City of Neighborhoods Exhibit
Posted March 24, 2014 by Jill Silverberg
This past Saturday, the map gallery where I work, the Leventhal Map Gallery, premiered their newest exhibit to the Boston public. The new exhibit, City of Neighborhoods, celebrates the racial and ethnic diversity of the city of Boston. While the former exhibit, Made in Boston, had featured antique maps of both Boston and the New England area from the late 1600s through the 1700s, this exhibition “Compares the neighborhoods of today’s ‘new’ Boston with those of 100 years ago.” Through the use of photographs and maps, the exhibit is colorful and enlightening. As music representing the cultures that form the social fabric of Boston plays in the background, one can see the areas where newer immigrant groups have settled and how the physical appearance of the city had changed to reflect those who live and work there. As part of Saturday’s opening, the map gallery pulled out all the stops. In a separate room, we had activities for families with children while a band played music from Cape Verde. For many people who attended the event, this was the first time they had ever realized just how diverse the city was….
New England Archivists Spring Meeting
Posted March 23, 2014 by Gemma Doyle
This week the New England Archivists held their spring meeting in Portsmouth, NH, and I (and a good portion of my archives classmates) were in attendance. This was actually my first professional conference, and I went to see and hear professionals in the archives community talk about their jobs, the current state of the archives field, and of course, a decent dose of networking, networking, and more networking. (I am terrible at networking, and would generally rather rip out my own tongue than talk to a complete stranger, but I went into the conference knowing that I would have to do exactly that at least once because it was an assignment for my LIS440 class. Let the record show that I did manage to talk to one stranger and did not die as a result, so I think I may be a better person for the experience.) (Let the record also show that one stranger was exactly how many I talked to, so… baby steps.) The thing about the archives field is that it is…
Storytelling Semi-Finals this Weekend
Posted March 22, 2014 by Maggie Davidov
This is a shameless plug for a certain storyteller (ME) who is competing in the MassMouth Story Slam Semi Finals this Sunday at Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge at 6:30 pm. I’m telling a story from my days in the Peace Corps, so it should be …hilarious. A story slam is every bit the event you are conjuring in your imagination: a forum where people from the audience tell personal stories, within a time limit and people cheer for a well told tale. In this particular story slam there will be no judges. The audience decides! So come out to hear some great stories and support a fellow GSLISer. Storytelling is a big part of our society these days thanks to organizations like MassMouth and the Moth. Librarians should stay involved in an arena they championed so many years ago. Let’s get back in this game and begin telling our stories!
March Madness
Posted March 21, 2014 by Emily Boyd
Clever title, right? It’s fitting because of everything going on right now, I cannot believe March is almost over already! This semester ends in just about a month and I’ll have finished 10 of 12 classes to graduate. In fact, just this week GSLIS made an exciting announcement, August grads (like me) will be able to walk at the May graduation ceremony. Although it will feel weird to receive a (fake) diploma for a degree I haven’t technically earned yet, I’m so excited to participate in the graduation ceremony! The one downside of finishing in the summer was that I thought I wouldn’t get to walk at graduation, so props to Simmons for changing their policy. It wouldn’t feel real to me if I didn’t participate in a graduation ceremony to make it official. March madness doesn’t just refer to school and my basketball bracket, last week I accepted a full-time job starting in June! I’ll be working for a tech startup company called Green Mountain Digital working on an amazing (and free!) app called…
Gateway to Reading
Posted March 20, 2014 by Alec Chunn
Welcome back! Here’s hoping your vacations were as pleasant as mine. I was able to return to the Pacific Northwest, and I spent some time in a museum in Oregon that a friend of mine works at. It was interesting to see the ways that libraries and museums differ. I wanted to ask the librarian about her collection, but it was her birthday and she was out. I did get to see the way certain artifacts are stored though! What I really want to talk about happened before my vacation. Just before I left, I had the opportunity to see Marc Brown, creator of the beloved Arthur television series, at the Boston Public Library. The talk he gave was part of BPL’s Lowell Lecture Series. Luckily for me and other kid lit types, this year’s theme happens to be “Gateway to Reading.” Marc Brown is only the second of many more lectures–many of which you might want to check out. (I’d extend my commercial beyond this, but I think you can decide for yourself what…
