Meet Adam Brin

By Ellen Meltzer, Information Services Manager

Who is this mild-mannered, scholarly-looking fellow whose office walls are plastered with images so compelling, you don’t know where to look first?

It’s Adam Brin, a Technical Project Manager in CDL’s Discovery & Delivery group.  (The whole crew includes Patricia Martin, Debra Bartling, Bob Brandriff, Lynne Cameron, Stephanie Collett, Rebecca Doherty, Randy Lai, Virginia Sinclair, Michael Thwaites, Margery Tibbetts, Sherry Willhite, Leslie Wolf, Claudia Woo, and Lena Zentall.) Adam provides technical support for resources critical to users of our tools and services: the Next Generation Melvyl Pilot supported by WorldCat Local (WCL), UC-eLinks, and HathiTrust.  His work is varied, but in the case of Next Gen Melvyl, includes deep analysis of technical aspects of the project; moving to rolling out Request; coordinating with OCLC to bring out new features; providing technical support to user interface designers to insure appropriate data is available to support new features; and analyzing and aggregating users statistics.  Adam is the man to ask if you have a question about the “guts” of the Next Gen Melvyl Pilot.  For HathiTrust, he is focusing on the implementation of the user interface for HathiTrust.

Adam comes to us with a passion for making museum and library resources available to users.  Following these interests, his career path included stints at AMICO, Luna Imaging, and as director of library technology at the Tri-College (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore) Consortium in Pennsylvania. CDL provides a good match for Adam’s skills and interests—the UC libraries have been consumers of both AMICO and Luna, a fact noted (and filed away for a while) by Adam while in these previous positions.  Among his other talents, Adam has also made contributions to SFX, including the “linking within a frame” feature, a popular addition to UC-eLinks.

After a stretch at a much smaller institution, Adam admits to being humbled by the sheer number of people using our systems on a daily basis.  “Yesterday,” he commented, “there were almost 50,000 page views in Next Gen Melvyl—on one day.  It may not be so much compared to Yahoo, but it’s definitely on a scale I wasn’t used to in my previous jobs.”  Among his greatest challenges at CDL are managing the dizzying array of issues he juggles, and the scope of UC—in terms of both technological and human issues.  We’re so glad you’re here to do the juggling, Adam!