Flying Solo!
Posted August 12, 2012 by Julie Steenson
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…
Equal Access: Technology and the Olympic Games
Posted August 9, 2012 by Katie Olivo
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.
Shooting for Par, Pigeons, and Career Preparation
Posted August 7, 2012 by Sarah Barton
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…
AALL Annual Meeting & Conference, 2012
Posted August 2, 2012 by dunhame
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.
Adult Programming at the Library
Posted July 31, 2012 by Julie Steenson
When asked to come up with some ideas for the Adult Summer Reading Program, to add to what was already planned, I struggled with how to appeal to a different library population. In our small town library, the same people generally come to book clubs, foreign films and speaker events. This population is devoted to the library, and many of them belong to the Friends of the Library organization. We are grateful for their support, but I really wanted to bring in some new patrons. My first thought was that I wanted to appeal to working parents and families, who can’t come in to storytimes and children’s daytime events due to work schedules. Unfortunately, that territory appears to involve some toe-stepping and political wrangling so that idea is being tabled for now…. but not forgotten. My second thought was to appeal to an audience interested in pure entertainment, as a way to introduce a new population to all the library has to offer. We all love to be intellectual and talk about the latest bestseller…
For Me, a Library Job is Better than the Mall
Posted July 19, 2012 by Sarah Barton
The other day I set foot in a good old-fashioned mall for the first time in several years. It was almost lunchtime on yet another 90-degree day, and the mall was relatively empty save for a handful of folks meandering in and out of the stores. I basked in the air conditioning while strolling past old teenage haunts like American Eagle, Finish Line, and Abercrombie & Fitch (ugh). While standing in the Verizon store waiting for a phone repair, a sign near one of the mall entrances caught my eye: “We are committed to making our malls a greater part of each community they serve.” The first thing my librarian-in-training brain did was to replace the word “malls” with “libraries.” Which then made me think, how similar is a mall to a library? Well, both are free for people to enter and look around, both are spots for congregating or hanging out, both revolve around customer service, and both are mainstays of their communities. People frequent libraries and malls to find a specific book or…
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…
Pay We Must
Posted July 15, 2012 by Julie Steenson
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” -Mark Twain Tuition is a small expense on the path to greatness. The tuition bill arrived yesterday, which is always a “Gulp!” moment around here. Having just finished paying for my daughter’s undergrad education, I never really allowed myself any breathing time before it was time to pay for my own education. My daughter and I are both attending grad school this year – different places and degrees – and we have both been blessed with some scholarship help, for which we are enormously thankful, but that falls short of what we both actually need. I am not here so much to share my money woes, the high cost of gasoline, food, and education…We all have these concerns. What I would like to do is share some of my solutions and hopefully ease the stress of that tuition bill sticker shock. Don’t let money stand in the…
Metadata and Street Art
Posted July 13, 2012 by Maya Bery
Metadata and street art. These are very distinct “things,” if you will, each with their own importance and meaning to those who are familiar with them, yet they exist in worlds that do not often crossover with each other, unless of course, you are an art librarian with a penchant for cataloguing. Metadata, for the uninitiated (or those who have not yet had the pleasure of taking Information Organization) is data about data. It doesn’t usually intrude upon our daily lives, but it’s vital in the work of librarians and those dedicated to making information accessible. When you’re looking for that thing that you want to know about on Google and you just can’t come up with what you’re looking for, it’s because you likely haven’t hit upon the right kind of keywords (which are part of metadata) to describe what you’re looking for, and thus make it appear. A friend from college, the wonderfully eloquent Laurenellen McCann, recently discussed this at a TEDxWDC talk entitled “Making Cyberspace for Public Art.” in the context of trying to…
A Conversation Starter…or Stopper?
Posted July 12, 2012 by Sarah Barton
Last week I was discussing my library school escapades in two different situations with two very different results. The first interaction was with a seventy-year-old uncle who said “I don’t understand library school, can you explain it to me in one paragraph?” This query presented several challenges, especially since the guy is not a library user. The conversation lasted less than a minute and I could tell that he wasn’t super interested in what I was saying. It was frustrating not only because I did not really know what to say, but also because whatever I said didn’t quite seem to resonate with him. It’s almost like he was trying to pick a fight, but neither of us was willing to throw the first punch. The next interaction was much more engaging and pleasant. It was between myself and three teachers from a prestigious private school in Connecticut. One of the teachers is currently being encouraged by the school library director to pursue a library degree, so he had all kinds of questions. Another worked…