reading
It’s LIT!
Posted August 6, 2019 by Katie Carlson
The truth is, sometimes I think of myself as a ‘bad librarian’ for how few books I’ve read in the past year! It may even be less that I’m not living up to the librarian stereotypes, and more because I feel like I’m missing a piece of myself! In middle and high school (especially over the summer), I would read two or three books a week. College kind of killed my reading bug. I’d find it almost impossible to read for pleasure after 200-some pages of theory, so Netflix it was! I had high hopes that the ease of reading would fly back to me post-graduation, but that was not the case! One book. I read one book! ALL SUMMER! After Karin Slaughter’s thrilling but terrifying Pretty Girls (highly recommend), I was overcome with moving to Boston, making my first apartment home, and finding a tribe. Kicking off grad school meant more prescribed reading, three jobs, and more exhaustion. But even though summer is almost over, I decided I’d had enough. I work at a…
End of Summer Term, Plus Beach Reads!
Posted July 30, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
It’s the last week of summer term! Yay! I am almost done with all my work. I submitted my final project for my Info Sources class, but I am still finishing my final paper for my Management class. It’s a grant proposal and I’m struggling with it. Grant writing is very different from academic writing. It needs to be very concise and to the point. I love to write and play around with words and sentence structure and having to pare down my language has been tough. I’m focusing on brevity but I’m also worried that I’m not explaining myself enough. I’m sure there’s a sweet spot between too little explanation and too much explanation, but I haven’t found it yet and I’m frustrated. It feels very sparse and cold somehow. Thankfully I have a solid base written out and I just need to make sure that I’m being addressing all the necessary points. But grant writing is something that I am probably going to be encountering in my library career, so it’s good to…
To All the Bookstores I Ever Loved
Posted July 8, 2019 by Maria Reilova
Now that summer has officially started, I am finding myself with something I almost never have, extra free time! I am interning full-time this summer so I am still busy throughout the day but it is so nice to be able to leave my work at the office and come home and not have to worry about catching up on my assignments or readings for class. So obviously, my conclusion for how to occupy all this new free time is that I can finally start catching up on all my leisure reading. This also means I have to make a trip to my favorite bookstore because you can never have too many books. I live pretty close to Brookline, and Coolidge Corner has always been one of my favorite areas to take a stroll and hang out when the weather is nice. The Trader Joe’s is there, a great tea shop, a yoga studio (I keep saying I will take a class at one of these weekends), and best of all Brookline Booksmith, (a used…
Book Talk Beats Bed
Posted March 25, 2019 by Katie Carlson
Sometimes, as a student with a mishmash of jobs and an objectively messed up sleep schedule, it can be hard to find the motivation to go to SLIS events, even if they are right up your alley! This Tuesday was one of those days where I just needed a nap. I was ready to trek to the bus, journey home, and wrap myself in covers. But, at the invitation of my friend Lee, I powered through and ended up at Professor Jeannette Bastian’s talk on her new book: Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader. I’m so glad I went! In undergrad I took a slew of courses on colonization in Latin America and Caribbean women writers that changed my entire outlook on life. This event, put on by the Student Chapter of ALA International Relations Round Table (SCIRRT), brought me right back to those amazing classes! Professor Bastian’s background as the Territorial Librarian of the United States Virgin Islands from 1987 to 1998 means that not only is she an expert on the subject,…
Searching for the Unknown
Posted February 26, 2019 by Amie Grosshans
We are taught early on how to search for information in a library. You search by author, title, or subject, and find what you need. But the reality is, it’s not always easy to find exactly what you want unless you have a good idea of what you are looking for. In LIS 415, Information Organization, we completed an assignment where we searched for the word “grey” as author, keyword, and title. Predictably, the results were numerous and varied, as “grey” is a fairly common word that can be a name or a color. That assignment gave me a lot to think about. I use the library a lot, both for school and for myself. Most of the time I have an author or title in mind when I’m searching, or at least a subject that can narrow down my search. But how do I search when I don’t know what I want? And more importantly, do I ever search for the unknown? All these questions came up because of my trip to the Needham…
Fall Beckons!
