Tag Archives: Digital Library Services

(Mirror) Reflections: Day of DH 2012 and Day of DH 2013

Today is my first day back in the office after being out for two weeks.  I am disoriented and overwhelmed by my inbox and to-do list so rather than regale you with musings about the consequences of being “away from work” [1] for two weeks, I thought to look back to my Day of DH 2012 postings to see what’s different today.  Sadly, not much. Or perhaps it can be better stated as: everything has changed; nothing has changed.

I can’t go on.  I will go on.

So what’s tangibly different?  I am no longer nursing my youngest, Jude.

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A lover of books, indie music and his mommy

I went a little over 18 months nursing the tiny human, but work travel became an obstacle to nursing.  Thank you, Digital Library Federation 2012 Forum for breaking my bond with my baby.  Actually, I sincerely mean it.  It was time to wean the kid. These days, I have been recalling the feelings of re-entry after maternity leave, pumping, and the challenges of dealing with kids before heading (4 kids in my case) to work thanks to Miriam Posner.  My life-partner, soul mate, and XSLT guru, John Walsh (@jawalsh), inhabits this DH and family space with me so in many ways not much as changed as we continue to navigate our family and professional commitments in this shared space.

Olivia and Patrick, my sweet and smart pre-teens (also competitive like their Michi)

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Mia, my three year old, who is quite the conversationalist (she’s even talking in this picture).

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Partners in crime: @jawalsh and @mdalmau

The other big change is Dot Porter’s defection to the University of Pennsylvania.  Dot (@leoba) headed up my group and really did lots of good stuff around IU and for the libraries.  I miss her.  In fact, I just finished morphing her former job post into an interim head position for me.  That’s how we roll here at IU.  It’s not official, but assuming no administrative flubs I will be Interim Head for All the Stuff Dot Left Behind.

Now onto the faux changes …

The Indiana University Digital Library Program no longer exists organizationally though I think we still do exist functionally.  In a recent re-organization at the IU Bloomington Libraries, the former Digital Library Content and Services group is now under the Associate Dean for Collection Development and Scholarly Communication, and we are now known as Digital Collections Services, which sounds too much like Debt Collection Services.  This new world order makes a lot of sense for my group, but we are still working on defining ourselves not necessarily by “what we want to do” as digitally minded people, but “how we want to be” so that we can support the IU Libraries’ goal for pervasive digital initiatives.

To this end, I was calling/agitating (whatever) for a flatter organizational model since so many of our core functional areas in the library are tightly interrelated in pursuit of digital projects; no real departmental boundaries exist at the lower levels.  Right now we are operating as if dotted lines exist between departments that were once unified (former DLP), but these dotted lines also more readily exist between departments that were not historically organizationally unified (scholarly communications and DLP).  Certainly the “be” part and the org chart part still needs some work.  If we sincerely want to embark on transforming our role as digital library/digital humanities experts in the academy, it’s time for a sweeping cultural change, not just an organizational change. For now, it’s business as usual (mostly, sort of, sometimes not really) and we are hoping that we can continue this good work that we love regardless of reporting lines [2].

Interestingly, the only meeting I had today was a long one concerning our Image Collections Online service.  This is interesting because I documented this meeting last year.  I didn’t take pictures this time because we didn’t really have any action moments like last year when we engaged in whiteboarding (to sketch coherently at the moment ideas concerning architecture, functionality, workflows, etc. that later become smudged or ironically permanently ingrained on the whiteboard that yield little clarity after a week’s time).  We all just sat around and talked about how the administrative interfaces for empowering collection managers to upload, describe and make accessible all their awesome photos or cultural heritage artifacts suck.  The next phase of web dev is dedicated to people like me who setup these services.  Thankfully the stakeholders are currently happy with what they have.

And now I want to stop writing this blog post because I feel like I am trapped in Groundhog Day.

[1] I am seldom fully “away from work” even when on vacation.

[2] I should say that part of the fuzziness is due to the “new” Scholars’ Commons, which I excitedly boasted about in last year’s post though it was then called something like the Digital Research Center.  The focus is now more broadly on digital scholarships across all disciplines, not just the humanities.