About Mike
I'm Mike Giarlo, and Technosophia is a space for tidbits and musings related (sometimes) to libraries and technology. I have no illusions about the greater utility of this blog; it exists mostly as a personal outlet and a quasi-permanent scratchpad. If others find it useful or amusing, so much the better.
Sometimes I pretentiously describe myself as a digital library artisan — part librarian, part programmer — as it's somewhat more descriptive of what I do than either of those terms or others (like my official title of Information Technology Specialist): I design and build library services and tools out of digital bits. I'm currently employed by the Library of Congress's Office of Strategic Initiatives, where I am on a team developing digital repository tools, processes, and architecture (supporting projects such as NDIIPP, the World Digital Library, and Chronicling America (NDNP)). [Please note that what I write here is strictly personal and is in no way endorsed by my employers.]
I earned my MLIS degree in 2006 from SCILS at Rutgers, and enjoyed a brief stint in the Professional Master of Arts program in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington-Seattle, where I was interested in applying techniques of natural language processing to metadata extraction from full-text digital collections. My undergraduate degree, also from Rutgers, is in linguistics and philosophy, capped by an honors thesis on syntactic and semantic theories of pronouns and reflexives in Germanic languages. I was a member of Phi Beta Kappa only to realize it's not a fraternity and, alas, would not get me into any toga parties.
Among my research and development interests are digital preservation and archiving; digital libraries/repositories; web services; identifier persistence; roles of trust, authority, and skepticism in information behavior; and library technology.
Previously I developed tools for the Princeton University digital library. My projects included: Arkham & Noidman, Ruby on Rails web applications for the creation, management, validation, and resolution of persistent identifiers based on the ARK schema; xqOAI, an XQuery-based OAI-PMH data provider for native XML databases; scripts for metadata munging; and hacking and managing Trac-based departmental wikis / code repositories / ticketing systems.
Prior to that, I worked for the University of Washington Libraries (2005-6) and the Rutgers University Libraries (1999-2005) as a systems administrator, project coordinator, and digital library/repository hacker, and before that was a wear-every-hat techie during the mid-late '90s dot-com boom. As an undergrad, I shelved and retrieved books at the Archibald S. Alexander Library at Rutgers. And before that I was a kid, my only occupations watching television, reading comics, and gaming. While I was in utero, my mother was part of the first automation effort at Alexander Library, so one might say this stuff's in my blood.
For more information, feel free to check out the following: personal posts, resume, professional network, bookmarks, the blogs I read, Facebook, my music project on MySpace, or a (possibly) recent playlist.
Feed
[...] Michael Giarlo and I have been having a comment conversation in the Fedora Disseminators to Enable Accessible Repository Content posting about coming up with a common del.icio.us/technoraci/flikr/etc. tag to help us find each others stuff. I'll claim modest ignorance, as I did in the comments, to the social order surrounding tags, but would point out that it is unlikely that at the moment our use of the 'fedora' tag by itself would be drown out by its usage for a certain flavor of the Linux operating system. ¶ [...]
Isn't Princeton home of the Eliot / Hale letters?
and if you are ever looking for brilliant entertainment
the Archivist by Martha Cooley
I have read your article "The role of skepticism in human-information behavior:
a cognitive-affective analysis" found on the Library Student Journal. Very nice approach! I'm a current student at the MLIS at Rutgers and your article has helped me a lot!
Thanks