Talks

What kinds of interventions can library tech workers or those with above-average technical aptitude make to improve their coworker’s morale after a migration? I share some of the results of survey and interview research on morale and migration and the importance of small acts that keep possibility alive.

Cataloging and metadata workers operate in a space of unrealized promise. For over a decade, we’ve been told “linked data is coming, be ready!” Now we hear “AI is coming, be ready!” Yet in our day-to-day, many of us work with data structures that are older than we are. If you’re not working on the few cutting-edge projects, how can you make use of the time? What is still worth doing even if the promised futures never materialize? This talk will take its grounding from research into the era of library automation and the worker experience of systems migration as well as the past decade of linked data development and experimentation.

What does it mean to consider the “human aspects of library automation” when we approach a migration or other technological shift in the workplace? In this talk, I reflect on the contexts and experiences of workers over the history of library technology and share preliminary insights from my research.

When you’re used to having the tools you need, it’s easy to expect things to just work. And unless you specialize in thinking about how systems come together or study how they were made, it may be hard to identify all the things that have to get done between “we have a BIBFRAME standard” and “we can make BIBFRAME records” or “we can make BIBFRAME records” and “we can use BIBFRAME with the same degree of friction as we use MARC now.” This makes it tricky to attend a presentation where someone is talking about linked data or BIBFRAME and evaluate what they’re saying or what it means to you. I hope that this presentation is not only informative but will give you some framework for understanding where future updates fit in and how to evaluate what you hear.

This is the text of a presentation I recorded for an IST 616 course at Syracuse’s library school. I was asked to introduce library discovery in 10 minutes, or less, with some focus on how metadata is created and used.

The 21st century academic library runs on an increasingly interconnected network of systems, from the traditional ILS to emerging technologies. While they support core library functions, these products are often implemented without a plan for their maintenance in the years or decades until their sunsetting or the next migration. Drawing from the emerging field of maintenance studies, this presentation will share results from qualitative interviews of 16 ILS maintainers and propose steps for building a workplace where core maintenance tasks are recognized and supported. This was recorded for CNI’s 2022 Project Briefing Series.

What happens when you try to build a new catalog based on the MARC standard? This presentation is a retrospective of experimentation, failure, and compromise in the design of Penn State’s Blacklight Catalog with lessons learned about designing for MARC data in the real world. This was presented at the ALA Core Catalog Management Interest Group on March 9, 2022.

Text of a keynote given by Sandy Rodriguez and Ruth Kitchin Tillman at the 2020 New York Archives Week Symposium, October 22, 2020. Other than the paragraphs in which we each describe our own positionality, we share joint authorship of the talk.

When working with spreadsheet data, sometimes you need to get data from Spreadsheet A into Spreadsheet B. Learn how to use the Cell Cross feature of OpenRefine to move data between spreadsheets by matching data points (identifiers, text, numbers, etc.). Tutorial and demo video derived from webinar held March 26, 2020.

After bringing their card catalogs online in the 90s, many libraries have maintained decades-old interfaces even as they adopt new systems focused on the discovery and use of subscription materials such as single journal articles. Though antiquated in design, such “classic catalogs” remain popular with librarians and faculty. As libraries move into a third generation of catalogs and discovery systems, those charged with leading such transitions are choosing to rethink the classic catalog or do away with it entirely. This paper visits the history of library catalogs on the web, examining the necessary maintenance introduced by each generation. It concludes with an assessment of the difficult decisions around labor and maintenance faced by those hoping to improve access to their materials.

In my presentation, I’m going to be talking about a project we recently completed with the Association of Religion Data Archives, a multi-institution data catalog located in Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute. I want to highlight two elements of the project. First, I will to talk about the process by which I turned a request for something else into an opportunity to explore linked data. I saw a chance to use it in a meaningful way and our partnership paid off better than I could’ve foreseen. Second, I will do a brief walkthrough of how we described datasets and modeled a data catalog using the Schema.org ontology. In the second part, I want to emphasize that our choices were based on the data available and that they were one of various ways one could approach this work.