June 2012 Archives
Posted June 26, 2012
It is nearly July, and a few people have asked me if I have been busy so far this summer. The answer is yes, provided that vacationing qualifies as being busy. May was busy with volunteering and taking the Corporate Libraries course, and June has been busy with trips to Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and a quaint little New Hampshire lake. So yes, technically I have been busy, even though my time has been increasingly spent vacationing rather than working. I have spent the last three weeks hiking in Santa Barbara, exploring San Francisco, and lounging on an inflatable raft in New Hampshire. It has been glorious, and the gallivanting is set to continue through July with a visit to the Rhode Island shore, a road trip to North and South Carolina, and more inflatable raft time in New Hampshire. While all of this has been, and hopefully will continue to be, wonderful and cultural and relaxing, I must constantly remind myself that this Summer of Sarah is not real life. Coming to terms with…
Posted June 24, 2012
The title of this post is pretentious and misleading. I’m sure I’m breaking a cardinal rule of blogging by using a title that’s pretentious and misleading. But please bear with me anyway as, rather than producing the manifesto my title implies, I simply attempt to wrangle in all of the thoughts I’ve had about social media lately. As the Webmaster of the Simmons College Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists (SCoSAA), I have taken on the responsibility of maintaining the organization’s social media accounts. As of now, SCoSAA has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I need to be doing with these accounts in terms of frequency of updating and content. Prior to taking on this role, I would sometimes get annoyed with how much discussion there was in library literature and online library communities about how to use social media. I snobbishly thought to myself, “Okay, we get it! Everyone knows how to use social media and we all know it’s important. Can we…
Posted June 22, 2012
If you’ve been in Boston the past two days, you know that we have issued in summer with a bang. Record-setting temperatures of the high 90s (with the humidity making it feel like the low 100s) have made people seek cool spaces, whether outdoors in the shade or by a pool, or indoors, in the air-conditioning. Having air-conditioning can often be a life or death matter for people at high risk of heat stroke (the elderly, young children, the infirm, the homeless), but not everyone owns an air-conditioner, or has the means to adequately cool their residence (my own apartment currently has seven fans and a portable AC running). That is why Boston, like many cities, designates places as cooling centers, where people can go and escape from the heat for a few hours. Suggestions include hanging out in shopping malls, movie theaters, museums, or libraries. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m in the first three places, chances are high I’m going to be spending money while staying cool. Great for…
Posted June 20, 2012
I have many career ambitions for my library degree, and to be honest, working in a small, public library is not one of them, but since the opportunity presented itself, here I am. I suddenly find myself at the circulation desk and preparing movie nights for the adult summer reading program. My first library job back in 1993 was in a children’s public library, and I absolutely loved it. If I had had the same opportunities then, I would have become a Children’s Librarian. I did, in fact, check out Simmons in the early 1990s, but as a single mom who lived far from Boston, it didn’t seem realistic at the time. Credible distance learning opportunities like West campus, and online/blended classes did not exist. One of my duties so many years ago was an evening storytime, complete with kids in PJs with teddy bears, usually accompanied by working dads who were having quality time while moms enjoyed an hour or two to themselves after dinner. We had our regular afterschool moms and kids, too,…
Posted June 19, 2012
Now that it’s the end of June, my classes are certainly keeping me busy. I have just a week and a half left of my history course on Race and Media, and I’m in the full swing of my online course – LIS 440: Archival Access and Use. Taking an online class certainly requires some adjustment. Our system, Moodle, is a very easy system to adapt to, but the online environment is a bit different. For the first time, I feel like I am truly in control of how much I learn. Granted, I was always in control of the amount of information I digested or whether or not I did the readings, etc., but this time no one is lecturing to me and I have to read and record the information in a way that I will learn it on my own. It requires more responsibility and thus far, I’m not that sure how I feel about it.
