grad school

Walter P. Reuther Library Awarded The 2008 John Sessions Memorial Award

According to a listserv message I received today, “Wayne State’s Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs has been awarded the 2008 John Sessions Memorial Award for its online resource: ‘No Greater Calling: The Life of Walter P. Reuther, 1907-1970.‘” This website was one of the projects I was a part of for the Recruiting and Educating Librarians for the 21st Century, while at Wayne State University. I want to take the time to say thank you for all the hard work by my fellow grant recipients on this project and congratulate them, too: Mignon Camara, Iman Dagher, Anna Fast, Megan Garza, Somaly Kim, Sharon Williams, and Akilah Wood.

Reuther 100

The Reuther 100th Birthday Celebration website, entitled, “No Greater Calling” is complete and live. You can visit it at http://reuther100.wayne.edu The launch was featured at a ceremony celebrating the life of Walter P. Reuther on August 27th at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. Notable guest speakers included, Mike Smith (Director of Walter P. Reuther Library), Irvin D. Reid (President of Wayne State University), and former U.A.W President and college of Reuther, Douglas Fraser.

Debian Etch - 64bit Flash install

Rework of the Unofficial nspluginwrapper & ia32-libs-gtk packages for Etch from from the guys at dipconsultants.com. sudo or as root… Add deb http://www.dipconsultants.com/debian etch main to /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update Install keyring: apt-get install markybob-keyring apt-get update again apt-get install ia32-libs-gtk nspluginwrapper Get Adobe flash player: wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz tar -zxf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz cp install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so Open Iceweasel, enjoy!

McMaster University = Job

So, I guess I’ll finally write about it… Early this month I accepted a position at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON as the Digital Strategies Librarian. Basically my job will be to manage the libraries digital initiatives, and utilize all the skills that I have enhanced creating and working with digital collections at Wayne State University. It is going to be a great opportunity - McMaster University is the leading research institution in Canada, and has a rich collection of materials to work with, and are waiting to be digitized.

Virtual Motor City Wiki - Update

It appears the test import of 1000 images has worked. I took advantage of the bulk media import php script provided on the mediawiki site, along with the required Snoopy Class (sourceforge project) requirements. More update will be provided when additional test is complete (metadata importation also). This is the sample code provided on the bulk media import mediawiki site: [Additionally the flat required for the import is very simple to create with the aid of textwranger.

WSU Virtual Motor City Wiki

New Project Create a test wiki for 30,000+ images in the Virtual Motor City Collection which will all allow registered users to add additional metadata for a given image. This is going to be interesting, I have to create 30,000+ wiki entries at once. My choices consist of the MediaWiki Bulk Page Creator or a cURL script.

DHM Toys Collection & HASTAC

One month to put together a website for the Detroit Historical Museum Toy Collection for a HASTAC conference on February 23 (link for HASTAC). Here is a link to some sample content/website design idea(s). Here is some sample images and videos:

XML Parsing and Reuther Site

In an effort to create a complete open source digital collection, this semester I will be working on implementing the OAI Standards for meta data harvesting. Which will then hopefully be harvested by the University of Michigan Digital Resource Harvester - OAIster. Straight from theopen archives initiative’s site: The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. OAI has its roots in the open access and institutional repository movements.

Walter P. Reuther Site

The design is nearly complete - pending approval from administration. The site features a php gallery which is sorted by decade, searchable image database, pdf files from selected Walter Reuther speeches, and a email image request form. Future additions may include streaming audio and video. Preview the site here

Search Engine & Image Gallery

Search Engine and Image Gallery is complete on Reuther site. View them here and here. Reuther Image Test