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Catalogers and technical services managers in public libraries are needed more than ever, but for a variety of reasons their numbers have been declining over the years. ALCTS CRG has convened a forum on careers in technical services in public libraries, but as the forum was not listed in the program guide, here’s the description. Full disclosure: I highly recommend this because, among other reasons, my wife, Marlene Harris, is one of the participants.

ALCTS CRG Forum in Anaheim Focused on Careers for Public Librarians in
Technical Services

Sunday, June 29, 8:00-9:30 a.m., Disney Paradise Pier Hotel, Pacific C/D

Want to get the scoop on the advantages and disadvantages of a technical
services career in public libraries? Be sure to catch the CRG forum,
Technical Services Careers in Public Libraries: Getting Started,
Building Your Career, or Making the Switch, on Sunday, June 29, 2008
from 8 to 9:30 a.m., in Room Pacific C/D of the Disney Paradise Pier
Hotel, when Carolyn Goolsby, Technical Services Manager at the Tacoma
Public Library, and Marlene A. Harris, Division Chief, Technical
Services at the Chicago Public Library, will offer advice and describe
from personal experience the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a career in
technical services within the public library setting. Ample time will be
provided for questions and answers after presentations by both
panelists.

The moderator is Elaine Yontz from the faculty of the Library and Information Science program at Valdosta State University.

Sponsored by ALCTS CRG (Council of Regional Groups)

Technorati Tags: alaannual2008, ala2008, catalogers, publiclibraries

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.

Last  Wednesday I gave a lightning talk at Code4LibCon on some musings about Git qua distributed version control system and ideas for distributed cataloging. Check out my slides.

Slides from the other lightning talks are being posted here. Be sure to check out Andy Mullen’s presentation when his slides and the video are posted — making player piano MIDI files from OCRs of scanned scores is special enough, but his sense of dramatic timing during his presentation was marvelous.

Erasmus sitting on the bag I used to cart my laptop around at Code4Lib

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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.