The Improvisatrice: A Blog About Stuff and Things

User Tasks

2010-08-04T09:00:00.002-07:00

I'm in the middle of a much needed/much appreciated vacation at the moment, but had this thought when reading through work emails today. The cataloger sent anyone doing copy cataloging information on the new BIBCO standard record (BSR). In reading through the revisions to the record for textual monographs I noted a nod towards the FRBR user tasks - find identify, select, and obtain. At this point I'm almost a little blind to that phrase in that I tend to scan it over and make a mental check of "Yeah, they're aware". But how aware are we, as a community, of these tasks? Do we really understand what we mean and are we doing our best to create data and systems that support these tasks? I'm sure that there is a ton of good work out there that I will undoubtedly find when I start looking. Yet there is a part of me that is afraid that those four little words will soon become as ubiquitous, and useless, as so many other buzzwords before them.

It's a time like this when I wish I was more involved in the cataloging community. As a student who barely has the time at work to download and mod a couple of PCC JSTOR records, but who is continually filled with new ideas, I wish I had a realistic perspective of how the field is moving and changing. The same report also noted the speed at which cataloging is evolving and I wonder if that speed is part of the problem - we're in the middle so everything in either direction is a blur. Also cataloging is not as cohesive a concept as I tend to imagine it to be. My background in academic libraries who have the time and the funding to keep up with changes and innovations means that I sometimes forget that people just can't have the most outstanding records or need to buy vendor records because, in reality, they're much better than no records at all. As there is a digital divide, is there a cataloging divide as well? The Cataloging Chasm? And if so, how do we fix it?

Knowing what I don't know...

2010-07-02T18:59:00.002-07:00

A week or so ago, while preparing for the second digitization task force meeting we had this morning, I became acutely aware of the fact that I really don't know what I'm doing in this process. I understand this process from a very conceptual standpoint. I know what we're aiming to accomplish with our pilot project, I know what CONTENTdm is and what it is capable of, I understand the basics of Dublin Core, and I know how everyone in the task force will work together. I can put a photo on a scanner and make a TIFF at X dpi. I can probably upload that and make some notes on it. Very simple, very basic, very straightforward. But the longer I think about I realize I still have a lot of questions. I can scan something, but I've no real knowledge of image editing/correction. I have barely scratched the surface of Dublin Core and never actually worked with it or really done anything with XML outside of a classroom. I get the general notion of what it means to digitize a collection but I'm not sure what that means for us, for our collection and for its future.

Happily, I work in a library, which means two very important things. First, someone else has probably done this before and generated a ton of documentation, articles, books etc. about it. Second, we have consortia borrowing and ILL. So I did what I normally do in this situation - which is order all of the books I can find with relevant subject headings, put them in a pile, and start to feel slightly more secure. I've shared them with BP and in the next week or so we'll start tearing through them. We're also going to start a road map/timeline. Launching this project is going to be very complicated and while we will not be able to anticipate every contingency, we'll at least have a secure base from which to start. We'll also have a better sense of what it is we're trying to accomplish here on a more particular level, which is what I find I'm needing at the moment. While I'm good with concepts, I find myself itching to do, to move forward, to construct and create, even if it's just a 12 point plan for good happy success.

But now it's the start of my three day weekend and I do believe the sun has just come out...

Reading!

2010-06-30T19:56:00.002-07:00

Freed from the mandatory assignments of the quarter, I am back to devouring novels at nearly pre-grad school rates. So. Freaking. Good. Because composing full sentences appears to be a challenge today and because the faster I stop blogging here the faster I get back to reading, a few random thoughts on what I've recently read.

*Pretty much everything I've picked up and read from the New York Review of Books' press has been amazing. Daphne du Maurier exquisite short stories, Mavis Gallant, and now Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado. I've ordered on Summit the second Dundy and Mitford's Madame de Pompadour.

*I am finally getting to reading David Copperfield and am in love. It's a strange read at times because I'm so familiar with Dickens' biography and can tell where he's drawn on his own history. That doesn't necessarily diminish the work, but means that I can sort of predict where portions of the story start to go. What I'm noticing in this read of a Dickens' novel is his incredibly strong sense of pacing. When he finishes a chapter/section, I find I'm torn between the drive to know more and the delicious sense of suspense or hesitation. Sometimes I close the book just for a bit to let it wash over me before pushing on. Bleak House was too long ago for me to remember and Pickwick doesn't start to feel like a novel until a fair bit of the way in, so I can't tell at what point he really honed this ability and when it started to fade (I do recall that he had trouble over/under writing Our Mutual Friend).

*I'm pretty sure I have a mental block against Middlemarch. I know it's beautiful and Important and changed the state of the novel and everything, but I just can't seem to commit to that much George Eliot. I'm sorry. I know I'm the worst Victorianist ever. Maybe I'll take it on a trip with me this summer as the only reading material and see what happens. Blargh.

*I have a million books on digitization and metadata sitting on my second desk at work. I still find it impossible to move forward in any major project without first ordering and/or consulting every book I can find in Summit. Smart or debilitating? We'll soon find out.

RDA Toolkit Goes Live Today

2010-06-23T08:38:00.003-07:00

The long anticipate formal launch of the RDA Toolkit begins today. I'll be touching base with the cataloging guru here today to see if/when we'll be able to start logging in, though after the demonstration we had in LIS 539, my hopes aren't as high as they once were. It will be interesting to see how the LC Test Partners start to feel out this new tool - how much will they be relying on the AACR2-to-RDA widget and how much will be actual immersion in the text? I'm also very interested to see what some non-MARC people will be able to do (XC perhaps?).

My real question is, can I begin my testing timeline countdown now?

Moving right along...

2010-06-21T20:56:00.000-07:00

The Quarter is over and soon AK will start his yearly pilgrimage East (camps, Summer Nationals, maybe home for a bit, potentially Coaches College, more camps..). While I still have some work to do for iPeer, there really isn't anything on my agenda for the next three months except friend, books, more friends, and more books. A friend will be flying up from the Bay Area this weekend in her boyfriend's plane (with two unnamed compatriots). I've just purchased a ticket to visit NY later in the summer, which is fantastic. The trip promises actual summer weather, the anniversary celebration at the Frick (my favorite museum in the city after the Met), and plenty of time with excellent people.

Tomorrow at work we unpack the giant scanner and thus our digitization program will begin. I've been doing a lot of reading up on CONTENTdm, which has been mostly web-based. Things should really start falling in place for me when I can get into the software and start playing around. I often learn by doing, by poking around to see how everything is connected (and to see how to fix things once I break them...). The project also promises to bring me back to my library roots: archives and special collections. While I won't be the one selecting the materials for our pilot project, I will get to scan, photograph, and otherwise work with the archival bits. Really, this project is a nice full-circle moment for me - my former archival work and my current technology/metadata work mashing together.

Still waiting for the LC RDA testing to begin. Tomorrow we'll be hashing out the kind of RDA access we'll need at our institution. I'm still really torn about the implementation of RDA in the US. While I'm glad that it hasn't been abandoned, I feel we're losing so much potential by staying rooted in MARC and by neglecting the RDA vocabularies. But the alternative? I'm not sure I have one, not yet anyway, and that's a continual source of frustration. How do we renew without blowing it all to bits? Or should I just grab a safety helmet and learn to duck?

Presentations

2010-05-30T15:11:00.002-07:00

The final paper of the quarter hit the drop box on Friday afternoon (hurrah!), so it's just presentations from the point out. One is a no-more-than-fifteen-minute presentation on how blogs can add value to a library's web presence. The second is an about-fifteen-minute presentation of RDA as if presented to a library director. The research for both is pretty much done, though there isn't much to do for the latter other than gather together everything from the quarter. A draft of each, in Powerpoint, sits on my desktop, awaiting tinkering. They're essentially outlined and essentially done except for the whole, you know, presenting part.

I keep stalling on the talky bit, which is unfortunate because I'm fairly sure I'm going to have to talk both presentations through before they start to make sense. I'm not entirely sure why. The recording itself is fairly innocuous. I don't really hate the sound of my own voice (though there still some shades of unadulterated Queens-style vowels in there). I seem to get caught up in the articulation bit. Even when I have a script and a timer in front of me, I tend to alternate between lethargic rambling and lightening-fast babbling. Before this program, getting up and talking in front of people/recording something as if I were talking in front of people just wasn't a feature. I can distinctly remember giving only two presentations in the four years of my undergraduate, and one wasn't even for a class but rather a summer research job. There was a group presentation for the MA, but I can barely recall if I said anything or if I wrote something and another person said it all.

The fact remain that I'm far more comfortable making my argument in text and handing it in or posting it online somewhere. The message boards we use in the online program just emphasizes this, especially because I even go back and edit once I've realized I've said something that's not quite right. If anything, I'm often too talkative on the boards. I try to tell myself that I'm not that librarian stereotype, that I do like people and that, in fact, I will miss interacting with students when I move into Tech Services full-time later this summer. But I just don't like talking in front of people. To people? Fine. With people? Absolutely. On a stage with people looking at me and judging? Ugh. I know that people are judging as harshly as I think and that, honestly, what is ten minutes on blogs and libraries and how does that impact the world? But the second I hit record I just feel like a complete idiot and start talking as fast as possible to get it over with.

Even though I've essentially been scripting this RDA presentation in my head for weeks, sitting down and getting it recorded just seem absolutely impossible. I'm sure I'll be able to trick myself into getting something down later this week (particularly since the blogging one is due on Friday). But right now, watching BBC history documentaries just seems like the best option.

Linked Library Data Incubation Group

2010-05-24T20:31:00.003-07:00

Link to the charter:

The mission of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group is to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web, by bringing together people involved in Semantic Web activities—focusing on Linked Data—in the library community and beyond, building on existing initiatives, and identifying collaboration tracks for the future.
The group will explore how existing building blocks of librarianship, such as metadata models, metadata schemas, standards and protocols for building interoperability and library systems and networked environments, encourage libraries to bring their content, and generally re-orient their approaches to data interoperability towards the Web, also reaching to other communities. It will also envision these communities as a potential major provider of authoritative datasets (persons, topics...) for the Linked Data Web. As these evolutions raise a need for a shared standardization effort within the library community around (Semantic) Web standards, the group will refine the knowledge of this need, express requirements for standards and guidelines, and propose a way forward for the library community to contribute to further Web standardization actions.
The incubator group has been initiated by actors from national libraries, university libraries and research units, library vendors companies and other interested stakeholders. Its scope is however not limited to libraries as institutions, but is meant to involve other cultural heritage institutions, partners from the publishing industry, and other relevant domains.

This is amazing. This is exactly where we need to be heading. And I am happy to see that LC is on board with this, as well as the DCMI (natch) and IFLA.

I am at loss for anything pithier than "YES!".

13 days...

2010-05-24T18:26:00.002-07:00

Today I've been somewhat ridiculously productive. Thirteen days remain in the quarter and I've managed to draft all of the remaining assignments (paper on the US's plan for testing RDA, presentation on RDA, presentation on libraries and blogs). Some drafts are far more drafty than others and there's the actual recording to contend with, which may or may not be made a million times easier via Jing. I love the ability to switch between a browser for demonstrations and a PowerPoint for the rest of it, but the lack of editing is a bit nerve wracking. I never bothered with the micro-editing functions in PointeCast, but I did go slide by slide. Though this running through things in real time is probably beneficial for me in the long run as there really isn't an opportunity for a "do over" in live presenting. Once I've done more than a ten minute test drive of the software, I'll talk more about it here.

