Freelance Propaganda

Conference Paper accepted

Well they’ve only seen the abstract, but it counts as my first peer reviewed first authored paper. Abby Goodrum has graciously agreed to help (and suggested the conference)

The conference is the Colleges, Code and Intellectual Property conference this year focused on P2P (CIP 2004)

Here’s the abstract:

This paper considers the deceptively simple question: Why can’t downloaded academic papers be managed in the simple and effective manner in which digital music files are organised? A consideration of the technical solutions available points to two primary differences: digital music metadata is standardized and moves with the content file, while academic metadata is not and does not.

To understand this phenomenon we examine the divergent evolution of metadata standards for digital music and academic papers. It is observed that the processes differ in interesting ways according to their intent. Specifically music metadata was developed primarily for personal file management, while the focus of academic metadata has been on information retrieval.

We argue that lessons from MP3 metadata can assist individual academics facing their growing personal document management challenges. Our focus therefore is not on metadata for the academic publishing industry or institutional resources sharing, it is limited to the personal libraries growing on our hard-drives. This bottom-up approach to document management combined with p2p distribution radically altered the music landscape. Might such an approach have a similar impact on academic publishing? This paper reports on the development of a proof of concept system for personal file and citation workflow management—-doing academic metadata and file management the MP3 way—-and considers its likelihood of success.

So this is the stuff that I’ve been exploring on THEMP but without much luck. Creative Commons has now set up adding XMP metadata to PDFs using only free software as one of their technology challenges.

Maybe for the proof of concept I’ll get on with implementing AutoFile for bibdesk.