Martin Haye is moving on, but not too far!
After almost 17 years designing, implementing, and maintaining innovative publishing technologies for the CDL and UC, Martin Haye is moving to the other “side” of the application equation. As of February 1, 2020, Martin begin transitioning into the Infrastructure and Applications Support team, where he will leverage his vast knowledge and expertise as a developer to provide robust systems infrastructure to all of CDL’s services and projects. The Publishing & Special Collections group will greatly miss his dedicated presence on our team, but is happy that his talents will be marshalled in support of the entire organization.
Although Martin is not leaving the CDL, we want to take this moment to acknowledge and thank him for his many contributions to our group’s work, to the CDL, and to UC. Martin has a longstanding connection to UC, beginning with his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley, where he received his BA in Computer Science in 1991. After spending over a decade in industry, he came to the CDL in 2003 when he was hired to build a flexible system for search and display of digital content, a system that came to be known as XTF–the eXtensible Text Framework. XTF became a core application framework at the CDL, used for experiments (remember Relvyl?), projects with partners (yes, the Mark Twain Project Online still lives!), and CDL’s flagship publishing and special collections services Calisphere, OAC, and eScholarship. Organizations around the world continue to use XTF to support access to finding aids and special collections materials.
Martin’s talents for designing systems and developing brilliant solutions to complex challenges helped catapult eScholarship from a vendor supplied product to an in-house, flexible, high-performance system tailored to the specific needs and aspirations of UC. Architecting and building first a new public access interface and then, in remarkably short order, a bespoke submission system, Martin gave the Publishing team an independent platform that positioned us to respond to the many needs and initiatives at UC, not the least of which was the UC Academic Senate Open Access policy, followed not long after by the groundbreaking UC Presidential Open Access policy.
In addition to his many contributions as an employee, Martin is widely acknowledged as a wonderful colleague. He has participated on Staff Council and the Halloween Committee, helped organize CampCDL, and convened CDL’s Happy Hour. He redefined what it meant to be a remote employee by building “virtual Martin,” a robot with a sport coat and jaunty hat who could wander the halls and attend meetings (sometimes even on other floors!). Following the success of the robot, and with the increase in the number of staff working away from the office, he built CDL’s video cart, which for years now has enabled distributed folks to more fully participate in meetings. Attuned as well to the little things, Martin has made sure to satisfy everyone’s need for gum and silly putty!
Most importantly though, Martin is always generous with his time and expertise, is interested in getting new perspectives and learning from others, and is a kind and reliable colleague. Although we will miss working with him everyday on our team, we are excited for Martin to tackle a new set of challenges and know that he will continue to make significant contributions to the CDL.