In researching libraries who use blogs, the idea of having something to blog about has come up again and again. Librarians are often eager to embrace and implement new technology, but sometimes they do so before they've really thought through the appropriateness of the program etc. Blogs are particularly attractive because they're often so easy to implement and use. But they're also so easy to forget about or to neglect. Updating a blog means that you have to find both the time to write and something worth writing about. My own struggles with blogging is a clear demonstration of that tension. The best ideas typically show up when I'm deep in coursework (though happily they tend to find a home on a class message board). When I'm suddenly free, it's all apologies and banalities. For an individual this might be forgivable, but for an institution it's much harder to pass off. An ALA TechSource report on Web 2.0 offers some excellent best practices for either choosing to blog and what to do once that decision has been made. While I am all for bringing libraries more into the web, I do balk at implementing for the sake of implementing. If it will truly add value, go right ahead. If not, find something else that works.

LCSH and VC's VS

2010-05-17T21:10:00.002-07:00

I spent two day this past week in scenic Eugene, OR taking a course on LCSH. The course itself is excellent - great information taught by incredibly knowledgeable people. Sitting there, I realized how lucky I am to have had a fairly strong grounding in the subject from LIS 531. Still, I learned a ton. The course spent much more time working with authority records than anything else and I'll surely be using all of that during my usual authority work. While the course material was incredibly useful, when trying to parse the complex strings and stumbling to figure out where the damn geographic subdivision belonged, I couldn't help but think about the limitations of LCSH as a whole. It's another one of those legacy products built in bits and pieces and updated in chunks for nearly a hundred years. While the strings, once properly formed, can be incredibly expressive, I can see how much of a pain they are to break apart for something like faceted searching or other types of reuse. Simply assigning identifiers to more pre-coordinated strings doesn't feel like a solution either.

As we've been discussing on the boards for LIS 539, so much of LCSH depends on the context of the subject string, located with in the context of the record. This lack of context, or rather lack of explicit context, seems to be a continual issue in trying to move catalogs to be more in line with modern technology. Is it that the library community never dreamed of having to break thing apart? Is it that we, as a community, never dreamed that we could be supplanted as information leaders and thus took the reasonable step of saving time and energy by relying on our shared systems/methods/records to carry the burden of context? I doubt in that position I could have foretold the world in which libraries must function. But to see the same issue crop up again and again, it makes me wonder. As usual, I feel I've not spent enough time in the field to say "Well, let's scrap it and start again!" Scrapping LCSH would be a waste and LC does seem motivated to make significant changes when called on (adding a subdivision for form and fixing all of the inverted headings just to start). Still, it will be interesting to see where this all winds up as libraries seem to inch ever closer to the Semantic Web... whether we like it or not.

*******

I received an email today from a Vassar student asking me to contribute my memories of the Victorian Studies program towards a project she's developing in conjunction with the college's 150th anniversary. I have a Word doc open right now where I've been dumping my memories of the program. I can remember when I first decided I declared. I can remember my first end of the year dinner. I remember feeling relieved that the program had left me well prepared for my MA. I remember chiding actors for wearing white tube socks during a production of The Invention of Love. It's still strange to realize I've been out of Vassar for nearly 6 years and that I've been out of high school for nearly 10. It feels alternatively that so much and yet so little have happened in the intervening time.

And on that note, sleep.

Mostly good...

2010-05-02T15:11:00.003-07:00

Things are happening and I can't quite talk about them yet, but it's mostly good, somewhat migraine causing, but good.

So in honor of the ebbing migraine and the fact that I'm nearly done with reading for the week, a list of things that are mostly good or good.

*The RDA Vocabularies

*Coffee and its migraine-fighting caffeine

*My Circ Students, especially the ones ~~leaving me forever~~ graduating today

*D-Lib

*Finally understanding what this Semantic Web thing is and why it's a Big Deal

*Lacey coming home in less than a month!!!

*Maria, who is going to be the best Tech Services manager EVER!

*A day off on Monday

*That Husband Guy. He's pretty awesome.

Elsewhere

2010-04-26T21:41:00.003-07:00

My mind, and my blogging, has been elsewhere of late. I'm in the midst of an incredible class on RDA (which requires its own blogging component and can be read here). The class is both wonderful and intense. I'm learning so much, but at such a pace that I can't quite spit it out into coherent sentences yet. This time last year I first learned about FRBR and Dublin Core, and now I find myself right in the middle of it (and the RDA vocabularies, and the Semantic Web and half a million other thoughts). Maybe this time next year I'll have it sorted for you all.

Add to this another class on systems, my attempts to fence regularly again, the Herculean effort of finalizing and organizing AK's summer camp schedule (*fingers crossed for Coaches College*), and impending end of the year at work and end of the fencing season and its no wonder I open a post here and then five minutes later find myself in the middle of a crossword puzzle.

But on the plus side, I have pomegranate molasses butter cake.

There's a light...*

2010-02-26T20:25:00.005-08:00

The end of the quarter is virtually in sight. I have a cataloging paper due on Sunday (LCSH!), then a justification of my class participation for my management class, and then the two final papers (case study of IBM and a catalog critique). In a matter of moments I'll be meeting online with my group to hash out how we're going to lead a discussion on the challenges of managing Sandy Berman (certified badass). My diet today has consisted primarily of coffee and doughnuts, so I feel less than sharp. It also doesn't help that I've been watching episodes of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? Monstrously emotional journeys as celebs trace out the more snarled bits of their genealogy. A lot of sympathetic crying and not much in the way of tightening my discussion on subject heading choices.

This is not to say that the quarter is a waste - the very opposite in fact. Working on blind authority headings yesterday, I was struck by how much I now understand when looking at an authority or bib record. Searching makes more sense because I now really get what the system is looking at, what the fields in the record actually mean. I keep feeling that a quarter of this program involves relearning stuff I already knew, a fair amount of learning things I never knew or considered, and a fair amount of learning the rhyme and reason behind things I thought I knew. It's all very enlightening, but it often feels like I'm re-indexing my head on a weekly or even daily basis when new information or new links between old ideas are forged. Exhilarating, but exhausting.

Group chat time...

*...shining at the Epcot Center.

Rhythm

2010-02-16T21:50:00.003-08:00

I can't decide if it's the classes I'm taking or if it's simply getting used to the program that makes each progressive quarter seem more manageable than the one previous. Once the first week passes and I have a sense of when things are do and when I have to read/listen to lectures, the rest seems to fall into place. As an added bonus, there's been very little fighting with technology this quarter - no websites going down or contrary coding. I read and think and write and post and drop things into drop boxes and call it a night. That's not to say that this isn't satisfying or enjoyable - it's both. Rather, I think I have finally figured out how to make school a part of my life. Apparently the fifth quarter is the magic point for me.

The other day I sat down to decide what to take next quarter. I am nearly done with my last core class, so everything is electives and "culminating experience". I realized that after next quarter, I'll only have 17 credits left. A little over two quarters. I just really hope that there are jobs starting up when I'm done with this program. I am willing to move and work at whatever professional level, but I think I would lose all momentum if I had to wait a few years before a job opened. And now I'm going to stop thinking about it, lest I freak out.

Other than falling into a rhythm with classwork, this quarter is running smoothly because I'm so interested in the material. My cataloging class guarantees me at least "Ooh, so that's why we do X" moments a week. It's interesting, after all this time working with bib records and MARC, to finally understand why it works the way it does - why the author name in the 245 doesn't match the name in the 100, for example. Incredibly simple moves, but it feels earth shattering to me. We're working on LCSH this week, the part of cataloging that made my friends' heads explode, so we'll see how optimistic and enthusiastic I feel after that...

Tomorrow morning I'm up early to do a plyometric work out with the boy, so to bed for me...

Ending Eras

2010-01-26T22:46:00.002-08:00

This evening I securely packed up my oboe, took it to FedEx and shipped it eastwards to be cleaned, tuned up, and eventually sold. There's already a buyer interested, so depending on the condition of the instrument and the whims of the buyer, the transaction could go on for a while. But for now I've done what I can to make sure that it will go to a good home instead of languishing on my shelf as it has for at least two years now.

I came into the idea in passing. An aside comment by my mother made me realize it's been literally years since I picked up the instrument, let alone took a lesson or played for an ensemble or even made a reed. My final year of college, though difficult, really brought me to the pinnacle of what I could do musically. I played a fabulous repertoire with brilliant musicians. I had the chance to solo on English horn. I played for two years on my own reeds (with the occasional tweaks). At the end of it all, over a decade of playing, I really felt I had done what I needed to do. Music has given me so much. I will never regret playing. I will always think of the positive influence of Joel, Cheryl, and Mr. Newton. But I'm done.

It seems final and it's really not. I'm not done with music forever, but rather my time as a participant, a performer is past. I had my chance, ran with it, and then necessarily moved on to different things. I know people who have managed to keep music as a part of their life, who have careers and are musicians, but I don't feel that's where I'm at or where I'll ever be. This sounds somewhat apologetic and I don't mean it to be. I'm happy with my choice. I'm glad there is now an affordable used Rigoutat on the market for some young player who needs more than a crappy plastic Selmer.

It's time to be someone else now or, rather, to be the person who is already here.

And worse case scenario, there's always an alto sax in the closet. At least I can get those reeds from the store.

Moving...

2010-01-21T21:09:00.001-08:00

Quick, quick, as there are many rules in AACR2R to read before I sleep...

"We are living in an era experiencing tremendous acceleration in many fields. Ours is a society that demands rapid access to large bodies of information. How can we proceed to satisfy the needs of the student, the scholar, the researcher during the period in which both intellectual and technical difficulties prohibit the development of a utopian library?" - From The MARC Pilot Project, Library of Congress, 1968.

Passing Time

2010-01-18T11:10:00.002-08:00

Today I looked like a student. AK is taking another class on campus and though it's my day-off, I'm nearby housesitting and I needed to print some readings, so I followed him to class. After nearly hitting two students while trying to park (look up, guys!), we wended our way through the parking lot and onto campus proper. I left him at his building and began to make my way to the library. Dressed in a black hoodie, jeans, and Chucks with a backpack over one shoulder, I looked like everyone else around me. I bobbed and weaved through the mass of students moving from one class to another, skidding to a halt when the girl in front of me had to stop to hug a friend, jumping over a bike strapped haphazardly to a bench.

Though I'm in school and the federal government gives me student level tax breaks, I sometimes forget I'm actually a student. The residencies up in Seattle drove that point home at the start of every quarter, when I was fighting with untold thousands of other students to get coffee before a morning lecture. In London I was a little more detached from that kind of student life. I road the morning and evening train with commuters. But after dropping off my coat in a coin-operated locker, carefully placing my work for the day into a clear plastic bag (better visibility for the security guards), and flashing my pass as I walked into Humanities 1, I was part of the world of scholarship, the people who could sit seemingly motionless for hours in front of a stack of paper, only jumping up with great energy and excitement when the little green light on my desk went off.

