Happy Ada Lovelace Day: a post in honor of Bess Sadler
If you've not heard of Ada Lovelace Day, today is "an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology." (And if you haven't heard of Ada Lovelace [1815-1852], she's often described as the world's first computer programmer. Here's her Wikipedia entry.)
As soon as I heard about Ada Lovelace Day, I knew I wanted to give a shout-out to my friend and former colleague Bess Sadler, who's currently Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment at the University of Virginia Library. Bess and I worked in adjacent cubicles during my second year at the UVa Library, and she was a large part of why our department—the then-nascent Scholars' Lab, which is now doing all kinds of fascinating work in the digital humanities—was such a fabulous place to work.
Bess is, among other things, a developer of the extremely cool Blacklight OPAC, which does the kind of faceted searching that the NCSU Libraries' Endeca catalog does, only it's an entirely open-source project. Dorothea Salo has already blogged about Bess and her accomplishments, but I'll add that Bess is also one of my tech heroines for speaking up about sexism in the IT world on her blog. And she's a terrific colleague and friend, who, when I was in angst-ridden job search mode, asked if I'd read Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever's Women Don't Ask (I hadn't, and it helped a lot), who pointed me toward Cory Doctorow's fiction and the Escape Pod podcast, and who's one of my role models for wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and problem-solving geekitude. She's also a fellow Firefly fan, which I think was the very first thing we bonded over when she first visited UVa. I hope we'll be bonding over similar things for many years to come.
(Ada Lovelace Day ends in a few hours, but if you want to participate too, here are the guidelines from the Ada Lovelace Day site:
All you need to do is sign the pledge,
pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on
Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is,
what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally
blog about – everyone is invited. …
It’s up to you how you interpret the phrase “in technology”. We’re not
just interested in hardcore ninja programmers, but any woman who
creates, invents, or uses any technology in an innovative way. Feel
free to interpret it as widely as you like.
Hopefully they'll do this again next year!)
Bess sounds great — I never met her. Thanks for encouraging me to do Ada Lovelace Day, too!