Data Architecture: I was an active member of the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee, the ARLIS/NA Artists’ Books Thesaurus project, and an OCLC initiative on Web archiving metadata. I used to contribute to development of international schemas, controlled vocabularies, and content standards for free, as a service activity. Meanwhile, I could have earned $134,677 as a data architect.
Web Development: I developed applications and customized discovery layers to help library patrons find resources. I learned several markup and scripting languages in order to take on this extra work for the library, in the hot-hot pursuit of grant funding to list on my CV. I could have earned $88,285 as a front-end developer (the folks who use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build the parts of a website that you see), or $101,021 as a back-end developer (the folks who work with APIs, and transfer data to/from databases).
Data Engineering: Libraries are constantly integrating data from publishers, digitization projects, legacy catalogs, union catalogs, and more. I became a whizz at data wrangling and transformation. I developed countless data pipelines and ETL processes to combine disparate data streams. I should have been earning $112,935 as a data engineer.
User Experience Research: To inform cataloging guidelines, and to better design catalogs and finding aids to meet user needs, I spent a lot of time in libraries researching information-seeking behaviors. I became intimately familiar with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. I ran focus groups, conducted usability tests, and led card-sorting exercises in order to gather insights on how to improve our discovery interfaces and their navigation. As a user experience researcher outside of libraries, I could have earned $140,985.
Fundraising: As a special collections professional, I was routinely asked to give tours and host events, with the goal of building relationships with donors. I cultivated skills in storytelling, and learned to quickly craft narratives about my projects’ efficacy and impact. As an academic and a gig worker, I helped develop numerous grant applications, and served as a principal investigator on several large-sum projects. Overall, I honed techniques that are crucial to fundraising and philanthropy. In the nonprofit sector, I could have earned between $98,765 as a development managerand $102,546 as a director of development.
Project Management: In libraries, I never had less than five major projects going at once. I oversaw several large-scale database and website migrations, making sure that each of my team members’ contributions were completed in sequence and on time, while I myself served as a project contributor. In the tech sector, I could have been working as a project manager — someone whose sole job is to hold others accountable to the development timeline — and earned $87,086.
The UK-listed firm, a major supplier of courseware and assessments in schools and colleges in the United States, Britain and around the world
Pearson CEO Andy Bird told Reuters that verified credentials were becoming more important as technology adapts, leaving many companies with a skills gap where staff need training on how to work with processes such as artificial intelligence.
Pearson, which has been buffeted by the shift from physical courseware to online learning, bought AI and analytics group Faethm in 2021, which spots skills gaps for organisations.
Credly partners with organisations such as IBM, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to provide certifications, or digital credentials, to workers both inside their firms and out who have attained a certain level with their product. Based in the United States, half of the people earning credentials on the platform are outside America, with India one of its biggest markets.
Pearson will now be able to combine the diagnostic tools of Faethm with its own digital learning programmes and Credly’s certification capabilities to offer a full service to companies.
More than 300 scientists have told Mark Zuckerberg they want access to Meta’s internal research on child and teen mental health because it doesn’t meet scientific standards
a Forrester survey of 4,602 Americans aged 12 to 17, published last month, found that 63% of respondents used TikTok on a weekly basis compared with 57% for Instagram. It also found 72% of respondents used YouTube weekly. It did not mention Facebook.
You are able to track time spent on the app across your organization and compare it directly with past methods. Getting an insight into both the amount of time training and the retention it’s causing is how you’ll balance the perfect VR Training Solution, and we’re here to make that a reality.
What the metaverse will (and won’t) be, according to 28 experts
metaverse (hopefully) won’t be the virtual world of ‘Snow Crash,’ or ‘Ready Player One.’ It will likely be something more complex, diverse, and wild.
The metaverse concept clearly means very different things to different people. What exists right now is a series of embryonic digital spaces, such as Facebook’s Horizon, Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox‘s digital space for gaming and game creation, and the blockchain-based digital world Decentraland–all of which have clear borders, different rules and objectives, and differing rates of growth.
TIFFANY ROLFE
different layers of realities that we can all be experiencing, even in the same environment or physical space. We’re already doing that with our phones to a certain extent—passively in a physical environment while mentally in a digital one. But we’ll see more experiences beyond your phone, where our whole bodies are fully engaged, and that’s where the metaverse starts to get interesting—we genuinely begin to explore and live in these alternate realities simultaneously.
It will have legacy parts that look and feel like the web today, but it will have new nodes and capabilities that will look and feel like the Ready Player One Oasis (amazing gaming worlds), immersion leaking into our world (like my Magicverse concept), and every imaginable permutation of these. I feel that the Xverse will have gradients of sentience and autonomy, and we will have the emergence of synthetic life (things Sun and Thunder is working on) and a multitude of amazing worlds to explore. Building a world will become something everyone can do (like building a webpage or a blog) and people will be able to share richer parts of their external and inner lives at incredibly high-speed across the planet.
