On the road

As I've mentioned before, I'll soon be driving to Alaska to start my first post-MLIS job. That means very little blogging, here, for at least two weeks. (I'll try to blog every day or so at my blog about the move.) But if 1) I don't pull together the blog post summarizing my Pitt experience and 2) there's no great library-land drama that captures my imagination, I may not actually get around to posting again before I start work, the first full week of October. Then, I imagine, I'll have lots to say.

So, until I return, adieu.

Good news!

I have a job! (As in, I received and signed an official, printed, mailed job offer today, which I plan to photocopy and mail back tomorrow.) But it's not just any job—it's precisely the kind of job I wanted to be doing, at a dynamic library, in a beautiful city, with excellent coworkers.

I will be working at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University's Consortium Library, as a Web Services Librarian. Part of my job will be Web site stuff—making sure the library's home page is working and troubleshooting when electronic resources act up—part will be reference and liaison work, and part will be committee and working group activities. It sounds like there will be plenty of variety to the work, leaving room to fiddle with new and different technologies as time and interest allow. I like my coworkers—they're laid back and fun, but also pretty dedicated librarians, which is exactly the kind of people I want to be working with. And they know I'm not a total genius with all of the development languages in use on their site, yet, which is nice. (I still plan to get a lot closer to genius level before I start work, though.) Finally—and this might sound stupid—I will have a window office. That makes me so, so, so much happier in places like DC and Pennsylvania, so it'll be absolutely amazing in Alaska!

Now, when I tell people about this, I get one of two reactions: "Alaska? Awesome! (Can I come visit?)" or "Alaska? Really? (Bleh!)" Although I really am sad to leave friends and family so far behind, I'm still pretty excited about living in Anchorage: it's a a far sight warmer and lighter in winter than some other parts of the state, and it's a city in its own right—just a little smaller than Pittsburgh. Though moose are not an uncommon sight, even in town. :) And, seriously, I've never been anywhere prettier. There are mountains high enough to have glaciers even in summer, and there's water, and there are state and national parks and forests all around the city—so much to explore!

I've promised to blog the move. If you have a strong opinion about whether I should do that here or make a new blog for it, leave me a comment, but for now, I'm planning to make a new blog and just link it from here and the homepage—keep this blog about librarianship. I'll have some exciting things to write, this year! (You can reasonably expect another post or two about library school before I get to blogging about the new job.)

On balancing social networking tools and family

This isn't as library-related or engineering-related as I try to be, but it does address what I imagine is a fairly common problem. I'm curious about your thoughts.

I've been using social networking tools--and, here, I'm going to address mostly Facebook and Twitter--as catch-alls, adding friends, colleagues, and, increasingly, family, willy-nilly. I have a couple of privacy settings on my Facebook, keeping a few people from seeing my updates, though if they navigate to my page, they can still see it. (I'm fascinated that I could lock even my profile page away from the eyes of people I've friended. I find that really interesting.) I think I may have "all pictures of me" locked down, as well, though I always waffle on that one--the only embarrassment I expect ever to get, on that count, is that I'm wildly unphotogenic at times. I'm hardly a wild partier.

But my point is, up until now, it's worked. I have, at times, wished I had a locked-down Twitter account, where I could say some of the things I really don't want the whole world to see me say, to a select group of friends. But I don't, because, for the most part, I'm inclined to treat social network sites as inherently unstable and very hackable--if it goes up there, one way or the other, it'll be public, anyway. (E-mail and IM should also be treated that way--for reasons inherent to the technology--and to an extent, I kind of do.)

But I'm finding that social networking with my family isn't really working out the way I'd expected/hoped. I already self-censored, a little bit, because there are some professional colleagues I really respect on any given social networking site, and I don't want to offend or to seem "too weird," whatever that is. (Sometimes I still forget that it isn't just me and my college buddies, because I am not perfect, but I generally do an OK job of this, I think.)

However, I'm finding myself self-censoring--and, to my horror, censoring others by deleting their comments on my posts--more often, now that family members are there. Do I mind my high school-age cousin or Dale's college-age brother knowing I'm human and goofy? No, not really; I want them to know me well enough to trust me, to come to me with questions if they need to. But I'm finding I'm not really comfortable with the level of openness Facebook is forcing between, for instance, my mother and me. I've grown comfortable--as I think most of us do--with some distance, some lack of knowledge, about what is going on in our lives and our minds. Facebook wants to bridge that gap, but for a multitude of reasons, I'm just not sure that's a gap that should be bridged, in our or most other parent-child situations.

Also, I notice that some family members use these tools very differently than I do. They don't follow the same conventions. They don't even have the same definition of what constitutes "social networking." It could be a fascinating learning opportunity for me, if I could find the balance, and the distance, necessary to really observe them.

