Semester is Almost Over
Posted April 23, 2015 by Hayley Botnen
As I’ve mentioned before, April is a crazy month for me. What I forgot about was the fact that registration and the end of the semester were also both approaching. Registration always brings challenges and stress along with it. This semester, I completely forgot my registration time. Twelve hours later, I remembered in a panic and hustled to our registration site. I managed to get into two classes easily, but one already had a waiting list of 8 people! I try to remind myself not to stress. I try to tell myself that even if I can’t get into the class (which I think I will because the school tries to work with people) that it’s alright. I can extend school by a semester and my life will still be alright. But I still spend a lot of time freaking out. I also have like 8 projects due in the next week and a half which I keep trying to prioritize in order of due date, but it’s stressful. I’m excited for summer and the…
Website Launch and Other Odds and Ends
Posted April 18, 2015 by Samantha Quiñon
Last week at my cataloging internship at the American Archive for Public Broadcasting (AAPB) at WGBH Boston, our website launched and went live. This has been a long time coming and many, many people worked very hard to make this happen, so I wanted to take a minute and share it with you. Understandably, we had a party at lunch. I basically only ate cake and powered through the afternoon on a sugar high from the excellent buttercream frosting. Here’s a link to the AAPB, so you can see the results and learn more about the project I’m working on: http://americanarchive.org/. This week was busy, but I managed to break my routine a few times. First on Tuesday, I went to happy hour at a near by bar called the Squealing Pig. The event was sponsored by the SLIS Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists (SCoSSA), and there was all sorts of good food and good company. It was a nice mid-week break. Later in the week, I had an interview for an…
Library as Remembrance
Posted April 16, 2015 by Hayley Botnen
Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day began Wednesday night and goes through tonight. I was struck by the timing of one of my class assignments, and it made me consider the many ways in which libraries are the place for cultural heritage and remembrance. For one of my classes, I am required to design a text set around Lois Lowry’s Newbery award winning novel, Number the Stars. The novel follows a young girl and her Jewish friend at the beginning of the Holocaust. I focused on the ideas of risking one’s life to save another person’s and the many ways in which people act courageous. I found a wonderful amount of books, but at my library, they were tucked back in the stacks. There were a small amount pulled in the teen section, but the children books were focused on spring titles. I wonder if children librarians felt that the subject matter was too dark or depressing for young kids. As someone who wants to work with kids and teens, I was surprised by this…
LIS Career Fair
Posted April 15, 2015 by Jill Silverberg
Yesterday afternoon, a project I started about four months ago came to an end. Since January, I have been working closely with the Career Education Center and the School of Library and Information Science to put together a career fair for the SLIS student population. While the process was long and certainly not without its surprise twists, overall, I am very grateful that I was tasked with being this year’s LIS Career Fair Coordinator. For those of you who didn’t get a chance to read an article published at the end of March where I answered questions about the career fair and the preparation process, I won’t bore you with the details. You can find the link to the article here. I will say that one of the most important parts of being the LIS Career Fair Coordinator was ensuring that I had invited exhibitors that represented the various fields within the world of Library and Information Science. Fortunately for Simmons, Boston and the greater Boston area is rife with all sorts of information institutions. Once…
Girls Wanna be with the Girls
Posted April 12, 2015 by Samantha Quiñon
We have two weeks left in the spring semester. Two weeks! But is that going to keep my friends and me from going out when we have course work and final projects looming over us? Absolutely not! I’ll keep this brief, because now that I’ve spent all of today procrastinating my work, I should probably start doing it. (Well, I probably should have started doing it at the beginning of the term, as recommended, but it’s too late now.) Here was our day in pictures: Brunch at Scollay Square. Evidence of cocktails omitted. Me and fellow SLIS student Amanda Baker, Massachusetts State House in the background. Photo courtesy of Samantha Quiñon, all rights reserved, 2015. SLIS student Christina Benedictus “shooting the duck” on Boston Common. Photo courtesy of Meaghan Kinton, all rights reserved, 2015#shoottheduckrevolution And then we went to the movies and saw The Longest Ride, but really we just went to look at Scott Eastwood. He’s a good actor, okay? Meme by Sara Davis.
