Student Snippets A Window Into The Daily Life & Thoughts of SLIS Students

Learning about the Copyright Act

Yesterday in my Photographic Archives course (LIS 471) taught by the wonderful Professor Martha Mahard, my class was was treated to a crash course in the Copyright Act and all of its wonderful quirks. For those not acquainted with the Copyright Act, it is something that many of us will encounter more than once in our line of work as librarians, archivists, and information professionals. To describe the Copyright Act is no simple task but I will do my best to define it in under 100 words. The U.S. Copyright Act: a piece of federal legislation that provides Constitutional protection to the writings of authors. The term ‘writings’ is a loose term, one that encompasses architectural design, software, graphic arts, movies, and sound recordings. The owner of a copyright has the sole rights to reproduce, distribute, perform, display, and license works based on the copyrighted work. The rights of the copyright owner are subject to limitation by the ‘fair use’ doctrine. Fair use applies to criticism, comment, news, reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. These are not…


Temporary Disturbances in the Force

Hello there! I’ve had trouble finding time to write recently because work has been incredibly busy. I like my job for many reasons, one being that my firm offers great benefits, like sabbaticals every 10 years; however, in the last two weeks, one coworker’s sabbatical overlapped with another person’s honeymoon. Doing the job of three specialists has made me feel like a battle droid running around with its head cut off. This week, one of my coworkers is back, so things have quieted down a bit. Finding time to celebrate Halloween!   I have definitely started to find a healthy balance when it comes to school work, and my last few assignments have come back with high marks. I felt confident enough, when I registered for classes next semester, to sign up for 9 credits instead of 6 – kind of. It will work like this: during spring break in March my adviser, Jim Matarazzo, is teaching a week long class called “Special Libraries,” which is 3 credits like any other course, but meets from…


Go See Some Art!

I know that, for a graduate student, the concept of “free time” is like some ungraspable mist, always hanging nearby making you aware of its existence, but rarely solidifying into something practical and tangible and enjoyable. Because its appearance is so rare, it is important to make the most of it when it arrives. And Boston is never lacking in cool events to check out in that precious free moment. For a theatre geek like myself, one of my favorite discoveries over my last year and a half in Boston has been the Student Rush program. This program has been such a gift for my grad-school-afflicted wallet. For just $25 and a peek at your student ID, you can receive amazing tickets to some of the biggest Broadway touring shows in town! All you have to do is show up an hour before the house opens and show your ID! Now I know this sounds too good to be true, and while it IS true, there are a few downsides… You can only get one…


NaNoWriMo and Me

For most of the school year, I struggle with my time management skills. It’s not that I don’t have the skills, but rather that I struggle to effectively use them. I have planners and notebooks and generally know of the syllabus and the schedule I should be on to get everything done. I have a tendency to ignore all of them in favor of doing other things, which, often, are not actually productive. This, however, completely changes in the month of November. November is NaNoWriMo. I’m very passionate about NaNoWriMo. I’ve won the official NaNo every year since 2013. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. It occurs in the month of November when a bunch of completely crazy people, myself included, decide to write fifty thousand words in 30 days. This averages out to 1,667 words per day. It’s a lot of writing, and, to get it all done requires a lot of planning. I haven’t stayed up past midnight yet to get homework done or get a head start on my…


Walk the Walk (on Commonwealth)

Last week I somehow caught laryngitis. To my memory, I have never been that sick in my entire life. I was sleeping 20 hours a day, quarantined to my little apartment, voiceless and surviving on canned soup, white rice, and rolled-up tortillas, and mentally swaying back and forth on whether I wished I still had roommates: On the one hand, I’d have someone to take care of me. On the other, they would be forced to be witness to my sickness and squalor. Thankfully my prescription meds worked wonders and I’m on the up and up, but my lost week means that autumn in New England appeared out of nowhere for me. Before I was sick, the leaves were just starting to change, littering the streets with neon yellow slivers. Now, the reds and oranges have arrived, bold and utterly beautiful. On Sunday afternoons I work at the Boston Architectural College Library and I take advantage of the still mild weather and Boston’s essential walkability and stroll through Beacon Hill, across the Public Gardens, and…


