Presentation vs. Preservation

An excellent article by 2014 All Star Todd Bruns and Stacey Knight-Davis of EIU titled If it's not powered up, it's rotting, raises questions about preservation vs. presentation issues in Digital Commons. As a rule, we have chosen to be only concerned with presentation - OCRing files to keep them small, and not recording any preservation metadata. But are these the right choices? Should we also be concerned with preservation at some level?

Never agree to that which you don't want

A few months ago I was contacted by Elaine B. from Albany asking if I would run for Secretary of the ASLS section of NYLA. The incumbent was also running, but they wanted to have a second candidate on the ballot. This being the organization that gave me the Special Project Grant last year, I thought it appropriate that I say yes. Admittedly, I never dreamed I would get elected, but now I have. When will I feel like I can stop trying to prove that I'm something I am not?

Our alumni

As I search for alumni to ask permission to post their thesis in Digital Commons, it is interesting and rewarding to see where their journey has taken them. Yesterday, I found an English alum who went on to be a noted African American poet and Professor at a Chattanooga College. Unfortunately, he died a few years back, at the age of 58, so I published his thesis posthumously. Other alums are a philosopher in Italy, a Dean at Mount Saint Vincent, and a professor at RIC. Those are just today's early AM batch!

Fall Webinar

Mark Roquet contacted me asking if I would consider doing a webinar on building community around the IR, based on my presentation last year at the DCGLUG. Of course I was willing to, but I thought that it might be more interesting to take it a step further and have my colleagues tell their own stories. To that end, I spoke with Susan Perry, Charlie Cowling, and Greg Toth. They all agreed, and when Mark called today he loved the idea. Not we just have to decide on a time and topics!

Building a community around the IR - fall webinar

Mark Roquet approached me by email to ask if I would be willing to do another webinar:

Hope you had a good vacation! I wanted to run something by you - we're working on organizing community webinars for the fall and winter, and I wanted to see if you'd be interested in presenting.  The topic I was thinking about was building a community around the IR - how you've been able to distribute projects among your team and create a sense of ownership - the type of content that's in your "Brockport Staffing Model" poster.  This could be a panel where we have a few folks present on the same topical area.  However, if there are other topics you'd be interested in presenting on, let me know.

While I would be happy to talk myself on this, I also write back and suggested that it might be interesting to hear directly from some of these colleagues to share how they feel about it, and how it fits into their schedule and duties. I was thinking of people like Charlie, Greg and Susan Perry to name a few. We'll see where it goes from here.

Becoming a (Research) Data Librarian: Starting from project officer

Webinar by ANDS-Cathy Miller from the University of Adelaide takes us through her journey from project officer to research data librarian. This recording is from the Becoming a Data Librarian webinar on May 13th 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_0oTqPCoFU&list=UUlbZWqIv8Si0siuizaxAS1A

Webinar – PLOS: open data, ORCIDs and Article Level Metrics - 3 July 2014

This ANDS webinar features Dr Virginia Barbour, Chief Editor of PLOS Medicine, discussing the new PLOS data policy, the introduction of ORCID Identifiers to the people records in the PLOS manuscript submission system, and the development of PLOS article level metrics to measure the impact of research.