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October has been a month of transition for the past several years.

I moved into my first apartment in New Brunswick, NJ (my hometown) in 2001, shortly after the attacks of 9/11. 2003 saw me preparing for the MLIS program at Rutgers. Elizabeth and I moved from New Jersey to Seattle in 2005 so that I could study computational linguistics at the University of Washington. (I burned out on school very quickly and decided, after the Code4Lib 2006 conference, that I could in fact make a career in library technology.) We moved back to the New Jersey area in 2006 for my current position working on the digital library at Princeton.

It's been a great year. My time at Princeton has been highly rewarding and we've taken full advantage of living closer to our family and friends.

October is also my favorite month of the year (even when the Yankees don't win the World Series): the leaves turn pretty colors; the air takes on that early autumn crispness; and groves of apples are ripe for the picking on lazy weekend afternoons. And this October, we have yet more changes on the horizon. Elizabeth and I are moving to Arlington, VA and I'll be starting at the Library of Congress on the 29th. I'll be working with folks like Dan and Ed on the repository development program, which supports a number of projects including Chronicling America (National Digital Newspaper Program).

It will be difficult to say goodbye to folks around here, but it's the right move for us at this time. Ah, October.

Thanks for the nod, Winona. Hopefully you folks will get some good use out of the XQuery-based OAI-PMH data provider I've been working on.

I just want to clarify that only one small bit of the code is specific to X-Hive, and that's a call to an extension that gets last-modified dates from the X-Hive service. We do not reliably store this information in the metadata itself, and so I needed to go this route. Some folks do store this in MODS or elsewhere in descriptive or administrative metadata. It should be a two-line change to short-circuit this behavior (xhive-exts:last-update() is only invoked in two places, I believe).

I'm currently working on adding EAD support, modularizing things a bit more, and streamlining configuration. resumptionTokens will come after that, I hope.

I'll be interested to hear more of UVM's implementation and how I can make this thing more useful to others.

Nicole Engard has posted the results of her library school survey. She writes,

Why aren’t we all required to learn a bit of the basics from each area of the library? All schools should require an intro to reference/research, intro to cataloging, collection development, library automation, management, and systems class – that gives students a feel for each area of the library allowing them to decide where they want to go. Then after giving a grounding throw in some practical experience.

I agree with her in principle that a core curriculum is helpful in preparing library school students for librarianship. After all, what's wrong with subjecting a future cataloger (or reference librarian, or subject selector, or systems librarian…) to learn about other aspects of what we do? It puts their work in context within the library.

I can't speak authoritatively about other library schools, only having been to one, but I would surmise that the answer is simple: that the library degree tries to be too many things to too many people. We need clearer vision.

Case in point: the MLIS degree at Rutgers combines library studies, information science, and school media studies. If these disciplines are collapsed into the one degree, how is it possible to have a core curriculum? A good strategy is to have multiple tracks with set requirements, but students are, for the most part, left to mix and match their courses.

I can appreciate the freedom afforded to students by this. They can craft the degree that they want with very few restrictions. And that works for some students.

One is left to wonder, though, what a library degree from, say, Rutgers says about a candidates' qualifications. One conclusion to draw is that selection committees need to look beyond the degree towards specific courses and especially towards experience in the workplace, whether it be in a library or elsewhere.

Antonio reports that our review of the 2007 Code4Lib conference has been published in volume 27, issue 6 of Library Hi Tech News.

Though these articles have very low impact, the more press code4lib gets, the better.