Washington & Lee (1992-2005)

W&L was on the leading edge of work on computers in libraries, thanks to Law Librarian John Doyle, an indefatigable tinkerer who had set up a Netlink server and then an implementation of Gopher (1993: " ...probably the single most useful resource on the Internet, not only for lawyers and law librarians, but for all users. By accessing this one location, it is possible to access almost any other resource available on the Internet through a simple, menu-driven system..."). John was happy to have me play in the resources he managed, and I soon started to build an Internet presence for W&L's undergraduate library. I attended SIGWAIS at Library of Congress in July 1993 and learned about Mosaic (one of the first graphical Web browsers), and soon thereafter John had the requisite software running at W&L, and I learned basic HTML and started to build the public face of the university's Web presence. Here was the hypertext environment I'd dreamt of, mine to use in any ways I could imagine. I did a lot of imagining, and documented my process as I went.

From the very beginnings of the Web at W&L, I pioneered in my own space of the W&L computing environment, building web pages to explore the teaching possibilities of the medium, and teaching faculty colleagues and undergraduates (see a brief history of the early days, and a personal chronology). Before there were blogs I was posting my 'logfiles' as public Web pages to track my discovery process in the many endeavors of a working librarian, to communicate my discoveries to colleagues, and to create examples for how hypertext and the web could be used in education. I taught students to make web pages and explicitly required that they maintain logfiles of their own. I taught a variety of courses in the University Scholars program, worked on emerging Digital Library issues, and was a participant in W&L's efforts to develop a unique approach to International Studies. I put a lot of effort into the possibilities of Geographical Information Systems as a cross-disciplinary pedagogical tool, and spent more than five years experimenting myself and trying (almost without effect) to convince Library and Computing and disciplinary colleagues of the importance of spatial data.

Here's a clutch of links to some examples of my own logfiles for many subject areas and purposes (linkrot abounds, but it's interesting to trace what I was thinking and finding):

History of Technology 1998 (preparing for a University Scholars course)

GIS explorations 1998 and continued and still more and the Miley GIS project

Humanity Computing 1999 (preparing a University Scholars course)

International Education Advisory Group deliberations 1999-2001

Digital Libraries 2001

Human Geography 2001 (preparing a University Scholars course)

Sabbatical 2002

Articulatorium and log for the Global Stewardship Program 2003

Blogworld

Five Year Plan, 2004-2009 (I retired in 2005 --see The Disgruntlement File)

others, mostly 2003-2005 and a timeline linking logfiles from 1998-2005