Staff Users

Scenarios - Sample Staff Profiles

Mark Subowski, Tech Support - School of Information, University of Michigan
Mark began working with LAMP back in the days when people ate Perl for breakfast and AJAX was still a cleaning detergent. Installing Linux 5 times in one day was par for the course. One thing led to another, and before he knew it he had exchanged college for rubbing shoulders with Silicon Valley's finest at various nerdy events: What could he do? He was young and needed the money.

Then came the bubble burst. Luckily Mark had not found it necessary to live in a house with a huge TV (and one college worn out couch) and a Lamborghini -- taking all his (substantial) savings, Mark made his way to Austin, TX where he worked as a system administrator for a check clearing firm. He got paid well, but the three hour acronym spelling bees, disguised as meetings were too much. After 10 years, he started looking into going back to school, but he quickly realized his experience level pretty much eliminated the need for a degree. However, in the process of checking out programs, he noticed a system administrator position at the School of Information in the University of Michigan. This sounded like a good opportunity, because he could work and take the classes he always wanted to take (for free at that).

It was off to Ann Arbor, to reunite with the educational world he had abandoned so early on (and was still sort of avoiding). The job was good (good benefits), but not as challenging. To fill his time, Mark found interesting projects on campus and spent his side time providing systems support. Through this side gig, he came across a sort of online education initiative, which intrigued him because it kind of fit his mental model of how a non-traditional education could happen. After some inquires, he hooked up with the right people and immediately assumed the position as an administrator for the back-end of a tool that was utilized in validating the intellectual property of the course materials.

Mark’s skills he has acquired along the way include:

Systems administration (Windows/Unix), API Design, C++, C, Perl, Qt, Platform Independence

Tasks:


 * 1) Install tool on servers
 * 2) Add/Remove/Edit initial school/curriculum/dscribe2 information
 * 3) Maintain tool (install updates / deal with problems)

Tyler Anderson, Electronic Publishing Librarian, University of Michigan
Tyler graduated from Michigan State University in 2003 with a degree in journalism. While studying journalism, Tyler became interested in the ways that technology was changing the way ideas and information were being published, stored and distributed. He decided to attend the School of Information at the University of Michigan and study Library Information Science. At the School of Information, Tyler developed skills in web and graphic design which made him an ideal candidate to work in the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan Library. As an Electronic Publishing Librarian, Tyler edits, reviews and prepares scholarly materials created at the University of Michigan to be published and archived electronically.

One of Tyler's challenges is dealing with copyrighted content within the materials which are submitted to him for publishing. Before the Scholarly Publishing Office can publish any material, all images, graphs, and other content must be clear of any copyright restrictions. But Tyler believes that restricting authors from submitting material containing third-party content causes authors to spend an unnecessary amount of time creating original content and that the overall quality is damaged by this process. Tyler feels that allowing authors the freedom to insert their first-choice content objects into articles, regardless of copyright status, would greatly improve the quality of submissions and publications he oversees. Tyler decided that the Scholarly Publishing Office would take the responsibility of verifying the copyright status of everything within a submission.

Tasks:


 * 1) Search all submissions for images, graphs, diagrams, and any other content which could possibly have copyright, privacy or endorsement restrictions.
 * 2) Extract all content objects from each submission and place them in folders, organized by submission.
 * 3) Working through each folder and each object one by one, evaluate each object according to the Scholarly Publishing Office's copyright guidelines.
 * 4) Communicate with authors and copyright holders via email to determine provenance, permission, metadata and other important information about content objects which will affect final decisions about an object or about the nature of the final publication.
 * 5) Keep a log of events and rationales for each content object.
 * 6) Search for possible replacements when a copyright issue cannot be resolved.
 * 7) Reconstruct submissions in collaboration with the authors to prepare them for publishing.