Tuesday, February 24, 2009
l'Institut Culturel Italien and Moroccan archeology
My class at ESI ran late (we had to talk about plagiarism and it took a while longer than expected) so I arrived 10 minutes late. I can only assume that the presentation began on time, and I learned a lot during the time I was there.
In the period before the Romans, the Mauritanian period, all trading villages had to be built inland because of the high tides associated with the Atlantic. Settlers would take a river inland for 10 km and set up trading villages in naturally protected areas. The Mediterranean coast to the north was entirely inhospitable, and only from the level of Tangiers down could trading settlements begin.
When the Roman toops arrived, they came in small numbers and with soldiers who had been recruited in Spain, Syria, and Bulgaria. Some of the "Romans" were Berbers who collaborated, and took Latin versions of their Berber names. It is likely that none of the "Romans" in Morocco had ever set foot in Italy, much less in Rome. Volubilis is the most well-known Roman installation, but there are others. One site, called Chellah, is near Salé in Rabat.
In one Moroccan city, Essouria, a center for dying purple dating back to Roman times has been identified. It takes 11,000 mollusks to dye one small shirt purple using these ancient techniques. The liquid pigment is unstable and cannot be transported; the fabric must be transported to the dying center. Dr. Papi's team can be certain of the production of the dye because of the mounds of mollusk shells in the area.
The Romans may have been among the first colonizers of Morocco (followed by the Arabs, the Spanish and the French), but this scholarly presentation was in the language of the most recent colonizers, the French. Dr. Papi did a beautiful job of describing his work in French, to an audience of French speakers, nestled away in a room at the Italian Cultural Center. French may no longer be the international language it once was, but it continues to be the language of scholarly communiation in Morocco. Of course, the audience was largely Western, but that should be the topic of another blog post, I suppose.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Street parking
These parking attendants are self-organizing. Within the network, they vy for the best streets and get to know the inhabitants. When they go out of town on vacation, they find a replacement. The blue coats are a tradition, not something official.
Around the corner from me, a new attendant appeared last week. He must be about 11 years old. I suppose he has to work -- despite governmental claims to the contrary, the economic crisis is hurting Morocco, especially in terms of tourism. This boy works all day, while American boys are in school learning to read and to reason. I've been giving a lot of thought recently to whether Morocco should being using French or English for international communications. Perhaps in doing so, I've been overlooking a much more serious problem: that of 50% illiteracy within the country.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Cataloging I and II
The first years get a taste of cataloging theory at the beginning, and I get two days during that period to discuss the basics of MARC. That's a whole week -- a lot in terms of the time alloted for the class (and I'm very grateful). The rest of the semester is spent studing the cataloging code used in France (AFNOR) and applying it to examples. At the end of the class, I also get several sessions where I'll be able to walk all 90 or so students through the process of marking up their AFNOR records with MARC 21.
The second years dive straight in to using AFNOR for more complex cataloging problems and formats. I get the last three class periods to introduce them to MARC and to walk them though some record creation. We'll use the Koha with Class service through LibLime (thanks to LibLime for hosting us, and for giving a French interface when possible!) It's all very, very exciting!
In all honesty, I expect that Moroccan libraries will not as a whole adopt the use of MARC records ever. Online catalogs are not yet the norm over here, and I hope that XML formats will be the library gold standard by the time that Moroccans are ready to get online en masse; no one will ever need to learn clunky old MARC. The hope is that our preliminary look at MARC cataloging procedures today will serve as a solid point of departure for the librarians in the trenches in the future.
And for once, I'm trying to be Moroccan about my handouts. I'm trying very hard to prepare handouts that are in the style of the other materials used in class ... to encourage reuse next year when I'm gone.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Movies
In comparison, Morocco doesn't seem to have the same movie theatre culture. Moroccans certainly enjoy films, as evidenced by the roving vendors of pirated DVDs that are on just about every street in Rabat. There are only two movie theatres in Rabat, and the selection of films is limited. The Institut Francais de Rabat sponsors a film each week, which is reasonable. There are more theatres in Casa, however. Apparently, there's a district with theatres that only show pirated films. There, it's possible to see American films before they come out it America, it seems.
I've asked Moroccan friends if they think this disrespect for intellectual property is holding Morocco back, since what is evident in the world of cinema is surely evident in other realms too. The answer is always "no", but I admit to having a hard time knowing what's to be gained, in the very least by permitting theatres to operate that way. In Sidney Poitier's memoires, he mentions sneaking into the theatres as a child since he couldn't afford to pay for a ticket. Perhaps saving Moroccans the humiliation of sneaking around is worth something. It's difficult, however, to see how a laissez-faire attitude toward intellectual property will benefit the country in the long run.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
WSDM, Day 3
Final day of the WSDM2009 conference: presentations the first day gave a lot of emphasis to translation and multi-lingual content, including the keynote from Google. Apparently Google would like to translate all of the Web, which sounds pretty ambitious. It makes me realize, though, that perhaps I’m on the right track being interested in working with audio files in “critical languages” (i.e. languages not commonly taught in schools in the US). However, there remains little interest in audio, from what I can tell.