Judging by the newly moving groups of students behind me in the reference room and the growing crowds outside, it's passing time again. Time to pack up and go.

Cataloging the Quarter

2010-01-17T10:30:00.002-08:00

So a new quarter is begun and I'm taking my first elective (531) and my final core requirement (580). I'm happy to report that thus far I am not feeling too overwhelmed by work or concepts, but rather I'm actually rather exhilarated and excited. I know freaking out about MARC and Charles Ammi Cutter (already mentioned here as inherently awesome) marks me as a special type of nerd, but I really don't care. It's so exciting for me to finally get the "why" for so much of the work I do on a daily basis or work that I've done before.

My history with cataloging is complex and piecemeal. While I had managed to develop and understanding of library catalog records from playing around in OPACs as a patron and a page, I didn't actually get into the meat of things until my first summer at the Music Library. The cataloging librarian, who is utterly amazing at her job, had severe problems with her wrists and hands. I believe the damage was done during some crazy retro-con project. In order to protect her wrists from further damage, and to allow her to continue to play oboe (and she is a very talented player), students were assigned all of the heavy typing work. I got a crash course in MARC and heading searching and was sent on my way. I would search for all appropriate subjects/performers (I did a ton of scores and CDs, as most of the books we bought were copy cataloged) and print them. She would work her magic and order them into a MARC template, which I would then type up and upload. I knew enough to pay attention to exactly what was written, but that's it. I knew enough to do the job and to do it well, but obviously when you have a ridiculous backlog of scores to retro-con, you're not going to take the time to make sure your student has a strong conceptual grasp of the fundamentals of cataloging. Especially when she'll be gone in three months.

This "sorta understanding" of the catalog followed me through the rest of my library jobs, but didn't really call upon them until my current position (in the Archives I worked primarily with finding aids). Again, I relied on my understanding of the bibliographic record as an advanced catalog searcher to get the work done. This was expanded when I trained to produce LHRs for our collection, but I was still working under the notion of "it has to be like this to validate", not 'it has to be like this because of X principle". It wasn't until I was assigned authority work that I finally sat down to learn what my coworker meant when she said "245 field". I read a few LC pubs and essentially threw myself into the work, asking innumerable questions and leaving things for others to look at when I could. Eventually things started to slide into place.

A cataloging exercise this past week finally helped to cement together my day to day notions and the larger picture of cataloging. I find it thrilling to finally look at something that you know has to work a particular way and to finally grasp WHY it works that way and to see how that rationale stretches all the way back to the nineteenth century (okay, maybe I'm the only one who is excited by Victorian era cataloging writing). I still have miles to go before I can sit down and catalog something from scratch, but I feel that the potential is there, that it's no longer as mystical and obscure a process as I once thought.

Right now a paper on this very subject is calling, so more later.

Monomania, On and Off

2009-12-27T10:30:00.002-08:00

Before I left to do my MA in London, a dear professor of mine gave me a copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. The accompanying card suggested the gift was for amusement on the flight and, as we taxied away from EWR, I dutifully opened the volume and began to read. I think I managed about two pages before I set the work aside. The quality of Gaskell's prose or the subject was the problem, I simply wasn't in the mood for the work before me (and, recalling my nerves at the time, I couldn't have concentrated on anything had I determined what exactly I was in the mood for). So the book traveled with me to London, from London back to New York, and from New York to Portland.

Five years and roughly nine-thousand miles later, I finally pulled the book from a shelf on my "Victorian" bookcase and made it past the first two pages. When I was finished, I picked up Villette, long overdue for a re-read, and lined up Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for similar treatment. In my copy of Villette are scattered pencilled notes and underlining, remnants of the my first read through and the Great Project to Read All The Brontë Novels I Haven't Read Yet (GPRABNIHRY), undertaken in the Summer of 2004.

To find the aforementioned novels I had to paw through roughly alphabetized-by-author stacks of books (my bookcases are cheap pine garage shelving, so books are stacked horizontally in piles). In doing so I uncovered the bulk of my gothic novel project, the beginnings of the (sadly stalled) Dickens reading project, the Sarah Water Project (neo-Victorian and complete), the Great War collection (primarily poetry), and Victorian Women Poets (a course from my MA and almost entirely Broadview Press). Later that day I went to my "Non-Victorian or Everything Else" bookcase to find a novel for a friend. There's the quarter shelf of Atwood (though I'll refrain from buying her new one till it's out in paperback), the half shelf of Murakami, the long stretch of Harry Potter hardbacks, the Arthurian Myth/Joseph Campbell set (a course with the amazing Beth Darlington), and the Hemingway/Fitzgerald set, and my tiny Jane Gardam set (just now coming into print in the US).

My husband jokes that I don't know how to not do and he's somewhat right. I always have some sort of project going, even when I'm not in school, and the projects are often centered around reading. Or, if they're not specific projects, I will get into a mood where I sit down and just absorb a large chunk of something. When Fall quarter started to wind down, I ordered a ton of books on Dickens and Christmas - food, booze, stories and the like. I read them all in bits and pieces in between XML assignments and policy papers. I do the same with television or movies. I devoured all of Q.I. and Top Gear during a few wintry months (which also necessitated reading a ton of Stephen Fry's books and handfuls of the textual produce of Clarkson et al.). My husband and I, prostrate from the intense heat this past summer, watched all of The Tudors (necessitating a brief refresher on British history) and are now working through Mythbusters (I am just hoping that nothing in our apartment is blown up in the future).

My undergrad and MA are examples of this sort of highly localized and intense focus that is rapidly replaced by a new topic or subtopic. For a time I was going to be a Bronte specialist, then a Dickens scholar, and then I was determined to master the "scientific romance" and the gothic novel. While this sort of intense devouring of a topic can be intensely satisfying (and excellent preparation for any sort of trivia game), it does make me worry for my career in libraries. When I started my current position I felt most comfortable in technical services. After a year or so on the job my focus shifted and I began to feel that perhaps Circulation/public services would be the place for me. And now, another year later, I'm thinking that it is in fact technical services that is where I should be once this degree is over. Will my fascination with FRBR and MARC last till the end of this degree and beyond? What about the siren call of Interlibrary Loan and the exciting new ILLIad 8 interface?

Though my specific topics ebb and flow, there is still a shared thread throughout my reading/viewing interests -- Victorian, British, often reviewed by the Guardian, easily fueled by Powells and Netflix. What is the connecting thread in my library work? Problem solving? Service? I think this is a question that I will have to answer before I'm finished with my degree.

Fuzzy and Grey

2009-10-17T16:27:00.003-07:00

Grey seems to be the theme of the past few weeks. Though at the very second I type this the sun has decided to shine its face, for the most part the weather has turned to autumn in the Pacific Northwest - rain, rain, and rain. The reappearance of the rain is always so surprising to me, which seems an odd statement. I mean, I do live in Portland. Rain is kinda our thing (only slightly less so than Seattle, where it really, really is their thing). Summer visits Portland rather late and, as if to make up for its tardiness, stays on into the end of September. So though school is underway, the weather is still gorgeous, the sun bright and the breeze cool. And then, one morning, I wake up because I'm far too cold and it's dark and there's a hard wind and leaves everywhere. I stumble out of bed, feeling more than a little like Rip Van Winkle to see so sudden a change after so short a sleep.

Grey is the color of a scarf I'm knitting up for a friend. The Right Coast has suddenly grown even colder than here (snow in October!) and he needs something to help keep him warm. It's the easiest pattern ever (k2p2 rib) in a lovely soft merino and I can knit it while standing up and talking to people or while listening to lectures on information ethics. I'm a little worried I'll run out of yarn -- I only have two skeins in grey and one in green, so I'm wondering if I should put the green skein in the middle or asymmetrically at the end. Either way, I'm glad to be making something with my hands again. I somehow feel more productive in life when I'm producing something tangible. Concepts and understanding make up the bulk of my days and that's often difficult to represent, to have something to show for all the time I put in. But a scarf (or, last quarter, a stack of dishcloths) let's me know that I've been sitting and absorbing, twitching and learning.

Grey and fuzzy lines are a continual topic of conversation in my Information in Social Context class. We're talking a lot about ethical considerations and the tools available to us as information professionals. Since I spend most of my days in technical services at an academic institution, I never have to worry about people trying to ban books, children asking for things that might be inappropriate, officials trying to track patron computer usage. There are ethical considerations for sure - I do have access to sensitive patron information, for example - but I'm rarely called on to make a judgement, to provide definition to these lines as I almost always have someone else to refer to, a chain of command. Public Librarianship seems so difficult when I consider the type of careful balancing that must go on everyday. I think the friends of mine who are focused on the public side of the coin are amazing, especially those who are running in headlong, anxious to make a difference.

And now that I've written this, I'm off to check in on our Division referee seminar, where they are undoubtedly discussing the fuzzy grey areas of the rule book and the fencing phrase.

Borrowing in the Future

2009-09-27T19:56:00.003-07:00

Last week, I had the chance to attend a day of the Northwest Interlibrary Loan Conference, hosted at a local college. Though I believe that I'll probably wind up focusing on cataloging and systems in my degree, I am greatly intrigued by ILL. At my last review my boss asked me what interested me the most about my job. My answer was problem solving. I love it when someone hands me a problem or a question and then sends me off to discover the answer. Now, this does lead to a fair amount of frustration, but the result is so rewarding. I feel in cataloging the problem I'm trying to solve is "How do I represent this [book, serial, website, pony, atom] in this system so people will actually be able to find it and use it?" What a great question! It means I need to consider the users, the world they're in, the library I'm in and the limits and requirements of our systems, the rules and suggestions that others have created, and then an end product. Admittedly I'm a baby cataloger (editing established MARC and downloading into a local system), but the possibility is there.

ILL presents a similar sort of challenge - namely how do I decipher what it is the patron wants and how do I get it to them as quickly and cheaply as possible. Sometimes that does mean "I'm sorry, you will have to go downstairs and use the paper copy we have". Or it means spending fifteen minutes waiting for the NLM catalog to load (does it seriously need to be that slow?). Sometimes it means that I'm recreating their citation searching. Few things in life are as satisfying as finding what the patron wanted freely online and then sending them an email saying "Here is is right now and it's free". There are judgment calls to be made too - do I try to send this out or do I use a supplier? Do I cancel this request or do we try to see if we can get it? It's constantly piecing the puzzle together, since for articles we have a longer workflow that means I'm checking copyright, our catalog, the need by date, and then OCLC itself before sending out the request.

The conference made me decide to stick more systems, because I realized how much work I can do there to make ILL better (libraries, please do your Local Holdings Records. You will save us all a lot of time, including yourself when you need to cancel requests for things you've never owned). Cyril's lecture on the IDS Project and the GIST form and the future of ILL was eyeopening. In LIS 520 it was suggested that we can and should view consortia borrowing and ILL as an extension of the library's collection. It's stuff that we can provide to the patron, so we've "collected it" for them. Leading to ideas on cooperative collection development etc. But what the IDS project shows is that we can increasingly move towards that global system Sam Sayre is constantly talking about. That project is what could bring me back to NY. A large group of libraries who have just decided that they're going to work more closely to improve their ILL borrowing. It's magnificent. And they've created such great systems (a connecting database of all of the ISSNs and holdings so article requests can be routed with little intervention). What's also fascinating is that this is really a sort of informal gathering of libraries, all with a clear drive and desire to borrow and share.