I guess when it was just two groups--friends and colleagues--I could balance the stack of dishes, or house of cards, or whatever metaphor best fits. But it seems to be crumbling, now that a third group has really come into the picture. I'm not sure whether the problem is "too many groups" or "one group is family," but I have definitely become aware that I've lost the balance I had maintained for so long.

Has anyone else had this experience? What did you do? I hate to scale back my involvement in these tools, or to lock out family (where I even can). But maybe therein lies the only answer--what do you think?

Keeping it brief (for once)

I feel like my posts have all been coming out through the lens of the job search, lately. I mean, I try to address bigger issues, but you can probably see the thought patterns behind some of what I say... Like I mentioned before, I have started looking for jobs--and even applied to a few--but it's ludicrous that I could be less than 2/3 of the way through my MLIS and so focused on that one thing... isn't it? It's a semester too early for "senioritis."

Ah, well.

Anyway, I apologize if I seem kind of one-track in my thinking. While the question of where I'll be living and what I'll be doing in [not even] six months dominates a lot of my headspace, there are other things going on. For instance, there's spring (soon?), allergies (western PA hates me), long walks (1.5mi today), taking care of my injured parakeet (he's fine now), dancing with book carts (going fantastically), and some "for fun" reading instead of the work reading I should be doing. Sometimes, I even go out for hot dogs and beer or politics and beer (OK, only once). And, while I feel hopelessly behind on all of the projects that are coming due, I am getting used to the feeling and remembering that, every other time I've ever felt this way, I've pulled through just fine, with everything making it in by its due date.

Just have to remember to breathe. And take enough allergy medicine.

Spring Break, Classes, Et Cetera

I had a pretty fantastic spring break. I did not, as I had hoped I would, research and complete my paper for Academic Libraries, though I did settle on a topic. I also did not catch up on Cataloging, where I feel like I'm shamefully behind the curve (on the bright side, if you can call it that, there are a bunch of other people who feel similarly). Nor did I get much of anything else school-related completed. But I think I needed the break, honestly. This short, intensive program, with internships and job applications and with so much else going on in the library world that I want to keep up with in my free time, is beginning to burn me out. ... I feel stupid saying that. Who gets burnt out in less than a year? But it isn't real burn-out; it's just an awareness that I need to put my mind firmly on something that isn't school and isn't libraries, now and then. And I think taking some time to do that, last week, was beneficial (even if my Google Reader and inbox were bursting at the seams on Monday).

I worked on some crafty stuff, including some pretty jars of bath salts to sell for Book Kart Drill Team fundraising, and a jewelry-selling (or perhaps eventually a jewelry-storing) rack that I'm really quite proud of. I read most of Alex and Me, which is probably still an interesting read if one isn't a bird-lover but is absolutely wonderful if one is. I cleaned my kitchen and did a little bit of actual cooking, for the first time in a while. No homebrewing, yet, but I hope to get to that in the next few weeks, depending how project due dates fall.

And then I spent several days in DC, visiting people, which was tremendously fun. I remembered how much I like my friends down there, even as I remembered how little I like getting around Northern Virginia. Also, I got to play with a baby. Good times. (No, you don't have to want to have a baby to enjoy playing with them. They're cute!)

Anyway, now it's back to the grind, as they say. I have five or six big assignments coming due in the next few weeks, and it's stressful. But I'll get through it.

On Thursday I'm attending a session on Dialog. I'm pretty excited about it, actually, though I feel bad missing volunteering at the Aviary for a second week in a row. Hopefully I can make it up to them in the form of 120 more hours (and some course credit for me) over the course of the end of this semester and the summer. Or, if the job fairy makes an early visit, one Saturday a month until I'm finished.

Brewin' and visitin' DC

It's time, folks. I haven't run this by Dale, yet, but I'm proposing that brewing should happen on March 7. I won't have any homework due that week, since it's spring break, and I don't work that Saturday (I do work that Sunday night, though, bleh). Anyone want to come watch/help stir?

Also, about spring break... I would like to visit the DC area sometime that week (March 9-15). I'm going to see whether getting that Wednesday or that Friday off is possible. If you're in the DC area and want a visit, chime in with what times are good for you! If you're in Pittsburgh and want a ride down there, also chime in. I haven't asked around for crash space, yet, but once I have a rough schedule decided, I will. :)

I'll post about summer classes later this week.

Current courses and other topics of interest (to me, at least)

I've been meaning to give an updated run-down of the classes I'm taking and my general opinions of them, but school and life and bronchitis (yeah, again, but I'm on the mend) got in the way, like they do. To make it up to you--and because I am waiting for my wonderful SO to come pick me up so I don't have to stand in the cold and watch full buses go by--I'll talk about extra-curriculars and such, as well.

