I am the Web Systems Manager for the University of Michigan Libraries. The Web Systems Department creates and maintains the web applications that make the library's web site tick. It's an exciting position and one I'm thrilled to be undertaking. I also maintain a blog, RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS, where I discuss various ways libraries can (or should) take advantage of RSS as an effective data exchange tool. I've recently written about:
From March 2004 through March 2007, I was a librarian at the Edwin Ginn Library at The Fletcher School (Tufts University's graduate school for international relations). Half of my position was is mix of traditional and "library 2.0" work -- reference, database development, web site design and programming, and so forth. One of my projects is the Fletcher Faculty Publications database and RSS Feeds. The remainder of my time was spent managing IT services for The Fletcher School's faculty, staff, and students.
From 1997-2004, I was an Information Specialist for the Ford Motor Company research library. I oversaw the library's web site and information architecture projects. We developed information services including customized e-mail alert services, automatic text classification, and intelligent agents. Please see the Publications and Presentations section, below, for details on some of these projects.
From 1995-1997, before working for Ford, I worked for the now-defunct Open Media Research Institute (OMRI) in Prague, Czech Republic. OMRI was a non-profit research and publishing organization that studied the then-new democracies and emerging states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and that was funded by the Open Society Institute. Although OMRI no longer exists, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has preserved portions of the OMRI web site.
Presented at Computers in Libraries 2008 with my colleague Mike Creech. Abstract: Learn how to foster user-friendly digital information flows by eliminating silos, highlighting context and improving findability to create a unified web presence. Hear how the University of Michigan Libraries' (MLibrary) are reinventing the libraries' web sites to emphasize information over the path users previously took to access it. By elevating information over its location, users are not forced to know which library is the "right" starting place. The talk includes tips for your library web redesign process and user-centric design process.
I gave this talk at the Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries' Cool Tools and New Technologies conference on October 27, 2006. The talk abstract: The Ginn Library has created several databases to track and promote scholarly research by our faculty and students. A faculty publications database provides RSS feeds by author- and user-supplied keywords along with a current awareness feed that includes everything published. A second database highlights student master’s theses. Feeds are used internally to populate web pages and externally to promote the school. Learn how we created these two databases. (PowerPoint, 1 MB)
Slides from a talk I gave on Intelligent Agents at the Intranets 2003 conference in Santa Clara, California, on October 14, 2003. Discusses a project to create individualized information agents to fine-tune e-mail alert services. (PowerPoint, 256KB)
Information at Your Fingertips: Porting Library Services to the PDA
All about how to convert your Web-based content into a PDA-accessible, go-anywhere information service. Discusses some of the issues, problems, and successes in porting web sites onto Palm Pilots and other products using AvantGo, MobileLink, and good old-fashioned CGI programming. (Online, September/October 2000).
RSS4Lib
RSS Bumper Sticker
Remote Grinnellian