But the GIST request form - which lies on top of the standard Illiad request form - is what really set my mind spinning. With this form, the role of collection development goes straight into the hands of the users - a frightening thought at first. This isn't the librarian mulling over suggestions or making educated guesses as to what the library needs. When a request is brought into the system, the library can decide to request or to buy - depending on which seems to be the cheapest option or the best for the library's collection. ILL and Acquisitions merging together into a larger workflow, which is entirely intuitive if you do work off the assumption that both are just workflows for bringing material into the library's collection and thus into the hands of the users. This blows my mind because it's one of those things that appears obvious, but that I couldn't have thought of in a million years. It is an act of faith and it is brought about by the idea that libraries are weeding at an incredible rate, so the cost of used books will be negligible for awhile.

I'm already starting to wonder how I can insert myself into this transition in the future.

Piling it on...

2009-09-14T21:16:00.001-07:00

Looking at my desk at home and at work, one wouldn't necessarily get the impression that I'm the type of person who likes organizing for a living. I have plenty of folders (plain and hanging), a board for pinning notes, a brand-new filing cabinet, and binders a plenty. And yet, especially mid-quarter, you can't move more than six inches in this room without tripping over several piles of readings, class notes, or project drafts. For someone in an online program, I do a ridiculous amount of printing (enough to justify purchasing a laser printer for home). This comes primarily from my inability to adequately interact with text on a screen. I cannot digest or remember an online work as well as one that I've held in my hands, despite my best efforts.

This reliance on print feels like a personal failing in this digital age, something that marks me as a non-native, like a slight accent or a penchant for mayonnaise on fries. Full-text databases and electronic reserves are dear friends and providers of such joy, but once that PDF hits my desktop it must be printed. I must have paper in my hands when I read, and I can only partially blames my eyes. Primarily, I need to be able to viciously underline or thoughtfully circle portions of the text as I read. My marginalia is the essential component of studying as it's where I first start to work out my thoughts, where I mark down questions or issues. I fully realize that technology has advanced to the point where I could do that on the screen. A fellow classmate once spoke about a program he used to mark up and edit PDFs of readings, a program that allowed him to deface and edit a page just as I do. Though It's rather telling that I've no recollection of the name of the program nor have I downloaded it. I seem determined to kill trees and stub my toes on my final projects till the end of this degree.

This penchant for paper and the inability to keep it all neatly organized isn't a unique trait really. Upon further consideration, I'm not sure if I've ever met a librarian with a well-ordered desk that is nearly free of paper. I've heard more than one tale of librarians facing off with the fire marshal or losing work among their teeming stacks of printouts. This situation, I believe, stems from the nature of the job itself. Though as a whole the field if moving inexorably toward the digital, librarians seem to tear through a ton of paper a day in the form of reports, bib records, work flow sheets, scraps of magazines for ordering, and meeting notes. Yet it doesn't have to be that way. There are scanners, wikis, shared directories and other tools, but many of us, myself included, balk or give myriad reasons for preferring to pass around a sheet of paper instead of logging in and working from there. All librarians aren't paper hoarders, but I think that many of those tools lack something, some sort of flexibility, that paper still provides.

I was reminded of this need for paper yesterday when I installed a file cabinet next to my desk. The point of the purchase, and subsequent hell that is building an Ikea product, was to combine two plastic file boxes and two cardboard boxes of paper into a single, organized space. While sorting through one of the boxes of paper, I re-discovered an article that touches on the endurance of paper in offices.* The article describes a study on how people go about organizing their browser bookmarks, and how deeply contextual and varied this process seems to be. What stuck with me from this article was their discussion of how grounded we are in paper and how difficult it is to move conceptually from paper to a digital environment.

The spatial aspect seems to be one of the biggest obstacles in moving to a fully digital office or digital world. I make piles not just because I'm too lazy to file everything away (though I often am), but rather because the piles need to be there. I need to see that pile of bib records on my desk so I remember to deal with them. I love that people's piles often have a sense of methodical madness to them. My papers and projects are developed from stacks of articles that are sorted by topic or the order in which I'll use them. That's not really going to help anyone who might come upon the stack, but to me it makes perfect sense. (This why I envy literary biographers who pore over boxes of idiosyncratic piling, and not just because I'm nosy. I desire the sort of psychological insight and patience it must take to find sense in a pile of manuscript pages.) That personal aspect is also what makes shared filing systems so treacherous. Without something as strict as the AACR2 in place, who knows where anything will wind up because odds are that in Circ we'll call something by three different names or have a different view on where an item falls in a process.

Obviously this is something that systems and software folks are keenly aware of, so help is on the way. But until then, I'll buy another box of paper for the quarter.

*Gottlieb, L. and Dilevko, J. (2003). Investigating How Individuals Conceptually and Physically Structure File Folders for Electronic Bookmarks: The Example of the Financial Services Industry. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(2), 124-139.

Writing Again or At Last

2009-09-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

Since I was old enough to read, I wanted to become a writer. Well, that's not necessarily true. Since I was old enough to read I wanted to be surrounded by books and by words. I loved (and still love) becoming lost in a book, being completely absorbed by a novel. I like having the author's syntax still stuck in my head. I owe an entire vocabulary of outdated and unpronounceable words to the Victorian novels I devoured in middle school (vocabulary which has proved useful in academic papers and the SATs). Books kept me sane in a small, salmon colored room in London, during my commute across town, and through now 9 years without cable. I believe it is the natural impulse of a reader to want to cross over into creating what she loves best. So, for as long as I can remember, I've kept journals, dribbled out poetry and essays, and chose schools and classes that demanded an intense interaction with the written word.

Writing is, unfortunately, much harder than reading. Or, at least, I find it more difficult. Thinking it over, I'm somewhat convinced that this is partially because I practice reading more often than I practice writing. The professor I had for the short story class I took a few summers ago at UP adores John Updike. When he taught the class story "A&P", the professor related how Updike treated writing like a job. He rented office space, sat down to write at regular times, and thus produced nearly a book a year during his life. It seemed strange to me at the time that writing would be like any other occupation or craft. While I cannot count the hours I've spent playing scales or repeating footwork patterns, the idea that writing would have to be actively worked at still seemed strange. I suppose I felt that writers just sat down and did, that they had some sort of idea in their head and applied pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and a novel emerged. Naive, I know. And that image of Updike walking up a flight of stairs, unlocking a door, and ceremoniously sitting at his desk and beginning to write has stuck with me ever since.

Not that I necessarily know what to do with it. Despite halfhearted efforts to work through The Ode Less Travelled or to set aside time to work on this blog, nothing has materialized. Again I find I must contradict myself as soon as a sentence emerges. Nothing has materialized in the form of something that could be submitted to The New Yorker. However much has materialized in the way of message board posts, literature reviews (which I find strangely and immensely satisfying), final papers, presentations, and reviews. I can even now say that I have an article "in press". What in earlier degrees had been a constant source of anxiety and dread is now a somewhat pleasureable requirement.

This requires some explanation. A naturally neurotic person, my anxiety problem came to a head in my senior year of undergrad. Under the combined stress of being a senior in college, two break ups (one of the relationships having lasted nearly three years), and trying to apply to graduate school and determine my future, I found I could not write. I had always been a procrastinator. The fear that something wouldn't come out perfectly or to mine or other's expectations kept me from really working on something until the last minute. I needed the fear of a deadline to kick me over the edge before an essay would flow. I learned to edit as I wrote, printing out drafts when I started to lose steam and tearing them up with pen. At my worst (or best, depending on your perspective), I wrote two term papers in a single 18 stretch (over 12 pages each) and aced them both.

However when faced with my undergradute thesis, I found I couldn't get the fear to push me over the edge. I felt absolutely terrified. I could read and outline, but at that time in my life all I wanted to do was to be left alone and to sleep. When I did manage to pull words into setences and then into paragraphs, I became disgusted by the effort and would delete it all. Happily the counsel of an advisor and the loving intervention of two friends who discovered me hysterial in the reserves room of library allowed for a week long break from school when, finally over the edge, I pulled together something like a thesis, passed, and graduated. My graduate thesis was a trial on a similar level. Admittedly here the research was much better and the writing flowed faster the second time around, but I'm still not terribly happy with the final results nor the final few all-nighters to pull it together. I still had not learned how to draft nor, most importantly, how to write without the pressure of fear.

Writing without fear would come after a couple years of talking with a therapist, settling down into a new life in Oregon, and figuring out what I was going to do with myself. The writing assignments I took on at work helped greatly. Those assignments provided a fair amount of structure and control in terms of topic. While analysis was often welcome, the driving force behind the projects was clarity and concision. I learned to make my writing tight and engaging. I learned not only how to draft, but how to put my work out there for my peers. My coworkers and boss actively read everything I wrote (or most everything). This past quarter I exchanged reflection papers with a classmate in a peer-editing scheme, something I would have never contemplated 3 or 5 years ago - mainly because I would never have gotten something written far enough in advance to allow for it!

While I am very proud of the work I have produced in my MLIS program thus far (proud enough to post portions on my web space), I still want to be writing other sorts of things, particualarly essays. I want to learn how to set aside time for writing for pleasure just as I've set aside time for writing for work and for school. This is a sample of what I want to create and, though it's taken me nearly a week to finish it, the sort of thing I want to put up here at least once a week from now on.

Internet - The Greatest Procrastination of All

2009-08-11T19:22:00.001-07:00

Last week a friend on Facebook linked an interesting article by a writer who went a full month without using the Internet for anything. In this age such a venture seems absurd as we're all increasingly Internet reliant. Having continual access to Google can be a boon. For example, recently some friends visited Portland and during the entire time we were together they were never separated from their iPhones. I appreciated this continual link in that we easily and quickly located tapas for dinner (link to place). However, the younger of the two spent a ton of her time interacting with her screen instead of with the people around her - texting and messaging and emailing. It's interesting to me that such a powerful convenience tool can so easily become the greatest time suck of all.

This time suck wasn't so much of a concern for me when I used my old computer. The thing was cranky, clunky, and crashed within minutes of loading a YouTube video. Between that and the fact that I found myself tired from staring at a computer screen at work all day, I rarely logged on at home. And I accomplished so much. I read constantly (averaging about 3 books a week, even when my daily commute was reduced). Since this was before I could stream Netflix through the XBox, I rarely turned the TV (okay, except between 6 and 7 pm to watch the same 5 repeats of Family Guy). I wrote letters, cleaned the apartment, cajoled my husband for a fencing lesson etc. I never felt particularly bored and I continually got stuff done.

