New Staff Member Joins Library IT

Please join us in welcoming Sara Cronquist to Library IT,  as our Senior Administrative Assistant. Sara will divide her time between Library IT and Mansuscripts and Archives (MSSA), handling supply ordering, expense reimbursement, agendas and minutes, budget reporting (mostly in MSSA), assisting with events and coordinating interview candidates, and generally keeping things organized and running smoothly.

Sara has worked in the non-profit education space before; at Earthplace Nature Discovery Center she managed the organization’s CMS, as well as coordinated their budgets and outreach/engagement efforts. She is also an experienced office manager with a degree in Photography and Digital Imaging from Paier College of Art in Hamden, CT.

Sara’s first day with Library IT will be Wednesday September 6th. She will spend her mornings with Library IT, from 8:30am to 12:15pm, and after lunch, she will join MSSA until the end of the day.

Sara’s desk is located in Dale Hendrickson’s office at SML 411.

Welcome, Sara!

New Staff Announcements

Over the last month, Library IT has had the good fortune of welcoming two new staff members.

In early June, Keith Boyd-Carter joined LIT as an Operating Systems Programmer for Enterprise Systems and Services. He began working in this role last October as a contractor making the leap to staff quickly this past June. In this capacity, Keith performs system management, application deployment and infrastructure upgrades. His first project at Yale was to work on the Avalon Media System for the Gilmore Music Library. The Avalon Media System is an open-source system for managing and providing access to large collections of digital audio and video.

Prior to coming to Yale, Keith worked for Owl Cyber Defense Solutions as a Quality Assurance Technician. Keith quickly grew in his role at Owl from QA Technician to Systems Administrator. Owl Cyber Defense Solutions focuses on cyber security for networks using a patented technology.  Keith received his degree in Computer Engineering and Technology at Central Connecticut State University. He looks forward to incorporating new technologies for the ease of day-to-day operations, as was evidenced by his June Tech Talk about using Ansible at SML.

Also, in June,  Lise Gazzillo joined LIT as the Client Engagement Coordinator. In this role, Lise is responsible for the Library IT’s outreach and communication efforts. She will plan and produce LIT’s monthly “Tech Talks” as well as the monthly newsletter. If you any ideas or topics for future “Tech Talks” you would like to explore she would love to hear your thoughts, email her at lise.gazzillo@yale.edu. Lise will also develop a LIT brand book based on client feedback and in coordination with University and Library branding. Managing and creating content for LIT’s social media presence is another project Lise will undertake.

Lise has been designing and producing websites since there were only 216 browser-safe colors to use. She was responsible for creating and producing content for Time Warner’s Road Runner Service, one of the country’s first broadband cable modem services. She worked with Microsoft Consulting Group, based out of New York City, creating multiple user interface designs for their clients. A project she is particularly proud of completing was a STEAM website for the National Academy of Science titled, “Engineer Girl!” She has a vast knowledge of content strategy, specializing in non profits and startups. Lise is excited about her new role and is looking forward to applying her experience to upcoming LIT projects.

 

Keith and Lise can be reached at keith.boyd-carter@yale.edu  and lise.gazzillo@yale.edu respectively. Welcome to the Team!

New Manager of Workstation and Technology Services, Beatrice Richardson

Greetings to all- I have joined Yale Library IT as the Manager of Workstation and Technology Services (W&TS).   I am originally from Boston MA, but I have lived in several states over the past 15 years. During that time I have had the privilege to work for a few other higher education institutions including: Vanderbilt University, North Carolina State University and most recently New York University’s Division of Libraries.

My role with in Library IT will include managing our technical support staff, Reon Keller and Frederick Rodriguez.  Helping them to continue to provide responsive and reliable customer service. Our unit is responsible for the lifecycle of the Library’s networked staff computing infrastructure including asset management, workstation support and collaboration efforts between LIT and University ITS.

My office is located in SML 509 and my phone number is 432-2491.  Please feel free to stop by or call to say “Hi”.

New Staff in the Digital Library Programming Services Department

I’d like to introduce everyone to Tracy MacMath, she joined us this week as a User Interface Programmer who will be working primarily on Hydra, Blacklight, Ladybird and other Hydra related applications we adopt such as Avalon. Previously Tracy worked as a User Experience Producer at Gartner and received a Masters of Science in Interactive Communications from Quinnipiac University.

In addition to introducing Tracy, I thought it might help to offer some quick bios for the whole team.

Michael Friscia – Manager, Digital Library Programming Services
michael.friscia@yale.edu 
I arrived at Yale in 2007 and worked primarily supporting workstations, ILLiad and programming on various projects for the LSF, Map Department and the wide range of Digital Library interfaces. Since then Library IT has changed quite a bit and I now manage the group that is primarily responsible for working with the Hydra implementation in support of a number of grant funded projects including Arcadia, NEH and the Dr. Henry Kissinger Papers. I started programming early, my first computer arriving for Christmas in 1979 and recently celebrated 30 years of programming C++ applications though still enjoy programming in Algol and Basic on a variety of vintage computers in a collection that spans from 1964 to 1995 with some overflow in my office that I crank up from time to time. I enjoy writing software of all types but spend my free time working on several open source video game and game emulation projects.