YAT SIU, COFOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF GAMING AND BLOCKCHAIN COMPANY ANIMOCA BRANDS
Reality will exist on a spectrum ranging from physical to virtual (VR), but a significant chunk of our time will be spent somewhere between those extremes, in some form of augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality will be a normal part of daily life. Virtual companions will provide information, commentary, updates and advice on matters relevant to you at that point in time, including your assets and activities, in both virtual and real spaces.
TIMONI WEST, VP OF AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY, UNITY:
I think we can all agree our initial dreams of a fully immersive, separate digital world is not only unrealistic, but maybe not what we actually want. So I’ve started defining the metaverse differently to capture the zeitgeist: we’re entering an era where every computer we interact with, big or small, is increasingly world-aware. They can recognize faces, voices, hands, relative and absolute position, velocity, and they can react to this data in a useful way. These contextually aware computers are the path to unlocking ambient computing: where computers fade from the foreground to the background of everyday, useful tools. The metaverse is less of a ‘thing’ and more of a computing era. Contextual computing enables a multitude of new types of interactions and apps: VR sculpting tools and social hangouts, self-driving cars, robotics, smart homes.
as carbon is to the organic world, AI will be both the matrix that provides the necessary structural support and the material from which digital representation will be made. Of all the ways in which AI will shape the form of the metaverse, perhaps most essential is the role it will play in the physical-digital interface. Translating human actions into digital input–language, eye movement, hand gestures, locomotion–these are all actions which AI companies and researchers have already made tremendous progress on.
Qualcomm views the metaverse as an ever-present spatial internet complete with personalized digital experiences that spans the physical and virtual worlds, where everything and everyone can communicate and interact seamlessly.
As an active researcher in the security and forensics of VR systems, should the metaverse come into existence, we should explore and hypothesize the ways it will be misused.
CHITRA RAGAVAN, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER AT BLOCKCHAIN DATA ANALYTICS COMPANY ELEMENTUS
I picture [the metaverse] almost like The Truman Show. Only, instead of walking into a television set, you walk into the internet and can explore any number of different realities
We imagine the metaverse as reality made better, a world infused with magic, stories, and functionality at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.
CAROLINA ARGUELLES NAVAS, GLOBAL PRODUCT MARKETING, AUGMENTED REALITY, SNAP
Rather than building the “metaverse,” a separate and fully virtual reality that is disconnected from the physical world, we are focused on augmenting reality, not replacing it. We believe AR–or computing overlaid on the world around us–has a smoother path to mass adoption, but will also be better for the world than a fully virtual world.
URHO KONTTORI, COFOUNDER AND CTO OF AR/VR HEADSET MAKER VARJO
In the reality-based metaverse, we will be able to more effectively design products of the future, meet and collaborate with our colleagues far away, and experience any remote place in real-time.
ATHERINE ALLEN, CEO OF IMMERSIVE TECH RESEARCH CONSULTANCY LIMINA IMMERSIVE
I prefer to think of the metaverse as simply bringing our bodies into the internet.
The metaverse isn’t just VR! Those spaces will connect to AR glasses and to 2D spaces like Instagram. And most importantly, there will be a real sense of continuity where the things you buy are always available to you.
At its core will be a self-contained economy that allows individuals and businesses to create, own or invest in a range of activities and experiences.
NANDI NOBELL, SENIOR ASSOCIATE AT GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN FIRM CALLISONRTKL
the metaverse experience can be altered from the individual’s point of view and shaped or curated by any number of agents—whether human or A.I. In that sense, the metaverse does not have an objective look beyond its backend. In essence, the metaverse, together with our physical locations, forms a spatial continuum.
NICK CHERUKURI, CEO AND FOUNDER OF MIXED REALITY GLASSES MAKER THIRDEYE
The AR applications of the metaverse are limitless and it really can become the next great version of the internet.
SAM TABAR, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, BITCOIN MINING COMPANY BIT DIGITAL
It seems fair to predict that the actual aesthetic of any given metaverse will be determined by user demand. If users want to exist in a gamified world populated by outrageous avatars and fantastic landscapes then the metaverse will respond to that demand. Like all things in this world the metaverse will be market driven
Sixty-eight percent of students were also in favor of some combination of in-person and online courses. On the faculty side, 57 percent said they would prefer teaching hybrid courses post-pandemic — slightly more than those who preferred teaching fully online.
both students and faculty agreed: Roughly two-thirds across the board said they would like to use more tech and digital course materials in the future.
