Events
Librarian Advice
Posted April 2, 2018 by Megan Ondricek
Spring break has come and gone (while we’re still waiting for actual spring to arrive) which means we’re entering the second half of the semester. It’s amazing to me how different this semester has been from my last. In the fall I had the same number of classes and the same number of credits, but 20 hours a week was barely enough time to complete all the assignments and I struggled to keep up with the reading (I was also doing my 60-hour archives internship). This semester, 20 hours a week feels fairly sufficient, and my current two classes require lighter reading and fewer written assignments. Last Saturday we had one of our Day-in-the-Life lunchtime programs that could have been called “Personalized Advice from a Career Librarian.” It was awesome. These lunchtime events are one of the best things about SLIS West. There’s free food and the opportunity to mingle with classmates and librarians from around the area. Saturday’s speaker was Barbara Friedman, current part-time director of Erving Library with nearly fifty years of library…
An Exceptional February Day
Posted February 27, 2018 by ShanTil Yell
Today, I had the supremely cool opportunity to join a group of my classmates on a tour of the Boston Athenæum (courtesy of the Simmons Panopticon chapter–y’all rock!). Also, spring decided to pop its head in early with sunshine and warm temperatures, so I was more than happy to don a peekaboo dress and roam into the city. The Athenæum is one of the country’s oldest libraries, and is filled with floor after floor of amazing pieces of fine art, as well as extensive circulating and special collections. A couple of my favorite bits of the afternoon included viewing part of George Washington’s personal library, and also getting to browse the original card catalog, now very much a relic of times past and tucked away in the building’s basement. Sitting pretty at 10 ½ Beacon Street…a cousin of Platform 9 ¾ perhaps…the Athenæum is located in one of the most historically rich parts of the city, and is itself a distinguished cultural heritage center. I trust the patron goddess of wisdom was pleased to be…
Less is more: Small scale librarianship
Posted March 30, 2017 by Megan Ondricek
One of the great things that I love about attending SLIS West is the lunchtime events. Many of my blog posts will probably contain thoughts and reflections from the latest SLIS West speaker or presentation, especially since I plan to attend ALL OF THEM. Part of my motivation for this is the free lunch provided. Listen: I think I’ve had to bring my own lunch only twice this entire semester. This is a great, great thing. The food that they get for these events is excellent. Also, I am like an eager little sponge that just wants to soak up all the library stuff, and this is an easy and convenient way to do it! So, last Saturday we heard from Andrea Bernard, Library Director at the Tyler Memorial Library in Charlemont, MA and one of 10 I Love My Librarian Award winners in 2016. I just have to quote this section from the story about Andrea’s award: “Andrea Bernard will go out of her way to serve her library patrons. Just ask Stephen Ferguson,…
I Am No Charles Schulz
Posted March 27, 2017 by Amanda Pizzollo
I’m kind of out of words lately. ACRL last week was super fun and awesome, and I highly recommend taking advantage of conferences as much as you can. It’s great way to know what other folks are doing across the library land and to get motivation and practical advice for your own role and community. But, I am kind of not functioning at high octane levels right now mind-wise. ACRL and the travel to and from while trying to keep up with my 2 classes (which are awesome but the most work intensive courses I’ve had my whole grad school time) and settle into my new position at work has left me a little out of articulation energy and wherewithal. So, here’s a bad comic I made today to illustrate my current feelings about dealing with Dublin Core- a specific metadata schema- for my digital libraries project with class. PS: don’t mistake this post for me grumbling about being stressed/overwhelmed or even about me not loving Dublin Core. I am a bit overwhelmed with school…
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…
NECode4Lib
Posted December 5, 2016 by Amanda Pizzollo
