I had a fantastic time as a Forum Fellow at the Digital Library Federation Forum 2012, and am very grateful to DLF for the opportunity. I was also fortunate to be assigned a mentor: Jenn Riley, the head of the Carolina Digital Library and Archives at the University of North Carolina. Jenn was wonderful about answering all of my questions, from digital preservation, how digital archives work, to how UNC is thinking about digital publishing…
Posts Categorized: Reports from the Field
Several MPublishing members recently returned from a mini-conference in Chicago. Jason Colman from Digital Publishing Production sums it up for us: Along with two other MPublishing staff, I made the trek to Chicago for the O’Reilly Tools of Change Mini-Conference on April 9th. The Mini TOC made for an interesting mix of folks from university presses, small publishing houses, libraries, and big corporations. Brian Fitzpatrick, who founded Google’s Chicago engineering office, spoke about the…
Ah, MLA. Your reputation for pre-interview angst, post-interview binging, self-important Q&A sessions, obtuseness and obscurantism has put you on many scholars’ non-grata list (at least those not professionally obligated to attend). This year, however, avoiders missed what felt like the stirrings of a sea change: the MLA’s heart (like a post-holiday Grinch) grew at least three sizes over the four days of the 2012 conference. (Luckily, anyone who missed the convention could follow sessions on…
The MPublishing team recently returned from THATCamp Publishing in Baltimore, MD. For the uninitiated, THAT (for “The Humanities and Technology”) Camp is a new breed of “unconference” attempting to move beyond the stand-and-deliver (and sit-and-listen) variety of academic conferences many of us are used to. Instead, the mission is collective discussion and concerted sharing around particular themes and with specific goals in mind. If you’d like to read participants’ notes from THATCamp Publishing, they are…
I wanted to share the Prezi portion of the workshop that Aaron McCollough (Subject Librarian for English and Comparative Literature) and I offered recently at the Teaching and Technology Collaborative. The presentation, “Introducing the Digital Humanities,” was a whirlwind tour of new large-scale databases and tools for conducting and storing research, and a demonstration of some of the interactive platforms for broadcasting and publishing findings. We examined the digital humanities as a dynamic field (or…
Terri Geitgey is the Manager of Library Print Services at MPublishing. On April 4 & 5, she attended the Coalition for Networked Information spring meeting in San Diego, California. I attended the Coalition for Networked Information spring meeting to do a co-presentation with staff from the University of Utah Library on our respective experiences with the Espresso Book Machine (EBM). Our session, The Espresso Book Machine in the Library: Case Studies from Two University Libraries,…
On May 4, I taught an Enriching Scholarship session called The Care and Keeping of eBooks. The title–which I made up when I proposed the session back in December–may not be the best description of what we did. The workshop was really more like “The Dissection and Creation of eBooks.” My goals were that the attendees would: better understand the place of the EPUB format in the landscape of digital publishing have a sense of…
Reports from the Field: This post is by Bryan Smith, applications programmer in the Publishing Technology Group at MPublishing, who recently attended DrupalCon 2011, an international conference about the open source content management software, Drupal. Approximately 3,000 DrupalCon 2011 attendees took over the Chicago’s Sheraton Hotel and Towers between Tuesday, March 8th through Thursday, March 10th. The conference was tremendously educational and fun, featuring countless sessions, code sprints, lightning talks and birds-of-a-feather sessions. Many content…
Four MPublishing staff attended Tools of Change for Publishing 2011: Publishing Without Boundaries earlier this month. Here is a roundup of what each of us found most interesting, provocative, and relevant to our work in university-based digital publishing. Kevin Hawkins Head, Digital Publishing Production There was a lot of buzz at TOCCON 2011. During the two days of the conference, a number of major announcements were made: Borders Group, Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection, Apple…
Reports from the Field: In this series, MPublishing staff share their thoughts & experiences with us from conferences, workshops, events and other collaborative projects. This post is by Seth Johnson, a programmer in the Publishing Technology Group at MPublishing, who recently attended Code4Lib. This year’s code4lib conference presented a dizzying array of information by and for the programmers and technologists working in library environments. The pace of the conference is very fast: most talks were…