 | Content associated with the teaching activities of Candy Schwartz, Professor at the Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Simmons College. |
« November 2006 | Main | January 2007 »
Between Wednesday and Thursday, we got steel beams over the construction site, and lots of activity. I put the latest photos in flickr here - they are arranged in chronological order, so scroll down to the last dozen or so. Or you could just run "View as slideshow" to see the whole thing from the beginning (125 photos to date), minus the captions.
I just read an interesting piece on "slanty design" by Russell Beale, in the latest issue of Communications of the ACM. If you are interested in usability, you might enjoy this. The January issue isn't online yet in public view, but if you have access to Simmons e-resources, the DOI is:
http://0-doi.acm.org.library.simmons.edu:80/10.1145/1188913.1188934
Okay - the Godfrey Dewey answers are now in VISTA - on the main course page. Happy Chranuza to everybody, and a Happy New Year. Stay well.
IMLS hosts a free conference in DC called WebWise. This year it's all about digital libraries. The conference and the workshops are free, but the latter are limited and you do have to preregister. Check it out: http://www.getty.edu/webwise2007/conference/.. I can't go, since I teach on Thursday and Friday, but if you are taking 419 and want to go, please feel free.
Hi all - I have placed your final grades in your Bioquiz assignment in VISTA. I was going to publish here the best of the bioquiz answers, and then one of you found out about what really happened to Godfrey (he had quite a distinguished career). So instead, I have created a file called "Godfrey Dewey" and will put it on the main course page in VISTA as soon as VISTA is less busy.
Here are some of the timeline answers:
Bliss and Bush had definite potential of meeting in Chicago or maybe at a convention. Many people’s lives had the potential of crossing in Boston turn of the century including Dewey and Cutter,. Salton came little bit too late to meet them in Boston but maybe felt their effects.
Minnie Earl Sears and Margaret Mann may well have crossed paths at the University of Illinois. Minnie earned her BLS there in 1900 and Margaret taught and was a librarian there from 1897 to 1902. Charlies Ami Cutter and Melvile Dewey were contemporaries living at the same time in Boston when Dewey lived there from 1876 through1888.
Both Taube and Lubetsky studied in the University of California system. From the bios, it appears Lubetzky started in 1925 and worked at UCLA afterwards. Taube received his degree in 1935 from the university of California.
Mann and Bliss were working in New York City around the time Avram was born, and for a few years, they were all in the same city, approx. 1919-1924. They could have run into each other in the park. Bliss and Avram would have shared the city until she moved away after college. Avram also lived in Washington around the same time as Lubetzky, though their employment at the LC never overlapped. Avram was also working at the LC while Sanford Berman was crusading against them, though it’s not really clear whether or not they would actually have met
Dewey and Sears definitely could have intersected at Columbia between 1927 and 1931 if he had stopped by to visit his old staff.
'Nuff said.
Our client located North of Boston is seeking a Senior Metadata Librarian.
The Sr. Metadata Librarian to be responsible for the analysis, specification, testing and maintenance of applications and processes involving our client’s bibliographic and rights metadata, assuring conformity to company policies, procedures and standards. The Sr. Metadata Librarian will provide consultation on complex projects and is considered to be a top level contributor/specialist from the Data Systems & Services team. In addition, the Sr. Metadata Librarian will serve as liaison between Data Systems & Services, and other internal business units and the IT Application Development team, to provide technical solutions that meet user needs
Qualifications
Required: Bachelor’s degree, and ALA-accredited MLS or ALA-recognized foreign equivalent or equivalent direct library or information center experience, or related advanced degree in Information Systems; 5 or more years experience working in an academic or business environment in a position with direct involvement with large, highly-structured, bibliographic database systems and applications, including library metadata and standards; experience in the analysis, design, management, provision, and support of customer-facing technical and service-based products and solutions; project management experience; demonstrated leadership and management skills; strong service orientation and commitment to the profession; and collegial, team-focused, strategic orientation and collaborative attitude. Management experience is desired.
Preferred: Prior experience and/or training as a Business Analyst; experience with cataloging operations, including original cataloging; use of AACR2, LCC, MARC21, OCLC, and with an integrated library system; working experience with cataloging non-book materials; experience with a variety of other (non-bibliographic) database environments and systems; working knowledge of tools for analyzing, summarizing, and reporting on bibliographic and other data.
Skills & Abilities
• Strong cognitive skills, including analysis, problem solving and decision making
• Meticulous attention to detail and quality of data
• Proven ability to take charge of and lead project meetings/discussions
• Experience in modeling complex flows (work, process and data) along with extensive system design experience
• Excellent leadership skills and extensive experience interacting with business users and stake holders (including interrogation/interviewing techniques)
• Demonstrated ability in testing and documentation techniques, excellent planning and organizational skills, excellent oral and written communications skills
• Ability to work within changing priorities, while paying acute attention to detail
• Flexible self-starter who is comfortable working with minimal supervision
• Ability to work effectively on/with cross-functional teams
• Ability to interface successfully with various organizations and levels of management, in a professional manner
Please send word formatted resumes to: Paula.Maloney@infocurrent.com
All those little missed topics are now coming home to roost - there are three PPT presentations in VISTA for tomorrow.
