Last month a CSU-wide 2016 ScholarWorks Symposium took place at CSU San Marcos. The symposium program included a presentation about our adoption of Islandora as well as presentations by the Chancellor’s Office Aaron Collier, announcing the decision to migrate CSU repositories from DSpace to a Fedora 4 and Hydra based repository solution by early 2017. There were also presenters from UC San Diego, who outlined their migration to Fedora 4 + Hydra. Zach and Michele, who both attended the symposium, will be sharing their notes with us soon. What does all this mean to us? Our big focus this year is on the new library services platform (ULMS) and on an improved search and discovery experience. But we are also actively involved in piloting and advising on these system-wide developments in digital collection management and presentation. We started getting to know Hydra and Fedora and their close cousins (Sufia, Blacklight, Spotlight) last winter, and we are proudly in the thick of these things now.
One of the things libraries and IT both understand well is the importance of “identifiers.” In fact, anyone who has a phone number, an email address, a mailing address, or a social security number, understands how important it is to have a unique, precise identifier! We know all about identifiers for books (ISBN’s), journals (ISSN’s), and more recently, for journal articles (DOI’s or Digital Object Identifiers). These identifiers make it possible to automatically exchange and link information about books and articles across organizations, time, language, and cultural and physical space. I don’t usually geek out over such things, but the brilliance of a unique author identifier – the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) – is indisputable. Amazingly, a unique author identifier has never existed before. As a result, with the vast number of researchers in the world today, distinguishing which A. Kumar wrote which medical journal article is not an easy task. ORCID is a big step towards being able to represent, exchange, and precisely link not only authors, but all the elements in our system of research: works, places, dates, authors, research instruments, funding agencies, and more. Once all these elements can be identified precisely, we can start to do very cool things like showing how authors are related to each other, or what research was done on what instruments. And because ID geeks like to have fun, there is (I kid you not) a celebration of researcher ID’s in Iceland this November: PIDapalooza. We’ll learn more about ORCID during Open Access Week this year when our Open Access team will be hosting a visitor from ORCID.
Labor Day (or for Canadians, Labour Day) has been a national holiday for more than 100 years, since 1894. The first Labor Day was held in New York City in 1882. A former Department of Labor historian describes the details:
On May 14, 1882, a proposal was made at the Central Labor Union meeting that all workers should join together for a “monster labor festival” in early September. A committee of five people was appointed to find a park for the celebration. They chose Wendel’s Elm Park at 92nd Street and 9th Avenue, the largest park in New York City at that time; the date was set for Tuesday, September 5. By June, they had sold 20,000 tickets with the proceeds going to each local union selling them. In August, the Central Labor Union passed a resolution “that the 5th of September be proclaimed a general holiday for the workingmen in this city.”
At first they were afraid that the celebration was going to be a failure. Many of the workers in the parade had to lose a day’s pay in order to participate. When the parade began only a handful of workers were in it, while hundreds of people stood on the sidewalk jeering at them. But then slowly they came – 200 workers and a band from the Jewelers’ Union showed up and joined the parade. Then came a group of bricklayers with another band. By the time they reached the park, it was estimated that there were 10,000 marchers in the parade in support of workers.
The park was decorated with flags of many nations. Everyone picnicked, drank beer and listened to speeches from the union leadership. In the evening, even more people came to the park to watch fireworks and dance. The newspapers of the day declared it a huge success and “a day of the people.”
As we head into our own massive fall gatherings here at Cal Poly, we are proud of our work, of each other, and of our colleagues and union leaders who will help us kick off another year together!
Have a wonderful Labor Day weekend,
Anna