Post Spring Break-a-thon

Posted March 13, 2017 by Amanda Pizzollo

So long Spring Break, and thanks for all the fish! 

Spring Break was fun. You know: non-stop parties, sunbathing, margaritas, that kind of thing. JUST KIDDING! hahaha. buwahhahahahah! (I could go on but will spare you).

I’m in grad school and per my situation in life that was not my personal spring break experience. It was nice, though, to have a break from classes so that I could catch up on homework and reading for class (so exciting, right?!) and because I just increased my working hours. Why the increase in hours? Well…

I got a professional librarian job! Wohoo! I’m now the Bicentennial Metadata Librarian at Amherst College and thoroughly stoked about it. I get to create metadata and metadata guidelines for digitized collections that are going to be made available in ACDC (rock on! No, actually it stands for Amherst College Digital Repository). I’ll especially be working on digital collections that highlight the history of Amherst College and its alumni and students for the upcoming Bicentennial of the college in 2021. So that’s fun! It means that I’m going to pull some late evenings and keep having Sundays as The Day of Bountiful Homework Work (Saturdays would be this too, but I have class and work at the school) until the end of the semester when I graduate, but that’s a-okay with me.

In other news, we have our Dean’s Lunch this coming Saturday at SLIS West, and I always enjoy that event. The Dean of SLIS comes out to the west campus and has lunch with us in between our 2 Saturday class sessions. We get to ask questions, provide input on the program, and all that kind of jam. Plus, lunch is delicious.

Otherwise this week I’ll be finishing up a cataloging assignment, and it’s ridiculous how much fun I have referencing RDA and getting down to nitty gritty details like:
me: “should this have a space semicolon or just a semicolon immediately following the word?”
other me: “I think a space.”
me: “hmm, well can you cite the RDA rule for that?”
other me: “no.”
me: “well then, let’s go to RDA and investigate! shall we?”
other me: “splendid idea! genius!”

I’m also finishing up a presentation for my digital libraries class on the International Children’s Digital Library which has been really fun because that site is just cool and you can read kid’s books in a lot of different languages! Digital storytime ideas are abounding. Plus I’m working on metadata for that class and reviewing DCRM (a content standard model- i.e., not the structure of how you describe something, but how and what you should describe about something. RDA is a content standard too.) so that I’m ready to create a best practices document with the rest of the metadata team in my digital libraries class. Lastly, I’m investigating the changes from FRBR to the IFLA LRM, how they might affect RDA, and especially how it might change or improve the way we treat aggregating works. It’s okay if that last part doesn’t make sense, you learn all this lingo in lib school. Or you don’t. It depends on what you’re into, friends! That’s one nice thing about library grad school versus the nurse practitioner grad school I went to, unless you’re in a specific concentration of the program, you can pretty much design your own curriculum and explore what you wish.

Anywho, busy week but good week. Hopefully this nor’easter won’t make it to tough to drive to class in Boston on Wednesday night. Everyone stay safe, have a great week, and learn something new!

~Manda

This week’s The Great TP quote (sorry I skipped this last blog post since I didn’t want to sully his name by having it anywhere near my bad metadata poetry).
“It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.”
Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites.