Meta Interchange

I’ll be attending the following programs during ALA Annual this year.

Friday, 27 June

• 10:30 to 12:00: Old Records, New Records, New Interfaces (ALCTS Catalog Form and Function Interest Group)

Saturday, 28 June

• 13:30 to 15:30: Metadata Mashup: Creating and Publishing Application Profiles (ALCTS) or There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog (LITA)
• 16:00 to 18:00: Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR (ALCTS) or Science Fiction and Fantasy: Looking at IT and the Information Rights of the Individual. Hmm, RDA or Cory Doctorow? Decisions, decisions…

Sunday, 29 June

• 08:00 to 12:00: Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging (ALCTS and LITA). And where did I leave Hermione’s hourglass?
• 10:30 to 12:30: The Open Library, Promise and Peril (LITA)
• 13:30 to 15:00: Top Technology Trends (LITA)
• 15:30 to 17:00: Koha Interest Group Meeting (leaving early)

Monday, 30 June

• 10:30 to 12:00: Legal Issues in Developing Open Source Systems for Libraries Understanding Free/Open Source Software Licenses, Project Forms, and Project Governance Options
• 13:30 to 15:30: Open Source Systems Interest Group (LITA)

Other than that, I’ll be variously at the LibLime booth, in meetings, or hacking Koha.

I was a math major in college, but it was my student job at the college library that ended up setting the current direction for my career and life. I started out filing update pages for the Standard Federal Tax Reporter (and sometimes reading it!). I worked for most of the departments at the library at various points in time, and ended up as a junior systems administrator.

Towards the end of my undergraduate career, the library changed its ILS, and I wrote most of the code to extract and migrate the library’s data from the old system to the new one. After college, I started working for the vendor of the new ILS. I have spent the last nine years migrating data, programming, moving from Chicago to Anchorage to Tallahassee to Chicago, finding love and kitty cats, and watching and experiencing the trials and travails of the library automation industry.

I changed jobs recently, and am now coding for and supporting an open source integrated library system, Koha.

I plan to blog about library automation, open source software, metadata and the many headaches inspired by it, and anything else I happen to think of.