Retrieving Information: I should have taken this course last semester. (I really mean this course; I can't speak to whether or not I should have taken the version of this course that was actually offered. It had a slightly different teaching staff and some different assignments.) The textbook is pretty good and kind of surprisingly useful to me, specifically: I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I don't know the difference between certain kinds of library resources, and I'll be learning that very basic knowledge through this course. Had I known this stuff, going into my internship at the Engineering & Science library, I think I would have done a better job last semester. (Not that I did poorly. But there's always room for improvement.) Just generally, I think it will make me a better librarian. I also like that it's taught by a practitioner--if any course should be, it's this one.

Introduction to Cataloging and Classification: No surprise that I like this class. I liked grammar in high school, too. Also, it's taught by a really fantastic professor. Now, from recent discussions off AUTOCAT, I'm kind of in a tizzy over the oldness of FRBR and RDA and the relative lack of implementation--or alternatives--put forth by the library community. And so I am studying this not just for the nitty-gritty rules of cataloging, which interest and intimidate me, but perhaps even more for the sociological understanding of how catalogers think and why change is so hard for the cataloging--and library--community at large. Also, you know, I kind of still want the title "Metadata Librarian." I liked scripting, in limited quantities, and would be interested in doing some serious data wrangling; this class will bring me one step closer to being really qualified to do that.

Issues in Academic Librarianship: Another fantastic course, exploring various ... well, issues faced by academic librarians and academic libraries. The professor is great--she actually treats us like graduate students, which left a few of us in mild shock and will require readjustment, after last semester's freshman seminar. (Yeah, still bitter.) Her co-instructor and TA will bring some excellent insight to the class, as well. There's a lot of reading, a fair bit of discussion, and a complete split between the in-person and online versions of the class. I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am that she decided to run the course that way.

Resources for Young Adults: Dropped. Would have been a really good course and almost* entirely worth my time, if I had it to give, but the amount of work required was all out of proportion to the likelihood that I'd ever get to use what I learned. I'm probably going to be an academic librarian, and, furthermore, I'm probably never going to be a parent; there's very little reason I need to read 20+ YA books and discuss, in depth, the issues facing today's youth. Though, yeah, the 20+ books would have been fun. ... Also, I've just got too much else going on to be able to give my full attention to four courses.

Field Placement: (Institutional Repository at CMU.) This is going well, although I feel like I'm moving very slowly and taking up a lot of my site supervisor's time. I've uploaded 15+ documents, all but the first 5 without supervision, as well as harvesting a few more than that, some with supervision and some without. I think I pretty much understand the whole workflow and can really begin to contribute, now. So that's exciting.

As for the Aviary, which is not actually a course (though I do hope I can make it count as a field placement for the summer), that's going pretty well, too. I have the bulk of the journals organized and inventoried, and I've been comparing the collections against Worldcat and Science Direct, to see where the gaps are. There are a surprising number of older ornithological publications available online, which is pretty nice. I'm sad that I won't get to see the library reach its full potential: the construction work for the Aviary's expansion won't be done until 2010, so my library will continue to be scattered across multiple rooms. I did have a pretty heartening thought: probably not that many librarians can say with certainty, "I have touched every single book in my library." Although I'll never be formally employed by the Aviary, so it is not in all senses "my library," I will still be able to say that, at least until the quarter after I leave, when the new journals come.

Other general news: 1) I'm VP of SCALA and am co-directing the Book Kart Drill Team. We're still picking songs and putting together a routine, not to mention thinking of funding options. We aren't much past square one-point-five, I think, right now. Lots of work to be done. 2) I'm still Membership Coordinator of SLAPSG. We'll be doing a special tour at the Aviary on Monday, which is pretty exciting--and has pretty much nothing to do with my volunteering there, except I happened to ask about both at the same time. 3) I'm trying to do a little bit of crafting, to help maintain my sanity. I'm going to have a separate blog for that and other not-at-all-library-or-engineering-related things, but it's not up yet. 4) I'll send you a gift and sing your praises in my blog and, if you want, answer a hard reference question for you if you can figure out why my CSS doesn't work with Blogger and how to fix it. (I don't care whether it's a javascript workaround that you write me or whether it's a Blogger setting I tweak or whether it's just some added CSS; I just want it fixed, without breaking the rest of my site.) The class I call "content" is the problem; everywhere else, it auto-sizes properly, but it just won't auto-size through Blogger. (It did, for a while, briefly, and then it just stopped.) I've got a number hardcoded into my template, which is not just inelegant but actually causes problems (say when someone resizes my text, or views a single entry on its own, or I forget to update the number after I write a longer- or shorter-than-average post). If you're up for the challenge, I will happily send you my Blogger template, and you can probably find my CSS file yourself.

