Tod A. Olson

"How do you know I'm mad," said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Intro

I am a Sr. Programmer/Analyst at the University of Chicago Library. My time is split between Integrated Library Systems and the Digital Library Development Center. I finished a Master's Degree in the UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information Science in May 2005, through the LEEP distance education program.

Contact

Address: Tod A. Olson
The University of Chicago Library
1100 East 57th Street, JRL 220
Chicago, Illinois, 60637
Phone: 773 702 8764
Email: tod (at) uchicago.edu

Projects

Not many of my projects are publicly visable. Here's one one that is:

Chopin Early Editions: CEE is a collection of Chopin scores published between 1830 and 1880. These are digitzed versions of scores in our print collection, made available via Greenstone.

Posters, Presentations, and other professional activity

Greenstone: Installation to Production. Laura Sheble, Tod Olson, Allison Zhang, Ian Witten. Panel. ALA Annual Conference 2005 June 23-29, 2005, Chicago, IL.

Greenstone in Practice: Implementations of an Open Source Digital Library System. Allison Zhang, Ian Witten, Laura Sheble, Tod Olson. Panel. LITA 2004 National Forum October 7-10, 2004, St. Louis, Missouri.

DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) Web-Delivery Workshop. Invited participant. Oxford, UK, Julie 29-30, 2004.

Toward Melodic Access and Title Uniformity in the Chopin Early Editions Music Digital Library. J. Stephen Downie and Tod Olson. Poster. JCDL 2004, June 7-11, 2004, Tucson, AZ.

Online Chopin Variorum Editions Workshop. Invited participant. Philadelphia, PA, May 26-27, 2004.

Digital Libraries with Greenstone: An Open Source Solution. Frederick Miller, Tod A. Olson, and Curtis Kelch. Educause Midwest Regional Conference, April 21-23, 2004, Chicago, IL.

Building Collections with Greenstone Digital Library Software. Digital Library Federation Fall Forum 2003, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Nov. 17-29, 2003. Talk materials.

Building Chopin Early Editions. Tod A. Olson. Invited speaker, Digital Sheet Music session. International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Baltimore, Maryland, Oct. 27-29, 2003

Chopin Early Editions: The construction and usage of a collection of digital scores. Tod A. Olson and J. Stephen Downie. Poster. International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Baltimore, Maryland, Oct. 27-29, 2003

Reading

Currently reading:

Fiction

  • Fleming, Ian. From Russia with Love. 1974.

Recent reading:

Fiction

  • Jin Yong. Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain. 1959. (Translated by Olivia Mok, 2nd. ed., 1996.)
  • Leiber, Fritz. Conjure Wife. 1953.
  • Deighton, Len. Spy Story. 1974.
  • Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal. 2004.

Non-fiction

  • Passini, Romedi. Wayfinding: A Study of Spatial Problem Solving with Implications for Physical Design. Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University. 1977.
  • Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. 1960.
  • Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies. 1997.

2005:

  • Decker, Ronald, Theirry Depaulis & Micheal Dummet. A Wicked Pack of Cards: the Origins of the Occult Tarot. 1996.
  • Ayers, Edward L. What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on Reflections on the South and Southern History. 2005.
  • Vance, Jack. The Night Face. 1963.
  • Vance, Jack. Big Planet. 1952.
  • Bradley, Marion Zimmer. Hunters of the Red Moon. 1973.
  • Vance, Jack. The Last Castle. 1966.
  • Leiber, Fritz. Gather, Darkness! 1950.
  • Jager, Eric. The Last Duel: a true story of crime, scandal, and trial by combat in medieval France. 2004.
  • Dumézil, Georges. Gods of the Ancient Northmen. Einar Haugen, ed. 1973.
  • Vance, Jack. The Dying Earth, 1950.
  • Leiber, Fritz. A Spectre is Haunting Texas, 1968.
  • Algren, Nelson. Chicago: City on the Make, 1951.
  • Rosenfeld, Louis & Morville, Peter. Information architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd ed. 2002.
  • Moore, C. L. Northwest Smith. 1981 (stories originally published in 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1957).
  • Le Guinn, Ursula K. The Farthest Shore. 1972.
  • Le Guinn, Ursula K. The Tombs of Atuan. 1971.
  • Furst, Alan. The Polish Officer. 1995.
  • Le Guinn, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea. 1968.
  • Shapiro, Laura. Something from the oven: reinventing dinner in 1950s America. 2004
  • Leiber, Fritz. A Spectre is Haunting Texas, 1968.
  • Keneally, Thomas. American Scoundrel: the Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickels, 2002.
  • Leiber, Fritz. The Big Time, 1958.

2004:

  • Adelson, Roger. London and the Invention of the Middle East : Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922. 1994.
  • Kasdorf, William E., ed. The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing. 2003.
  • Pratchett, Terry. Monstrous Regiment. 2003.
  • Leiber, Fritz. Ships to the Stars. 1964.
  • Bulmer, Kenneth. The Million Year Hunt. 1964.
  • James, Lawrence. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. 2000.
  • Delaney, Samuel R. Empire Star. 1966.
  • Purdom, Tom. The Tree Lord of Imeten. 1966.
  • Anderson, Poul. Hrolf Kraki's Saga. 1973.
  • Le Guinn, Ursula K. Left Hand of Darkness 1966
  • Azimov, Izaac. The Caves of Steel. 1953, 1954.
  • Le Guinn, Ursula K. Rocannon's World. 1966.

Interests