Posted September 13, 2018 by Megan Ondricek
My penultimate semester at Simmons has begun and the summer is officially over. I’m at this stage of my school journey in which things are beginning to feel very repetitive. Here I am: getting up before 6 am every Saturday, driving the same route to South Hadley, Mass., stopping at the same places for gas and a bite to eat, walking the same paths to familiar classrooms, seeing the same faces, eating the same lunches at the SlIS West office…. This is not to say that there’s nothing unique about this semester, just that it’s begun to feel very routine. In many ways, though, this semester is unprecedented. For the first time, both of my kids will be at school for some portion of the day, giving me chunks of dedicated homework time in the mornings. The kids’ school schedules force all of us to be up and at ’em fairly early so there will be more discipline and more routine. And I’m starting this semester with more planning, motivation, determination, and better personal organization…
The End of Summer
Posted August 29, 2018 by Sarah Callanan
So, I thought that my fall class started next week- I was wrong. Guess who gets two more weeks of summer?! That’s right, I do! The students in my class got an email from our professor a few days ago giving us details about the class (LIS 488: Technology for Information Professionals), and it said that our start date is September 11, which means that I get more time before school starts! Now that I have the syllabus and some more details about the class, I can see that this is going to be different than other online classes that I’ve had. There are going to be a few “live sessions” where everyone is online and interacting with each other at the same time, which I’m really looking forward to! While I’ve gotten to interact with my classmates during online classes before, it’s been mostly through forums, and we reply to each other at our leisure. With the live sessions (I assume) we will actually be able to see one another and participate like an…
Summer Has Arrived
Posted July 11, 2018 by Sarah Callanan
Oh my goodness a heatwave has hit Massachusetts! If summer wasn’t here before, it has definitely arrived now. I must admit, I’m not really a fan of excessively hot and humid weather, and I’m glad that it seems to be cooling down just a bit. Because of the heat, I’ve been trying to stay indoors with my beloved air conditioning as much as possible. Between work and my summer class, it really has not been difficult. As I mentioned in my last post, my summer class is online, and we’re fitting 14 weeks’ worth of material into 8 weeks. The class is keeping me very busy between the readings and assignments, but I’m really enjoying learning all the new concepts and interacting with my classmates. We’ve been learning about information organization, metadata, and as of this week, encoding standards. I will admit, learning all the new material in the shortened time frame has been a challenge, but it has been an enjoyable one. One of the best parts about this class is that there…
Books and Adaptations
Posted June 12, 2018 by Ashley Jackson
Hello again! I am back in Boston as of late last night (early this morning) and they weather is gorgeous. I read many great books while abroad including a thriller/mystery series. My sister-in-law had obtained a collection of books from the UK author Ann Cleves. These books are great mystery books and the Vera series has been made into a television series in the UK (which we can watch here in the States on Hulu). These series remind me of Agatha Christie series with Hercule Poirot. Great for summer time beach reading of you’re into that sort of thing. Reading these books got me thinking about books that have been adapted into television and movies. I feel that most popular books have now been adapted into a film or television series. Often, people only know about the adaptation before learning that it was a book first (with the exception of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games). The Divergent series, The Maze Runner series, The Book Thief, and Riverdale as well as Lemony Snicket as Netflix…
Summer Reading
Posted May 31, 2018 by ShanTil Yell
It’s time for another book list! Here’s what I’m currently diving into, and one more that I’m planning to pick up from the library ASAP. Needful Things by Stephen King- I haven’t read a good scary book in a while. Well, that’s not true. I did read The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani, which thoroughly unsettled me. I would not suggest that one if you are a mother looking to hire childcare anytime soon. The kind of scary I’m talking about is the supernatural horror variety, and King is my go to author for that particular brand. I’m only a few pages in, and once again he’s taken me right into the small-town life and happenings of Castle Rock, Maine. He has this enchanting way of writing characters, dialogue, and setting that transports me inside of the story. It’s fantastic, and it also guarantees that I’m going to be frightened at least a few times. I can’t wait 🙂 Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert- Yes, I’m reading this one again. I think it’s going to…