*It did have several essays-in-300-words-posted-to-Blackboard, with required responses of 150 words, the latter of which is only a small step above "utterly useless," in my experience.

The semester begins

My first class of the spring semester happens today. It is not 12pm-3pm, as I had mistakenly remembered, but 3pm-6pm. (So, in order to leave myself one weekday for doing homework, I think I may move my internship hours from Tuesdays to Mondays.) I have a cold and am considering napping for a couple of hours before I go, because, wow, do I feel cruddy. What a terrible way to start a semester!

For anyone who is planning to go to ALA Annual this year, a reminder: registration opened today. The early bird price is significantly lower than the full price, so sign up now!

Looking back at 2008 and forward to 2009

This year started out really awfully, to be honest, right down to a nasty stomach flu on New Year's Eve. There was all kinds of badness. I think the extra hole punched in my ear was the high point of my January. Anyway, here's a fairly complete rundown of the failures and successes of the year, with some added commentary at the end.

Tried and failed (in roughly chronological order):

• Getting a graduate assistantship at Pitt - their website lies; there is no such thing for Master's students
• Keeping my wisdom teeth
• Studying for (and eventually taking) the CCNA - I got through maybe half of the book before quitting Booz Allen and thus the study group I'd set up.
• Taking an American Sign Language class - work got in the way, and I had to drop out
• Talking sense into a group of more than five people who were doing something damaging
• Not hurting my knee severely enough that I couldn't use it all summer
• Having a nice beach vacation
• Getting people to come play in my parlor larps
• Making a blanket in time to give it to people for late-Christmas
• Unpacking

Tried and succeeded:

• Getting into library school
• Getting a Pitt Partners placement doing what I [thought I] would want to do after graduating
• Playing with a penguin at the Aviary
• Buying a Mac and an iPod
• Getting a summer job as a library assistant before library school started
• Building a website on my very own domain, for the first time ever (I've Tripoded and my-school-paged it up in the past, which just isn't the same)
• Rescuing four baby ducks from a drain
• Attending first ALA conference and making some library friends
• Getting good grades in my first semester of library school
• Finding an excellent field placement
• Getting a volunteer position at the Aviary
• Getting a scholarship to attend a conference

On the whole, I think it's been a reasonably successful year, despite the poor start.

Looking ahead, I know I am changing careers at a bad time, economically speaking, but I've got high hopes that I'll get a reasonable job before this time next year. (I also have not-entirely-plausible hopes about what that job might be. :)) More immediately, spring semester is going to be rough, but I think I'm ready for it.

I am still working on my resolutions and goals. So far, the only one I've really set is that I am going to stop eating factory farmed meat, except for 1) what's already in my freezer right now and 2) when I'm at someone's house and they've cooked. I'll still eat grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, though obviously less often since they cost more. I'll also eat fish, though I need to find the little card I have that lists "ethical" fish to eat. (Some are really environmentally unsound, right now, it turns out.) This is part of a larger goal of living more sustainably. Also, I think a goal of straight A's through the rest of library school is obvious, even if it's a tad unreasonable, given my schedule.

Since the bulk of my year is taken up with school, and I can't know whether I'll be in Pittsburgh or elsewhere afterwards, goal-making is a little tricky.

One down, two-ish to go

I've started a few posts in my head, but only today did I realize that I didn't, you know, post any of them. It turned out that I didn't have the kind of down-time I expected to have during the break: classes (and projects) ran until the 11th, work kept going right up until the 19th, and I started both my field placement and volunteer position in work's "off" days, in addition to trying (and, it seems, failing) to knit a blanket, making Christmas presents, and just generally preparing for two back-to-back multi-state treks. I didn't actually get more than one Sunday at home, and I think I wasted most of it sleeping, instead of doing all of those cleaning/organizing projects I was hoping to do; so, I'm going into next semester with a still-messy apartment, some CSS glitches on my homepage, and just generally less stuff accomplished than I'd hoped...

Moving on to news and starting with the largest first, I decided not to apply to PhD programs. As much as I'd like to continue my education, I'm just not certain enough, one semester in, what specific things I want to work on. Also, as much as I want to work on pie-in-the-sky research--and, wow, would I--I am awfully tired of being a student: the undergraduate feel of my MLIS program has worn me down far more than I would have expected, going in. And while I know a PhD program wouldn't have the same kind of atmosphere to it, I still find my motivation to continue being a student is pretty much gone, for the time being. I want to go out in the world and do stuff.

