A month!

I haven't posted in a while, mostly because the Monday after I returned from Code4Lib I interviewed for a new job at Cornell and spent the next months in the bizarre limbo that is being an internal candidate. I did my first interview in about 13 years and my first all-day academic interview ever.

Inspired by this article on how (little) librarians negotiate, I did make some effort to negotiate on by own behalf. I got something but not what I wanted, I did not get my offer rescinded or any of the other things people worry about. Negotiate!

Anyway, I'm a month into my new position as a metadata operations librarian and things are going fairly well. I have spent most of the last month working on our rare and manuscript collection deparment's migration to ArchivesSpace and specifically the part that relates to exchanging marc data between Voyager and ASpace.

I started a plugin for our custom import mappings which kept me playing in Ruby, which is nice, while also doing close reading of marc records which is something I really have not done before. A good bridge between my old and new.

I feel like I should throw in some links but if you're working in ASpace, you know the usual culprits. Work at Yale, the Bentley, UNLV and Harvard have all been extremely useful to look at.

Because I moved from a position where I was Samvera focused, I can't help compare the two OSS communities here a bit. ASpace feels very quiet after the raucousness of Samvera but I'm looking forward to seeing how it may be possible to get more involved. ASpace gets to enjoy more focus and a much narrower spread of use cases. The rate of change seems slower, but given how many people wanted Samvera to slow down, that may not be a bad thing.