Howdy fellow interwebs browsers! This week I wanted to talk about the NECode4Lib event on 12/5. So, NECode4Lib was a fun and informative informal conference organized by librarians from around New England (with special attention to Johanna Radding, former SLIS West program manager, and Abby Baines, current SLIS West prof, who did a lot of the work!). It was held in the Red Barn at Hampshire which is beautiful, especially with sparkling snow on the ground outside. Talks included a range of topics. For a full list, visit here: https://wiki.code4lib.org/NECode4lib_2016. I think some of the slides will be going up soon too. Librarians are so great at collaborating and sharing information (duh on that last one I guess). I love that I’m in a profession now where there are often conferences like this one- and ones bigger and smaller than this. It’s such a great way to meet people and learn about what other folks are doing. I especially enjoyed a lightening talk on lightening talks by a couple folks at MIT because they talked about…
Lit Crawl, Book Fest, Maybe Zombies
Posted October 14, 2016 by Tara Pealer
I would like to introduce you to the Boston Lit Crawl, an inaugural event which is occurring on the eve of the Boston Book Fest weekend. Boston Lit Crawl is happening tonight, October 13th, from 6:30 to 8:30 ish. There are 14 events, and you can either go to one event each round or crawl around getting free drinks, free food, and great company. There are events like the Wheel of Austen (Improv! Comedy! Jane Austen! Maybe zombies!), the Exquisite Corpse (remember that game you played in elementary school where someone wrote the first line and then you wrote the next and it went around? It’s like that, but it’s adults with alcohol), and a Boston Lit Crawl ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’ for attendees to check out. And there will be free food and drinks at some places–it’s like someone crawled inside my brain and rattled around to create an event which sounds like my ideal way to spend a night. There’s also a reading at the Granbury Burying Ground to close the night….
SLA Conference 2016
Posted June 24, 2016 by Amy Wilson
I’m home! It’s been a week and a half, but I still feel like I’m getting back on my feet after a month of traveling – Puerto Rico (for fun), Ohio (for work), and Philadelphia (for school). Most recently, I was in Philly for the Special Libraries Association 2016 Conference. My boyfriend and I took advantage of the location to also stay with family outside the city, and we got to meet their new (four months old is new, right?) baby! We drove to Philly on Friday (June 10) night after work and arrived in the suburbs at about 11:30pm. On Saturday we took a bus tour of the city with Rob’s cousins and had a nice dinner with them – there was a lot of chilling out because it was so hot and muggy! On Sunday, after lunch, Rob headed home to Boston and I went to the conference downtown. Because of my stipend from SLA New England, I was able to get a rental car, which allowed me to drive in and out…
Events, Elections, and Even More
Posted April 14, 2016 by Tara Pealer
This week was a little intense. I had completely new material to learn in tech class on Monday, two papers due Tuesday, four hours of volunteering at the career fair on Wednesday, and classes to pick out for my registration time on Friday morning. Between that, I had plans to come home to pick up my professional reimbursement check and plans to make with old friends I hadn’t seen in a while. This semester has been like that a lot…every other week. One week I have free time, I’m relaxed and I feel like I have time to breathe. The next week I’m so stressed out that I’m surprised that I can find time to sleep. But there’s plenty that’s exciting going on in SLIS right now. We’re about 25 days from the end of the semester, student elections just closed, and there are so many events happening in the next few weeks that it’s hard to keep track everything! Just in the last two weeks there were four or five different career focused events….
Accessing the Potential of Graduate Students
Posted April 9, 2016 by Amy Wilson
Yesterday I attended a conference that was jointly hosted by LLNE and ABLL at Northeastern University School of Law. The focus of the conference was “Access to Government Information,” but I noticed a second theme throughout the day: strong partnerships. The LLNE/ABLL spring conference was my first as a graduate student, and my strongest take-away from the day has to be the power of strong partnerships to produce successful results. The conference itself was obviously a collaboration of LLNE and ABLL, but this theme also came up consistently during the day’s events. I think that the most important step in forming a strong and healthy partnership is to recognize one’s own limits, and then to identify how the other party’s strengths can fill the gap. We heard an example of this strategy from Dan Jackson from the NuLawLab when he described his partnership with game designers and law librarians to build a game for self-representative litigants. Susan Drisko Zago also spoke about aligning law librarians with public librarians to serve rural populations in northern New Hampshire. Beryl Lipton and Pam Wilmot shared…