Oh, can’t anybody see? We’ve got a war to fight.

Posted July 17, 2012 by Danielle Geller

The past two weeks since my last update have been ridiculously busy. First of all, I’m at the point where I have been forced to sit down and start committing all of my findings to paper. I feel like the progress has been abysmally slow, and 20 (single spaced!) pages in, I feel like I’m only half-way to my conclusion. Luckily, it’s broken down into a number of smaller sections, so I’ve been hopping around to smaller topics that interest me to try and keep up my motivation. I’ve also found that if I listen to the same song on repeat for eight hours, I don’t get nearly as distracted as I would if I let Pandora do its thing. Thanks, Portishead. I can literally listen to your song “Roads” all day long. So far today, I’ve written two pages on the disposition of culturally modified human remains!  Oh, jeeze.
This past weekend I also had the opportunity to attend the 2012 Wikimania conference in Washington, D.C. Fortunately for me, the conference was held at George Washington University, where I just so happened to be staying! I mostly attended GLAM-Wiki sessions (GLAM stands for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), and I really feel like all library and information professionals should explore how Wikimedia projects—not just Wikipedia, but Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource—can facilitate greater access to our (very broad “our”) collections. David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, gave the closing plenary, and I actually got to shake his hand!
Well, I jotted down this blog post during my lunch break, and now it’s back to writing about the secularization of sacred objects. I only have three and a half weeks left of my internship, and I’m amazed and kind of sad about how quickly it’s all gone by. Tomorrow, I’m planning on attending a mini career fair held at the Smithsonian Institution; I wonder if they’ll give me a job if I just ask? I wish!