My Vote is Split
Posted April 10, 2015 by Alison Mitchell
I am a student at SLIS. I have two young children. They take a lot of time and attention. I am their primary caregiver. My first two semesters at SLIS, I intentionally scheduled classes and schoolwork in such a way that it barely impacted my kids. Everything was done while they were at (their) school. Even my library shifts are primarily during their school hours, and a grandparent typically picks them up when I work later. Things are much easier for me when the girls’ schedule isn’t disrupted. Not so much from now on. I’m pretty much done with required courses, which are offered at a variety of days and times each semester. From now on, I’ll be taking classes that are only offered once a semester, or even once every other semester (or even once every two years, but I don’t even want to think about that). This means that I have very little choice as to when I go to school, and my kids’ schedule will now depend on my schedule, instead of…
The Particularities of Writing for People
Posted April 9, 2015 by Hayley Botnen
As I mentioned last week, April seems to be the month of literally everything being due. My biggest struggle–like every semester–is trying to learn to write for particular professors. I have my own writing style. I use it when I blog. I use it when I do my NaNoWriMo months. I use it in emails and Facebooks posts. I write the same way pretty much everywhere. But when I have to write for class, I try to spruce it up. Most people realize that you speak in different “registers” depending on who you’re speaking with: friends, family, professors, clergy, strangers. This also tends to happen with writing. When I write for school, I try to focus on certain facets of writing which I pretty much ignore otherwise. These facets are generally concepts I’ve been taught in school: don’t use “I” in academic papers, don’t end sentences with prepositions, make sure you have a thesis, avoid passive voice, and other “standard English” rules. However, one thing I always seem to forget is the subjectiveness of writing…
At the Dance Archives
Posted April 4, 2015 by Samantha Quiñon
For a few hours every Thursday I have started to go to the archives of Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre (JMBT), which has its facilities in the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, a beautiful field stone building in the American Gothic Revival style just off of Harvard Square. There, two other SLIS students and I are taking an inventory before processing the collections, as part of a grant-funded project to process the archives of many of Cambridge’s dance companies. Two weeks ago, my first time seeing the JMBT archives, I knew our goal was ambitious. The collections comprise everything from institutional records, to costumes and props, to old promotional material and performance recordings. They are crammed into four large rooms in different parts of the church, much like I imagine industrial-sized, hastily packed storage lockers to be (if such things exist). Battling through the dust and teetering piles of boxes, we have to move records around Tetris style to wind our way from item to item before noting it in our spreadsheet. Admittedly, this style of inventory…
Books: 2015, 1st Quarter
Posted April 3, 2015 by Alison Mitchell
As I’ve written before, I keep a log of all the books I read. I don’t really do anything with the list, though. Occasionally I’ll have trouble remembering an author or title and it comes in handy, but it’s more just something I do for no particular reason. At the beginning of this year, I read Jessamyn West’s blog post about the way she tracks her reading, and decided to give it a try. A cursory look back at 2014 made me think that my reading was pretty evenly distributed between male/female authors, fiction/nonfiction, and authors of color (the categories she tracks). So, for the first three months of 2015, I tracked all that information, sure I would come out with a diverse, inclusive list. I was kind of wrong, and kind of surprised about that. Here’s what I read in January, February and March 2015: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes Kinda Like Brothers by Coe Booth I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer Not That Kind of…
The Insanity of April
Posted April 2, 2015 by Hayley Botnen
As always, the final full month of a semester is filled with the insanity of every class wanting to fit in the rest of the assignments before class is officially over. I have papers upon papers (seriously, I have 24 papers due in one class this month–short papers, but still 24 of them) and a few rogue assignments as well as discussion board posts. So what do I decide to do? Camp NaNoWriMo. Camp is the equivalent of regular National Novel Writing Month, however, it occurs twice (April and July), and people are free to set their own word count goal. Writers can also work on a variety of works, a novel isn’t the only option. I’ve also been enjoying the presence of two friends who have moved in with me. Hence, my life has become unexpectedly busy. I’ve been enjoying walking with the warm weather. I also started listening to podcasts! I had downloaded several podcasts to listen to during the 43 hour drive from Montana, but I didn’t end up listening to very…