lib schooled.

My birthday is in 12.5 days in which I will be turning 29 for the ninth time (37), which is in spitting distance of 40 which is close to death.

What an auspicious way to being an entry, eh? But, I figured it was the right time to sit down and do half-year updat. Because interestingly enough I find myself at a cross-roads, one of my own choosing, A decision doesn’t have to be made this second, but, I need to write it out at the very least to sort it out.

Academically, the school year has been amazing. Going to library school has to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I ended the first full year with a overall GPA of 3.88 (B+ in cataloging, of which I proudly wear), I won the Graduate Student Assistant job at the library, which means that my tuition is now paid for AND I have a job manning the reference desk at the graduate library. For one of my classes, I ended up helping design and implement WordPress for a local Detroit museum and will more than likely end up doing my archival practicum there as the archivist loves me. (She’s also pretty awesome as well!) One of my professors has tapped me to work for her company part-time, making really good money, as a web2.0 consultant of sorts which could possibly land me as a full-time gig when I graduate if it works out. I won a scholarship and am also being pushed to fine tune some of my student papers to publishing worth materials and submitting them to appropriate journals.
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I’ve been dying, for ages actually, to do a music blog with someone. I have grandiose ideas and I knew that this would not be a one person job, that it would take time, energy and love to get it off the ground. I really am in love with the idea of taking a topic and presenting the same idea with multiple viewpoints and finding someone who would not only have the time or the energy to do this has been difficult, even though there has been interest from variety of people. Via Twitter, I met Chris when we bonded over music via another tweeter, our now mutual friend Steve. It was via Steve that Chris and I started talking about music, finally following each other and carrying on our own conversations about music. If you go back through my time line, you see a lot of @ replies to Chris and this does not include our hours long conversations over IM, mostly about music with the occasional gossip thrown in about mutual Twitter friends.
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Right now there is a battle of noises happening between Wednesday and the radiators. Wednesday wins, hands down. For an 18lb Pug, she snores like no ones bidness.

A lot has happened in the last month, way too much to document in one post, so I’ll give the run down (in no particular order):
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Be suspicious of Women. They are given to the Reading of frivolous Romances, and at all events, their presence in a Library adds little to (if it does not, indeed, detract from) that aspect of gravity, Seriousness and Learning which is its greatest Glory. You will make no error in excluding them altogether, even though by that Act it befall that you should prohibit from entering some one of those Excellent Females who are distinguished by their Wit and Learning. There is little Chance that You or I, Sir, will ever see such an One.

Taken from The Old Librarian’s Almanack. A real update coming soon, I promise.

Currently, I have a 1.5″ binder that is jammed packed with articles that are assigned in one class. If I were pro-active, this binder would have been completed and sorted at the beginning of the semester over than half-way through but I am the queen of procrastination (or suck at time management, take your pick).

As I was reading the this weeks homework for that class tonight, the assigned article is about indexing as a cottage industry, I found myself surprised by the author discussing the “probability of indexing the Internet” which made me go back to the beginning of the article and look at the date — 1996. My notes in the margin? “Google? Yahoo?”

While I’ve been woefully behind in keeping the day to day (or week to week) stuff of my first semester of lib school documented as well as I would have liked, one thing that has struck me since the beginning of the program is that some of the information that is parsed to us as teaching tools is woefully out of date. I don’t mean in age, per se, but in content of the information being given. In the computer competencies class that I’m taken, the book (current, dated 2008) is incorrect about various technologies as well as gives too much information on things that for the lay person, may seem to be over wrought. I’m trying to figure out why a librarian will need to know what EEPROM is, but apparently this information is necessary for dissemination.

Referring back to the article from 1996, yes it does give a good overview of what indexing is and is not but on the flip side, how much are we to take away from this over what has changed in the last 12 years? By this I mean that clearly there has been much advancement in the field of librarianship that would warrant more current and perhaps more timely piece then something that is so aged?

I find this to be a circular argument within myself in that as someone coming into the program with such a heavy technical background, perhaps I’m jumping the gun on these topics but on the other hand, it is not like my professors are not technically savvy or incompetent — they are, in fact, neither. It just seems irksome that so many of my professors seem stuck in older information while new information arrives daily. THIS is what I do not get.

For now, I am going to go mull this over a bit more and will return with a more complete update soon, I promise.