Eric James, Senior Programmer Analyst
eric.james@yale.edu
My official title is Programmer Analyst, Library IT.  I was hired 7 years ago to work on a digital repository service that became the current YaleFindingAidDatabase, and a grant project A MiddleEasternElectronicLibrary (AMEEL) that was one of the earliest adopters of a software stack for the submission, achiving and dissemination of digital material.  This work has matured over the years and is now basically taken the form of Hydra, an interinstitutional project with these same goals bringing together such components as fedora, solr, and mysql.  I am a programmer on these these projects (php, java and ruby/RAILS) and have been involved in various teams such as the Digitization Task Force, the YFAD Coordinating Committee, the Digital Repository Archiving Committee, and most recently the Kissinger Project working to coordinate technology with our strategic plans.  I have participated as a programmer in several sprints for the fedora 4 project (the future underlying repository of most of our solutions) and in the development and use of the hydra stack, and am involved in working groups related to these projects.  Throughout these projects I have worked with software project management tools such at GIT, sharepoint, wrike, basecamp, pivotal tracker, jira, confluence wikis, and classesv2.  I have been involved in several conferences including participation as presenter, and in lightning talks and poster sessions at Open Repositories, code4lib, hydraConnect and the DigitalLibraryFoundation.

Osman Din, Senior Programmer Analyst
osman.din@yale.edu
I got into software engineering, and programming in particular, due to my background in Computer Science. My current career focus is on developing back-end large-scale services for digital content management and publishing, as well as writing web applications and tools that aid in this enterprise. Besides other assignments or projects that I participate in, the bulk of my time is dedicated currently to two major projects, Ladybird 2 and Fedora 4.  Ladybird 2 is a Java application for managing the publishing and discovery of digital content to repositories (such as Fedora) and user-facing web applications (such as the Hydra interfaces). I’m the lead developer for this project. The code is written via IntelliJ, lives in GitHub (eventually, it will become an open source project), and is managed via Jenkins for continuous integration. For Fedora 4, which is an open source repository system with about 30 developers, I keep the code that I write in a fork on GitHub, and submit it to the Fedora 4 project team lead in the form of GitHub pull requests. The code is tested automatically for integration and fitness via Travis and Jenkins; the documentation for new functionality is kept up-to-date in Confluence; the status updates for features and bugs are recorded in Pivotal Tracker. My favorite tools for software design and programming are IntelliJ, bash, Eclipse (for proprietary frameworks), Virtual Box, Git, Jenkins and LucidChart.

Lakeisha Robinson, Programmer Analyst
lakeisha.robinson@yale.edu
How I began a career in programming:
Immediately following college is when I started my career at IBM. It was there at IBM, where I designed and coded programs in C/Assembly, when I realized how much I loved programming. I had a hardware background in Electrical Engineering and didn’t have a strong programming background. When I left that job I decided to pursue a degree in Computer Science to strengthen my programming skills. I started my career here at Yale University 2 years ago. I’ve participated on many exciting projects including Quicksearch, Kissinger, Ladybird and Findit.

Projects I’ve worked on and am currently working on:
I am the technical lead on the Blacklight based Quicksearch project. Quicksearch is where we are unifying our Orbis and Morris records to be searched in the same interface. I am responsible for many of the code changes for the setup, ingest and interface functionality. I am also working on the Kissinger project where I am responsible for the discovery of Kissinger material. I’m also one of the original contributors to our Blacklight based digital ‘Findit’ interface where I was responsible for the creation of the MODS formatted XML document retrieving data from the Ladybird database. I also was responsible for the object discovery in the interface and I continue to do ongoing work on enhancement.

Anju Meenattoor, Programmer Analyst
anju.meenattoor@yale.edu
I have been working in IT for 8 years focusing mainly on web development and C#.Net applications. I started my career at Yale in January 2014 and am current working on Dr. Henry Kissinger project. Since January, I have been involved in developing applications for importing Kissinger MODS files, automate Kissinger digital file import into ladybird, Manual QC tool for checking Kissinger digital files and Ladybird maintenance.

Tracy MacMath, User Interface Programmer
tracy.macmath@yale.edu
I’m the newest member of the Digital Library Programming team. As a User Interface Programmer, I’ll be working primarily on our implementation of Hydra, Blacklight, Ladybird and other Hydra-related applications we adopt in the future (such as Avalon). Before coming to Yale, I was a User Experience Producer for the Marketing group at Gartner in Stamford. I received a Master of Science in Interactive Communications from Quinnipiac University, and an undergraduate degree in music (drums and percussion).