Posted June 13, 2012
Goodness gracious was that one-week “Corporate Libraries” course a blur. In five days I had to do two short papers and two group presentations, so there was no time for “I’ll do this later.” Maybe that was a sneaky introduction to the “I’m asking you now, but I needed it yesterday” corporate library culture. Based on what I learned from the course, that theory doesn’t seem too far-fetched. [Before I get started, so as not to confuse the “Corporate Libraries” title with the many different types of libraries we learned about, this course could very well be renamed “Special (With a Large Emphasis on Corporate) Libraries.” Just doesn’t have a very nice ring to it.] Two of the most useful things about the course were the field trips and guest speakers. (I know I sound like a middle schooler, but bear with me.) Over the course of the week, we visited three different special libraries and had a number of guest speakers. We also had in-class lectures, PowerPoint presentations, handouts, and readings, but the visits…
Posted June 11, 2012
So concludes my first week at the Cultural Resources Center of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian! I’ll make sure to take some pictures that I can post next week. I have my own little cubicle in the Repatriation Department and access to all manner of really interesting office files and archives. At the start of my week, I felt a little overwhelmed at the scope of my project, but the more I dig, the more excited I get! I’m here through August 11, and by the end of my internship, I am expected to produce a report to the Board of Trustees on the department’s policy and case history. I am looking at how discussions have evolved around topics concerning human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony, as well as conclusions and debates surrounding cultural affiliation, stewardship, Native American identity and state, federal, and institutional recognition, author, jurisdiction, etc. As you can see, it’s a huge amount of information I’m trying to extra from Board of Trustees agendas,…
Posted June 8, 2012
One of the things I’ve struggled the most with since moving to Boston is the fact that, for the first time in my life, musical instruments haven’t been immediately accessible to me. Wherever I’ve lived up until now, I’ve had access to at least a piano, and I usually had my mom’s violin or my alto saxophone on hand. I took this privilege for granted (and grumbled way too much about practicing!), and its importance didn’t become clear to me until I found myself feeling stranded without a musical outlet in my apartment in Boston. I dealt with this problem temporarily at the beginning of the spring semester when I borrowed an alto sax and went to a few rehearsals with the Freedom Trail Band, Boston’s LGBT community band. This group is fantastic. The atmosphere is laid-back–there were no auditions and I could meet all of the skill-level expectations even as a self-proclaimed “hobby musician.” Unfortunately, as the semester pummeled forward and my juggling act got more difficult to manage, I decided I couldn’t commit…
Posted June 6, 2012
Reflecting on Katie’s post, regarding time flying in undergrad and grad school, I attended my daughter’s college graduation this past weekend! If you are a recent undergrad, I am indeed old enough to be your mother…but even if you are old enough to be MY mother, you are not too old for GSLIS. I have a wooden sign in my kitchen that reads, “You are never too old to change what you want to be when you grow up.” This might sound like a trite quote from the mid-life crisis crowd, but the sign has hung in my kitchen since I was “only” 32. Becoming a part of Simmons GSLIS was a huge lifestyle change, and if you read my earlier blog entries, I certainly had my share of anxieties. If you are part of the older crowd, you know what I mean about the great balancing act, but younger students have to strike their own balance, too. They don’t have it any easier than we do. Neither of us has more to juggle, we…
Posted June 4, 2012
I recently returned from a trip to see my parents, who have just moved continents and countries from India to the Netherlands. When I arrived, they had just received their shipment of possessions from India, and were still in the process of setting up. My parents are lifelong readers, and for as long as I can remember, our house has had endless numbers of bookcases overflowing with books, sometimes several levels deep, and not counting boxes in the garage or basement. When I got to college, I enrolled in a major program very similar to the one my dad had done more than thirty years earlier, and to my delight, I was able to use some of his vintage books. Nobody else had inherited copies of the Communist Manifesto, the Marx-Engles Reader, or even The Protestant Work Ethic, but I did. Yet, there was never a set method of organizing the books in any real or meaningful fashion. This never bothered me before, but it bothered me now. My librarian brain, fresh from the experiences…
