Library Staff News
a. The CDL Welcomes Peter Brantley; Thanks John Ober (Dan Greenstein)
I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Peter Brantley to the position of Director of Technologies for the CDL. The Director of Technologies has lead responsibility for the development and management of the technical infrastructure and the technical staff supporting CDL operations. In partnership with co-library staff from the campuses and the wider digital library community, the position also oversees development of new technologies and provides leadership in establishing a technical research agenda.
Peter is clearly one of the luminaries in the community of research libraries with significant digital development programs. He is currently Director, Information Technology Services, Division of Libraries and NYU Press at New York University. In that role he has led the deployment of many campus-wide applications including e-reserves, electronic gateways, and web services and has managed digital library development projects of national scope and partnerships. Peter is a participant in the Internet2/Mace Shibboleth project for user authentication and authorization, which has direct implications for digital library services. The Digital Library Federation and the Coalition of Networked Information are partners in the Shibboleth project and Peter has represented NYU in both of those organizations.
Many UC staff will remember and appreciate Peter’s earlier ties to UC. He served as Director of Academic Information Systems at the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at UC San Francisco, and more recently as Director of Computing Services for the College of Letters and Science at Berkeley. The CDL is thrilled to welcome Peter back to the UC community and the west coast. He expects to take up his position on March 24, 2003.
This will mark the conclusion of John Ober’s interim responsibility as Director of CDL Technologies, which he has carried since May 2002 (along with his position as Director of Education and Strategic Innovation). John’s tenure has had the challenges of major technical transitions and expansion. These include the Melvyl-T project, the addition of SFX/UC-eLinks, establishment or redesign of Counting California, the Online Archive of California, and a Consortial Borrowing System, and a renegotiation of data center machine room services. We are extremely thankful for John’s willingness to step into the breach and for the successful and quietly confident nature of his leadership during the recruitment for a permanent director. John will resume full-time attention to education, outreach, evaluation and strategic planning for the CDL and also lend his expertise in those areas to systemwide library planning.
As you have the opportunity, I urge you to welcome Peter to the family of UC libraries and to thank John for a job well done.
b. Ravikumar Gudipati Joins Access Programming Group
Ravikumar Gudipati will be joining the Access Programming Group in the new Programmer/Analyst position on April 7th. Ravi has more than eleven years of experience with software development in the internet environment, working for a diverse group of organizations that include PG&E, Telephia Market Track, Barclays, Hollywood Deluxe Color Lab, Walt Disney, and Minnesota Schools. He has worked extensively with such technologies as Java, Perl, JSP, servlets, RDBMS, and XML to develop a range of web-based applications ranging from such functions as data warehousing to college student and staff administration to circuit management and database conversion.