August 2012 Archives
Posted August 27, 2012
I approached this summer, off from classes, but busy with work and family, as a chance to catch up on many things. I had the best intentions to read the many publications, both professional and recreational, piling up in the living room. I had planned to maintain my gardens beautifully, and my house would be clean and organized before Labor Day. Well, you know what they say about good intentions… I did get through about half of the publications awaiting my attention. My gardens were beautifully maintained until about mid-July, and then the lack of rain dried up my enthusiasm. I had big plans for the house maintenance issues…I always have big ideas and never enough time or money to implement them. My cookbook shelf is clean and organized…does that count? I did manage a long list of excuses for myself. I didn’t get through all the professional development I had planned because I did explore a different field of librarianship (prison libraries) on my own time. I also dedicated quite a bit of my…
Posted August 25, 2012
To those of you about to start your Simmons GSLIS careers in two short weeks, welcome! It’s going to be a great experience, I promise. Now, if you’ve been a diligent student and read the handbook, you’ll know that Reference is one of the required core courses that everyone at GSLIS must take. I really enjoyed reference, in part because my professor gave us a series of assignments with puzzling questions that we then had to find the answer to. Let me tell you, I knew I had found my calling as a librarian when, after six hours of intense search strategies and different keyword combinations, as well as an extensive perusal of the Simmons’ databases (since all the answers were to be found therein), I made the internet yield the correct answers. It was a moment of pure and sweet triumph, and made me think for the first time “hey, maybe I really can be good at this whole librarian thing!” So, to get you into the spirit of the new semester and sharpen up your…
Posted August 21, 2012
As I mentioned in my last post, this semester brings me the joys of a part-time job and an internship. After months of what amounted to futile job searching, I eventually managed to land not one, but two library-related opportunities. Based on this recent experience, I have come to terms with the fact that networking can go a long way. For years I assumed that my unique (read: incongruous) résumé and undeniable charm (read: propensity for awkwardness) would force the job market to bow down to me in reverence. Incorrect. Rather, I have found that just about every job I have ever held was because of an acquaintance who already had a foot in the door. So finally, after months of wondering why I wasn’t hearing back from library job postings to which I had responded, I set my pride aside and resorted to some good old fashioned networking. In the midst of volunteering at the Somerville Public Library, I applied for a few part-time vacancies and was offered one which starts next week. I…
Posted August 12, 2012
Yes, I am a GSLIS student, but first, I am a Mom, and so the purpose of this post is to give you a parent’s perspective as you head off to grad school. My daughter is heading to the University of Rochester for graduate school, and at the time this is posted, my husband should be safely seated behind the wheel of the Penske truck, and my daughter’s room at home will be empty, and some of my furniture will be missing. I will have an empty nest, and I am not sure how I feel about that. If you are 25, you probably don’t really care about how I feel about it, and that is okay, except your mom probably feels this way, too, as you make your big decisions to travel cross-country or around the corner to pursue your librarianship dreams. What my daughter and I learned this summer is that we are both stressed about the big changes, both excited about the big changes, and both eager for them to happen… But…
Posted August 9, 2012
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve spent the last week and a half completely immersed in Olympic sports. I love to watch the live coverage during the day (when I can), and I’ve loved catching random events like track cycling and water polo. After all, it’ll be another four years until some of these will be on television again. However, I have to admit that I’ve been less than pleased with NBC’s coverage, as well as their technological decisions. It seems the Olympic Games are not open and available for everyone.
Posted August 7, 2012
Last week I tried two things that I had never done before: golfing and shooting a gun. In both activities, my shots were pretty poor. Frankly, some of them were downright awful. Having never done a sport that focuses exclusively on minutia, golfing and skeet shooting served as total wake up calls. A golf swing has to be one of the most finicky skills in all of sports, and I still can’t figure out why those clay targets are called pigeons – their size more closely likens them to hummingbirds. Alas, despite the particularity of golfing and shooting and the fact that I was certainly not a natural at either one, I enjoyed them both. If I have a future in either activity (golf is the front-runner at this point), I will need to put in many, many hours of practice. Boy is it frustrating to try something new and enjoy it, only to realize that obtaining any sort of skill in it would require taking it up as a part-time job. (Finally, here comes…
Posted August 2, 2012
You know what makes the end of a summer semester even more insane and difficult to manage? Attending a professional conference! Even though I knew it was a decision that would perhaps cause friends of mine to question my sanity, I went for it anyway and attended the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual meeting a week and a half ago. This was not my first professional conference since joining the wonderful world of professional librarianship, but this was my first national conference and mildly nerve-wracking in a number of new ways. At the New England Archivists meeting I attended in the spring, I felt very much at home because, well, I was with archivists. I could more or less assume that the majority of the people at the conference with me had receive/were receiving similar training, viewed the world of information in similar ways, and cared about many of the same issues that I do. Among law librarians, I was not so comfortable.
