aren’t interested in creating the standards, but are instead interested in how online (and Free/Open) education can change the world, talk to me about how FLOSS is at the center of that change. Tools (web or desktop based) can be built to make the work of learning more efficient, especially if those tools consume metadata that aids in every step.

Still curious? Read on. Entire interview reproduced below.

How did you get involved in CC initially?

It all started back when I was a student at the University of Michigan School of Information working with the fledgling Open.Michigan initiative (of which current CC staff member Tim Vollmer was one of the founders). Open.Michigan is the initiative at the University of Michigan that helps faculty, students, and staff share their educational material with the world as OER (Open Educational Resources). I was drawn to this project primarily because it aligned with my background as a member of the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) community. As I saw in the FLOSS world, our ability as creators of useful objects such as software and educational material to share these objects with each other in a way that allows them to not only read them, but also build upon them, is changing the way we interact with the world. One part of this ability is the legal assurance that you will not be sued for building upon someone else's work. This is where my interest, and involvement, with Creative Commons got its start.

I was an intern under the amazing Jon Phillips (rejon) during the summer of 2008 then stayed on as a Community Assistant for the next year. I continued my outreach as an unpaid fellow traveling to conferences until coming back to Creative Commons full-time.

Education Technology & Policy Coordinator, that's a mouthful. What does that mean? How does it relate to the work of other CC staff?

It is a mouthful! It means that I am the person you should talk to if you are working in the world of education, specifically Open Education, and have questions regarding integrating or consuming metadata, license choice and its ramifications, or any other legal, technical, or policy issue. This work dovetails nicely with the work being spearheaded by Tim Vollmer, Policy Coordinator, as I am focusing my time mostly in the education and technology realm while Tim also works on issues such as government data sharing and funder policy. I will be sort of a bridge between the CC technology team (note we’re hiring a CTO) and the policy and legal people, and a liaison for technology/policy discussions externally. My new boss is Cable Green, Director of Global Learning, who holds the big picture of how to scale OER.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how my new role can support and be informed by the work of the many OER leaders in the worldwide CC affiliate network.

You've been a copyright specialist at MLibrary for two years. There's a ton of cool stuff coming out of MLibrary. Tell us about that.

At MLibrary I worked for the Copyright Office which, contrary to what Melissa Levine’s (our fearless leader’s) title of "Copyright Officer" may imply, is not the copyright cop of the university. Instead, much of what I did was outreach and education on how faculty, students, and staff can share their scholarly works more broadly. This included issues of data sharing, open education, and open access publishing.

Specific to the library, the Copyright Office spearheaded the change of default CC license on the MLibrary website from CC Attribution-NonCommercial to CC Attribution. I hope that our reasoning for making the switch, which I outlined in a blog post, will help other galleries, libraries, archives, or museums (GLAM-institutions) adopt a similar license choice.

It is also about time for this year's Copyright Camp which is put on by MPublishing (the division within MLibrary that the Copyright Office resides). Copyright Camp is an unconference on all things copyright; from libraries to musicians, policy to practice, even education to robots!

Along with our outreach efforts, the Copyright Office also manages important projects at MLibrary including a new one concerning "orphan works."

So your most recent project is this orphan works thing, say more…

"Orphan works" are works (nominally books in our case) that are still under copyright but the copyright holder is not findable and/or contactable. These works are thus still unable to be legally reused without permission but there is no one to ask permission to reuse them.

With the leadership of Melissa and the help of my coworker Bobby Glushko, I built the process that powers the Orphan Works Project. The goal of the MLibrary Orphan Works Project is to either find the work's copyright holder OR determine that they are truly an orphan and make them available to users of MLibrary. (If you are a copyright holder of any works in the MLibrary collection, please fill out the form available on the project website.)

One could characterize part of the orphan works problem as one of a lack of metadata, or works with inadequate provenance. In a way, CC is mitigating future orphan works issues by making it easy for metadata to travel with works on the web.

You mentioned metadata and provenance, what excites you about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative?

LRMI excites me because it will finally allow all of the hard work being done by the various online education projects (open or not) to correctly tag their works with important information (such as license, audience, subject, learning outcomes, etc) to be indexed and exposed by popular search engines. Currently we have a smorgasbord of education-specific search engines that attempt to give learners access to the world's knowledge but they routinely fall short due to technical limitations. If the metadata applied to these resources is consumed and used by popular search engines, learning management software, and even the student's own computer then, I hope, big advances in education can be made more easily.

How can people get involved in LRMI?

There is a Call for Participation (CfP) and more information on the LRMI project wiki page that has all of the details.

You're also a technologist, not just a metadata technologist — no disrespect to the meta! What do you do with the Ubuntu community?

The Ubuntu community was the first FLOSS community I felt at home in. When I moved to Michigan for graduate school there was no local community team (aka "LoCo" in Ubuntu parlance) so I took it upon myself to create one. Little did I know that there was a wonderful group of individuals waiting for something like this and the team took off. The Michigan LoCo Team has since been your go-to group for Ubuntu (and FLOSS) related activities including release parties and bug and packaging jams. During graduate school when I should have been studying for exams or writing papers I spent a lot of my Ubuntu/FLOSS time reporting and triaging bugs.

