James Weinheimer

I am a librarian with experience in most areas of the library, including being a director, plus I have extensive international experience. An especially important part of my career has been devoted to open source software development, primarily taking advantage of free resources on the web. I am an author and have done consultation with different libraries. Finally I am a frequent contributor to library email lists.


Experience


Trip to Lisbon 2012
To see my complete experience, consult my resume. I successfully managed a library to achieve Middle States Accreditation, relying on the tools I created for students and faculty. I have also experimented a lot with different technologies to make the library catalog more useful. I have written a complete information literacy handbook utilizing a large library wiki that I incorporated into the library's catalog as closely as I could.

Some of the pages from this wiki have been assigned as required reading for library science students.

Slavic Cataloging Manual

I wrote the Slavic Cataloging Manual while working at Princeton University when I was Slavic Cataloger. It began as a paper manual for training and was one of the first documents I made for the web. When I moved to Italy, I gave it to ACRL and is now hosted at Indiana.
Slavic Cataloging Manual Current at Indiana University
Slavic Cataloging Manual (Original)

Innovations in the Catalog

Currently, most of my innovations are in the library catalog of the American University of Rome. These include experiments using various tools, and probably the best way to learn about them is to view this short presentation, one of the various Two-Minute Tutorials I made while there. One of these records is Chelovek s kinoapparatom [videorecording] = Man with a movie camera / proizvodstvo VUFKU ; [directed by Dziga Vertov] where the searcher can watch the movie from inside the catalog record. One of the major innovations was the Extend Search.

Early Web Attempts & Writings

I made some very early attempts on the web, dating from the mid 1990s. Here are a selection of those early attempts, primarily from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Some of the images and links no longer work.
First Home Page
Metadata Creation: Down and Dirty
Chess Page
Slavic Resources page
HTML/Metadata documentation

Short biography

I was born in Kansas and grew up in New Mexico. I worked in grocery stores for 15 years before earning my MLIS and getting into libraries. In 2001, my wife and I moved to Rome, Italy. I have also been interested in the history and bibliography of chess, wrote some articles on chess, and even curated an exhibition of the major chess collection at Princeton University, one of the high points of my life.

 
 

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