While we’re completing this process, we won’t be loading any items, but as soon as we’re done, the many new items we’re processing will start to load and there are a lot. We’re already sitting at 1,797,881 so we will hit the 2 million mark rather soon. Don’t be dismayed while we’re holding for the next week. In the meantime, check out the many wonderful materials we have online, like the image above, which comes from the digital Archive of the Rossica Society, a world-wide society devoted to all aspects of Russian philately, from the pre-stamp days of Imperial Russia to current post-Soviet philately.

Jane Pen has been instrumental in getting “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” digitized and she’ll be visiting Taiwan this May 24-31, and meeting with the library at Tamkang University. Hopefully this will lead to more partnerships with libraries and museums, especially with so many museums in Taiwan are actively involved in digitization projects.

“The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is an excellent site because it does something that couldn’t easily be done without the technologies it uses. For many of the other Webby Award sites this is also true, but many others are aesthetically pleasing first and then accessible second or not at all. For some sites like the National Palace Museum’s site tools to recognize calligraphy or handwriting akin to Optical Character Recognition simply aren’t yet available at the level they’re needed to make the site as accessible as possible, but the site still has a great deal of other accessible information. In the meantime, “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is a beautiful site and one that will hopefully be enriched even further in the near future with new technologies.

Open Access Directory: A wiki to organize information about the open access movement

Boston, April 30, 2008. Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists –for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal “declarations of independence”– and add more over time.

The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access.

The URL for the Open Access Directory is http://oad.simmons.edu

To contact us, email Athanasia Pontika, the Assistant Editor (OAD.contact@gmail.com), or the Editorial Board (OAD.editors@gmail.com).

The wiki is represented by an editorial board consisting of prominent figures in the open access movement. The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at Simmons College hosts and provides technical support to the OAD. http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/

The updated photos are old black and white images of campus. We still need to add the labels for these, so hopefully Flickr users could help us on some of these. I’m interested to see if users label these buildings before we have time to, and which buildings get labeled or commented on and what types of comments are posted. Check out our Flickr pages, and label a few if you know what they are!

Also, subscribe to our feed to know when new images are loaded.

www.flickr.com Go to University of Florida Digital Collections’ photostream

• May 8: Erich Kesse (director), Mark Sullivan (programmer), and Brooke Wooldridge (dLOC Coordinator, from Florida International University) are going to Washington, DC to meet with the World Digital Library based at the Library of Congress about the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
• May 11-14: Erich, Brooke, and Mark are off to meet with the US Embassy in Haiti and the National Archives in Haiti about the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and establishing a digitization center in Haiti
• May 14-18: Mark joins Brooke to travel to Guyana to meet with CARICOM
• May 24-31: Jane Pen (Metadata & Quality Control) is visiting Taiwan and will be meeting with the library at Tamkang University (淡江大學).
• June 26-July 2: Laurie Taylor (Digital Projects Librarian) will be going to the American Library Association Conference in Anaheim, California where she’s hoping to see the Disney Archives and to find a partner for the comics collection and the Barks’ materials

We’ll probably have other meetings and explorations in the near future, so let us know if you’ll be in the same area and would like to meet for coffee and great conversation about digital projects.

I think the best recommendation, though, is from the Libraries’ staff as a whole, and we’re a really fun group. We’re on Facebook (mainly for internal communication since there are so many of us); the HR main page has links to pictures of our picnics and parties; and some of us have blogs like this one and off-UF email if people have less formal questions (like about great grocery stores, the weather–right now it’s hot and dry–about the pet-friendliness of Gainesville, and so on). The UF Libraries have a great community and it’s just a great place to work overall!

Classification Title: Assistant Instructor
Working Title: Personnel Services and Employee Development Coordinator
Position Number : 00012789
Salary: (Starting salaries for positions may be negotiable based on qualifications and experience.) $45,000; Actual salary will reflect selected professional’s experience and credentials commensurate with selected applicant’s qualifications.

Work Location: Main Campus (Gainesville, Florida)
Department: 55130100-LB-PERSONNEL SUPPORT
College/Unit: UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES (55000000)

JOB SUMMARY:
The Personnel Services and Employee Development Coordinator provides leadership to the human resources and training and development functions of the University Libraries. The Coordinator ensures the delivery of vital customer services including: employee relations; interpretation of library and university policies; and faculty and staff recruitment. The Coordinator facilitates key processes including: tenure and promotion, professional development leave, and employee evaluations. The Coordinator develops and leads a need-based and outcome-oriented training and development program.

