South Orange Village, New Jersey, United States
Earliest series of jobs at Columbia University Library, from 1973--:support staff to supervisor, hiring and trainingsupport staff, endng as Acting Head of Butler Library stacks. MLS degree 1982. Second series of jobs at Columbia, from 1990: IT, supporting the servers involved in email delivery, including filtering. I list copy editor because I am very proficient in grammar and style. I was well-schooled in Fordham Prep. In the IT department I used to discuss copy for our newsletter with another man who was equally concerned about the difference between less and fewer, and the comma at the end of a series, and that an audience clap THEIR hands not ITS hands (in our opinion). Some others in the room rolled their eyes at this stuff. My sense of language is not only in English l, but also with syntax when I wrote Linux scripts in shell or perl. I enjoy the book Dreyer's English very much, for the hilarious examples, but also because it convinced me that copy editing is right up my alley if I get a chance. I hope this paragraph passes the test. I have received compliments on my own nonprofit work All the Funiculars, which is at http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/fun/ -- I copy-edited it myself.
I work with a small group of experts handling special support cases and doing project work on the email systems at Columbia. From 2011 to 2016 we migrated 80,000 users from cyrus to G Suite, and migrated unix gateways from solaris to SE RHEL servers. My work combines user support and systems administration, so I work regularly with Service Desk and VIP Support, Identity and Access Management, Computer Security, and Systems engineers. I am used to considering the human and technical sides of problems and proposals. I am application owner for Sendmail, MIMEDefang, SpamAssassin, and Mailman, and I am domain owner of Columbia's G Suite for Edu (ex Google Apps) instance. I do a lot of work with perl. I know the email RFCs very well-- SMTP, MIME, IMAP, POP3, etc.
I look after Columbia's main email system. Buzzword cloud: Solaris, Linux, Sendmail, Cyrus, MimeDefang, SpamAssassin, Horde, IMP ; smtp, pop, imap ; shell, perl, C ; http, css. I started out helping users, and have moved by now into administering server-side systems. I know the protocols inside out and the software mentioned. I investigate security problems involving the mail system.
Increasing responsibilities as Night Supervisor in a small library, then library privileges office, then Supervisor in a large library, ending as Acting Head. I supervised 20 people in the last position. I did some project management near the end, to plan and execute a large book shift in a 2-million volume collection. I worked with programmers on early automated circulation systems ; wrote some code for IBM mainframe and designed the layout of a custom terminal device. I liked computer systems so much I jumped from libraries to IT in 1989.