shitprincess

Thank you for participating in this AMA. I am a Roslindale resident and have been working for the past 6 months to try and navigate the permitting process for starting a small business in the food industry. I've researched everything from a brick and mortar establishment to a bike-cart. It has been exhausting, frustrating, and at times it feels like the system is working against me to get something started. I've spoken with people at the office of business development, the SBA, SCORE, and many others but almost never hear the same answer twice. I've also spoken to landlords and Main streets groups who find it easier to leave their storefront empty than making an investment to get the space up to code and ready for tenants. I've been to meetings, workshop, and a a dizzying array of websites to try and get my ideas off the ground but the longer I work on this, the easier it looks to move start my business outside of the city.

What is your office doing to reduce the burden on starting a small business in the city of Boston? What is your administration doing to make sure creative people in Boston can keep up with their counterparts in cities like New York and San Francisco?

Thanks! A good place to start is revamping this document and associated processes so that in order to receive 1 permit, you don't need to coordinate multiple different agencies. http://www.cityofboston.gov/images_documents/restaurant%20guide_final_tcm3-19418.pdf

I am late to the game, but my undergraduate thesis was about the Palestinian diaspora and Palestinian refugees in Iraq prior to and during the US war. They were treated very well by Saadam so when his government fell, the Palestinian community was targeted by Iraqis for violence and torture. People were angry that the Palestinian refugees were treated so well, and took their anger towards teh government out on them. Most Palestinians fled the cities and headed west to live in camp cities to live out the War. The conditions in these camps are appalling, but they had no where else to go. Other Arab nations had met their refugee or immigration caps on Palestinians, and those in Iraq were left in limbo.

A 2007 Amnesty International Report on this topic: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE14/030/2007

Can you expand upon what specific skills you are looking for in the rare books realm? I'm a SLIS student at SJSU and am attempting to cover the three areas you outlined, but the rare book/digitization courses are not as advanced as, say, the cataloging, MySQL or HTML/CSS courses. Additionally, what types of jobs or sectors should I be looking in if I want to get hands-on time with rare book digitization?

Edit: I wanted to add that I currently work as a librarian in the legal sector, but my real passion is for handling and improving access to rare books, manuscripts, ephemeral materials. I'm finding it difficult and frustrating that I need to 'start over' to move between sectors within the same field of study and I was surprised that you mentioned rare books in the 'need more of'em' category'