Posts

I have now migrated a library discovery layer twice in two years. At my previous institution I finished an EBSCO Discovery Service update just before leaving. Then I arrived at my current job, assessed the environment, and realized that the Primo instance I’d inherited was still running Classic — not Primo VE, not NDE, but the original, pre-Angular, pre-modern-stack Primo that Ex Libris has been nudging libraries away from for years. Nobody had upgraded it because, until I arrived, there was no dedicated systems administrator to do it. ...

A few years ago I co-created a digital archive. The Victorian Jewish Writers Project began as a scholarly problem: nineteenth-century Jewish writers in Britain had been systematically excluded from the literary canon, their work scattered across out-of-print volumes, digitized newspaper runs, and institutional collections that had no particular reason to surface them together. The project was an attempt to do something about that, to gather, describe, and make discoverable a body of writing that existing finding tools were not built to find. ...

What Actually Happens When You Request an Article You’re deep in a research rabbit hole. You find a citation that looks perfect, click the link, and instead of the article you get a paywall or a dead end. So you click “Request via Interlibrary Loan,” fill out a form, and wait. A day or two later the PDF lands in your inbox. Magic, right? Not magic. Infrastructure. I want to walk through what actually happens in that window between your click and your PDF, because it involves half a dozen systems talking to each other in ways that are genuinely interesting and almost entirely invisible to the people who depend on them every day. ...

Sometimes sysadmin work can seem relatively thankless–you can be three layers deep in a log file, tracing why a resource-sharing request silently failed at 2am, even while you realize that nobody noticed. That’s not because the service doesn’t matter, but because when infrastructure works, it’s invisible. When it breaks, it’s a crisis. Just as most of us don’t regularly think of the pipes carrying water in and out of home unless something goes awry, digital infrastructure is invisible to most people most of the time. To use a tired phrase, that’s a feature, not a bug. ...