A total of 225 participants attended both the conference and workshops, and a total of 12 student grants were awarded (out of 69 applications). I’m proud that I was given one of the student awards, and am even more grateful that I was one of 7 students to receive both free registration and some travel support. I will likely revisit some of the talks, which will be available at videolectures.net. And, wsdm2009 is the Flickr tag in case I want to browse photos of the event.
In some ways, this conference has been good because it let me participate in the workings of an epistemic community that is related, but not identical to the library and information science community. I thought I might get farther in understanding how to make A/V files retrievable on the web, but I really didn’t find out much. I met a lot of different folks interested in various aspects of indexing, so the event was in no way a wash! I leave tonight on the night bus for Madrid, and will fly back to Rabat on EasyJet on Friday afternoon.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
WSDM, Day 2
I admit to being surprised about the extent to which we’re all in silos in academe. The astronomer with whom I had dinner has been working on taxonomies. He commented that, to his surprise, as he was working on the project he realized that librarians have been working on these problems for ages. There’s also a linguist here who’s interested in machine translation, etc. and she’s also interested in some of the things I am and knew of some speech recognition work being done in Europe. In fact, I came here to learn about audio-visual digital libraries, but I’m finding a lot more overlap when it comes to the organization of information aspects.
I admit I’d had high hopes for discussing my project with the people at the Google booth, but I guess digital libraries don’t always speak to everyone. Folks from Google greeted the women of the conference today in a coffee-break session, at a booth staffed by two men. I assume there are women who work at Google; perhaps they were all busy.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
WSDM, Day 1
The early morning was devoted to Google (I had no idea that their method for storing information about Web documents was so similar to the raw MARC record that is used in library systems, tags and all) thanks to the keynote by Jeffrey Dean from Google in a talk that actually made the news. A real treat.
The rest of the morning was devoted to Web retrieval problems, and many seemed like problems that library and information science have been working with for a while. The "Query by Document" (QBD) paper was interested in cross-references on a document-level, and proposed using wikipedia for expansion. A paper on personalization/"group"ization was concerned by the query, the relevance of documents, and the user profile. Again, I'm reminded these aren't concerns exclusive to libraries, and I'm glad that such a gifted community is putting resources into exploring these questions.
No one talked about "ICTs," but one paper mentioned UGC (user generated content). I have a feeling that I speak a related language, but not the same as ACM folks here. For example, in the afternoon, we had two talks on classification, but both used the term, as far as I could tell, interchangeably with categorization. To me, as a cataloger, categorization and classification are NOT one in the same, and I admit to missing out on the finer points of the talks while getting caught up in the classing/categorizing details.
The afternoon papers talking about social tagging mentioned nothing of the socialness of tags... folksonomies were only mentioned in passing at the end of the second of the two papers on the topic, and the affective nature of tags was also only mentioned once. Again, this doesn't matter to retrieval folks, but to library and info. science folks (including knowledge organizagtion folks), it's a big deal.
One of the most interesting papers began by discussing the possibility of using Wikipedia to drive users to books. It turns out that the authors quickly focused instead on getting to Wikipedia articles from books (which seems much more straightforward), with more work in the future for getting to specific info in books. From some of my discussions at lunch, it appears that apparently folks modelling news are also interesting in identflying entities, in a way that doesn't seem dissimilar to the FRBR model. But that the way of getting to the book, especially using the surrogate (instead of the OCR for a full-text scan) remains wildly difficult.
More tomorrow.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
DDC in Morocco
Of the religion class (the 200s), there is one subclass for religions that are non-Christian (290s). With my cataloging students, we took a look at the section on Islam. The students were pleasantly surprised to see that it's possible to do some number building to make some very "close" or detailed numbers for a variety of Muslim scholars' works. We easily came up with a few very meaningful numbers that had about six digits after the decimal.
The numbers we generated were admittedly long. However, scholars' names were possible to class, and the number-building was adequate. My students were impressed with the system, and frankly, so was I. I know that Jewish communities have created a Jewish decimal classification scheme, and that work is underway to adapt and expand DDC in some Arab-speaking libraries (in Egypt, for one). There decidedly is a need for projects like these, especially when classing a large religious collection.
If an average library from these parts chooses to use straight DDC, it's still going to be able to meet user need to a very admirable and even surprising extent for religion. Well done, DDC editors!
Friday, February 6, 2009
Email at ESI
The last week of January was our winter vacation and we did not meet for classes. The first week of February was our exam prep period; also, no classes. Exams begin next week (on Feb. 9) but I was convinced not to give either of the exams to the classes that I teach alone. Therefore, I am off next week, too. As such, my 3rd years will present their wikis the week of the 16th (although the day that class meets is still unsure), and the masters students will meet with me one last time in February, and then sit their exam toward the end of the month.
With the masters students, there are only 4 in the cohort. They took the initaiative to create an email account to which they all have the password. I can send them information (and ppt slides from class) very easily. But communication with the 3rd years isn't as easy. As a student, I had an email account issued to me when I began UMKC in 1991 (I was an honors student and I had to go though some hoops to request it based on my honors status). That makes ESI about 20 years behind in terms of email communication. Luckily the students are clever enough to open their own accounts and to devise short-term solutions.