This all changed this past September when I started my online MLIS program and started spending a ridiculous amount of time on my new laptop. During the quarter I always have a browser open and am continually logged into MyUW so I can listen to my lectures, turn in homework and post on the boards. I have chat open for group projects. Now a person with reasonable self-control would probably be able to leave only the necessary windows open and power through their work like a champ. But I am not a person with reasonable self-control. I am also easily distracted. Eventually I found a way to work on my computer without checking Facebook every three minutes, but it was difficult and resulted in only going online to do the work I have to do and then putting the laptop to the side while I read or drafted my assignments. If I have to write or use the laptop for an assignment, I have found the little switch that turns off the wireless signal to be the greatest invention of all time.

This putting aside the distraction isn't possible at work as I cannot do most of my assigned tasks without an Internet connection. I need it to edit records in our ILS, to update holdings in OCLC, to run ILL requesting, and to edit documents on the shared network folders. When in Circ I need to be monitoring email accounts as well. So unplugging at work isn't really an option. At work what needs to happen in that I change how I interact with the Internet. I find that in order to be productive, I need some sort of background noise. When I'm really in the midst of something, I easily tune things out, but I seem to need something to jump start it, a louder background to react against. It's probably because I grew up with a twin sister in a family of loud New Yorkers that today I find I cannot even do class reading in utter silence. I have been known to do laundry just to have the sound of the dryer running for white noise. It's pathetic.

But when you're sitting in a technical services office, laundry isn't an option and internet radio is too tempting. So the challenge has become to create background noise without the Internet. This is why for the past couple of days I've been cranking out my weeding projects to the sound of Little Shop of Horrors, Sunset Boulevard, and other choice items from our media collection. It's working somewhat - I am finding myself more focused, but also more in need of regular breaks. I'm not sure if I'm necessarily getting more done but I feel like it because the moments of focus are longer and deeper.

I'm still intrigued, though, by the idea of walking away from the Internet for a month, or at least limiting my interaction heavily. Work email whenever, but personal email, Facebook, and reading only at certain points in the day (before and after work, for example). Could I manage that for a full week? Next Friday I leave on vacation and that might be the perfect time to attempt something like this. I might get more reading or writing done. I might be just as lazy and bored. But, until I remove the great procrastinatory variable, I'll never know.

For Alex

2009-08-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

Funeral Blues
W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Heat Wave

2009-07-27T16:05:00.001-07:00

This has been the strangest year or so of weather here in the Pacific Northwest. After being snowed in for over a week in December, the earth now decided to throw a week of 100+ degree weather our way. I think that the earth really must have meant to send all of that to my family in New York, since they seem to have a lot of chill nights and rain. If someone could set this straight for me, that would be excellent.

Of course the week of unending heat would be the week that AK returns home from his camps out East. He's off this week, so instead of running around with small children in AC'd glory, he'll be at home cleaning and fixing up his class equipment. I am sure that he is more than excited at the prospect of spray painting in the sun.

Though I'm now slothfully draped on the couch with a fan focused directly on my back, I've actually been rather productive in the past few weeks. I've knitted more than I expected (on the third scarf of the summer, since I seem to have sworn off sweaters). I'm in the middle of several excellent books, though I simply cannot bring myself to finish To the Lighthouse. I'm not entirely sure what's cause this blockage. Maybe I'm not in the right mindset for Woolf at the moment or maybe I screwed myself by devouring Orlando before I tackled this novel. Either way, it's staring reproachfully from the top of my active bookpile and I'm starting to feel just a tinge of guilt about it. The book directly to hand is Zamyatin's We, which I ordered on Summit after finishing 1984. It's beautifully written and thus far the plot is fairly compelling. I'll write up a Goodreads review when I'm finished. I think I might re-read The Dispossessed after that, to finish out the dystopia trilogy. That is, if I can put aside Woolf for just a little bit longer.

The Challenges of Composing

2009-07-18T12:14:00.001-07:00

Though I only officially spend two days a week in Circulation, I tend to be assigned anything that has to do with developing documentation on all of our policies and processes. This is probably because I once volunteered to re-write some portion of the Circ Manual and soon became the victim of my own success. Not that I really mind the writing assignments. Truth be told, they tend to be my favorite part of the job. Despite this affinity, it took me some time to realize that writing documentation for a department is vastly different from the sort of writing I specialized in previously. For example, think about both a piece on creating and checking patron records compared to an essay on Robert Browning and Florentine Portraiture of Women. The underlying purpose of both works is identical - the writer is attempting to convey some idea or concept to the reader in as clear and concise a manner as possible. However, when the execution of both works are examined, the differences are rather pronounced.

In my experience, documentation requires a tighter hand and a terser voice than an academic essay, at least more so than the essays I created. This is perhaps due to the lack of persuasion needed in documentation. In documentation it is not really necessary to get the reader to agree with an argument because it's not necessary to really argue anything. Documentation reflects an established consensus. In my work, documentation is composed and then approved in meetings, so everyone is on the same page. There are also procedural constraints - essentially, this is how we create patron records because of how the system works so it doesn't matter how much anyone hates having to remember to type all the zeros into an ID number.

Because rhetoric isn't necessary in documentation, the piece is more to the point. This tendency to concision an unbelievable challenge for me as I have always been a wordy writer, as this sentence amply demonstrates. Put simply, I babble. I brazenly defy Strunk and White's call to "Omit needless words", relishing melodic though not necessarily pertinent turns of phrase. Even worse, a brief survey of essay titles from my first two degrees demonstrates a shocking affection for alliterative titles. When writing academic essays on history or novels - where story is paramount - this wordiness can be easily integrated and can even be a boon. But when the purpose of a piece is to help a new and harassed Circ Supervisor figure out how to create an alumni record on a weekend when the alumni office is closed and when the impatient patron at the desk, who forgot their alumni card, really wants to leave with their books, this predilection will only earn the author their co-worker's ire.

So what does a useful piece of documentation look like? This will certainly vary between different organizations and their particular information needs and styles. Below is what I do to make documentation better for me and my coworkers.

1) Keep it Visually Simple: By this I mean no dense blocks of text. Think of the difference between a reference book and a monograph.* A piece of documentation should be easy to browse. The reader should be able to pick out the portion of the process or information they need. Formatting is key here - setting out important details in bold or providing numbers for long sequences of steps. I often begin an entry for the Circ Manual with a short preamble that details the purpose of the documentation and/or the process or policy it describes. For longer processes, such as consortia borrowing, I might also include a paragraph that is a general overview of the entire process. From there I'll get into the step by step way to carry out the desired task. I make sure that the steps are numbered and well spaced so that the reader can follow along easily on the screen or via a printout.

2) Know Your Audience: Departmental documentation is used by both full-time and student supervisors. This means that as I writer I need to consider the reader's learning style, job responsibilities, and comfort level with technology.

In terms of job responsibilities, I mean what sort of procedures the reader can be expected to carry out. For example, a full-time Supervisor can and should be comfortable looking up the status of an alumni in Banner before creating a record. However, Student Supervisors do not have Banner access and cannot verify patrons this way. If the documentation leaves the reader lost or at a dead-end, it's ineffective and needs to be changed. The documentation should provide work-arounds or alternatives. For example, is this a dinner break and can they ask the patron to wait or is it during normal business hours and is there someone else on campus they can contact?

In addressing comfort levels with technology, I tend to err on the side of overly explaining. While it's not the point of "Place your dominant hand on the mouse and move it laterally to the Start button...", I do try to break a process down thoroughly. Those who are more experienced can easily skim and pull out the basics and those who need the full click-by-click can follow along. If writing documentation on a process that involved technology of any sort, I like to provide screen-caps. I've never thought of myself as a very visual person, but I have found that seeing that my screen matches the documentation can be comforting and can help when things get a little complicated. By this I mean I can sometimes condense steps by saying "Make sure your screen matches that below" instead of trying to verbally describe how a menu should be formatted. But I also try not to go overboard. My rule is that if there's a significant change in the menu or something else pops up, you make a new screen-cap. Otherwise, a short sentence will suffice.

Variations in learning styles can be difficult to address. But learning styles I mean realizing that people learn differently and thus expect different things from their learning materials. I don't think it's necessary to follow something like 4mat slavishly to ensure that your two page summary on shelving is absolutely inclusive (though I recommend giving it a read to get a better sense of the cognitive differences out there in your readers). Instead, keep a critical eye on your work and ask if the readers will find your work easy to understand. Is your vocabulary and terminology at the right pitch? Are you including enough visual cues (or too many)? Are you giving enough examples to help reader's apply the procedure? Additionally, I've found that giving a rationale for a process will often mean that it will stick with people more. By explaining that all of the zeros in a patron's ID number are necessary to allow uploads from Banner to overlay properly and prevent duplicate records, that bit of information might stay more firmly lodged in one's brain (and make record clean up all the more easier for me).

3)Date Your Footer or Indicate Edits: This is a pet peeve of my boss and one that I've come to take on myself. In order to make sure that the most recent, and thus most accurate, version of a piece is being used, note the footer with a "Last Updated" section. Do NOT use the auto dating function in Word. That will change the footer every time you open the document. Make it a habit when editing to change the footer and add initials if necessary. If using a wiki, this is an unnecessary step (which is one of the reason's why I'm longing to move our documentation to one!). If your department is a fan of track-change in Word feel free to use that (I am not and since I am often the only person editing the documents, it's not really necessary).

This is all I can think of for now, but I hope to add to this in the future!

*Bates, Marcia J. "What Is a Reference Book: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis." RQ 26 (Fall 1986): 37-57. I have read this article at least twice in my program already and it's still pertient.

A slight trim...

2009-07-15T22:24:00.001-07:00

When I was small, my mother would let mine and my sister's hair grow out during the summer. We'd go running around outside with white blond ponytails that never seemed to stay up or free of twigs and tangles. Before school started in the fall, my mother would take us in to get the three months growth trimmed into easily manageable bobs. The first woman who cut our hair, a friend of the family, would sweep up our fine blond scraps and tease us by saying that they should be used to make Barbie dolls. For the next fifteen or so years, my hair followed the same pattern: start with a bob, grow it out until the knots or length becomes intolerable, chop back into a bob. There was a brief dalliance with "not quite a boy" cut towards the end of high school, but after that initial cut I could never seem articulate what I wanted. Thus the bob reigned.

This pattern remained unbroken until a November Sunday in London four years ago. Frustrated by the lack of water pressure in a fifth floor bathroom and the state of my greasy hair, I walked into a salon near Paddington Station and asked the taciturn Russian stylist to chop it all off. She gave me hair that was short, spiky, and slightly terrifying. But it's also exactly what I needed during a new grad program in a new country. I couldn't hide behind hair that was only half an inch long. I was out there, for better or for worse.

Back in the States, my hair returned to its former pattern, primarily at the behest of my husband and his preference for "girl hair". I've moved between bob, angled bob, nearly shoulder-length, and back to bob over the past four years. Recently I felt the need to chop it all off again. My current emotional state flows between relaxed with a novel to neurotic and up all night with a laptop wondering why I cannot seem to channel this continual creative urge. I started falling back into old habits of avoidance (my primary procrastination manifestation). I started to hide from people and emails. I needed to change something and, honestly, a haircut is the fastest solution. It sounds trite as hell - the image of a girl with a tear stained face slipping into a salon while simultaneously erasing a boy's phone number from her phone comes to mind - but it works. My hair is shorter and I feel more ready to take on world.