On that note, I'll be attending the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference in February. I applied for a scholarship, and to my utter surprise and delight, I won. I think it will be a tremendous help to me, as that's the area of the field I'm looking at... but I don't feel like I fully understand what the current state of the art is, or where I would best fit in. I'll learn a lot and hopefully make some good contacts, there.

I'm still signed up for four classes and a field placement, in addition to my 13-hour-a-week internship and the most exciting volunteer position ever. Yep, it turned out my meeting was just a meeting, not an interview, and he actually had me start that afternoon. So, officially, I am a volunteer at the National Aviary, helping to put their library together. They have a small but solid collection of books and journals, which I will help to put in order. For now, their "catalog" will be an Excel spreadsheet; perhaps once I've got a handle on what's there and how much time it will take to get everything together I can talk them into an open-source OPAC of some sort. But there's plenty to keep me busy now.

The field placement is also going well. I didn't get enough hours in December to finish by the end of the spring semester, but I can take an incomplete and finish early in the summer. It's going to be a good experience: I should come out of it pretty knowledgeable about institutional repositories and open access.

It's going to be an incredibly busy semester, but I am excited.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I know I use this blog a lot more to talk about what's wrong than what's right; maybe that's human nature, or maybe it's just mine. I tend to belong to the "if nobody points out it's broken, how can we fix it?" school of thought, which can be very useful. But too much focus on the negatives can bring you down and make you lose track of what's going right.

And, really, there's an awful lot that's going right. Most on my mind: I'm poised to enter a profession that is dynamic and interesting and has so much going on that it's hard to choose where to focus. ("It's hard to choose" looks a little complainy, but I really don't think having four or five totally separate areas I'd be thrilled to work on is a bad thing.)

I also live in a great city-town (Pittsburgh is this hybrid thing that's neither city nor town), and when I sit back and take the time to reflect, my little heart is warmed thinking about the new and old friends I have here. I really like these people and am happy to have them in my life. My farther-away friends make me both sad and happy to think about; I miss them, but I'm so proud and happy to call them my friends. And for all the time spent separated, the reunions are all the more joyous.

I have a partner who loves me and whom I love back, three mischievous pets (and two frogs--no mischief there), a warm and comfortable place to live, a cup of coffee in front of me, and a Thanksgiving dinner at my friends' warm and inviting house to look forward to this afternoon. I also have a pretty good shot at straight A's (or at least A-minuses) this semester, a part-time job that I like and that will help me get full-time employment before long, a fully-functional computer with all the bells and whistles I need, new vanilla-smelling soap for my shower, and several different types of purple pens.

And my bronchitis is mostly gone. I can breathe, and it is wonderful.

It's kind of a nice feeling, making lists of what's right in one's world. (This list isn't comprehensive. I've got a couple of chickens I choose not to count out loud yet.) I encourage you all to do the same, to yourself or in your blog or wherever seems best. And have a happy Thanksgiving!

My Grad School Life

I feel like I'm neglecting this blog--SNL videos and class assignments aside--but there hasn't been much to say: I've been sick for about a month (bronchitis and a never-ending cold), which has left me completely drained and not really feeling up to the time, energy, and brainpower requirements of my classes. I kind of just want to take a weekend to sleep and eat soup and drink hot tea, you know? But being behind on most of my projects (by my own estimation, not in any official capacity) leaves me no time for that kind of nonsense.

But, you know, such is the life of a grad student. It was the same in engineering grad school, only I didn't enjoy the reading. (I really do enjoy what I get a chance to read. I wish my professors had been a little more realistic in assigning books for the semester--seriously, there were students complaining about 100 pages a week per class, in some online forum, and I kind of wanted to smack them--but if I get around to finishing the books I've merely skimmed [or less], I will be a better librarian for the effort. They are really fantastic.)

One interesting point: I learned that specializations other than Archives actually do matter at Pitt. I couldn't register for the Academic Libraries class without being in the Academic Libraries track, which vexed me, the self-declared generalist, mightily. But it looks like it will not be a big deal to jump into the specialization--the paperwork was easy, anyway! Financially, I might have lucked into something: the only Academic Libraries "course" I had planned not to take was the field placement (3 credits, 150 hours working with a local library under the supervision of someone who has their MLIS--and, as far as I can tell, I can't get the 3 credits for my internship, because it is a separate program that pays a portion of my tuition per semester), which I could sign up for in the spring and finish in the summer. Since summer is pay-per-credit, having five classes in the spring and three in the summer would save me a few thousand dollars--SCORE!

