Thanksgiving memories

We had Thanksgiving at Adrienne's this year, for the first time. Adrienne, Wayne, Rita, Aeddon, Alden, Alwyn, Arian, John, Brandon and I all enjoyed a delicious meal of turkey, ham and all the fixings. We brought the turkey, and a pumpkin roulade for dessert. Though we didn't stay long after - John was sick, it was a wonderful meal. 

Thanksgiving always makes me think back to the past. In 1979, Tom and Gerry, John, Adrienne, Brandon and I went out to Glen and Becky's home in Port Clinton, Ohio. We lived in Rensselaer at the time, and had just lost John's sister Mary in a motorcycle accident that September. Although making the trip was a bit of a financial hardship, it was very important for us all to be together that year.

Once we moved to NY, we generally had Thanksgiving at our home, and invited family over there. In 2001, we had a large Thanksgiving, and used the parish hall at Saint Peter. Tom and Gerry, Marge and Earl, and dad; Gail and Lynn, Kelly and Randy, Scott, Kelsey, Taylor and Bailey; John and I, Adrienne and Wayne, Aeddon and Alden; Rita, Jesse and her child; Brandon, Corey and Matthew; all were there. We had just lost mom less than a year before, and it was nice to be together with all our loved ones. 

Another significant Thanksgiving was spent mostly on the road. In 2004, Brandon and Corey drove from Medina to Cleveland, Ohio to pick John and I up. John had just been released from his 3 week stay at the Cleveland Clinic, where they had removed his pericardium, and saved his life. That was a very poignant Thanksgiving, and one that the year before we had no idea if we'd be celebrating together. 

This morning, I was looking over Thanksgiving albums, and noticed that in 2007, dad was missing from the picture. It was the first year he didn't come over, and really marked the beginning of the end for him. Four months later he would be gone from my life, but he and mom live on in my heart, always.

Who knows what next year, or the year after that will bring. But I am always grateful for every year and every Thanksgiving I have to share with those I love.

Building the Digital Repository at 3:23am

Here are the challenges-There is a large body of scholarly work produced by the Brockport faculty - how do we:

• identify all the citations?
• get permission from faculty to post their work?
• find out from publishers if and in what format we are allowed to post?
• come up with the article in publishable format?

Right now we have 1204 identified in the initial round of harvesting. Of those, 105 are eligible to be posted in publisher pdf (the ideal format). Please note this is less than 10% of the total. From here, we have to get the faculty's permission to upload. What about the other 1100? About half of those we do not know what the publisher allows, if anything. They will have to be individually searched, perhaps contacted, and then permission requested from faculty. Or perhaps, we should get the permission from the faculty first, so we don't waste time with the publisher, just to have a faculty member say no. (Do they ever say no?)

Maybe another strategy would be to identify a prolific author from each department, and hope they will approve a publishable article, as well as provide us their CV, so we can work person by person. Then, they could act as a champion in their department, to encourage others to work with us. The biggest obstacle that I see is that you have to balance faculty permission gathering with publisher permission gathering. Some publishers (the minority) will allow the formatted pdf from the journal to be posted. Others will only allow preprints (pre-peer review), or post prints (peer reviewed, but not journal formatted). Preprints have little value, and although post prints are somewhat better, they are potentially hard to come by. I know from my days in ILL that faculty often don't even have copies of their published works, so expecting them to have copies of their working papers might be expecting too much.

Ah, workflow issues. And did I mention the challenge of collating the citations and checking for uniqueness? But that is another post, I guess.