It's funny how a new haircut can bring about that sort of change, that the simple application of scissors can suddenly increase ones confidence and internal sense of badassitude. This past Sunday I walked back to the bus with funky cropped, chopped hair. The stylist spent a good fifteen minutes inspecting my hairline, my face, the texture and fall of my hair. She worked to "open up" my face, broadened the bangs, and essentially razored off the rest. I missed the tug of the razor, the sudden exposure of the back of my neck. I love the feeling when, washing newly short hair, my hands go too far back, searching for all of the hair I left on the salon floor (and, as my stylist complained to her coworker, in her shoes and her shirt).

Since I'm blind as anything, the process of the haircut itself was a complete mystery. In a way, I've grown used to this and rather prefer it. Instead of staring at myself in the mirror, a hated activity to start with, I close my eyes and try to see if I can feel how the haircut is going. I notice the weight of my hair start to subtly shift while watching handfuls of the stuff fall to the ground. After all these years I've developed a pretty good sense of what the final product will be before I can see it properly. However when I put on my glasses this time, I admit to being shocked. It's been so long since I've gone this short. It was strange to see my face in the center of that hair, all the trendy angles and my bright red face staring back.

I'm out there again and I think it's exactly what I need.

Sluice

2009-07-09T21:40:00.001-07:00

During the summer between seventh and eight grade I went to what I fondly refer to as nerd camp. Imagine a college campus filled to the brim with overachievers from all over the country, all eager and energetic despite the moist heat of July in Pennsylvania. This was bliss. Since my math scores on the SAT weren't high enough to qualify me for any science classes, I signed up for a class on writing. For you see, when I was younger I wanted to be a writer.* This is perhaps the natural inclination of any bookish child. I believe the severely bookish wind up wanting to either create the works that bring them joy or want to surround themselves with the works that bring them joy. This does not necessarily mean that every writer or every librarian was once a severely bookish child, but it's probably more likely than you think.

The woman who taught my course is now a full English professor in her own right, information provided through the divine intervention of Google. My TA, however, seems to have disappeared as all I can remember is that her name was Eliza. Just Eliza. She was barely taller than me, with a slight frame, short brown hair and glasses. I want to add in a bandanna and cargo shorts, but I have a feeling that they've been added to my memory after the fact. Really the only distinguishing feature that my thirteen year-old mind has retained is that she was the first woman I ever met who didn't shave her legs. I remember workshopping an essay with her out in the stairwell during a nightly study hall. Perched on the wide windowsill against the black panes, she pointed out phrases on my looseleaf essay. I have no idea what I wrote or what she said, because it took all my effort not to stare at the long dark hairs on her thin pale legs. I sat across from her on the cool stone steps, nodding where appropriate, marvelling at how she must be either incredibly brave or incredibly crazy. Or so it seemed to my thirteen year-old self.

The only other distinguishing feature of Eliza (though, again, not one that's helpful in tracking her down) that I can recall is her favorite word: sluice. Our teacher asked us all to come up with our favorite word and I can still recall the slight smile on her face as Eliza drew out the sound of the world: "Slluuuuuiicceee". She had to define it for the class and I scribbled it down in the corner of my ever-present notebook. I still haven't forgotten it.

I hadn't really thought of Eliza, her legs, or sluices in years until today, when I came across this article. Here poets were asked their least favorite words. I have to say that I'm not a fan of "pulchritude" (also because I'm fairly certain I would butcher the pronunciation), but am guilty of using "chillax". The words listed in the comments are variously heinous and innocuous. Spatula? Really? I laughed at the continued hatred of moist. A friend of mine cringes terribly at the phrase "moist oyster", which is unfortunate as she lives in New England and cannot conceivably avoid either word.

The word I shared as my favorite all those years ago is, like Eliza's last name, forgotten. Today I am leaning towards inscrutable, but that's apt to change as nothing can have the same staying power as sluice.

*I also wanted to be a nun (wore suits and played guitar as far as I could tell). My father suggested lawyer since "you like arguing with me so much you might as well get paid for it".

Summer Loving

2009-07-08T20:01:00.002-07:00

The longer, brighter nights seem to get away from me faster than their shorter, darker friends. I come home from work brimming with excellent intentions and suddenly it's eleven at night and I'm still dancing around the house to my iPod instead of focusing on Virginia Woolf, my knitting project, or this blog. This, dear readers, is the true devilry of rock and roll - its procrastinatory powers.

I've been torn about what to put in this online space - the daily ramblings of The El-Jay are effortless, but this should be more of a thoughtful space. So I present something rambling and thoughtful: a play-by-play review of the new Tori Amos album.

While I love this album, it's more erratic in sound. Maybe I don't mean erratic, but rather eclectic. She's all over the place with sounds both old and new, in tone and mood. This could be an extension of the Doll Posse personae as well. I suppose that there's also the thematic linkage, though I tend not to dwell much on the lyrics during the first few times in an album. I am the sort of person who can spend years listening to a song, content with fuzzy lyrics or meaning (think early R.E.M.), and then will become utterly shocked when I actually figure out what's going on in the song. Suffice to say, my reactions here are more about the gut, the initial sound and flow of the tracks and the snippets of lyrics that I catch. The over analyzing of the lyrics are definitely more of an El-Jay pursuit.

Tori Amos -Abnormally Attracted to Sin

1. "Give": Dark from the start, feeling bits of Choirgirl here. She's stripped her sound back down again. It's focused without feeling too sparse, which leads to a greater sense of richness. Not rocking head bobbing, but a sort of swaying is provoked here.

2. "Welcome to England" : I completely understand why this is her first single. The more electronic stuff of late, but the lyrical flow and pulse of Venus/Scarlett (the two albums that I play the most). I am always a sucker for a gentle application of acoustic guitar with her strong piano rhythm. You can actually hear her piano here, which I want to say has been missing before ADP, but cannot be bothered at this point to go and research that. Call me on it if you can. This track is my favorite thus far. Also, "You've gotta bring your own sun...." See, the catchy lyric!

3. "Strong Black Vine" : Hi, Metallica circa S&M called and would like their sound back. I am too busy waiting for James to start singing to focus properly on this song.

4. "Flavor" : Bonus points for avoiding pretentious British spelling. There's the same atmosphere here as in "Give". A rolling, pulsing that could easily be monotonous but which she seems to make work. Atmospheric without making me fall asleep.

5. "Not Dying Today" : Okay, and now I'm waiting for... TMBG? Paul Simon? But it's working.... Okay, with the talking sing-song, I am totally heading to Graceland, Graceland, Memphis, TN. It's the underlying, continual throbbing that puts it in the Simon category for me. Bonus Gaiman reference? I still like this though. Playfully funky, if we're looking for the soundbite.

6. "Maybe California" : Just Tori and the piano/strings, as basic as it gets. I am somewhat underwhelmed by this track. Ridiculous after praising so much of the "OMG, piano!" of earlier tracks. I am writing this after listening to this track for the third or fourth time and my initial prediction of "I will probably grow to love this song" is so far pretty dead on.

7. "Curtain Call" : Loving the piano rhythm from the start. Good energy, good build. The darker songs have these ostinatos that just carry them through. Solid song. Strangely

8. "Fire to Your Plain" : My gut flipped when I heard the opening as I flashed back to the "... the power of orange knickers..." Slightly bizarre, but enjoyable. Could this be a perky Tori song that doesn't involve zebras?

9. "Police Me" : Getting back to the "noise", but this is an effective application of it. Interesting switch up to that, what at least feels to my mind, 60s syncopation. I'll keep listening to it, but it's not a favorite by any stretch.

10. "That Guy" : Somehow the sort of quirky that works for me. Nice swing. Gorgeous orchestration with just enough of a slant into the minor to give it some character. Third favorite song on the album after "Dying" and "England".

11. "Abnormally Attracted to Sin" : I never seem to care for the title tracks on her album, so my lack of amazement here shouldn't come as a surprise. I do like "impeccable peccadillo". Musically, I think she's trying to do too much here and it makes me want to skip on to the next song. On this listening, I sorta feel this would make a good James Bond theme. Or am I just insane?

12. "500 Miles" : So the Pretenders immediately come to mind, which really isn't the fault of the music, but rather the title. This song is... adorable. And I mean that in the best possible sense. It's about as twee as Tori gets, which I appreciate. She's helped away from the edge by the strong drum/rhythm line. "In the land of the midnight sun, I lost myself..." Am I still too hung up on the idea of sun (or the complete lack of it today in Oregon)? In the running for favorite song of the album.

13. "Mary Jane" : The evil step-sister of "Mr. Zebra". I sort of wish Horowitz was alive to cover this. I am trying to ignore the forced cadence on the lyrics. Otherwise, quite excellent.

14. "Starling" : Ummmm, oookaaaayyyyyyy. Well, it's growing on me. Still growing. Check back in a few weeks.

15. "Fast Horse" : Yes to guitar and piano joined in such a manner from the off. "Girl, you got to find you the man who something something Dark Side". No, that's not it. I am sorry, I am too busy dancing around to this to type properly.

16. "Ophelia" : I am a bit wary of anything purposefully directed this tragic heroine, but Tori seems determined to prove me wrong (also, see the above note about not really paying attention to the lyrics until much further along). Gorgeous, intricate piano work. Rich vocals. A win for me.

17. "Lady in Blue" : Slow and soulful start. An uncomfortable atmosphere - meaning that I'm feeling slightly unsettled here, instead of pulled into the swaying bliss of some of the songs above. Ah, and now she kicks up the energy and the piano and I am fully invested in the song again. I guess this album neatly illustrates my limitations as a listener. There's also a sort of cadence here, a sense of wrapping up. But I have been listening to too many musicals of late, so that could certainly be a side effect.

To sum: a solid album with moments of excellent and only one song that I can't be bothered to listen to. Well played.

Still Alive

2009-06-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

So yeah, in the midst of fighting through LIS 530 (which I conquered admirably), end of year for UP, the worst allergies of my life, two friends having babies and now packing up and sending AK off on his month long Great Summer Camp Trip, this blog has fallen to the side. I suppose part of the issue is that I barely had the time to think about anything that did not relate directly to either instructional theory or languages of description. I know I had this particular screen pulled up more than a few times in the past month, but nothing ever emerged. Besides, Facebook is a much faster and more effective way of expressing the frustrations and the joys of the quarter as everyone else who is suffering or celebrating are equally surgically attached to their laptops.

So the quarter is over and I am still alive and still seriously contemplating cataloging as a future. Apparently LIS 530 has a bit of a reputation for turning people off the idea of cataloging, which having survived the class I completely understand. I am drawn to cataloging through a combined desire to put everything in order and to make everything easily discoverable for the patron. But when you start thinking about not just how to put a MARC record together, but the years of thought and theory that informed its creation, your head wants to explode into tiny pieces. And this is after you've spent three weeks trying to wrap your head around the distinction between the manifestation and the expression of a work in FRBR. In my paper for LIS 500 (sort of a glorified "What I Want To Be When I Grow Up" essay), I wrote about wanting to follow my instructor's call to be a tool builder instead of a tool user. I'm quite naturally the latter and balking at becoming the former. Not so much balking as that I do have doubt that I'll ever have the skills required to do that sort of work. But I'm only through the first year and not yet in my tech heavy classes, so we'll see what comes.

Had things gone according to plan, I would be joining others in the start of the summer quarter. My one credit class was cancelled (along with the only other 1 credit I haven't taken) leaving me ineligible for financial aid. I was upset when the possibility of cancellation was first announced. But after thinking about it and looking back on 9 months of continual motion, the idea of sitting on my butt reading and catching up on errands and life for three months seems almost too good to pass up (even if AK will be travelling for a good third of that time). I'm still on track for graduation, so all is well. And I've already read two full novels and am nearly paralyzed by the amount of choice before me. Bliss.

Not much else to report. Today I accompanied a friend to her old lab at OHSU and helped her pitch failed mutant strains from her Ph.D work (little tubes of cultures and naphthalene that I helped her set up over a year ago). In tow was Mr. Rowan, her month old son. I danced him to sleep in the middle of a restaurant today and my right shoulder is yelling about it still. There are twins on the Right Coast that I have yet to meet but cannot wait. I am deeply unsure about having kids, but until I make that decision I am more than content with spending time with other people's (and then handing them back when they start to have a fit).

And now, to sleep.

Purpose Statement

2009-05-10T14:50:00.001-07:00

This quarter features more of those "Why am I doing this??" moments than the previous two. First quarter I was too overwhelmed to really think about what was going on and last quarter was a rather relaxing stroll through reference and statistics. LIS 530 is proving to be challenging - mostly the thrilling sort of challenging with spikes of the terrible challenging that makes me anxious and unable to sleep. Some of this is surely latent gifted child syndrome ("Everything was easy and perfect when I was 11 and, despite my brains, I can't figure out why it isn't now!"). Some of this is that the professor for 530 intends us to struggle, to not dance straight into perfect quiz scores. I appreciate this on an intellectual level and am left kicking my feet and pouting on a five-year-old level.

While finishing a paper, working on a quiz, and trying to plan out the next step of another major project, I kept thinking about all of the other things I could be doing at that exact moment if I wasn't in school. A late weekday afternoon featured running, reading novels, knitting, bringing the house up to a state slightly above hovel, and fencing. When I wasn't in school I had vacation time and money to spend to go on vacation. I didn't have to worry about tuition rates, Internet outages, or due dates.

Oh, due dates. My eternal nemesis. How many hours did I spend avoiding you with the vain idea that I "produce better when I'm under the gun." Now that I am officially too old to pull an all nighter, I hate due dates even more because I have to work ahead of them. I am much, much better at organizing my time than I was as an undergraduate or in my first grad program, but I still find myself overwhelmed. All I do is school and I'm terrified that in the future all I'll be able to do is work. Is this something I love enough to want to do it all the time? Most days, yes. I am a big fat nerd about most of this stuff and love when I can see what I've learned playing out at work. I know that what I want to do won't necessarily take the absorbing fanaticism that an English PhD would have required (unless I manage to become that cataloguer). Is this what a career means? Will I have to live and breathe it or is it that I have a tendency to live and breathe whatever my goal of the moment is? My history shows an ability to hyper focus with abandon...

I'm not sure, and I have a lesson plan to write and 8 readings on indexing and cataloging to get to...

awesomePants

2009-05-02T15:15:00.002-07:00

Since LIS 530 tried (and failed!) to completely destroy me, and because today features some Portland gray and continual reminders of my favorite graduating seniors, I present a list of what remains awesome:

*Maria'n'Stephen'n'Phoebe'n'Alicia'n'Jennifier(x2)'n'Claire(x2) - the best iSchoolers around

*Charles Ammi Cutter - librarian, cataloger, badass

*Trent

*Barnaby Rudge (I honestly didn't think I would be loving this as much as I am)

*Possibility of visiting EDDS in August and the sticky horrible beautiful mess that is a New York summer

*Boston holding it at 3-3 after going into triple overtime AGAIN

*The Triangle Offense

*Coffee

*The bus mall returning to 5th and 6th

*Three day weekends

*Going to the eye doctor on Monday (which means Health Care)

*New student supervisors to train (though I will miss my girls like whoa)

*The rain that washed away whatever it was that sent me into a Benedryl induced coma yesterday

*Sarah Waters at Powell's on Monday

*The Customer Service lady at Toyota Financial

*That boy who hangs out with me

Phil

2009-05-02T13:37:00.001-07:00

So FRBR, ARCS, MARC, IFLA, dc:, 4MAT and the Portland NAC have eaten my brain and my time. I haven't had the time to create a coherent, non-work related thought in forever.

Well, except about Phil Jackson.

Growing up, the only professional sport my father seemed to care about was hockey (we watched the Super Bowl too, but only because it featured Buffalo wings). Though my father and I were both born on Long Island*, we loved and cherished the New York Rangers. I will never forget that magical season when Messier, Graves, and Richter broke the curse (especially since I spent years being furious at my father for not taking me to the victory parade).

Over ten years later, I find myself living with a man who adores not the blood, speed, and beer of the NHL, but rather the narcissistic drama of the NBA. My father loathed professional basketball, so it was never on home. Until I met AK, my knowledge of the NBA began and ended with Pat Riley's pompadour. With great pleasure, he patiently explained the rudiments of the game during the Laker's failed attempt to take the Championship from the Pistons. He waxed poetically on the tactics, the rhythm, the movement. And then he wised up and just handed me Phil's book, Sacred Hoops and I was hooked.

I don't want this to be an essay on "How a girl learned to accept her husband's interest in sports, even though sports are icky", because that's a patently untrue assertion. Sports are for anyone, both in terms of who can compete and who can watch. The four greatest baseball fanatics I know are women (just as the biggest romantic I know is a man). It's for everyone. Period. Besides, I've always enjoyed watched professional sports because it provides all I want in entertainment: drama, complexity, and an excuse to yell at the screen. Perfection.

So even though I won't get the chance to see the Blazers take on Phil in the Rose Garden, I'll still be watching... if only to watch Kobe pitch a fit like the brat that he is.

*This is important, because New York has two other teams: the Buffalo Sabres and the New York Islanders. Once a coworker had Rangers' tickets he wasn't going to use and didn't think to pass them on to my Dad because he assumed my Dad was an Islanders fan. Heartbreak. Also, we hate the Devils and the Penguins.

Maybe Not...

2009-04-19T21:54:00.002-07:00

I'm beyond a bit late to the party for this, but the newest song on repeat of the moment.

Look for the Bathroom version of "Some Fantastic". Excellent.

Today was ridiculously bright and sunny and warm, so very little was accomplished in the way of work. There's been running and cleaning and laundry and a flurry of posting to the message boards, but I've yet to work on drafts of anything. AK and I took a long walk after the sun went down and the topic turned to places we could eventually move. While we both like Seattle, we agree that we need some place that has more sun, not less, than Portland. He will continually lobby for San Diego, which I think is still too expensive a place to live (even with the housing market bottoming out). The iSchool is pretty heavy on the Australian connections, so maybe that would be a possibility. Unfortunately my knowledge of Australian fencing begins and ends with an expat who fences at NWFC, so some research is in order.

Since my sisters came out to visit, I've been thinking a lot about the East Coast. I don't know if I could ever live there again. The Hudson Valley is unrecognizable to me now. Public transport is nonexistent outside of a major metropolitan area (essentially anywhere except NYC and Boston). The energy is different too. As much as it pains me to admit it, I don't know if I'm cut out for East Coast living (or at least southern New York/Tri-State area living). Right now I can't think of anywhere I'd want to be other than Portland, but unless the state schools find money and people start retiring, I'm not sure of the job prospects. Economy, you have three years to get it together!

I never thought that this would be a place that I would be reluctant to leave.

The Return of Running

2009-04-19T09:59:00.002-07:00

Before grad school started up, I was on a running regime of almost 20 miles a week - typically two shorter runs during the week and a long one on Sunday mornings. I peaked on a ten mile run in the blazing heat and decided that really a half-marathon would be my breaking point. I had planned on keeping up my running when grad school started with the idea that simply grabbing my shorts and sneakers would be a quick and easy break from the grad school grind. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case when I discovered that 8 credits a quarter (if broken up into 4 courses) made me insane and overloaded. After surviving Fall Quarter, I had plans to run again, but the Snowpocalypse of 2008 hit and kept us buried until well after the start of Winter Quarter. And I didn't run during winter quarter because I'm lazy. I get home from work and spend an hour making dinner, paying bills, cleaning up the place, or sitting on my butt not doing anything after working all day. Then I plunge into homework until 10 at night.

This is not to say that I've been a complete schlub the entire time. Yes, fencing had to give since AK coaches almost every night of the week and making it to an OFA practice is nearly impossible for my schedule. Almost every day I take a long walk, at least half an hour. I'm a twitchy type of person and I have to move. This is especially true when too many large projects are looming or the message boards look intimidating. I must move.

But I've been feeling the need for something more, for a proper sweat. I miss the pleasant exhaustion that follows a good workout. I miss feeling lean. So when a book on beginning running appeared on the new book shelf at work, I checked it out. There's a 14-week program in the back for people who are no longer beginners (you could run a 5k) but who aren't exactly out there on a half-marathon track. This morning I began session one of week one with a quick cycle of speedwork. It hurt only slightly (mostly my lungs). I absorbed so much wonderful sunlight and now I'm here on my bed, still in the sunlight, and ready for a day of laundry and literature reviews. Though listening to the birds and the stream outside my window, I'm a bit loathe to add to the background the thumping of the washer. An excuse? Perhaps, but at least I moved my butt today.

Access and the Supercatalog

2009-04-13T12:23:00.002-07:00

There's a lot running through my head at the moment. My husband and I bought a proper used car, my family is visiting me on this coast for the first time ever (I have a younger sister next to me on the couch reading Coraline and asking me "What does this word mean?"), and the new quarter is currently destroying and rebuilding mental concepts.

I just finished an article* by Cerise Oberman on the supercatalog and the "Cereal Syndrome" that many patron face in light of this massive increase in information. The cereal syndrome is essentially the issue of "more being less". Consumer studies showed that an overwhelming selection of goods in a store can actually lead to an increase in anxiety among shoppers, instead of a sense of pleasing bounty (190). This information overload and the anxiety that it brings is increasing prevalent in the library world, as we are adding more and more resources and databases and things to the catalog.

Oberman, writing in 1991, spoke of the creation of a "supercatalog", a "totally integrated information network" (190). I believe this is nearly embodied in entities such as WorldCat Local. One search and, at least in my library, you receive hits in the UW libraries, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, and everything that anyone has cataloged and affixed a symbol (like Harvard and their reserve articles....). That is, quite simply, a ton of stuff. Students need to be taught to think critically in order to slog through a multiplicity of hits, databases, and other resources.