As an added bonus, I found someone at CMU who may be willing to take on an intern. (I found him by asking "Do you need an intern?" out of nowhere, when he told me what he's working on. It was opportunistic, if not downright rude, but it may have worked out OK.) The project I'd be working on would be kind of ideal, in that it would fill in a gap in my goals and interests that my [awesome] Engineering & Science Library internship doesn't quite fill. It's some digital stuff; I'll explain more if this whole thing pans out--which looks promising, but maybe I shouldn't count my chickens prematurely.

So, there's good, and there's bad, and, as always, there's up-in-the-air. I'm excited about the stuff I get to do and worried about the group projects that need to get done and grumpy about the class on Halloween night (I'm not even joking, 5:30-8:30pm, the first Halloween in years I've lived where trick-or-treaters might show up, I'm going to be in a classroom) and tired from not being able to breathe for a month.

Also, I have a midterm on Monday. I'm stressing about it, mostly because that's just how I am. I hate midterms. Knowing what I do now about the structure of library school, I will immediately drop any other midterm-containing elective as soon as the syllabus finds its way to my hot little hands. (Unless it's the Intellectual Property class; not even a midterm could keep me from taking that!)

Further Musings

I feel like I was unnecessarily harsh in my post yesterday. Looking at it, there's nothing I consider untrue or really feel a need to change, but the whole thing kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I think what bothers me is that I came off sounding as though I'm unhappy, and, on the whole, I'm really not. Yes, I think there are some serious problems with Pitt's program--problems that may lead to a drop in our rank, honestly--but, you know, I'm still there, and I plan to finish my degree. I'm looking forward to next semester's classes, which I've mostly chosen, even though the official schedule isn't up yet. (An unofficial schedule is available to anyone who bothers Googling for it.) The student groups--something I haven't discussed, thus far, but ought to--are great; SLAPSG is a little late getting off the ground, but there's a lot of interest on the part of the student body, and I know the [super active and awesome] local chapter will help us out. SCALA is fabulous: we're planning on putting together a Book Kart Drill Team (it's spelled with a "K," yes) for ALA Annual 2009--I'm heading that up, because I'm involved in ALA already and because I'm Treasurer--a Technology Petting Zoo for students who want to learn about and play with various kinds of technology, and a t-shirt sale. And there's a new student group, centered around community outreach, called SISCO (which bothers me every time I hear it, because I think about network hardware, but there you go). These are excellent and all make me very happy.

As for my internship at CMU's Engineering and Science Library, I am really enjoying it and learning a lot. Every time I get really confident about my reference skills, someone comes along with a hard chemistry or math question (why is it never electrical engineering? or even computer science?), which reminds me what a beginner I really am. But that's really not a bad thing; it just means I am constantly learning. I'm signed up to help give a talk on RSS and Google Reader, in the near future, which I find pretty exciting (and terrifying), and I will be helping at least one of my coworkers redesign her portion of the library web site. I am super excited about these projects. Slightly less exciting--but certainly useful to the library and still a learning opportunity--is a set of ongoing projects, going through a large collection of materials science books donated by a retiring professor and a smaller, but much older, collection of books that belonged to Roberts' (of Roberts Hall) mentor. A large portion of my time goes, of course, to "other projects as assigned"; earlier this week, I went through some tech reports, to determine whether or not each one was redundant or new to the collection, and last week I picked up some journals from a professor. That kind of thing. I'm hoping for some collection development (spendin' money!) and more instruction experience, before too long.

So, you know, things are actually pretty good.

On a more personal note, I've finally gotten together the bravery and momentum to go out and volunteer for a cause that I think is important (in all that free time I don't have). That makes me feel pretty good about myself, even if it means I go to bed earlier than I otherwise might on some Friday nights.

And, as I predicted, my schedule is changing: I'll be working Saturday afternoons, starting in a few weeks, because the other Information Assistant, who used to do the Saturday shift, got a job. (Yay for enjobination!) I'll have to drop an hour, somewhere in the week (personally, I'm hoping to start at 11am instead of 10am on either Tuesday or Friday morning ;)), to stay on the right side of CMU's rules, but it will be a good experience; back-up is a phone call away, instead of a short walk away, on weekends. Self reliance and all that!

Also, I have a purple iPod Nano. I love it. It holds all of my music, a bunch of podcasts, and a couple of TV shows. I've already used it to listen to supplemental class material that I otherwise wouldn't. (Because I have very little self control when faced with a computer monitor, I have a very limited amount of time I can spend paying attention/not reading random stuff on the Internet, if I'm at my computer--limited by how many photos I have to sort, actually--and the Panopto-only lectures are going to soak that up; no time for the supplemental material on top of it! But with an iPod, I can listen while I wait for the bus, while I walk out to get tasty Indian food for lunch, etc.) It will make the 5 hour trip to Detroit and back, in early November, into usable time, which will decrease my guilt at going (instead of doing homework). This is a win.

