The Coffee's On, Let's Get to Work

Gluejar is becoming real. I'm pleased to announce the first three hires for Gluejar's new business of "ungluing ebooks".

Amanda Mecke is an expert in literary rights management. Before founding her own literary agency, Amanda was VP, Director of Subsidiary Rights for Bantam Dell, a division of Random House Inc. from 1989-2003, where she led a department that sold international and domestic book rights and pioneered early electronic licenses for subscription databases, CD-ROMs, audiobooks, and ebooks. She was also a co-leader of the Random House/SAP Contracts and Royalties software development team. Prior to joining Bantam Dell, Amanda ran the New York marketing office of the University of California Press. While there she served the board of the American Association of University Presses and was President of Women in Scholarly Publishing. Amanda has been a speaker at the Frankfurt Book Messe Rights Workshop, NYU Summer Publishing Program, American Independent Writers conference, and the International Women’s Writers Guild. She has a B.A. from Pitzer College, Claremont, California and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA.  Amanda will continue to represent original work by her literary agency clients.

Although our founding team will be be playing many roles at once, Amanda will be spending much of her time reaching out to rights-holders and identifying works that will attract financial support from book lovers who want to see the ebooks available for free to anyone, anywhere. Her experience in both trade and academic publishing, together with her keen insight into the world of book rights, stood her above a lot of great people who expressed interest in working for Gluejar. Amanda's Gluejar.com email address is amecke. Contact her with your ideas for books that deserve to be free.

Raymond Yee is a data architect, author, consultant, and teacher.  He is author of the leading book on web mashups, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (published by Apress and licensed under a Creative Commons license).   At the UC Berkeley School of Information, he taught Mixing and Remixing Information, a course on using APIs to create mashups.  An open data and open government aficionado, he recently co-wrote three influential reports on how the US government can improve its efforts to make data and services available through APIs. Raymond served as the Integration Advisor for the Zotero Project (a widely used open source research tool) and managed the Zotero Commons, a collaboration between George Mason University and the Internet Archive. Raymond has been an invited speaker about web technology at the Library of Congress, Fashion Institute of Technology, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, American Library Association, the Open Education conference, Code4lib, Educause, and NISO. While earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to middle and high school students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. Raymond is an erstwhile tubaist, admirer of J. S. Bach, and son of industrious Chinese-Canadian restaurateurs.

I've admired Raymond's work for several years now, and the work that he's done is very much is tune with the technical vision I have for an ebook crowd-funding website. The interfaces it will expose to other websites and the data mash-ups it will enable will be just as important as the website itself. Expect that any webpage- book blog, face book page, or library online catalog, will be able to combine book data and user interaction with the effort of nudging the book towards Open Access. Raymond's Gluejar.com email address is rdhyee. Contact him with ideas about how your website can work with ours.

Andromeda Yelton is former Latin teacher and recent library science graduate (with a background in mathematics) who's quickly made a name for herself in the library world.  She has a BA in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, an MA in Classics from Tufts, and recently completed her MLS from Simmons. She blogs at Across Divided Networks and at ALA TechSource, and last year won  the LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award for an article on  A Simple Scheme for Book Classification Using Wikipedia. She was named an ALA Emerging Leader this year.

Andromeda's been mentioned in this blog before. In January, I wrote about her fund-raising to "Buy India a Library". She also has first-hand experience with public broadcasting- she was once a listener contestant on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Andromeda has already started work on a new Gluejar corporate web site. Her Gluejar.com email address is andromeda. Contact her with all your libraryish ideas.

You can follow the Gluejar team on Twitter with a single click at @gluejar/team.

Don't be surprised if my blog post are less frequent- I'll have a lot to keep me busy!