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.”

It’s almost a month into DLS’ first encounter with back-to-school season, and we’re just beginning to catch our collective breath. After hiring and training a new cadre of digital library production workers – both undergrads and library school students, as well as staff members from other library departments volunteering a portion of their work timeContinue reading “Organizational evolution”

DLS continues to receive media attention in the form of last week’s Daily Iowan article: UI Libraries working on digitizing. As evidenced by another DI article written 10 months ago: Welcome the online library (p.8A), the public’s curiosity continues to grow concerning the Google Book Search Project. Recent developments such as the University of California joiningContinue reading “Google Book Search and DLS: Guilty by association”

July at the UI Libraries is Annual Report-writing time, with each department submitting a list of statistics, projects, awards, and other accomplishments for possible inclusion in the official end-of-fiscal-year publication. Although DLS has only existed half the year, with much of that time spent on department start-up, we still managed to accumulate a fair amountContinue reading “Happy ½-year anniversary to us”

Given that the Digital Library Services full-time staff is away for the first part of this week, it makes sense to report back to the libraries as a whole who may not know that the north hallway of Main Library’s third floor is slightly emptier. Despite a thunderstorm on the “heels” of our airplane, aContinue reading “JCDL 2006”

As in all other areas of scholarship, the internet has had a transformative effect on libraries and librarianship. While print collections are still the mainstay of the UI Libraries, information is increasingly moving online, resulting in the near ubiquity of the word “digital” – a term that, as researcher Karen Coyle recently observed in TheContinue reading “The revolution will be digitized”