FAQ – My Thoughts on MLIS and MY Background
Here’s a list of questions that people frequently email me regarding folks in my line of work (digital asset and content management): 1. About me and the Rutgers MLIS program: Since I had already been working in the field for 6 years (digital archives and digital asset management) when I entered the program, my advisor let me take whatever classes I wanted. He told me to get in and then get out. I honestly can’t even remember what classes I took. Since I was in the process of transitioning from non-profit digital archives work back to advertising (corporate knowledge management) work, much of the curriculum was either a repeat of what I had been practicing in the field or I took the course just to get the credits. I do recall taking metadata, records management, interface design, information visualization and a class on web 2.0 (which was pretty funny). The… Read More »
Getting Rid of the R.O.T!: A friendly reminder
It’s my favorite and most well suited acronym and I apply the philosophy behind it to just about every project I encounter. It stands for: Redundant, Outdated and Trivial and it refers to content and information you’re just better off living without or not creating in the first place. In order to really see something clearly you have to get rid of all the crud thats surrounding it. I (others included) call this simple method “getting rid of the R.O.T”. Nothing is worse than finding the same digital asset in over a zillion places in one system, it devalues the original and is a headache to seek out and destroy all existing versions. For the next point, nothing makes information more irrelevant that when it is outdated. Outdated information can not be leveraged nor can you receive any ROI on it being available, the best thing to do is just… Read More »
NYART Workshop – Monday November 10th, 2008
Digital Asset Management and Institutional Repositories: Case Studies Addressing the Development and Implementation of Systems Date: Monday, November 10th, 2008 Time: 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM Place: NYU Kimmel Center 60 Washington Square South, Room 405, New York, NY 10012 You can find resources to my presentation posted below including my keynote deck as a PDF here which includes my offbeat speech notes. I will say that its probably not fascinating reading compared to actually attending one of my talks. My deck style is a bit unconventional, it’s heavy on imagery and short on text. I am a big fan of Edward Tufte and I take his minimal stance when it comes to creating PowerPoint presentations. In fact I even prefer Keynote over PowerPoint all together. Here is a list of some of my go-to resources: Metadata Working Group, boxesandarrows, AIIM: Infonomics Magazine, AIIM: Blog, KMWorld, 37 Signals: Signal vs.… Read More »
A Librarian at the H.O.P.E (Hackers on Planet Earth) Conference
So, this weekend I attended my first hacker conference, “The Last H.O.P.E (Hackers on Planet Earth)” sponsored by 2600 Magazine. Featured con speakers were: Steven Levy, Kevin Mitnick, Jello Biafra, Steve Rambam and Adam Savage of MythBusters fame. Some of the sessions I did attend included: “Evil Interfaces: Violating the User”, “A Hacker’s View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)”, “Hacking Democracy: An In Depth Analysis of the ES&S Voting Systems”, “One Last Time: The Hack/Phreak History Primer”, Wikipedia: You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”, “YouTomb – A Free Culture Hack” and all the featured speakers (except I very sadly missed Steven Levy, I loved that iPod book!). So what’s a librarian to make of all this? Well believe it or not, there is some common ground between the hacker community and us information science professionals. Chief among these are copyright (especially now… Read More »
