Construction Paper Revelations
Posted February 13, 2014 by Alec Chunn
Before the first day of The Picturebook, Professor Megan Lambert sent us an email requesting that we bring the following items to class: a stack of construction paper, a pair of scissors, and a glue stick. If you’re anything like me, these magical three are the things you bring to craft nights because you can’t sew or embroider or knit or [insert equally awesome skill here]. They’re the essentials. They’re the things that make you feel like an artist even when people say you aren’t. Therefore, you can imagine my delight when I realized that the activity planned for class was nothing other than starting the project that would be creating our very own picturebooks. In grad school. Awesome, right? When I found out, I told everyone. As I rejoiced and Instagramed my process over the next few weeks, I realized that the people I was telling were making certain assumptions about the level of difficulty of my program. I can imagine why they would. Picturebooks, normally 32 pages, tend to have simple text and…
Papercut Zine Library
Posted February 9, 2014 by Gemma Doyle
The Papercut Zine Library takes up the back corner of Lorem Ipsum Books in Inman Square, Cambridge. Zines have been around since the rise of punk subculture in the ’70s, and continue to thrive as small handwritten or typed booklets today. There are zines on every topic imaginable, and thousands of new ones produced every year. I’ve always loved the personal stories found in most zines, and the time and energy put into making them tends to mean more to me than simply reading a blog entry on the same subject. The Papercut Zine Library is home to more than 15,000 zines, with new arrivals constantly being added to the collection. A year’s membership costs just $12, and unlimited zines are lent out for 4 weeks. Better yet, at least for me, they are always looking for volunteers to help out with cataloging the zines and running the zine library, and that was what really interested me. I still haven’t taken a cataloging class, but what better way to navigate the tricky cataloging rules than…
Get in Line for Story Time
Posted February 8, 2014 by Maggie Davidov
Are you sick of hearing me write about stories? Too bad, friends, because here comes another event too good to pass up. Next Saturday at Boston Public Library in Copley Square, MassMouth will host its 3rd Annual Storytelling event. Why do I get so amped about storytelling? I suppose it’s the rush I get when I go on stage and share an experience from my life with hundreds of people. It could also be the looks of surprise on the faces of the kids that come to my story time when I tell them that a WITCH has come to the window. BOO! Mostly, I tell you about these events and the glorious hilarity of it all because when it comes down to, it stories are meant for sharing. I tell this to you as I tell my 6-year olds at storytime: we are storytellers. All of us. Come to a storytelling event at MassMouth. Stop by Copley next Saturday for a half an hour. In a half an hour you can hear 2 or…
2014 Olympics Fun Facts
Posted February 7, 2014 by Emily Boyd
It may be a stereotype, but in my experience it has been true, that librarians (and archivists) love their trivia. In anticipation of the Olympics starting this weekend I decided to find some Olympics fun facts for all your trivia needs. The student lounge on campus is a place where lots of great trivia tidbits are exchanged and I hope to put some of these to use in the next couple of weeks. Looking forward to having lots of olympic action on in the background while I catch up on homework and try to keep warm in the bitter cold. So, because its 2014, I think its only appropriate to provide you with 14 fun facts about the Olympics, past and present, to use to impress your friends and family. 1. The Olympic flame in Olympia, Greece is rekindled every two years using the sun’s rays and a concave reflective mirror. 2. With a total of 303, Norway leads with the most medals from the winter games through 2010. The U.S. is second with 253….
