July 8th, 2008
The Evangelists of Empire online journal, part of the History Conference and Seminar series from the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne (deep breath, still with me?) was launched today. I worked on it with my colleagues at the eScholarship Research Centre, James Williams and Eve Young, and the lovely editors from History, Amanda Barry and Joanna Cruickshank.
All that wonderful research, freely available to the public and much more easily accessible (through Google) than it would have been pre-Web. Not to mention a print version of the entire journal finished and available at the same time.
We used Open Journal Systems for the content management system, and are pretty pleased with the results - although I tore my hair out at times working with it (and I really did tear my hair out - a bad habit developed since having a baby). Deferring to the blurb, “Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.”
Making the journal look different to so many of the other journals using OJS involved much tinkering with the css and the templates (and unfortunately having to resort to hard coding content into the about template :( - ah well) - that’s the good thing about open source. But I really should give some feed back to the developers about what improvements would have made my life easier - that’s the other thing about open source - finding the time to contribute when the next project beckons…
Posted in web, work, No Comments
June 24th, 2008
All the young people, it seems, are leaving Mauritius (or want to), if they can. Sweeping statement I know. That is the anecdotal evidence we hear, based on the phone calls we receive here in Australia, desperately seeking advice. But what is here for them?
A case in point. A husband and wife newly arrived in Sydney this week (trying to make a better life for their two children, who have been left behind in Mauritius with family). All their savings spent on expensive airfares and a most likely useless business management course that some exploitative “immigration/eduction” agent in Mauritius has sold them (she would rather do hairdressing, and it would be so much more practical, but if she trys to change courses now they’ll lose much of what they’ve down paid).
The agent has also told them work will be easy to get in Australia (try finding work newly arrived in a foreign country with no networks, yeah, right). The agent has set them up in a house where six people are sharing a room (one room) and being charged $150 per person a week. Together they are paying more in rent a week for a shared room than we are paying to rent a two bedroom house. The husband has been out to the country to check out agricultural work, and if he took it, would have to live in a shipping container with every other desperate immigrant currently trying to eke out an existence in this lucky country.
What to do?
Posted in personal, Mauritius, 1 Comment
May 2nd, 2008
Archivist, researcher and natural born recordkeeper that I am, it is perhaps surprising that I am a bit slack when it comes to personal digital recordkeeping.
I say a bit, because in some areas I’m quite good. I have a twelve year email archive that is still accessible and in regular use, and I migrated my Masters thesis (early 1990s) from an early word processing format on 5¼ inch discs. A copy is sitting on my laptop as I write.
But I last backed up contents of said laptop in February!
And worse, I have more than two years of certain aspects of my life invested in Flickr, and have yet to investigate ways of extracting all that data into a format I control and will be able to access in twenty years time.
Some while back I pondered the problem of archiving text messages. My solution, ultimately, was to photograph the particular messages of value to me. Where are those photos now? On Flickr and on my laptop…
Greater minds than mine Gunga Din have been thinking about these issues, and I leave you with this reference for now:
Paradigm: Workbook on Personal Digital Papers, Bodleian Library, 2007. (That’s the title of the web version. The hard copy version is Paradigm: Workbook on Personal Digital Archives, which, I think, is more meaningful.)
Posted in flickr, memory, archives, No Comments
