Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

millinery

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:50:43 GMT

My built-in china cabinet has long since ceased to be a cupboard to showcase hand-me-down wineglasses and become a closet for hats. Now I've outgrown that space, and my coat closet, too, has become overridden with hatboxes. Veils and feathers, fascinators and caps, boaters and fedoras.

What I'm saying is that I have a lot of hats.

I have almost as many metaphorical hats, though sadly they lack the trimmings of the physical kind. Usually I juggle my professional interests adequately, although every fall I come to terms anew with the reality that, for three months, my contributions to Dreamwidth are what I give up to make room for teaching. This year is slightly tighter than usual, because of membership on the Odyssey Award committee, but at least much of the time spent listening to audio books is time that would otherwise be dead space.

In any case, here is a description of the 48 hour period of which I'm currently in the center.

Yesterday morning, go to work as a digital archivist, where I've been having more opportunities to code of late as I've been contributing fixes and features to a blacklight/Hydra digital library portal we will be launching Any Day Now, and where I've been helping to manage our Open Access Week activities.
Leave after a short day to teach two sections of the children's and young adult SFF class I teach with Amy.
Get home at nearly 11 PM, go to bed, and wake up at 4:30 AM (on a gorgeous, starry autumn morning, Orion and Jupiter high in the sky) to catch the early train to New Haven for code4lib New England, where I'll be presenting on
- accessibility,
- debuting our FLOSS web-based archival collection management tool, and
- will sit on a panel on digital preservation.
On the train I'll be listening to audio books for the Odyssey Award committee;
when I return home I have some reading to do for Kirkus Reviews.

I do like hats. I like how they look and how they feel, how each one makes me into a slightly different person. But sometimes having so many gets a little complicated.

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go over to Tufts and tell us about your stuff!

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:16:16 GMT

Over on the Tufts DCA blog today I am asking people to talk about your concerns (or lack of them) about preserving your own personal materials.

I hope people respond, because that will be a distraction from the post I want to make but don't have time to make about representation and race, and about someone who makes a list which is intended to show "the breadth and incredible range of YA literature" should be doing better than 1 author of color on a list of 32 books. I don't want to make that post because I don't want to single out the individual in question for hammering the final nail into the coffin of my patience.

(I should also credit catwalksalone for the wonderful and wholly appropriate new userpic, from her wonderful batch of Diana Wynne Jones icons.)

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archives plus children's literature plus accessibility is my OT3

Mon, 03 May 2010 13:54:05 GMT

I like those rare moments when children's literature overlaps with digital archiving and preservation. Do you children's literature people remember Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Mary Azarian's beautiful Caldecott winner Snowflake Bentley? The University of Wisconsin at Madison has digitized the Bentley collection!

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (1865-1931), famous for his photomicrographs of snow crystals, prepared sets of glass lantern slides of dew, frost and ice crystals. ... Shortly after, the Library obtained partial funding through the Friends of the Libraries, University of Wisconsin-Madison, to preserve the physical collection and provide web access.

Gorgeous pictures of snowflakes made available through a dspace repository.

And what about those moments when my obsession with accessibility overlaps with my profession? Disruptive Library Technology Jester posted on Friday "UDL: Universal Design... for Libraries?" There's not much meat to that post, except an encouragement to think about universal design in a library environment. Maybe we can start a trend!

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sustainability, storage, and presentation

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:22:04 GMT

YES YES YES. An excellent post by Dorothea at Book of Trogool, inspired by Dan Cohen, about sustainability and chasing the shiny.

As I've had occasion to mention, scholars generally and humanists in particular have a terrible habit of chasing the shiny. [...]

The answer to this conundrum is not, however, "avoid the shiny at all costs!" It can't be. That will only turn scholars away from archiving and archivists. To my mind, this means that our systems have to take in the data and make it as easy as possible for scholars to build shiny on top of it. When the shiny tarnishes, as it inevitably will, the data will still be there, for someone else to build something perhaps even shinier.

Mark me well, incidentally: it is unreasonable and unsustainable to expect data archivists to build a whole lot of project-specific shiny stuff. You don't want your data archivists spending their precious development cycles doing that! You want your archivists bothering about machine replacement cycles, geographically-dispersed backups, standards, metadata, access rights, file formats, auditing and repair, and all that good work.

YES. We need to be working well with the people responsible for interfaces -- but we need not to be building those interfaces ourselves. (Hopefully, I will soon have exciting news about a project that follows these guidelines. I'm not going to make an announcement until we have it right, though. *g*)

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