Long Delayed Musings

I've been meaning to post a "State of the Schooling" kind of thing for quite a while, as the six week mark of the semester neared and then swooped past--it's funny how "six weeks" still has meaning to me, nearly ten years removed from high school as I am. Having a report card might not be such a bad thing; there are several post-graduation job openings with deadlines in the next few weeks. What, precisely, should I show them, in lieu of a degree, or even a transcript? (A cover letter and curriculum vitae, I suppose. Speaking of, if anyone would like to do a CV review for me or give me some academic library-specific tips for cover letters, I would be most grateful. I still don't feel like I know what goes in either.)

It isn't that I don't have work to do tonight, by the way; I had reserved today to work on a grant proposal for my Management class, but I was tackled to the ground by a cold. I'd like that to be more metaphorical than it is, but I think I've spent 18 of the last 24 hours asleep on an air mattress, where I collapsed last night and again this afternoon. My head is achy and stuffy, and I'm just kind of vaguely miserable and totally wiped out. Fortunately, though I don't have the wherewithal to work, I have it to blog. And blog I will!

There are some really fantastic things going on, schooling-wise, and some really not fantastic ones. Let's start with the good before we move on to complaining, shall we?

I love my Organizing Information class. It's one of the five "core" courses people in the general, academic, or digital track are required to take before graduating, and the professor who teaches it is just so great. She obviously cares very much about the subject, but she doesn't take it so seriously as to take the fun out of it. Actually, it isn't even just that she cares about the subject: she cares that we understand it. After every assignment she asks us if we learned from it and thought it was worthwhile, and she seems to really listen to our feedback. I think I will take the Cataloguing class next semester because her class has been so good; honestly, I'm really thinking about going into metadata librarianship (of the "data wrangling" variety, as Mike Bolam put it in his guest lecture, not the really hardcore cataloguing). ... Which sounds so flakey, as I re-read it. But it isn't just that I like the professor; I really find the subject interesting. I liked English classes because I liked grammar. The structure--diagramming sentences--really pleased me. I think engineering and computer programming--and sorting through data with Matlab (which, inexplicably, I miss very much)--appealed to me for the same kind of reason. There's just something very comforting about hierarchies and trees and structure. (Not that I apply any organizational acumen to my own life, but I imagine that's part of what appeals to me about studying the subject.)

My Digital Libraries class is also pretty good; I'm frustrated with trying to use the poorly-documented digital library software (I admit, Dreamhost's CGI support page is above my level), and I'm kind of nervous about the midterm, but there's a lot of good content in the class. Some of the topics are a review, but even that isn't a bad thing. I wish I had time to sit down with Lesk's book (Understanding Digital Libraries), to just read it cover-to-cover. Honestly, I'd settle for the time to really do the assigned readings in depth, rather than skimming through them in a hurry. (I'll get to that in a minute; honestly, the time requirement for this class is very reasonable, and I'm selling it shorter, in the time I give to it, than I would like.) But our professor encourages us to ask questions, lets us use blogs (instead of horrible, horrid, nasty Blackboard) to communicate with one another (as you know), and is just generally very understanding and accommodating. It's a good class.

My Management class ... isn't bad. I mean, I've never liked fuzzy business speak. It brings my hackles up and evokes a feeling of distrust in me (yes, even after a couple of years of consulting in the DC area... especially after that, actually). The assignments are kind of poorly defined, which I found frustrating until I started seeing the grades (both mine and the averages); I think perhaps the expectations for the assignments are also poorly defined, so the grading is fairly lenient. On the up side, two of the three group projects we're doing for the class are really relevant and useful to us in a real-world way; we will be writing a "management portfolio"--with a needs assessment, mission statement, vision statement, staffing plan, budget, and business plan--and a grant proposal (which the professor keeps referring to as though it is part of the other assignment, but very few of us joined up with partners who are in our management portfolio groups; also, most of the class seems to have gone out and found real-world grants to write up, whereas our management portfolios are all fictional). The irrelevant project is a slide show put together with a group of 5-6 people, to share with our "virtual groups" of 15 people chosen randomly from the in-person and online students. We're supposed to discuss these slides in the group discussion boards, but nobody cares; most of my group logged in, made a token comment, and never checked back again, the week my slideshow went up. (My feelings weren't hurt.)

