By Erik Mitchell

Inside ZSR

Erik and Roz attend PDC sponsored management class

Today, Roz and I attended a management class offered through the Professional Development Center titled “Moving from Boss to Coach.” The session provided an interesting overview of the perspectives typically associated with “bosses” versus “coaches” and discussed the utility of these perspectives in different environments. During the course, many of us got to share an... more

Blue sky topics from OLE discussion

In the afternoon we broke up into 8 groups and brainstormed blue sky elements. Some of the key ideas that came out of the discussion were: Decide what OLE is about – being an inventory system or adiscovery on teh web system Powerful, automatable staff clients Web localization – be a point of need service... more

Brainstorming list of business processes from OLE workshop

One portion of the workshop today included a categorization of course library processes and related sub-processes. The following processes were gathered from some small group work & grouped and categorized during the morning session. The key areas were: Acquire/license select, identify for acquisition, import data, manage funds, order, track, interoperate with external systems, interact with... more

Forget a nextgen ILS – I want the chair

Mary Beth, Lauren, and I are at a two day workshop at Duke on the OLE project and business process modeling. More info on the experience of that workshop is coming but during the first break, we took a guided tour of the Link, Duke’s recently remodeled teaching and learning center. We saw a lot... more

SPARC wrap-up

For me, this conference touched some big ideas including the implications of complex objects and data sets, the need to redefine what ‘publishing’ and information access means, and how to, on a large scale basis, create and deploy systems to enable collection, collaboration, and dissemination of these resources. It was interesting to attend a conference... more

Open Access

Day 2 of SPARC began with a discussion of Open Access polices. Presenters included representatives from Europe, Japan, and the US and in all 3 cases demonstrated that this is still a developing area. In conversations with attendees I have heard two themes emerge relating to OA – first, that OA is a tangential concept... more

Institutional Repository Services

This afternoon there was a set of presentations about services that are developed and offered for Institutional Repositories. I have tried to aggregate & summarize the services below from the work of Joan Giesecke , Paul Royster, Hideki Uchijima, and Norbert Lossau: Permissioning – figuring out for faculty what the access permissions on their publications... more

SPARC-DR – It’s all about (meta)data and services

The morning session of the SPARC DR conference were very interesting. I was thoroughly enjoying the discussion of open access and the implications that access restrictions have on data by John Wilbanks when out of the blue he started talking about the semantic web (one of my favorite topics)! Wilbanks cited several examples of how... more

SPARC Digital repositories in B-more

After an early morning drive to the airport and an unexpected re-route to Detroit (where yes. . .it is already winter), I wound up in Baltimore MD for a two day conference on digital repositories and scholarly publishing. Since I will probably spend the rest of my time here tirelessly ‘conferencing’, I decided to take... more

Funnest archive ever

Today after general sessions ended I headed north to Ohio State University to the Cartoon Research Library where a group of ASIS&T visitors was given a tour by the library’s founding curator Lucy Caswell. The archive contains over 250,000 original cartoons and focuses primarily on printed cartoon art. Lucy was kind enough to take our... more