Meta Interchange

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.