OhioLINK, my employer, is seeking nominations and applications for the position of Executive Director. The search is being conducted with the assistance of Brill Neumann Associates, and the position description is linked from their current searches page (direct link to PDF, cached link to PDF).
Tagged academic libraries, Higher Education, jobs, OhioLINKThis week I was at the Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability annual conference conference at the Ohio State University and was reminded again about the principles of Universal Design. The presentation was “Universal Design: Ensuring Access to All Learners” by Maria Morin from Project Enhance at the University of Texas — Pan American. Although she talked about Universal Design for Learning (encompassing assessments, instructional delivery and resource presentation), there was a point in her presentation that I snapped to Universal Design for Libraries.
Here were the two slides:
Last month, the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project posted job openings for Java developers. These are short-term, grant-funded projects and, having been on the hiring side of that equation before myself, I know how difficult it is to get good people for a one- or two-year project. The XC posting is different, though, in one important way: it is possible to have XC buy out the time of a developer on staff for the time that the development is happening.
Consideration will be made for qualified developers that are currently employed at another institution, but who may be available for loan to the XCO [eXtensible Catalog Organization]. The XCO would cover the salary and benefits of such individuals in the form of a direct payment to their host institution. This is an excellent opportunity for a library to invest in open-source software for libraries as well as a way to temporarily offset staffing costs in a difficult economic environment. Only staff that can be made available to XCO at 100% time (or close to that level) will be considered for this arrangement.Tagged Extensible Catalog, hiring, java, open source
Jay Jordan’s remarks during the OCLC Update Breakfast and the discussion at the Developers Network table at that breakfast generated further fuel for my previous philosophical thoughts on “Who is a member of the OCLC Cooperative?” In the context of things like Developer Network API keys1 this question of who is a member of OCLC the cooperative and who is not meets the on-or-off, ones-and-zeros nature of computers. One can’t “kinda” have an API Key unless that capability is programmed into the software (or a human chooses to override the established rules for who has a key).
Tagged ALA Midwinter Conference 2010, oclc, worldcatThis morning I was at the OCLC Americas Regional Council Meeting just prior to the opening of the ALA Midwinter 2010 meeting. In addition to the prepared talks and remarks, there was a series of breakout sessions the end of the meeting. Ever sense the record use policy kerfuffle got started, I’ve been thinking more about the governenace aspects of OCLC as cooperative, so I attended the session on “The Cooperative’s Shared Values and Social Contract.” It was a very interesting discussion, and for several hours after my mind was spinning with implications of the heartfelt ideas contributed by those at the meeting. In the end, I’m stuck with this line of thinking, starting with a statement then a series of questions:
Tagged ALA Midwinter Conference 2010, oclc
Image capture of NPR Tech Team Twitter account.
The new NPR site is now live. Kudos to the team for bringing the new site to its opening, and in doing so showing good practices for shared Twitter accounts.
As a youth I remember intently studying the troubles of others — what they did when they got into trouble and how they got out of it. If the saying “You Learn From Your Mistakes” was so true, I wanted to be able to learn from the mistakes of others. I don’t do that as much anymore — probably because I have more than enough of my own mistakes now to learn from — but every once in a while a situation comes up where this urge strikes. The case of Clinical Reader resurfaced that youthful urge.
Tagged socialmedia, twitterAs libraries feel the need to join the social media landscape to meet a segment of their user population already there, it is useful to step back and get acclimated. There is a pace of information flow that is unlike anything else in the physical world, and a minor incident — be it an ill-advised policy decision or an unfortunate slip of the tongue — can quickly spiral out of your control. And that is probably the key word: control. You don’t, can’t, and won’t have it. It isn’t the nature of this media. “Damage control,” if you want to think of it like that, is honest, sincere, decisive, and quick communication with your users. As a counter example, I offer the case of Clinical Reader.
Tagged socialmedia, twitterA non-librarian colleague forwarded a link to an essay by Mark Pesce called The Alexandrine Dilemma. From the context of one of the comments, I think it might have been the text of a keynote given at New Librarians Symposium in Australia last month. It is a thought-provoking piece that, well, provoked some thoughts.
Tagged description, Google Book Search
Towards the end of the last chapter of his book, Nicholas Carr relates an anecdote about the visit of a guest speaker to the Google headquarters (emphasis added):
George Dyson, a historian of technology…, Freeman Dyson, was invited to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, in October 2005 to give a speech at the party celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of von Neumann’s invention [of an electronic computer that could store in its memory the instructions for its use]. “Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, “Dyson would later recall of his visit, “I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air.” After his talk, Dyson found himself chatting with a Google engineer about the company’s controversial plan to scan the contents of the world’s libraries into its database. “We are not scanning all of those books to be read by people,” the engineer told him. “We are scanning them to be read by an [artificial intelligence engine].”
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Using Twitter For Service Outage Awareness:
Riding the Waves of Content and Change:
The Complex World of the Textbook:
PocketModMac: MacOSX PocketMod Generator Via Print Dialog:
Amazon Catalog Updates:
Clay Shirky on the Need for Better Information Filters:
Fixing a Mac OSX Leopard Login Loop Caused by Launch Services: