Laurie N. Taylor, Librarian

Congrats to folks with new publications affiliated (as publications or people) with LibraryPress@UF! Publications include: Chelsea Johnston and Jason Bozcar’s “Scholarly Publishing Literacy at the University of South Florida Libraries: From Advising to Active Involvement” – Chelsea was at USF and is now at UF with the LibraryPress@UF Suzanne Stapleton’s “A Team Approach: Library Publishing Partnerships with Scholarly Societies” about work with journals published with the LibraryPress@UF Ten new oral histories (audio, transcripts, and supplemental materials) with Briley Rasmussen’s Museum Education Oral History Archive, the digital archive compnent for her new book project; this is an enhanced monograph part, supported by the LibraryPress@UF  Read More →

This is a new position to complete our awesome Digital Development team!  The team supports the fanastic work done with/by/for UF, partners, and users with the UF Digital Collections and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). This is exciting, interesting, and meaningful work with a great team, within the larger great team at the Libraries. Full posting is http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/pers/documents/PVA_WebDevr2_November_2019.pdf Please see and share this position! POSITION VACANCY ANNOUNCEMENT POSITION: Digital Collections Front-End Web Programmer – Web Developer 2 REPORTS TO: Head, Digital Development SALARY: Minimum annual salary at $51,500; Actual rate will reflect experience and credentials REQUISITION #: 512906 DEADLINE DATE: January 6, 2020Read More →

Notes below. I am interested in reading more on organic leaders, identifying and developing organic leaders for scale, and organizing as opposed to activist or advocacy work (with many things that I’ve read blending these). I’m always looking for more reading suggestions (even with mountains of things to read), and I’m really interested in the 1199NE style unionism. McAlevey, Jane F. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. NY: Oxford UP, 2016. 121: “This is why CIO-style unions like 1199NE try to recruit the organic leaders, not the activists, for these positions. There is a radical and crucial difference between delegates whoRead More →

The Libraries at UF have a fantastic paid graduate student internship program where a person within the Libraries collaborates with a teaching faculty member on campus to develop a project proposal that supports the Libraries’ needs and that is designed to support the student’s future career opportunities. The proposals go through a supportive peer review process for improvement and validation, and then are reviewed by the Dean for awards. The awarded projects pay students $15/hour for 10 hours/week for 16 weeks in a semester, and can be for 1-3 semesters. There’s more on this fantastic program here: https://cms.uflib.ufl.edu/interns/Index.aspx Proposals are reviewed twice a year, andRead More →

Thanks, as always, to Philip Guo, for sharing great thoughts on his site! From November 2019, his piece “Computer Literacy Starts with Developing a Mental Model of Filesystems” covers the critical need for folks to have building blocks for computer literacy, noting: computer literacy starts with developing a working mental model of computer filesystems. This includes concepts such as: files file extensions and types folders (a.k.a. directories) hierarchical tree structure of folders and files what pops up when you plug in a USB stick or hard drive home folder (e.g., ~ on macOS) app folders (e.g., /Applications on macOS) apps can read, write, create, and delete files the differenceRead More →

The official announcement is here: http://northwestarchivists.org/news/8128319. and the news is below. It is always fantastic to see more programs and supports for people being paid for their work! Northwest Archivists, Inc. is pleased to announce the opening of the Archivist-in-Residence application! Please read on for more information about this important pilot program and for links to residency criteria and application. Problem: Unpaid internships have become a problem in our profession. They serve as a barrier to entry into our field, especially along the lines of race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and class, contributing to an imbalance in our profession. Unless an individual is willing and able to work withoutRead More →

I’m supporting an internal training by awesom Bess de Farber, sharing on grant partnerships. She’s talking about asset-based community development, and stated: “if you don’t know what you have, you don’t know what you can do.” This is exactly what we do in digital libraries, and we describe this in many ways. For ways of describing our work, I remember when I first started in digital libraries, and two senior librarians gave their examples of how we should do our work (it was 2007, so still in an earlier golden age of digital libraries). Both gave examples from movies. One gave an example of aRead More →

We’ve passed through so many major changes in the digital age. Librarians led the way in the internet revolution, teaching people how to use a mouse, what a web browser was and how to use it, and so much more for internet and information literacy. With the National Digital Library granting program in the US in the 1990s, we saw early digitization work move from experimental to codifying standards, and expressing ways to dream and think of how libraries could be—radically open spaces of possibility where access to materials heralded access and connection to services and experts. This was the golden age of digitization—from experimentRead More →

I learned that a friend of mine is from the “Pole of Inaccessibility” for the US, and thus also learned what a pole of inaccessibility is: with respect to a geographical criterion of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach according to that criterion. Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline, implying a maximum degree of continentality or oceanity. In these cases, pole of inaccessibility can be defined as the center of the largest circle that can be drawn within an area of interest without encountering a coast. Where a coast is imprecisely defined, the pole will be similarlyRead More →

Part of my work includes checking on new materials contributed by partners to the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) to be able to share them with different groups, like the dLOC Scholarly Advisory Board. This is a fabulous part of my work, where I get to see so many amazing materials shared openly online with the world by so many different partners. In looking at new items today, some of the many highlights include historical newspapers from Cuba, including: Carteles: https://dloc.com/l/AA00065193/00001/allvolumes El Crisol: https://dloc.com/l/AA00067403/00001/allvolumes See all newspapers and periodicals in dLOC: https://dloc.com/cndlRead More →