The duties of this position include:

Human Resources:

1. Coordinates recruitment activities and supports the work of faculty search committees.
2. Ensures delivery of excellent customer service through the HR Office.
3. Develops and maintains policies and processes.
4. Interprets library and UF personnel policies.
5. Ensures the maintenance of personnel records and data housed by the HR Office.
6. Counsels library employees and supervisors on employee relations issues.
7. Facilitates the processes for tenure, promotion and development leaves.
8. Facilitates employee evaluation processes.
9. Liaison with relevant UF entities and officials.
10. Coordinates recruitment activities and supports the work of faculty search committees.
11. Ensures delivery of excellent customer service through the HR Office.
12. Develops and maintains policies and processes.
13. Interprets library and UF personnel policies.
14. Ensures the maintenance of personnel records and data housed by the HR Office.
15. Counsels library employees and supervisors on employee relations issues.
16. Facilitates the processes for tenure, promotion and development leaves.
17. Facilitates employee evaluation processes.
18. Liaison with relevant UF entities and officials.

Employee Development

1. Assesses library-wide training and organizational development needs.
2. Develops and implements strategies for delivering training and development programs.
3. Measures outcomes of training and development programs.
4. Frequently facilitates and occasionally conducts training sessions.
5. Actively works to improve the effectiveness of training and development programs.
6. Develops and maintains a skills inventory database.

Minimum qualifications:

1. Masters degree in human resources management, higher education, library sciences, or related field.
2. Professional level experience in human resources management.
3. Strong customer service orientation.
4. Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
5. Ability to manage a broad variety of tasks simultaneously and deliver results.
6. Excellent analytical and innovative problem solving skills.
7. Judgment, tact and discretion.
8. Ability to work effectively with diverse groups to achieve objectives.

Preferred qualifications:

1. Library science or equivalent degree.
2. Professional experience in an academic or research library.
3. Advanced knowledge of laws and standards pertaining to employee relations and employment.
4. Experience developing and conducting training programs.
5. Expert knowledge of spreadsheet and web development software.

APPLICATION PROCESS:
The University of Florida is an equal opportunity employer and is strongly committed to the diversity of our faculty and staff. Applicants from a broad spectrum of people, including members of ethnic minorities and disabled persons, are especially encouraged to apply. As part of the application process, applicants are invited to complete an on-line confidential and voluntary demographic self-disclosure form which can be found at: http://www.hr.ufl.edu/job/datacard.htm. This information is collected by the University of Florida’s Faculty Development Office to track applicant trends and is in no way considered by the Smathers Libraries in the selection process.

Please submit application materials via e-mail. Send, as attachments (MS-Word format preferred), a cover letter detailing your interest in and qualifications for this position, your current resume and a list of three references. Include address, telephone and email information for references. Please include a 250-word document on the topic “The process of developing a need-based and outcome-oriented training and development program.” Apply by June 8, 2008 (applications will be reviewed as received). Send all required application materials to Brian Keith, Smathers Libraries Financial and Human Resources Officer, at: brikeit@uflib.ufl.edu.

Job Close Date 06-08-2008

I’m not sure how I came across the “Pruned” blog’s post on autotechnogeoglyphics, but it’s the most wonderful word I’ve seen in sme time. auto-techno-geo-glyphics sounds of steampunk, science fiction, fantasy, epic world building and world altering technology, histories of giants, and it holds so much promise, so much potential for exploration. While the definition speaks more to reality, the word speaks to fantasy worlds of stone like Shadow of the Colossus, science-fiction worlds of steel, and ancient worlds of myth and reality, of stone, sediment, and things long lost.

“Pruned” explains autotechnogeoglyphics from the CLUI newsletter as:

Among the many wonderful things worth noting, there is their aerial photographs of automotive test tracks — those concrete hieroglyphs, in the fringes of urban sprawls, recording “the condition of America, land of the automobile, a syndrome that transformed the landscape of the nation, and the world, more than any other.”

As an information addict, I normally value words by utility. However, there are those words that go beyond the possible into the impossible, seeking for more than they can possibly find and finding all that they can in the process. autotechnogeoglyphics is one of those; it speaks to what it is and what it could be, helping to define studies of large-scale, made-designs in the Earth, made only over time with parts intentional and parts their sum unforeseeable in their planning, and all seen only with enough correct distance. It only seems right in all lowercase, perhaps because weighting the first letter seems to give priority to the auto over the rest, or perhaps the font isn’t right for a word of this magnitude. Hopefully autotechnogeoglyphics will appear enough to find its fit for font and scale, and hopefully it will also find and share new words that similarly sing.