The “Grab a book” meme

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Ok ...

"However, if F is itself weak, then some or all of the key attributes of F supplied to E will be key attributes of one or more entity sets G to which F is connected by a supporting relationship"

This is from "Database Systems" by Garcia-Molina, Ullman & Widom which just happened to be lying at my left elbow on my desk. Weak entity sets are doubtless terribly interesting to people with a thing about relational data models, but as they bore the crap out of me I'm not going to even attempt either to understand or explain the above sentence.

The Future of the Past on TV

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the future for the huge Radio & TV archive we are building here at Statsbiblioteket. In various forms and media we have the broadcast streams of the major national channels stretching back to 1984 (radio) and 1987 (TV). The older material sits on all kinds of assorted media, with the largest part being the shelves of VHS TV recordings patiently sitting in our basement awaiting D-Day (where "D" is for "Digitisation"). The newer material is recorded direct-to-digital and currently fills umpt-ti-tumpt terrabytes and will soon start to grow even more rapidly as we add kanal-5 to the 20 channels we currently archive.

Now the process of archiving and preserving this material presents all sorts of fascinating challenges for we digital-preservation nerds - dealing with digital TV, choice of formats, bitrates, metadata-management etc. but that's all trivia beside the biggest challenge we face which is how to make this vital national cultural archive available to the widest possible audience. Or rather, how to manage the technical and administrative challenges of making the material freely and conveniently discoverable and available to those who have a right to use it while simultaneously complying with our legal obligation to respect the claims of the copyright-holders.

For me as a developer the challenge will be to develop a system which will support a workflow which will allow this process to be managed efficiently. In the current system, we use way to much time in manually filling orders for material from the archive - mainly authoring and burning DVDs. This is not an effective use of skilled, educated labour.

Our next-generation system should be based around on-line delivery. With the crippling workload of manually servicing orders removed, our skilled staff would be able to concentrate on managing access rights to the material. The two clearly go hand-in-hand - without proper access and rights control (ideally in the form of guiltware) we cannot have online access, but equally it will be online access which frees up the human resources we will need to manage the access rights.

In future posts I will outline some of my ideas for how such a future system might look, both the from the point of view of the enduser and from that of the rights-manager.

Middle-Eastern Developments

Since starting this web log or "blog", as I like to think of it, many people have asked me "Garkbit, what do you think about the situation in the Middle East? Is peace possible in our lifetime?".

Well, until yesterday I would have had to say "no". But the news that the Israelis are to have popular 70s children's TV character Zippy as Prime Minister has led me to reevaluate my position. This surprising development, if repeated across the Middle East, could signal a sea change that could lead to lasting reconciliation. I understand that Hector the Dog is already being considered as a possible successor to Pres. Ahmadinejad of Iran, while elsewhere there is talk of an unnamed "Pig in Lipstick" running for office in an as yet unnamed country. Is it too soon for optimism?

A Little Something From The Whine List

... with more to follow