Wow, day 4 already. This week seems to be going by fast. Worked from home for a bit this morning and then took the train in again. Email this week has been miraculously low. Probably from all the moves. The 5th floor eerily empty, absolutely bizarre up there now.
Morning
Morning soundtrack: BBC World Service podcast, Aphex Twin - Druqks, Metallica - Master of Puppets. (BTW, did you know Metallica did not produce any records after …And Justice for All.
Day three started off with a Go Train that decided to arrive 20 minutes late. Three cheers for mass transit. The delay was a good thing, it gave me 20 extra minutes and I was able to finish Calvino's, "Six Memos for the Next Millennium."
Morning
Morning soundtrack: BBC World Service podcast, Search Engine - Trolling 101, Funkstörung - Appendix
In the trenches of morning emails. ILL requests for theses to be made open access, therefore said theses are made open access.
Here goes day 2! Tuesday is generally my first day of the week physically at work, which generally means that I have lots of meetings. Thankfully i did not have an immediate morning meeting.
Morning:
Morning soundtrack: Software Freedom Law Center - Episode 0x2C: Eben on Software Liability, Adult. - Resuscitation
Spent the entire morning working on more merges and trying to hunt down some expected deliverable item from a vendor.
So here we are again. Library Day in the Life number five! Monday is a work from home day. No audacious commute from Toronto to Hamilton today!
Morning:
Morning soundtrack: BBC World Service podcast, TWiT - It’s The New Sex Talk, CBC Spark Daniel Pink on Motivation 3.0, The Protomen - The Protomen
Catch up a bunch of email from last week, and finally got around to setting up Drush. Don’t know why I never got around to it before, but it definitely worth the time of checking out if you manage a few Drupal sites.
Now that Historical Perspectives of Canadian Publishing is all finished up we have time, albeit a small amount of time, to concentrate on other portions of the Digital Collections site, and other collections.
World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection is nearly complete. Only a few boxes remain to be scanned. The next portion of the project is World War, 1939-1945, Jewish Underground Resistance Collection. This collection is predominantly from 1941-1944 and will contain 325 items.
Oops, I was supposed to write about this last Thursday when we actually launched. Busy, busy week. So, without further ado - Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing!
So, here is the actual library news story. The site was a year in the making, and still has some content that will be added. An immense amount of hard work was put in by the team. I would like to give a special thanks for all the hard work put in by the project coordinator, Judy Donnelly, Bev Bayzat who handled the data management portion of the project, and Matt McCollow who took over the majority of development responsibilities on the site.
More updates on the World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection. The Internment Camp Correspondences are now finished. There weren’t too many of them - only 56 to be exact. With the internment camp letters finished, we have moved on to the Gestapo Camp Correspondences.
I have also added the “Related Information” feature to the World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection and Russell Library Collection. It is just a block in the right column, which is an extension of the faceted search module.
After an entire year of scanning and meta data entry by a couple of amazing students, we have finished a portion of the World War, 1939-1945, German Concentration Camps and Prisons Collection. The entirety of the Concentration Camp Correspondences [http://digitalcollections.mcmaster.ca/concentration-camp-correspondence] - 1031 to be exact - are up online with full meta data records. Also, a very help volunteer has been going through and translating/summarizing the records. If anybody knows German, Yiddish, Polish, or French and would like to volunteer, please contact me.
I must say that the Digital Odyssey was the best one day event I have been to. Just a fantastic day with fantastic people talking about awesome projects. It cheered me up and gave me hope in these crap times. Best part of the day had to be Mike Ridley’s keynote speech - The Age of Information is over. It is time for the Age of Imagination. It will be the library’s job to nurture and foster creativity.
So, I bet a lot of you are wondering what is up with my with my title? Well, I don’t plan on standing up here taking potshots at OCLC for 15 minutes, but I am sure some people in the crowd wouldn’t mind. Basically, the title should have had a very long sub-title along the lines of, like Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Open Source Software.