behind AotW

I am pleased to see Laurie’s “This Week in the Blogs” survey on CWi. Thanks to Drew for putting the word out. It’s great to see how an outside reader sees what we do. It’ll probably help new readers find us, too.

In the inaugural edition Laurie notes that, in commenting on the JFK Library digitizing records, I used

some geek-talk , as in “…proprietary software platforms or storage formats, but trust that core data will be available to the end users in standard web-friendly formats like .txt, .xml, .pdf, .jpg.”

Such things are important even for those of us who are not as geeky as we ought to be.

I apologize for the jargon. I’ll watch out for that in future.

To translate the snippet quoted above:

I am worried that the JFK Library will create digital records that can be read only by people using EMC products, but expect they would also make the information available to the public in standard formats all of our browsers can read.

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While I’m at it … the CWi blog listing on Link Central says of behind AotW that we

get into some very interesting, albeit scholarly, issues.

“Scholarly” usually means stiff, pedantic, even dry and uninteresting. It also suggests a subject of interest only to academics. I am a life-long student, and I try to be careful with History, but don’t want to come across as scholarly. Nor would I want to portray doing History on the web in those terms.

I’ll work on that, too.