\n\nTowards the end of 2008 I was working (remotely) for Valueclick Media (formerly Fastclick.com). It had generally been a fun job with smart and interesting coworkers and decent pay, even if the product (an ad network catering largely to bottom-feeding advertisers and web sites) wasn't something that kept me warm at night. But after the failure of strategically important project we had been working on for over a year, the writing was on the wall, and — just after my birthday, and just before Christmas — I was laid off.\n\nWe were looking deep into the heart of a recession and Alabama, Tuscaloosa in particular, is not exactly a high-tech mecca. Unless you think working on Sharepoint deployment qualifies as \"high-tech\". I've used Sharepoint (which is basically Microsoft's answer to Lotus Notes) and let's just say that's not a career path I plan to explore.\n
Any Port in a Storm
\nI should mention we had two young twins (born in March of that year) so this was pretty much perfect timing. After bouncing around head hunters for a month, I ended up applying for a job at the University of Alabama as a programmer in the library.\n\nNow, money has never been enormously important to me, but I had baby twins. The salary with the new job was roughly half what I had been getting at Valueclick Media (and I had gotten that far after resetting my career in 2004 after my business in Sydney went under, so it was the second time in less than ten years I'd basically gone back to \"fresh out of college\" salary levels). Still, we kept hearing about people like me in New York who were now flipping burgers.\n\nThe best thing about the new job was that while it was underpaid, my role was actually very ambitious. My boss (Associate Dean Tom Wilson) wanted to figure out a way to improve digital asset workflows. The library was currently using a product called CONTENTdm which is, despite being provided by a not-for-profit, both quite expensive and pretty much a total pain in the ass for anyone concerned.\n\nDuring the job interview I eventually laid it out: \"basically you have a repository of digital assets and metadata, and you want a magic box that looks at this repository and creates wonderful user interface that lets users search and view all this stuff by magic\". (I paraphrase, of course. My memory is not that good.) They agreed that this is what they'd want in the ideal world.\nProof of Concept
\nThe test case was the Cabanis EAD (an XML specification), a \"finding aid\" that, when reasonably well-formated becomes a 500 page book. We had a bunch of documents like this and grant money that stipulated it was to be made available online (before my hire date). I had on-the-fly EAD rendering working within a couple of weeks, and a complete \"magic\" system prototyped in less than a month.\n\nEventually, the Dean decided to name this project Acumen.\nVersion 1.0
\nOver the next six months, Acumen was refined to the point where we decided to call it 1.0. At the Spring 2010 CNI membership meeting three of us, Tom Wilson, Jody deRidder, and I, presented Acumen as an open source project. (We've only just, as of May 2011, gotten clearance to actually open source it, and it should be available for download real soon now.)\nWhat is it?
\nJody and I wrote up Acumen fairly comprehensively for Code4Lib in the middle of 2010. But if you want the nutshell version, it's a web application that automatically indexes a repository of digital assets and their associated metadata and produces a nice search and display interface for all that stuff. The Acumen codebase itself is small and as simple as I could make it — most of the heavy lifting is done by XSL.\n\nUnlike rival systems it runs on the cheapest and simplest possible server configurations (PHP and MySQL, no Tomcat or whatever required), requires no ingestion (if your stuff is named correctly and your metadata is in the right format, you're done), and is highly and easily customizable (via CSS and XSL — it's hard to be more flexible than that).\nMoving On
\nI'm starting a new job on Monday. I'd like to think Acumen will go on without me. Most of the software I've written has faded away when I've moved on — there are two exceptions I can think of — the software templates I developed at Learning Curve remained in use for years after I left, and a database program I developed at the ACT Housing Trust in my first professional programming job turned out to live long after I left (to my utter astonishment).","$updatedAt":"2024-06-05T09:10:30.278+00:00",path:"acumen",_created:"2024-07-09T20:30:09.582Z",id:"4179",_modified:"2024-07-09T20:30:09.582Z","$id":"4179",_path:"post/path=acumen"},"page/path=blog":{path:"blog",css:"",imageUrl:"",prefetch:[{regexp:"^\\/(([\\w\\d]+\\/)*)([\\w-]+)\\/?$",path:"post/path=[3]"}],tags:["public"],source:"",title:"",description:"",_path:"page/path=blog"}}