deborah | Entries tagged with tufts

I've left Tufts DCA after the longest tenure I've had at a job to become a support engineer at Safari Books Online. Among other things, this means that after nearly a decade, I've left academia for private industry.

Well, for publishing. Which is like private industry, but for people laugh at profit.^[note]

( I want to talk briefly about my career trajectory. )
^[Note] I snark; Safari does just fine, online tech books being a popular item even before you get to all the reference book contracts. Though after a decade in academia, my scales for what is considered financial success are all off. Academic institutions measures success not by quarterly profit, which can be low, but by the size of the endowments they sit jealously and often uselessly upon like learned Smaugs.^[back]

Along with Anne Sauer and Eliot Wilczek, I've just had a new paper published: "Archival Description in OAI-ORE", in the Journal of Digital Information, a free, green open access journal. This is a version of a paper which we presented last year at Open Repositories 2010, and mercifully, has been greatly improved since the draft of the paper I wrote while running a temperature of 102°.

This paper, by the way, is our attempt to COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONIZE ARCHIVES AND CHANGE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. Sort of. Revolutionize archival description using new technology, anyway. Changing the laws of physics will have to wait until we get grant funding.

This year, at work, I helped shepherd an accomplishment of which I am inordinately proud. Those of you who are from organizations which have your shit together more than we do might not think this is so impressive (although it seems to be a truth in this field that every organization thinks that everybody else has their shit together more).

Under the leadership of my manager, our libraries' Scholarly Communications Team worked with the provost to develop a fund for open access publishing. Over the last several months, I've been instrumental in making sure that we set hard deadlines to write guidelines, accept applications, and of course, give away that money. And now we have. Our first round of applications came in, funding has been announced, and now we've started to receive our second round of applications.

Giving away other people's money in order to increase the amount of open access scholarship in the world is totally, thoroughly awesome.

No! You cannot think of anything more fun than working closely with me every single weekday! I will bring in candy! I will go swimming with you! I will let you play with my large collection of librarian action figures! (Photograph to come as soon as I remember to bring a camera.)

Archivist for Digital Collections

( job description beneath the cut )

Please pass it on.

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.)

It's international "closing tabs so therefore linkspam" day. Actually, that was a month ago -- if you noticed the links at the bottom of this post are fairly dated, that's why.

( Scholarly Publishing: California Versus Nature, Institutional Repositories, Humanities scholarship )

( Librarians and archivists: no longer advanced )

Polymers for fuel cell technologies

Awesome thing at my university: "Polymers for fuel cell technologies". Four undergraduate interns are describing their summer research project on polymers for fuel cell technologies. Orthogonal to the science or the topic of the video, all four students are deaf or hard of hearing, and the science and the video is communicated via ASL. And thank you, Tufts Jumble, for presenting the video as being about the science. Because it is.

I'm worried that this entire blog is going to turn into a repetition of "look what I posted in that other blog this week!" but I'm getting to post such cool stuff I can't help pointing to it and saying "see!"

Seriously, this week my blog post got to include a photograph of a glass cuttlefish. How cool is that? And it was torment choosing among all the photographs, and having to decide not to use the images of the glass borellia viridis, the glass annelida, or the glass coelenterata.

I mean, seriously, glass flowers, Harvard? There are no flowers that are this cool.

Okay, maybe they are a tiny bit cool.

Aw, I can't resist. Here, have a glass Portuguese Man-of-war: ( behind a cut to preserve your screen real estate )

Yesterday, in the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives blog (

tufts_dca), I talked about our newly-launched institutional repository, Tufts eScholarship. I'm very optimistic about the success of our IR, though there has been a lot of conversation in the IR world about what makes institutional repositories fail. The number one reason I'm optimistic about our IR: it's not what purists would call an institutional repository.

( I'd like to buy university digitization efforts a Coke and teach everyone how to work with each other: cut for length )

The decisions leading to this wonderful conjunction of circumstances all predate my presence here at the university by many years. I'm talking about this not to toot Tufts' horn, but to push this vital idea of collaboration. Even now, I see so many institutions in the repository space that have entirely orthogonal approaches within their own organizations. The people digitizing images aren't talking to the people digitizing texts aren't talking to the people dealing with digital records aren't talking to the people doing institutional repository. Sure, maybe you would never use the same software platform or workflow approaches for all of these efforts. But maybe you will. Maybe instead of getting six different perfect software packages, you will find something that is good enough for all of you, and uses only one license, a smaller number of technical support staff, and something which will continue to be supported by your university even if hard economic times make some of the digital collections look less important.

Heck, I'm looking at this entirely selfishly, and you should too. In tough economic times, digital archives might go by the wayside. Open access institutional repositories are still untested. But management of the university's digital records is never going to be unnecessary. Work with other people instead of merely alongside them, intertwine your jobs, and you will not just save your institution money and resources, but you will increase the number of ways in which you are vital. Job security FTW.

yAt! My copy of the encyclopedia Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin Anne Reid, has arrived. I wrote the essay "Girls and the Fantastic" and the short entries for Ursula LeGuin and Raphael Carter. I'm so pleased by it, and will shelve it right next to my Oxford encyclopedia of children's literature.

In other news, I'd like to encourage you to check out the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives blog (

tufts_dca), especially if you like photo blogs.

lamentables, I'm looking at you! We post about once a week, and most of the posts involve an awesome picture from our archives. For example, my most recent contribution there, "Disaster!", features a fabulous photo of Jumbo the Elephant looking just a tad battered.

Sometimes, when I am looking through our collections, I discover shocking, shocking things. For example, in preparing my blog entry for this week, I discovered that in 1996, the Tufts Daily editorialized on the inadequate spookiness of Spooooky World. Didn't those students understand that spooky world is Spoooooky?

In other words, being an archivist has taught me that students of the distant past (1996!) didn't truly value the cultural centers of greater Boston.

ObDisclaimer: I have never been to Spooky World. But it must be spooky. I mean, it's called Spooky World.

My department, Digital Collections and Archives at Tufts University, has just put together a new website. My colleague Jennifer chose the banner photos for each main section, and I adore them all, particularly the banner photo for Submitting Materials.

Even more exciting, we are now blogging! You can catch the Digital Collections and Archives Blog, subscribe to the syndicated RSS feed, or read it right here on livejournal at

tufts_dca. I'm already for my chance to blog about my favorite treasures in our archives.

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Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.

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Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The Australasian Journal of Me

Entries tagged with tufts

changing my career without changing my role

archival description in OAI-ORE

when giving away money is just the best part of your day

can you think of anything more fun than working with me closely every single weekday?

go over to Tufts and tell us about your stuff!

Nature versus Nurture. And by "nurture" I mean "the amazing University of California libraries"

Polymers for fuel cell technologies

glass cuttlefish. What could be cooler?

collaborative efforts: archives, institutional repository, records, in one big tasty stew

new encyclopedia, excellent blog

shameless attempt to convince more of you to read the DCA blog

new website and blog

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