A Devotion to Knowledge

This post is for anyone who may be worried about their undergraduate programs being (or seeming) totally unrelated to a master’s program. I came into the SLIS program feeling a little bit of this anxiety, which lived next door to my fears about having been away from any school for a year. I have adjusted without too much difficulty, and I think this last year has been invaluable in terms of gaining some real perspective. In May 2014, I graduated from Saint Michael’s College (VT) with a double BA in English and Religious Studies. After those four years of liberal arts, I appreciate a healthy dose of critical self-reflection. I have recently been trying to imagine a rough intellectual trajectory to rationalize how I came to my present studies in LIS – in fact, this question is part of why I started this blog. The English piece of my B.A. degree makes sense (books, right?), but how do I bridge my past studies in religion to my present work in LIS? My answer arrived in…


I Do Love a Themed Snack!

I am currently waist-deep in my classwork for the semester and starting to feel the toll of the impending final projects, presentations, and papers, not to mention the weekly coursework I still need to stay on top of. But, thankfully, I was recently treated to a wonderful surprise that brightened my week and reminded me again why I love this school, this program, and my fellow students. One of the classes I am taking is entitled Victorian Literature, in which we are focusing particular attention on the subgenre of school stories. Well, as any lit. major knows, it is almost impossible to escape a Victorian literature class without encountering the infamous Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. Now, it’s time for a confession…I’ve never read either of the Alice books before this year. I’ve seen the Disney movie a couple dozen times, sure, but I entered this class and this book with fresh eyes. Well, Mr. Carroll did not disappoint. The whimsical characters, bright poetry, and charming word pictures were a welcome change from the…


Presentations: Or, the overwhelming fear you’re doing it wrong

I love to give presentations. Give me a PowerPoint or Prezi, a somewhat captive audience, a chance to pretend to organize my notes, and I’m off. My philosophy for presenting is ‘if you want to make a splash, you’ve got to jump’. For me, that means is that when I start a presentation, I go into it believing that the most important part of a successful presentation is the actual presenting. If I go into a presentation knowing everything, having an exact plan, but get nervous and stumble or get mentally disorganized, I feel like I’ve negated any work I’ve done. My confidence is derailed completely. Other people, I know, feel confident in their presentation if they’ve collected and organized all the knowledge they wanted to get across. They just hate the presenting part. I’m flashy. I’ve got the substance, sure, but flash is where it’s at for me. I did a presentation last week which I kicked off by handing out two jars of m&m’s to the closest guesses of the number of book…


Happy Halloween!

Grab your pumpkins and copious bags of candy ’cause Halloween is right around the corner! This year the holiday fortunately falls on a weekend which means that us students do not have to deal with the epic struggle of deciding whether or not to attend class dressed in full costume. While I will certainly support anyone who has/would do it, I sadly have never really had the opportunity to do so. Life just has a way of messing with my plans. Oh well. In preparation of All Hallows Eve I’ve been binge watching and reading anything and everything that reminds me of my favorite autumn holiday. From watching Let’s Plays of survival horror video games to reading a horror novel set within a store reminiscent of IKEA, I know that come November 1st, I am definitely going to need a year to recover from my apparent Halloween overdose. But until then, the parade of all things spooky, creepy, and nightmare-tastic will keep marching on. While I sadly could not make a visit to Salem, MA this…


Flexibility

One thing I like about being an older student is that I have some flexibility.  I’m not trying to finish SLIS super fast to get a job or move somewhere else — my job and family are already here.  I can take my time with the program and get what I want out of it.  Since I have two kids in elementary school, that flexibility is pretty important to me.  When I entered Simmons, I expected to take three years to finish the program — two classes each semester (instead of the traditional three) and no classes in the summer, since my kids would be out of school.  It seemed like a good plan.  Then I took a three-credit short course late last spring, which put me ahead of where I expected to be.  Suddenly, I had options — should I take another short course and graduate a semester earlier than I’d planned?  Should I take only one course some semester, and pick up additional work hours?  Which brings me to the upcoming semester.  As…