Going Home and Coming Back
Posted March 17, 2014 by Jill Silverberg
In the weeks preceding spring break this year, I’ll admit, I was starting to get a bit stir crazy. You see, for the last four years, I had the luxury of being able to journey off my undergraduate campus for weekend hikes all around Massachusetts. These weekend adventures not only provided me with a break from my academic responsibilities, but also helped fend off any possibility of developing recklessness. As an individual who can’t ever seem to stay in one place for too long, you can imagine how much I miss these weekend outings. While I absolutely love living in Boston, sometimes, a person just needs a change every now and then and I hit that wall about a month a half ago. Of course, without access to a car or enough free time to venture off on the commuter rail, I’ve found myself essentially stuck within the confines of the city. Now don’t get me wrong, one can never go wrong with a bit of urban exploring, but sometimes, a person just needs to get out. And so, I decided to do just that and last Wednesday, I said…
Alternative Spring Break
Posted March 16, 2014 by Gemma Doyle
This week I took advantage of one of the many opportunities that are offered during spring break to try something new and spent an afternoon volunteering at the school library of the Boston Teachers Union School. I’ve spent a lot of time working with teens and adults in public libraries, but have not really spent a substantial amount of time in the children’s rooms. I’ve also never worked in or even volunteered in a school library before, so I thought it would be a really interesting and fun experience -and that I was pretty much guaranteed to learn something. Given my lack of experience, it was a good thing that our day consisted of labelling, barcoding and shelf reading; anything more advanced probably would have been a little nerve-wracking because I would have been too worried about screwing up something completely new to me. Boston Teachers Union School is K-8, so we got to see kids of every age throughout the afternoon, and process materials for every age as well. We also got to see…
Being a Librarian 20 years ago… today
Posted March 15, 2014 by Maggie Davidov
Today I worked in a library system 20 years ago. Ok, that’s a lie. I don’t wake up every day, hop in my time machine and travel back to the simpler age of the card catalog. Though, if I did have a time machine I would choose a much simpler time with cooler clothes and become friends with Billy Shagspar (see Bill Bryson’s biography of a certain Elizabethan playwright). No, today my colleagues and I were mostly immobilized by the World Wide Web (the birthday present it re-gifted to us). Our circulation program, Millennium, just decided not to work. We began running around like chickens with our heads cut off for a good fifteen minutes, calling every supervisor under the sun to no avail. What could be done? Without computers how do we run the library? Technology is not the maker and breaker of libraries these days, although it seems like it. If it were the only thing holding a library together then there would be very little point to getting an MLS degree. The…
180 Degree Perception Change
Posted March 10, 2014 by Emily Boyd
In the fall of 2011, when I first started telling friends and family I was planning to pursue a masters degree in library and information science, the response across the board was something to the effect of “you need a masters degree to be a librarian?” I would reply by saying things along the lines of “well libraries are about a lot more than books” and “technology is so key now, I’ve got a lot to learn.” This all sounds well and good, but at the time I think I was more or less parroting back what I’d read and heard from those already in the field. I knew this was all true, but in the back of my mind a little voice kept asking “is it really about more than books?”. This self doubt was justified, especially given that the public image of a librarian is a matronly woman surrounded by books making shushing noises. That said, it didn’t take me long at Simmons to realize that, yes, it’s about a whole lot more…
Little Libraries
Posted March 9, 2014 by Gemma Doyle
One of the first things I learned from working in public and special libraries was that even though they all provided more or less the same services to the community they served, there were countless differences in how they functioned and what people even meant when they said “library.” The wonderful thing about libraries is that they don’t have to exist in a certain way. They can be the giant buildings with borrowing cards and policies, but they can also just be a small shelf of books that people are invited to take and replace as they will, all for free. Little Free Libraries are a network of tiny libraries set up on street corners and curated by anyone who wants to put in the work, who have free books that anyone can come along and take, and leave their own books in. There are 10,000 – 12,000 Little Free Libraries set up around the world, including seven in the Metro Boston area, mostly in Cambridge and Somerville. They each have their own eclectic selection of…