This past week, we started depositing digitized books into our institutional repository instance for The McMaster Collection. As of this posting we have 216 books in the collection. However, currently these materials are only available to the McMaster community. This is completely out of my control, and I agree what some of you may be thinking, “wait, out of copyright books are not available to the general public!?”
The workflow is a little complicated right now, but it is the beginning and will definitely be improved.
Morning
email - lots of email. oh joy!
General project maintenance/managerial stuff. Investigate/fix workflow issues with the Mass Digitization project (the robotic book scanner). Hunt for a workstation for the contract worker that is working on the WWI digitization project. Do my due diligence on that massive black cloud looming.
Today is Wednesday. Wednesday is my weekly research help desk shift. Each week I have mixed feelings about my time on the desk.
Day three…
Morning:
Yes, email.
Got into work early to cover on Research Help Desk for a colleague. I always find my shift on the help desk quite comical. I get the feeling that students and faculty don’t know how the approach the guy covered in tattoos sitting at the help desk with a laptop. Once they find out that I am actually a librarian, and not a student, or some weirdo sitting there, they seem quite surprised.
We are launching another student journal in Digital Commons - Nexus: The Canadian Student Journal of Anthropology. The first few issues of the journal have been loaded today. The journal goes all the way back to 1980, so it will be a bit before it is all up online. Also of note, this is an open access journal. Nexus is a graduate student-run publication from the Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
We have launched another new journal in Digital Commons - ESURIO - which features refereed content by undergraduate and graduate students on the issues of hunger and poverty. They also officially live at esurio.ca, but wanted to be apart of the institutional repository here at Mac. Check ‘em out!
It has been a while since I have done an IR update. So, the UPDATE: 3 new e-Journals, 2 in the works, and 2 books from the anthropology department have been published to the IR. Also, the big news is we have a Scholarly Communications Librarian now - Barbara McDonald - who will be the spokesperson for the IR. So, now I can concentrate more on the technical side of the project.
It has been a while since I have done an IR update. So, the UPDATE: 3 new e-Journals, 2 in the works, and 2 books from the anthropology department have been published to the IR. Also, the big news is we have a Scholarly Communications Librarian now - Barbara McDonald - who will be the spokesperson for the IR. So, now I can concentrate more on the technical side of the project.