About Mike
I'm Mike Giarlo, and Technosophia is a space for tidbits and musings about libraries and technology (usually). 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. You may also be interested in my digital library architecture (work) blog, my curriculum vitae, or the open source software projects I work on.
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: I design and build library services and tools out of digital bits. Now that my official job title is digital library architect, I feel somewhat less pretentious.
I am currently working at the Pennsylvania State University as its digital library architect.
My last job was at the Library of Congress where I was on a team developing digital repository tools, processes, and architecture (supporting projects such as the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the World Digital Library, and Chronicling America (the National Digital Newspaper Program)).
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.
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.
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.
For more information, I maintain a list of the major social networking sites on which I am (more or less) active: http://lackoftalent.org/michael/.
[...] 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