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As far as I'm concerned, the most exciting developments this year in repositories and digital curation have come out of the California Digital Library. It has been impossible not to notice their papers and presentations. Put simply, their idea is that digital curation is enabled by "micro-services" built upon well-known abstractions such as the filesystem. The benefits are obvious: filesystem tools are ubiquitous and cross-platform, and there are strong market forces to ensure the filesystem persists. The idea is radically simple and straightforward, though many questions remain about such a paradigm. I'll return to those later.

If you have not yet taken a look at CDL's curation micro-service specifications, most of which may be printed on as few as one or two sheets of paper, see the Digital Library Building Blocks.

My co-workers in the LC Repository Development Center have been chatting about these specs on and off throughout the year. After months of procrastinating, I finally read all of the specs on Thursday; it's wonderful that you can do so in the course of one reading session, I might add. Yesterday a bunch of us RDCers got together to chat (informally) about the specs: what they're for, how they work, and how they interact with one another. I learn by doing, by examples, so I combed through each of the specs in advance of our meeting and tried to construct a minimal repository[1] based on micro-services.
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Notes

1. Perhaps it's more in line with the specs to refer to this space as "a managed filesystem that drives repository and curation services," given the CDL philosophy that preservation is not a place/repository. But it's easier to say "repository," so there you go. [↩]

While doing some reading for a little talk my colleague, Ed Summers, and I are giving at code4lib 2009, I came across a paragraph that sparked a crazy thought. So crazy that it's not crazy at all. So not crazy that I am sure other people have thought of it. But nonetheless, here I am writing about it just in case.

From Sarah Currier's paper on SWORD (emphasis mine):

One of the most frequently cited barriers to academics depositing their teaching materials into repositories is the keystroke-count involved in logging into a repository, uploading the resource, creating metadata, perhaps selecting a licence, and publishing the resource. It was a quick win, therefore, to create a drag-and-drop desktop tool to allow a single keystroke deposit of resources, including multiple resources in one action. For a repository that supports automatic metadata generation, administrative metadata can be created at the point of entry to the repository without the user needing to create any.

And I wondered how many repositories supported automatic metadata generation. I wondered how many repositories supported automatic generation of rich metadata. And lastly I wondered, might this be a more or less natural role for catalogers: augmenting stub metadata records or doing original cataloging for institutional repository deposits? Especially at a time when many of them are being reclassified as acquisitions specialists or digital projects managers?

Potential issues and questions:

• Author ignorance: Maybe catalogers are already doing this and I'm a moron?
• Scale: Is it realistic to expect to be able to "keep up" with repository deposits?
• Granularity: Does cataloging at the level of articles, and perhaps at even finer granularities, introduce challenges?
• Duplication: If pre-prints are cataloged in the IR, for instance, will they need to be cataloged again later?
• … there are others I thought of on my commute this morning but have since forgotten them. Feel free to add comments.

I will admit here that I've been somewhat out of the (academic) institutional repository space a while, and cataloging is something I don't share thoughts about very often because my exposure is limited to having taken one course a couple years ago.

I assume there's a body of research about this out there somewhere but I figured I'd post this anyway.

Karen Coombs responds to Ross Singer, re: requiring an MLS degree in library technology positions.

I'm torn on the issue, as an erstwhile systems analyst who went through library school primarily for letters after my name. I've seen both sides of the divide and have seen IT positions that might have benefited from the MLS — a particular non-MLS comes to mind who had no sense of which battles were winnable and ultimately wound up leaving — and also seen jobs with a totally unnecessary MLS requirement that accomplished little other than watering down the candidate pool.

If a position will need to interact with librarians or act in public services capacities, the MLS is very useful; folks from IT (or elsewhere in the extrabibliosphere) do not necessarily know our culture or our values — hell, they might not even speak our language. And there is something to be said for this sort of familiarity. Librarians hold the reins in libraries and if you can't speak to their values in a language they understand, you are likely to spend much of your career tilting against windmills (and getting nowhere fast).

On the other hand, we librarian folk think that libraries are a hell of a lot more special than we actually are. Our needs are sometimes esoteric, but many times they are not, and so an MLS requirement probably does more harm than good. And too often "web librarian" and "systems librarian" are euphemisms for "underpaid IT workers." Earning a master's degree should not reduce your earning potential, and yet that is precisely what happens.

In summary, I guess my views align with Karen's but I appreciate what Ross is adding to the dialogue (having experienced much of the same nonsense). We need more Rosses in library-land, and ought to treat them very well in order to keep them around. Library technologists are (read: "should be") first-class citizens in libraries and will play an active if not vital role in our future, whether they have the MLS or not. We'd do well to keep that in mind.

I was stoked to see our Digital Initiatives Coordinator position posted earlier today. We have been without a full-time field officer for nearly eight months, though Kevin Clarke (lead programmer) has served with distinction — and with nary a complaint! (Well, okay, there may have been some complaints, but he always had a smile on his face.)

Here are some reasons you might consider this position:

• A chance to get in on the ground floor — our team is still undecided on many important issues, so you would have the opportunity to shape the organization.
• Work with a broad range of technologies, such as Java, Ruby, XQuery, XForms, native XML databases, Solr, and more.
• Assist in the ongoing effort to select repositories for various use cases — we're evaluating DSpace, several Fedora front-ends, and the X-Hive/DB native XML database
• Many rare and beautiful library collections.
• Great location — it hardly seems like New Jersey!
• Lead the digital collections team, currently consisting of four librarian programmers and five digitization gurus.
• Forge ties with one of the finest faculties in academia.
• Comprehensive benefits package — 24 days vacation, the whole insurance kit and kaboodle, and so on.
• Uncommon amount of support (financial and otherwise) for professional development.
• … and you get to work with me! But seriously, the great team we have assembled has been a big part of why I've thoroughly enjoyed my time at Princeton.

You can get a sense of the work we've been doing by browsing our Digital Collections, though that's only the tip of the iceberg, and the site will be overhauled in the coming months.

Have some digital initiatives experience? Ready for leadership responsibilities and an environment in which you will hone your vision? Then by all means, check it out. An MLS is not required.

Peter Binkley wrote a while back about the crop of neat digital librarian-y jobs that'd been popping up. There've been a bunch more lately:

• Head, Library Technology (Oregon State University)
• Coordinator for Digital Library and Metadata Services (University of Colorado)
• Digital Collections Coordinator (U. of Oregon)
• Digital Projects and Catalog Management Librarian (U. of Oregon)
• Digital Initiatives Coordinator (Clemson U.)
• Digital Library Initiatives Manager (Temple U.) [Direct link could not be obtained]
• Digital Library Program Manager (UC-San Diego)

It's great to see academic libraries diving head-first into digital collections / library initiatives, and doing so with dedicated staff.

Some of these positions look like great options for folks like myself who've been bouncing around the digital libraries world for a few years now and are starting to think about taking on greater responsibility within an organization. I know you're out there, folks. Consider applying!