The University of Iowa Digital Library now contains 100,000 items. To mark this milestonetemp, a 13th-century Bible manuscript page from the Special Collections Department of the UI Libraries has been scanned and uploaded to represent the transformation of information storage over the centuries, from handmade parchment to zeroes and ones. “Digital versions of rareContinue reading “Iowa Digital Library now contains 100,000 items”

It can be hard staying current in the emerging field of metadata librarianship, so when I heard that instructors from Brown University’s Women Writers Project would be giving a nearby workshop on TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative XML schema, I immediately signed up. Besides learning how to encode historic texts for possible digital humanities initiatives,Continue reading “Fellow travelers”

Funded by a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant , our new digital library fellows have been tracking their progress with a suitably 21st century learning tool: the blog. During the next two years of their program, these students will be blogging their way through a series of half-time clinical rotations in various departments andContinue reading “Educating the 21st century librarian”

On my drive to work this week the radio told of more soldiers dying in Iraq. Soon, an ambulance whizzed by me—off to save another life. Talk about work that really matters, I thought, as I tootled toward the University of Iowa Main Library for a day of helping lead the charge to digitize aContinue reading “Why digital collections matter”

Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com… No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, aContinue reading ““Every book ever published””

Last year, a friend of mine gave me several dozen CDs that he did not want to store and take care of any more. Most were albums and artists that I liked and might have bought anyway, but his large, one-time donation saved me that time and expense, and obviously caused my music collection toContinue reading “Legacy collections: piling on the content”

No, it’s not my actual birthday, but this January marks my first full year as a Digital Initiatives Librarian at The University of Iowa Libraries, and while I served in a couple of short-term roles at UI since 2004 (Map Library Assistant & Statewide Digital Initiatives Specialist for the Iowa Heritage Digital Collections), 2006 wasContinue reading “Happy birthday to me!”

VII. We strive for excellence in the profession by maintaining and enhancing our own knowledge and skills, by encouraging the professional development of co-workers, and by fostering the aspirations of potential members of the profession. — from “Code of Ethics of the American Library Association” The first-annual DLS Winter Holiday Student Appreciation Celebration was enjoyedContinue reading ““Fostering the aspirations””

I have been working for many years in the Libraries’ technical services division as a cataloger, and more recently as a supervisor and trainer of other catalogers. As a consequence of supervising and of being involved in an arduous, and apparently never-ending reorganization of technical services, I had begun attempting to take the long view,Continue reading “Lessons learned as a DLS intern”

Earlier this year, writer Kevin Kelly wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine that envisioned a future in which all books in existence will be searchable from a single source, if not totally available to everybody with an iPod. Libraries and corporations are scanning around a million books a year (the Google BookContinue reading “Scan this book! …Even if the result sucks.”