The Repositories Support Project has released two dozen UK, European, and North American digital repository case studies that were prepared for the Open Repositories 2008 conference. I thought it was a great idea when they solicited these for the conference, and I am very happy that my UVA case history is included.
You can still comment in support of Project Blacklight's nomination for the Mellon Foundation "Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration" (MATC). Anyone who'd like to say something positive about Blacklight, please visit the site and comment:
http://matc.mellon.org/nominate/university-of-virginia/project-blacklight
Project Blacklight is one of the many worthy nominees for the Mellon Foundation "Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration" (MATC). Folks can submit comments in support of nominations, and I am encouraging anyone who'd like to say something positive about Blacklight to please visit the site and comment before 5 PM Eastern Time on Monday April 14.
http://matc.mellon.org/nominate/university-of-virginia/project-blacklight
Today is my last day at the UVA Library. I will very much miss my colleagues, the projects I had the opportunity to work on, and Charlottesville.
I keep telling people that I'll only be 2 1/2 hours away. I think I'll be on speed dial for a while. We move on or about the 21st, and I start my new position at the Library of Congress on the 28th. I plan to be at beCamp the first weekend in May (probably Saturday only), so I'm not making a very clean transition. And I still need to sell the house.
Folks who don't have other methods of contacting me can contact me here if they need to while I'm transitioning. I won't have time to blog, though, because we are way behind on packing...
There was a great post on ReadWriteWeb about the top ten traits of a rock star software engineer.
I have one little quibble. These should be the traits of ANY software engineer, not just a rock star.
I have worked with "programmers" who posses maybe one or two of the ten traits. I've worked with great programmers who have eight or nine of the ten traits (having the time in libraries to continuously refactor code is a bit of a luxury).
This could be a great jumping off point for developing interview questions for the hiring of programmers in any institution.
Having been happily ensconced in a series of offices during my 6 years at UVA, I seem to have accumulated way more stuff than I imagined. Even after recycling many years of personal journal subscriptions that the Library didn't need or want, the contents of pretty much every file folder in my file drawers that wasn't important enough to give to someone else, folders and binders full of conference programs and attendee lists, and returning all the books I had checked out except for the one I am reading right now, I still have 4 boxes of stuff. Some books of my own, conference proceedings that I want to keep for now, files for some committees and publications, old backup CDs that I keep out of paranoia, personal desk organizers that work well for me, and way too many gewgaws that I seem to have accumulated. And some framed posters, not all of which are hung on the wall of my current office, but have been in past offices so I've moved them around with me.
Hi, my name is Leslie, and I am a packrat. I thought I was a recovering packrat, but apparently I've been deluding myself.
The timing of my changing jobs this month did not allow me to attend Open Repositories this year. Thankfully, Digital Koans has a great roundup of reports on OR08 sessions.
The PREMIS Editorial Committee has released PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, version 2.0, a revision of the May 2005 report. A draft XML schema -- still undergoing a month of review before its final release -- is also available.
TAPE (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe) has published Audiovisual Research Collections and Their Preservation. This report looks at the requirements for access and re-use, focusing on the potential of digitization for creating distributed content-based archives.
There is something so charming about the first sites on the web with their white backgrounds, lists of blue underlined links, directories of the internet, and requests to "Click Here."
In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the web site for Mosaic Communications Corporation in 1994 is now back online, as is their earlier site at http://mosaic.mcom.com/. And check out the archive of vintage Netscape browsers!
Read about the trials and tribulations required to make this all live again at http://jwz.livejournal.com/856745.html.
When I first saw this on BoingBoing, I and others were certain it was an April Fool's joke: "Free bulk-scanning, OCR and web-publishing service launched by Scribd."
Then someone from Scribd posted in the comments that this was, indeed, a real offer with a very badly timed annoucement.
Part of me still suspects it's a prank, but this could be a real, limited-time prototype service offer.
My thoughts about iPaper are still as undecided as when I first wrote about it.
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