Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, I still believe information networks can amplify the best in us. As part of my MLIS, I wanted to do a deeper dive into how new technologies are being used in libraries but also imagine how they could be applied in innovative ways while still protecting patrons and staff.
My professional work so far has been in library technology and user experience design. My feeling is libraries are often underserved by vendors, and I would like to help contribute to free and open-source solutions by and for libraries. My hope is this could scale to make libraries and GLAM institutions more resilient to the divergent motives of private equity.
My research interests in LIS are broad, but I’m particularly interested in the process of scientific scholarly communication. Last term, I wrote an evaluation of the arXiv.org pre-print server, which predates the Web. There was a brief time, in those heady years of the early Internet, when you could access arXiv via gopher. They were originally only going to keep articles for 3 months. Now there are 2.8 million. The mind reels.
Recently, I’ve gravitated towards the interoperability of digital repositories and metadata. I’m interested in how this shakes out in the real-world for things like identifier schemes and harvesting protocols, and also the sociotechnical challenges that come with standardization.
I dream of a test bed of representative systems with which to perform ongoing interoperability and standards conformance testing for protocols like OAI-PMH. (Well, golly, that is one of the nerdiest sentences I’ve ever written. Welcome to the blog!)