The big downside of the Management class, other than the vague hand wavyness of it (that's a management class for you) and the fact that most of it is repetition from my two-day Project Management class at BAH, is the fact that the management portfolio and grant proposal are to be done in groups of five and two, respectively, on very different topics (which, again, the professor doesn't seem to realize?), and turned in on the same day. The five-person group is deliberately chosen so that on-campus and online students are grouped together--one physical meeting will happen, less than a month before the project is due, for no more than an hour, and everything else is to be done online. I know the professor thinks this is a beneficial look into real-world working conditions, but I've done real-world distance collaboration, and there's usually a little more in-person, or at least teleconferenced, interaction. So that's frustrating. But group work in school is always frustrating; I've gone through worse.

Aaaand... I saved the class I like the least for last. (Say that five times fast.) It's required of every single person who enters the program, regardless of their "specialization." This semester, as an "experiment," they have something like 250 people in the class, half of them online. There are roughly ten professors running it, and as nearly as I can tell, each one was allowed to pick a book or two that they'd like us to read. They didn't, you know, whittle it down after that discussion, either, or choose a set of topics to really focus on: we are expected to read 15 books, on various subjects, clumped together in a sometimes arbitrary fashion. We are asked to write 400 word essays about these sometimes arbitrary clumps of books, citing outside reviews, roughly every other week, and to post them in our randomly-chosen "group"'s discussion board. This week, we wrote about two books; next week (actually next week, not two weeks hence), we write about four. Roughly zero percent of the class [I've asked something like thirty people] reads every book, or even half the books, before "winging it," as I say, and it kind of shows in reading their essays... (Sorry, my group! I am sure you're very smart people, and I'm sure my essays also leave something to be desired.) Anyway, on the off weeks, we're given big lists of articles and asked giant questions ("How has the WWW influenced the way in which ideas, information, and knowledge are exchanged? .. blah blah, Semantic Web"), which we are to answer in 250 word essays. Every Thursday, we turn in the "big" essay, and every Monday, we are expected to write a response agreeing with one of our colleagues' points and disagreeing with another. And then there are various other discussions we're supposed to participate in, on Blackboard, as well. I think they also expect us to go to lecture, though I'm not sure how many people still do that. (Which is a shame. I actually really like the one professor's lectures, but because of the class size, they had to move it to the far side of Oakland, near nothing else that interests me and up a smoker-filled hill from the closest bus stop. I'm not kidding; half the nurses at UPMC seem to smoke, and they all do it between the bus stop and class. The two times I went, I was miserable with asthma for half of the two-hour lecture. So, I decided to watch them online. But the online software is buggy, so the times I've tried, it's often frozen on me part-way through. So I'm sporadic in watching it, now.) This kind of workload isn't really conducive to, you know, having multiple classes and a job, and I find their lack of selectivity and realism--and particularly their lack of flexibility in the face of students' complaints--deeply frustrating.

My big complaint about the program overall is that it feels very undergraduate. No kidding: we have to have our advisors' signatures on our class signup forms--1) we have forms, rather than doing it online, and 2) I didn't have to have an advisor's signature even as an undergrad, that I remember. (I think I had to certify that I'd met with him, but he didn't sign anything.) There are no research assistantships available--internships, most of them outside of Pitt, yes, but those are only allowed to provide up to half our tuition--and we are stuck into a 250-person lecture, then graded on our participation in discussion boards. I realize the program lets in pretty much everyone who applies, so they have to do a certain amount of hand-holding, but couldn't there be, I don't know, an "advanced class," for people who've worked in the real world and don't need to be condescended to?

My second biggest complaint is that the focus--at least this semester, in the particular classes that are taking up the bulk of my time--seems to be on technology, rather than on library skills. Now, it isn't that I don't care what effect Google is having on libraries, or what we should expect the future of the printed word to be, but those things will be different in five years. Also, you know, I already understand technology fairly well. I think it's fantastic that my colleagues with less technical backgrounds are getting this kind of exposure--we need more technical knowledge in the field!--but it is really frustrating to me: I learn technology in my free time; I want to learn about libraries while I'm at school.

My third complaint is about Blackboard. I'll tag this post with the "Blackboard" tag so you can click it and go read all about that, if you care to. Part of that, which I did not cover in the previous post, has to do with changing our in-person classes around and making the bulk of our class discussion happen, as they like to say, virtually. This bothers me. I just don't see the same candor, or quality, in the discussions we have on Blackboard, possibly in part because the professors are watching and grading us on our comments; people are hesitant to criticize or make mistakes. I really think the quality of online classes is lower than the quality of on-campus classes because of it.

Next up: how's the internship going? (Far less complaining in that post. Spoiler: I am enjoying it and learning a lot.)

Dale's Nephew & My New Picasa

http://picasaweb.google.com/coral.hess/Elliot#