A Pilgrim’s Digression

After a half-day working session yesterday, myself and my fellow Digital Preservation Management participants took a field trip to the Cornell Ornithology laboratory, the curiously nicknamed “Lab of O.”

For me, this field trip has been the highlight of my week at Cornell. I have had an amateur interest in ornithology all my life, inherited from my Grandpa who early on taught me to identify by sight and song all the birds one might see in an Eastern back yard or woodland.

I was especially excited to visit the Lab of O. because I have been following the story of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, ever since it was rediscovered last year by, among others, field researchers from Cornell.

I have a Google News Alert set to email me when any new stories about the bird appear online. Most recently, Arkansas wildlife officials have offered a $10,000.00 award to anyone who could provide information that would lead them “to an ivory-billed woodpecker’s nest, roost cavity or feeding site.”

Cornell has sponsored several expeditions to the Arkansas bayou where the woodpecker was spotted last year, and hundreds of ordinary people have volunteered to spend two weeks in the swamp, searching for the bird. I’d love to be one of those volunteers. I think that would be great fun, but it would cost me an entire years worth of leave from work.

Instead, I have to be grateful for what I can do from here. The Lab of O. has a bookstore and gift shop, and I bought a copy of the book that describes the history of the once-thought-extinct woodpecker, The Grail Bird. I started reading the book on the bus ride back to campus. I also bought a cap with the Woodpecker on it.
If you aren’t familiar with the story of this rare bird, you can listen to the NPR story that broke the news that scientists believe it is still alive. It’s really an amazing and gripping story. And when you think of all the bad news that seems to dominate environmental reporting these days, it can almost bring tears to the eyes to hear, for once, about how an animal returned from extinction instead of vice versa.

The Audobon Society of Arkansas now lists the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker as “Present” rather than “Extirpated.” Present, but not fully accounted for…thus those volunteer expeditions sponsored by Cornell.

The Ornithology Lab is a lovely place with its own woodland habitat, called the Sapsucker Woods, into which the visitor can stroll and feel at peace. If you prefer the indoors, there is a lobby area with a large, glass viewing window that looks out onto a pond and the woods. With powerful birding scopes provided, you can sit in a wooden deck chair and watch the birds and soft-shell turtles in the marsh in air-conditioned comfort.

I chose to walk the trail through the woods. And again, although I had no camera, I took some pictures with my cell phone. This first one is just a picture of a marsh that I found really stunningly pretty; the cell phone cannot do it justice.

This second one is of an old, gnarled tree root.

Unfortunately, other pictures I took of birds were of too poor quality to keep. I took a picture of one of the turtles sunning itself on a tree limb just above the pond’s water line, but I disposed of that picture, too. Cell phones suck for photography!

Why didn’t I bring my camera? I ask that question every day.

In the lab itself, we learned about the project to preserve audio and video recordings of animal and bird sounds and behaviors. Many of these sounds and behaviors have been preserved on analog tape formats that are sixty or more years old. Cornell is busily digitizing these items (on Macs, I was pleased to see) as both a preservation necessity, and for the greater access to the items digitization provides.

One result of this massive digital preservation project has been the Birds of North America Online, a subscription database of information about birds, bird behaviors, and bird sounds. At $40.00 per year, the subscription price for individuals is not bad at all, and considering the money benefits a great cause, the money is well spent.

The free sample, the entry for the Peregrine Falcon, gives you an idea of what an incredible resource this site is. Clicking on Audio and Video provides you with some examples of the Lab of O.’s digitization efforts. This is truly amazing work.

Interestingly, much of the lab’s audio and video collection is the work of amateurs. Birders and amateur researchers from all over the world submit audio and video they have collected to the lab. Currently, donors submit their metadata (literally, “data about data,” or descriptive information) in Excel format using a template provided by the lab. On the Excel sheet, the donor provides such metadata as time the audio was recorded, date, weather conditions, background noises, etc.

This spreadsheet is then imported into the lab’s Oracle database, edited for errors, and added to, if there is any metadata to add. This then becomes the bibliographic record for the audio or video item.

The participation of the donor in the data ingestion process was pretty revolutionary to me. I can see how it would save time, and it also makes the donor a legitimate stakeholder in the project, rather than some peon who never gets credit for the valuable service he/she provides.

At one time, donors submitted their metadata on paper forms along with their recordings, then a technician created the bibliographic record from that piece of paper. This resulted in a huge backlog of unprocessed materials. The decision to move to an Excel-based “application” for data entry on the part of the donor was a major innovation.