Big Moves
Posted February 6, 2014 by Alec Chunn
So, I moved. I’m still in Allston (darn), but at least I am several steps closer to Brookline. I could wax poetic about how much I love that city (fun fact: I volunteer in the Teen Room at the main branch of the public library) but that would do little for our purposes here. As much as I might like to publicly complain about my laborious moving process (it really wasn’t so bad), I find myself distracted by a much more exciting move than my own: The Horn Book is coming to Simmons. For the children’s literature world, this is huge. HUGE. I’m telling you. (Don’t believe me? Click here.) This move makes a lot of sense considering that the magazine’s founder, Bertha Mahony, graduated from Simmons in 1902. Nowadays, Simmons (specifically its Center for the Study of Children’s Literature) and The Horn Book are both involved in Children’s Book Boston, a new organization dedicated to providing a shared space for the Boston-based kid lit world. Simmons also hosts The Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium…
The Future of GSLIS: Blended and Online Courses
Posted February 5, 2014 by Maggie Davidov
You haven’t heard from me in a long while because I’ve been in class every day for the past three weeks. No, I am not taking more than my usual part time load. However, I am taking my first online class this semester. The online class is taking up most of my time. I spend a good hour every day following my class discussion on twitter. Check us out #lis460. I also listen to podcasts from my professor, the ever so talented Linda Braun. After the podcast for the week is over I watch her explain a new trend in social media through multiple screencasts on youtube. I then do my readings. Thankfully they are more relevant than a textbook on reserve at Beatley; they are blog posts or magazine articles from the LIS, technology or education field. I then take all of this knowledge and discuss it with my group on a collaborative google doc. There are of course other projects, but that is the bare bones of what we do every week. I…
I Need Office Supply Rehab.
Posted February 4, 2014 by Carolyn Lucas
Please indulge me as I nerd out for a second about something that I don’t think many people nerd out about. Yes, I played World of Warcraft for years. Yes, I am really into Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and a plethora of even less well-known fantasy and science fiction-y stuff. But one of my favorite nerd-outs is so nerdy that no one even talks about it, and I’m not sure if anyone else suffers from this affliction besides myself (and apparently the whole of South Korea). Let’s nerd out about supplies. Seriously, guys. Is there anything better than the perfect pen, or a fresh notebook, or – the crème de la crème – a desk organizer? I have spent years hunting for the right school supplies. My father, bless his heart, finally gave up and sent me his credit card number so I could order my own planner, because in his words “just pick one already and buy it for yourself and consider it a Christmas present.” Everyone is different with what…
The Super Bowl from the Perspective of a Non-football Fan
Posted February 3, 2014 by Jill Silverberg
I’m not going to beat around the bush, I am not really big on this whole football thing. Don’t ask me why, because I can assure you that at age 22 ½, I’m still trying to figure it out. My three other roommates, on the other hand, are about as nuts about football as cats are to cat nip. Every Sunday evening, they can found in our common space with a game on (because there is always a game on, somewhere), surrounded by chips, dip, and beer. Like the fans in the stadiums, they hoot, they holler, they make snide remarks about the opposing team. Even from the perspective of someone who would much rather listen to silence than hear a baseball game broadcasted over the radio, my roommates somehow always managed to make whatever they are watching seem like they are watching the greatest show on earth. And so, after months and months of listening to their weekend hoopla, I found myself Sunday night, over at a mutual friend’s apartment watching the Big Game….
Hidden Value in Boring Courses
Posted January 31, 2014 by Emily Boyd
I’m about to say something that may shock you. Not all classes in library school are riveting. One in particular is considered by many to be the most boring class they could possibly imagine. This course has only recently been removed from the list of core courses and I’m here to suggest that when you come to GSLIS, you take that boring course. This infamously boring course is LIS 403 Evaluation of Information Services. Perhaps the name is a giveaway for why it might be considered a bit of a snooze. In truth, no it wasn’t my favorite class to sit through, for three hours, in the evenings, on Mondays, but I am now applying so much of what I learned to my current library job. Professor Mary Wilkins Jordan did her best to keep classes lively and interesting, and considering that the subject matter is dry, I’d say she succeeded most of the time. The real value of the class was the semester long assignment to create a research proposal for a theoretical evaluation….
Corporate Archive
Posted January 30, 2014 by Gemma Doyle
I work in a corporate archive. When I took LIS438 (Introduction to Archival Methods and Services) last spring, one of the questions someone asked me was what the main difference is between a corporate archive and a historical archive, besides the obvious fact that the corporate archive only hosts documents pertaining to the institution I work for. The one I can think of, off the top of my head, is that our legal department gets to determine how documents should come to the archive, and what shape they should be in when they get there. One of the first things I learned while I was doing my first archival internship at the Worcester Historical Museum was just how much I should appreciate the lovely uniformity of the records that I got every day in the corporate archive – everything organized and arranged just so before they even got to me. Of course, at the historical archive there was always the excitement of opening a box and having only the vaguest of ideas what might be…