Do you see underplayed opportunities for CC and OER communities to leverage Ubuntu and other FLOSS communities and vice versa? Or instances that we just know more about?

Everywhere. The FLOSS community is first and foremost a sharing or gift economy. This aligns well with the OER community (as I said before). There are many FLOSS projects that are primarily developed to be used in OER (such as the OERbit publishing platform and OERca content management system from Open.Michigan) that could have far greater impact when applied to non-institution specific endeavors.

I also firmly believe that some of the sticking points holding wide spread adoption of OER back can be addressed using software, and specifically FLOSS. Examples of this are the Open Attribute browser plugin that makes attributing CC-licensed works dead simple, the Open Badges platform being created by Mozilla that will help online learners record and display their efforts, and AcaWiki which aims to make high-quality scholarly article summaries available in every discipline. These are all great projects to get involved with from both the education side and the software side, if you are looking for something to contribute to in your free time!

At the beginning of this year, Carrie and I have been putting a plan into place that will enable us to create the type of family that we want to have and be a part of. Parts of the plan include things like having a child, moving to the Bay Area, and welcoming new members to our family. The institution of marriage is not an inherent requirement of our family, but it is also not antithetical.

Carrie and I believe that a family is more than just a couple and their offspring. A family is everyone who we love, independent of our legal relationship to them. To be more explicit, we believe that our love is not limited to each other. We see love as the basis of all that we do. It should be apparent to my Free/Open Source Software friends, my colleagues in the Open Science/Scholarship/Education world, and my new friends in the Wikipedia community that love has a tremendously positive effect on how well we work and live together. This is especially true given the nature of our communities. Online communities of practice (and of recreation) have special qualities which encourage, if sometimes necessitate, a level of openness and kindness that is above what is the norm in our respective location-based cultures. Assuming good faith, being respectful, or just being good to each other are all another way of saying that you should have an open mind and see the good in each other and truly appreciate that part of them that is good, without resorting to impulsive reactions that could incite unneeded fissions between people. Those fissions only harm our ability to reach our shared goal whether that is a universal operating system, knowledge and education for all, or any other world betterment project.

Is that sounding too lofty? It shouldn’t because this is a post about a marriage which is, at its core, about love. And love is the most spectacular emotion we experience. It permeates almost everything we do in varying intensities and effectiveness.

Which brings me back to Carrie’s and my family. We started the community building phase of that project when we decided to get pregnant. Zuzu (the fetal name of our child) will be one of the first new members of our family. We hope to increase the size (and origins) of our family when we move out to San Francisco at the end of this summer.

Until then, we had some things we needed to do, like getting married.

We’re Married!

We have been planning on getting married for a while now but we weren’t exactly sure how it would happen. The option that routinely floated to the top was a ceremony somewhere in the Rockies next year with a justice of the peace thing to get Carrie on my health insurance this summer. Well, we went to the county and applied for our marriage license and then set out to line up a judge to do the officiating. Unfortunately, given my busy travel schedule and the fact that judges only do these on certain days, it was looking like we wouldn’t be able to get in before our marriage license expired.

So, I sent out that tweet around 9pm on Wednesday June 29th. The next day Bobby came in, we confirmed he can actually do it, and I sent out a Google+ notice* that later that day, at 4:10pm, we were going to have a ceremony in front of the Shapiro Library. about 35 people showed up to join in the celebration of our wedding.

John Weise, one of my amazing coworkers at the University of Michigan Library, luckily had his nice camera with him and took a wealth of photos. You can check out the slideshow Carrie made of the best ones below.

Thanks to everyone who came out to make Carrie’s and my spontaneous special day such a wonderful experience!

* I and others think that Carrie’s and my wedding was the first to be announced, and live-blogged, via Google+. I think we should get Guinness involved!

MUG, because it is one of the best groups around, brings in great speakers and hosts the meetings at quality venues. This means that it takes money to keep MUG going. You can become a member of MUG for $35 a year (which is a steal for the content they provide) but since MUG is an open event (anyone can come, paid members just feel better about it) and the fact that they recently moved to a better, but more expensive location, that isn’t covering all of their costs.

In response, MUG started a sponsorship program targeted at companies. A company can choose to sponsor a meeting for $150 where their sponsorship will be recognized and all of their employees will be full members for the year. The Michigan LoCo put out a call to raise funds to sponsor a meeting and we blasted past the $150 amount and ended up donating $185 to MUG.

What did we do with our meeting? We took over MUG for the night! We had SIX! (6!) awesome talks by these amazing members of the LoCo team.

• “Who we are / What we do / Why we do it” – Me
• “PPA’s: Personal Package Archives” – Rick Harding
• “Ubuntu 11.04: Latest release of Ubuntu” – Craig Maloney
• “Ubuntu Server, Oneiric Cycle” – Scott Moser
• “Ubuntu One” – Jorge Castro
• “Lernid” – John Gruber

Thanks to everyone who participated and especially to everyone who donated to such a worthy cause!

And don’t worry, there will be videographic evidence of the event posted later. We did take up about 1.5 hours for all of our talking, so it’ll be a bit before it is processed and posted online.