By the way, they chose Excel rather than a more robust application, such as Access or MySQL, because Excel is ubiquitous and easy to use. Some donors are from third world countries with limited means and resources.

Soon, the lab is going to migrate to a Web based form that feeds directly into the Oracle database. I know it makes me sound incontrovertibly geeky, but I was really excited to learn about this because my own project relies on amateur donor submissions.

I think the way the Lab of O. has handled the problem is potentially a solution for us, as well, if I can present this idea clearly to my co-workers (and if the folks in Internet Development don’t balk at having to design such a tool for us). I would want to skip the Excel spreadsheet and go right to the Web Form interface, since that is the direction the Lab of O. is heading.

Also, as I mentioned briefly earlier, I have been impressed by the number of Macs I’ve seen in use in a research environment, this week. At the lab of O., there were new iMacs, “old iMacs” (by which I mean the “desk lamp” model), Mac G5s, Intel PowerMacs, and even old G4s running OS 9 (something I really did not expect to see!).

Plus, I even saw several iBooks lying about. It seemed like everyone at the lab had at least three Macs in use in their office.

Macs were everywhere on the Cornell campus. It was truly heartening.

Unfortunately, yesterday I had one uncomfortable moment in which I pissed off a PC person. We had just listened to a fascinating lecture on “Dealing with Digital Obsolescence,” a hot topic in the digital preservation field. To give one example of how important this subject is, think back to the Beta vs. VHS war in the late seventies, early eighties. The best format did not necessarily win, and that fact has had far reaching complications, primarily that VHS is a notoriously short-lived format. You can expect a VHS tape to begin to degrade after only ten years of limited use. Heavy use will degrade it significantly faster.

Now think about this: what if you find a cache of old home videos recorded on Beta in a box in the bottom of your closet? How do you preserve those tapes, which are your master copies? How do you migrate the content on them to a new form? Or do you throw a blanket over them and hope someone else, someday will do all the hard work for you? Or do you just say bunk it and throw them out?

Anyway, after this lecture, which ranged from obsolescent media to obsolescent file formats (ever had an old computer file you could no longer open on a modern machine?), a gentleman spoke up and began ripping on the Macintosh as a platform that is notorious for creating files that become obsolescent quickly because, as he said, “The Mac has never had more than a five percent market share.”

What the Mac’s market share has to do with file format obsolescence is beyond me. Personally, I think the guy was just looking for an opportunity to trash the Mac.

I said nothing then, but on a break I approached him and said genially I thought he’d been too hard on the Macintosh. First I pointed out that originally, Apple was the market leader in home computers. Microsoft got its start writing software for the Macintosh: Word 1 was a Mac-only application, in the beginning. Then I went on to relate a story that, I thought, illustrated how a Mac could actually help combat obsolescence.

When I was in college, I wrote my school papers on a PC version of Microsoft Works. Some years after graduating, I tried to open those files with a newer version of Works. No such luck. I could not even open them in Microsoft Word! Apparently, Microsoft does not support cross-application interoperability, even when it owns both applications!

However, all was not lost. I put the floppy disk containing my files into my wife’s Performa, and Appleworks was able to read and open the files, thanks to built-in translation software that, in those days, was a necessity for Mac users.

As I told this man yesterday, Microsoft files only have to be compatible with other Microsoft applications (and sometimes they aren’t even that compatible); Macs have to be able to get along with a wide range of software and file types that were not intended to be read on a Mac.

Needless to say, this man was not convinced. He grew angry, too, which surprised me. He spluttered that Macs were nothing but headaches for IT people, and that he was just waiting for the day when Apple would be bought out by Microsoft, so that finally, the world could evolve onto one standard operating platform.

By this time he was growing red in the face. I told him I thought his prejudice was just a bit extravagant, and he said, “Go look in the mirror. You Mac people are fanatics. The sun doesn’t shine, but that you don’t give Steve Jobs credit for it.”

And he turned on his heal and went back to his chair. Ever since, he has either avoided me, or looked at me meanly when I’ve caught his eye for some reason. There is no love lost for my part, either. I’m a little perplexed at how quickly he went from a calm, jolly, rotund little balding fellow, into a spittle-spraying Orc ready to snap my neck if he could only get his chubby hands around it.

The only answer I can come up with is that he is so anxious with rage that the next version of Windows has been delayed innumerable times, that he took out his frustrations on me.