The clustering search engine Clusty has added "Clusty clouds", and they encourage you to run your own name. So of course I did. It's now a section on the right side of this blog. Too cool (but one has to wonder at some of the associations).
[If interested, contact GSLIS Alum Joel Abrams, at 617-929-2893]
Are you a proud Bostonian?
We at Boston.com know Boston. We're from here. We love it here.
And we want to build the best site for Bostonians. We want to build a site where our readers can find news and information for living a better life. We want to organize Boston's information in useful ways. We need your help.
Do you have at least a year or two of experience in the working world? Maybe working as a journalist or as a web producer? Maybe working as a librarian? Maybe you're just wicked smart and want a cool job?
We have the job for you: Boston.com Search Producer.
What you'll do
So, what's a search producer?
We've invested a lot of time and money this year in building out Boston.com’s local search engine, a piece of software that will make it easy for our readers to find whatever they're looking for in Boston.
We will succeed against our national competitors by emphasizing our relentless local focus and our sharp editorial voice. We can focus solely on Boston because we don't care about anything beyond Worcester. We don't care how search works in Peoria, only how it works in Plymouth. (Or Plimoth, as you remember from your grade-school field trips).
Our "sharp editorial voice" is where you come in. You'll work closely with our search editors and the Boston Globe newsroom to ensure that our readers are getting the best possible Boston search experience.
More specifically:
You will tune the search engine to make sure it returns the best results for given queries. You twirl the right knobs and the search engine does your bidding. Don’t forget, though, with great power comes great responsibility.
You'll also work to help manage our external crawl. This is where we pick worthy local sites and add them to our index. You'll prospect for new sites and revisit old sites. If some bloggers are especially insightful, you'll give them a little extra juice in the rankings.
You'll also engage your mind-reading skills each morning. You'll get a list of what our readers are searching and adjust how the search engine responds. If breaking news happens, you'll work with the newsroom to make sure we're delivering quality search results.
We're also building out some specialized Yellow Pages and Shopping products. You will help set them up and ensure the data is accurate and pretty.
And of course, we also have "special projects and tasks as needed". We're making some of this up as we go, so if you need all the processes nailed down before you can do anything, this may not be the right job for you.
Who you are
Still interested? Great!
Here's what we're looking for:
You should be nimble. We're inventing stuff in a fast-paced environment. Mistakes are OK (encouraged, even); apathy is verboten.
You like thinking things through, finding good answers to tough questions. We’ve already solved all the simple problems; you'll work on the tough ones. You’re not afraid to think, brainstorm, dream. We’re hiring you for your smarts – and your backbone.
You enjoy mind-reading, divining intent from cryptic words in a box. (You'll be surprised what people will type into a search box.) It's your job to deliver our readers to what they mean, despite what they actually type.
You can handle the tools of the web trade, including text editors, content management systems, and Photoshop.
You can handcode HTML. We won't be doing anything too outrageous, but you need to be able to do the basics. It would be fabulous if you also know some SQL and PHP or Python -- you'll have the opportunity to build your own tools, if you're so inclined.
You can write in complete sentences with proper capitalization. We're part of the New York Times Company – we expect you to be able to string a few words together.
Who we are
Millions of people come to Boston.com each month looking for news, sports, things to do -- and sometimes quick diversions from the drudgery of their own jobs. These millions of visitors view billions of pages each year. It's one of the advantages joining us -- people will actually see your work.
I would much appreciate it if you could take a little bit of time before next week, and let me know by e-mail your thoughts on a couple of things. I know this will take a bit of time out of your busy lives, but the course has changed for the better every semester thanks to feedback from previous semesters.
What do you feel was your own major contribution to the RMW DL?
Who do you feel was/were the "unsung hero/es" - the person(s) whose work went above and beyond the call of duty in contributing to the success fo the DL?
What would you change in the way things were done for the next time around? In this question, you can speak to things related to the digital library project (for example, did your committee encounter any difficulties which you feel could have been avoided, and how), or to the course as a whole and its various components.
Would you change the prerequisites at all (they are currently LIS 415 and LIS 488)?
My thanks
Just in case you have not seen this on a thousand blogs, Casey Bisson got a Mellon Award for his work on WPopac. See http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133/.
Has been loaded into VISTA. See you tomorrow - and have I told you all lately how proud I am of what you have accomplished this semester?
Do you know anyone graduating this semester who knows a lot about instructional technology? Brandeis needs to hire people soon. Interested people should apply to either the research and instruction librarian or research and instruction technology specialist position or both on the HR website (http://www.brandeis.edu/humanresources/jobs.php). Also send me a resume which I can forward to my contact there.
Linda Watkins and Em Claire Knowles now have a range of gift bags, gift tags, and Christmas cards, all based on 3x5 cards. These are wonderful objects for any bibliophile. If you are interested, contact either of them. As always, the proceeds go the the Farragut Public School Library in the Fenway for the purchase of new books.