Getting to Know TS Librarians: Elizabeth Outler

1. Introduce yourself (name & position).

I am Elizabeth Outler, Assistant Director for Technical Services at Oliver B. Spellman Law Library, Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?

I think my job title is pretty accurate, though my experience in the TS field is only a couple of years at this point, so I may be mistaken about what is typical. I have recently arrived at Southern and my first task has been working on a cataloging and processing backlog that has stacked up while they waited for hiring to be approved. In the past my role focused on acquisitions, so this is different territory for me. I’m also getting to be in charge of Systems, which again, isn’t really in my training background, but I like it. I really enjoy learning new skills and solving problems, so I am having a pretty good time, and I think I have a great job.

3. What are you reading right now?

I am sort of an abomination – a librarian who does not read. The only explanation for this phenomenon that I have been able to come up with is that law school, and studying for the bar examination, scarred all my reading brain cells and I just don’t want to do it anymore. I do have a book on my nightstand that I have been creeping through when I make myself pick it up: Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, by John Marzluff & Tony Angell. I like birds, and am particularly interested in crows, so this was a birthday present a few years ago. It is a fascinating book.

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?

I am totally in love with my undergraduate alma mater, Smith College, so if I could work in any library, it would be Neilson Library, which is currently undergoing a major renovation designed by Maya Lin. (See https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/17/arts/design/maya-lin-unveils-redesign-of-smith-college-library.html) 

Linked data for librarians - new online tutorial

Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics and the Institute for Library and Museum Services have recently released an online course, Linked Data for Librarians. The course provides an accessible, free and open access introduction to linked data concepts. 

The first part of the course is designed to provide introductory material, part two covers more advanced material and hands on exercises. Each module requires a relatively brief time commitment concluding with a series of questions designed to check the user's understanding of the material presented.

The course is designed and presented by Seth van Hooland, Associate Professor, Département des Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication, Université libre de Bruxelles, and Ruben Verborgh, professor of Semantic Web Technology at IDLab, a group of Ghent University/imec.

As of this writing, I have completed the first three units of Part 1. The material is well organized, examples are well thought out, and the topics are presented in what seem to be new and creative ways. I am looking forward to completing the balance of the material.

Course citation: van Hooland, S. and Verborgh, R. (2017) “Linked Data for Librarians.” Available at http://course.freeyourmetadata.org/

Course outline:

Part 1

• Introduction
• Understanding data modesl
• Possibilities and limitations of RDF
• Data quality
• Data profiling and cleaning

Part 2

• Vocabulary reconciliation
• Metadata enriching
• REST
• Decentralization and federation
• Conclusions

2018 IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) Conference

Registration is currently open for the 2018 IIIF Conference held May 21-25 in Washington, DC. The IIIF Conference is co-hosted by the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, with an aim to advance the adoption of the IIIF framework. 

IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) is a framework for publishing image-based resources in a way that enables images across repositories to be presented in IIIF-compatible image viewers. In particular, images can be “viewed, cited, annotated, and compared” side-by-side. In this example, you can view and compare digitized Litchfield Law School student notebooks from the Harvard Law Library collection and the Yale Law Library collection, in a Mirador viewer. The Harvard collection of student notebooks is from Harvard’s Digital Repository Service and the Yale collection is from the Internet Archive.   

Pre-conference workshops will demo and showcase Mirador and Universal Viewer, two open-source applications that are gaining growing communities of adopters among libraries and museums. 

Conference takeaways will focus on:

• How to adopt IIIF at your institution
• Leveraging open source software to get more out of your collection of images  and video
• Use cases and best practices from IIIF adopters
• The latest developments in the community including IIIF A/V