While I deeply appreciate Oberman's proposed methods (grounded in my dear Kuhlthau), I think she missed one vital part of instruction, namely evaluating access. Oberman alludes to this in her first point on the online environment, namely that students should understand the function and purpose of the catalog. In doing so, students should be taught how to get to the materials they're locating, once they've figured out that the material is appropriate for their needs. At work we talk a lot about how students just want to click one button and have the materials appear, but right now that's not feasible with current catalog functions. Students have to decide if a material is local, in Summit, or in WorldCat. They then have to decide if they want to order it, how to order it (there are two different logins students have to use to order materials) and then how long it will take/how soon they need it. At work we try to provide good customer service by getting things as fast as we can, but often students shoot themselves in the foot by not understanding how to locate materials. If students order on ILL a book in Summit, we're going to cancel the request and order it via Summit, but they have to sit and wait for an ILL person to look at the record and run the search. If they pick a record with 3 holdings, they should maybe emotionally prepared for not getting the materials or should seek out new resources.

I suppose I'm wondering if this is a burden that should be on the student or that should instead be on the catalog developers. I think the question should be not can we make the catalog one click, but should we make it that way? As long as students have to rely on courier trucks and the US Postal Service to ship books and materials, information will not be instantaneous. Should we leave students with that impression of immediacy or instead teach them about the limits of the system? While it might not make us feel that great about our product, it's a valuable piece of information for students who need to make quick and important choices about material selection.

*Oberman, C. (1991). Avoiding the Cereal Syndrome, or Critical Thinking in the Electronic Environment. Library Trends, 39(3), 189-202.

Organizing

2009-04-02T15:53:00.003-07:00

I should probably be finishing the last lecture I need to listen to for class tomorrow, but I'm feeling rather excited and alive at the moment, so it's best to write now. I'm typing from a table at the top of my hotel, looking out on the university. I spent four excellent hours this morning in class for LIS 560 (Instructional and Training Strategies for Information Professionals). My professor is as excellent and articulate as I remember from my first quarter. Once again, I'm happy that I have some knowledge to help me ground the material, though in this case I'm relying on what my husband does for living --teaching-- instead of library experience. Throughout the lecture and discussion this morning, I kept noting bits that I wanted to share with AK (either because he might be keen to know something or because I was learning something he'd already discovered and shared). Because the 560s tend towards youth services, I was a little hesitant about this course, since working with children is not anywhere close to what I want to do for a living (I know my limits). so I'm glad that I'll be able to come away with something that will help me in my training of students or future job talks.

But I'm just as glad that I'll have a better sense of what it is that AK does. Yes, he gathers up small children and adults and teaches them to fence, but he's never just stopped at that. He's always considering how to approach the material, how to best present the material and engage the student to both make the class enjoyable and to make better fencers. He's truly interested in the pedagogy of fencing, not just how to best win a touch. While he always has a plan for his class (6 week intro versus 1 week camp, epee versus saber etc.), it's never exactly the same. He's always considering his methods, looking at how to change and improve what he's doing. And while I think it's possible to chalk some of that up to his need for constant creativity (which isn't necessarily a flaw), a great deal of it comes from just wanting to do it better, to give the students a better experience and more knowledge. Since I've often been placed in the frustrating role of guinea pig when he's trying out some of these theories (which can be good or bad, depending on the idea... and on my mood), it's nice to think that I'll finally have the perspective from the other side of the piste.

After class and lunch with the awesomest workshop group ever, I visited with my advisor. Since this is the last residency ever, I wanted to touch base with her about my future, something beyond the core courses. We had a great chat, which is why I'm feeling somewhat pumped and excited about the future. We discussed how I could gain perspective of the field outside of the academic library world. Academic libraries, especially small liberal arts colleges, is the bulk of my library experience, both as employee and user. When I have to think about a career that doesn't involve becoming a systems librarian at a similar institution, I'm blocked. I really don't know my options yet. Really, that's because I'm still new to this field as a professional and I haven't yet developed the skills that will dictate my options. She feels that once I get through the beginning 530s I'll have a clearer sense of where I'm headed. The idea of doing a directed fieldwork in a similar, but non-academic environment was proposed. If I could track something down, that would be perfect - building skills and an idea of where I'm headed all at once. After that we just chatted about life and the world and other tangentially related topics. She's a very cool person and I hope to find the excuse to get up to Seattle again, if just to talk with her.

So now I'm back at the hotel, in the middle of the aforementioned lecture. The lecture and my meeting this afternoon lead me to think more on why I'm attracted to the organization of information. It's more than just a compulsion for order - I have often seen offices of catalogers that do not bespeak of a mind geared towards controlling chaos. Before I followed the path of Victorian Studies, I felt very drawn to the sciences, especially chemistry. I loved the precision of it, certainly. What I really loved was how you could write things down, how a simple collection of words and numbers could tell you so much. Entire reactions, creation and destruction, in a single line. If you could read it... Making things useful, making things accessible and easy, even if on the back end they're terribly complicated, is a lot of what we're doing now in libraries and a lot of what I want to do. There's so much possible data, but how do you get to it and how to do you render it in a way that people or machines can do what they need to do? That's the sort of question that I find interesting, though I doubt my ability to answer it. Well, at least my ability at this point in my career. But the question will still be there in three years.

Third Verse Same as the First...

2009-03-31T22:30:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I work a full day and then take Amtrak north to the final MLIS residency. While I'll certainly miss the inherent decadence of a forty minute flight to Seattle, I'm not missing the cost of a last minute ticket. I'm still hoping to get some funds from the travel scholarship, which would make my life so much happier and easier. We'll see.

In anticipation of residency I'm trying to ease myself back into a work cycle. It's amazing how easily the concentration and time management muscles atrophy with the slightest break in practice. Both my courses don't look terribly difficult, though I'm sure they'll be plenty challenging - I'm naturally nervous about them, but there's none of the abject fear brought out when I first read the Information Behavior course site. The only reading I've done so far is on metadata, which is a term that I admit I've thrown about with much abandon and very little understanding. While some the reading is floating in that nebulous philosophical area above my head, much of it is interesting on a practical level. I suppose that's what I find so attractive about cataloging and the like - how do I take this stuff and arrange it so people can find it and use it? I love the idea of making things easier to find and thus easier to use, be it by helping to clean up authority records in the catalog or updating a patron record.

One article*, which is an overview of metadata schemes in the library and museum world, there was a brief discussion about user-created metadata. Particularly in small communities (hobbyists), the shared understanding and, most importantly, shared language can be a boon for tagging. But, as I've seen in other studies, the lack of control can be an issue in terms of accuracy. I know of colleagues who dislike the idea of user tagging in a library catalog, not out of a sense of "Keep off my lawn, you crazy kids!" but more from the the realization that what is added might not be all that useful. A value-add should add value, not clutter things up. Getting a good base support of users to tag can be a challenge. An empty catalog doesn't spur on participation (if no one else is doing it, why should I?). While I know that I could probably hunt this down, doesn't anyone know of a successful user-tagging projects within the confines of a library catalog?

When read the article I was struck by the underlying calling for expertise. This shouldn't be shocking as the article seems geared towards nascent professionals. The idea of arrogance connected with expertise, the "I know what the user needs better than they do" has reared its controversial head in a number of my classes so I suppose I'm a bit sensitive to it. Is metadata a place where the user doesn't belong? At least, not directly. Clearly metadata and other features of the organization of information exist to serve a user based, which must always remain in the back of the mind. But I'm left wondering if you achieve the ultimate metadata goal (according to the article I read) of "rich, consistent, carefully crafted descriptive metadata" without some level of expertise and thus control. Does the creation and maintaining of the swarm of information surrounding information demand professional control or does it demand the creation of a controlled system that can be used easily by nonprofessionals (like Dublin Core)? How do you balance it all?

I doubt this is something that can be answered in ten weeks, but it's a start of something...

*Gilliland, A. J. (n.d.). “Setting the stage.” In Introduction to metadata: Pathways to digital information. Online Ed., Version 2.1. Murtha Baca ed. Available: http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/standards/intrometadata/setting.pdf.

Nicholas Hughes

2009-03-24T08:31:00.003-07:00

When the news of his death appeared in my news feeds, I was saddened to hear of it. I felt that his sister certainly didn't need any more death in her life. I also realized that it was the first time I knew anything of the man who so neatly absented himself from the poetical spotlight of his family.

But, his death wouldn't be news unless the obituaries turned to recounting the death of his mother, his father's mistress, and his father. Judith Flanders says it better than I ever could:

Yet the "curse" idea is repellent. Repellent to those afflicted with depression; repellent to those whose friends or family have been so burdened; even repellent to lovers of poetry. Sylvia Plath killed herself after many years of psychological instability - she had attempted suicide in her teens, had undergone ECT. Her marriage had broken down, she was living with two small children through one of the coldest winters for decades. Like all too many others, before and after, in a desperate moment, she killed herself, having first carefully set out bread and milk for her two toddlers in their cots. That she had just written some of the great poems of the twentieth century is neither here nor there. She was a great poet, and a depressed person. She was not a great poet because she was depressed; she was not depressed because she was a great poet.

He was a professor who, according to the University of Alaska website, was well loved and dedicated. Let's remember that instead.

The Food that You Eat

2009-03-23T20:30:00.002-07:00

I wish I had an excuse for not posting over this somewhat relaxing spring break. Well, I have scoured areas of the apartment never before scoured (you know you have some sort of compulsion issue when you're using toothpicks to get at grime on a part of the stove no one will ever see). Break usually means reading, and I have been devouring books as best as I can (including an autobiography of a woman bullfighter and some Sarah Vowell).

I just finished Mark Bittman's latest, Food Matters. Bittman is the only reason I even bother with the food section of the New York Times. His How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian are staples in my kitchen. His recipes are simple, delicious, and come with handy sidebars on the variations you can do with dishes (which has lead to some successful "toss some stuff together and call it dinner" meals of late). In Food Matters, Bittman argues for a new approach to food and what we eat. I've known since I was seventeen and reading up on vegetarianism that the commercial meat industry is pretty heinous towards the environment. I know that the Food Pyramid developed out of marketing for the beef and dairy industry (even wonder why those sources of protein get to hang out on their own?). I try to avoid HFCS, and have all but banished white bread from the house (except for the occasional homemade baguette, because really bread doesn't get much better).

Bittman presents all of this, and more, in his defense of a better way of living. That's what I like most of all about this work, which is a type of diet book. He's advocating for a lifestyle change. It's absurd to think that a few weeks of something odd will leave you skinnier and healthier and able to go back to your old eating habits (I remember my parents going on that odoriferous cabbage soup diet years ago and my father dabbled in Atkins until the kidney stones hit). To improve your body, you have to improve your diet, which means long-lasting change, not just abstaining from sugar until your next weigh in. Bittmans' approach is interesting - essentially you bulk up on the veggies and plant matter, remaining vegan (or so) until dinner, when you can eat as you will. This approach makes sense to me, though I'm not sure how to work it around my own weird eating schedule (breakfast late at work, lunch as the primary meal, and dinner made primarily to produce leftovers for lunch). Vegetables and fruit are full of all the good stuff we need to survive, and are what our meat-poor ancestors lived on for centuries. Meat used to be flavoring, not necessarily the focus of the meal. And somehow along the way, with subsidized farming and a booming fast food industry, that idea was lost. Vegetable production (even the megafarms) is less harmful to the environment than meat and, in this crazy town of Portland, I have plenty of local and sustainable produce options available.

Though I think I might be hard pressed to give up on dairy as a whole (I love plain, nonfat yogurt and I'd honestly rather go without cheese or milk than head towards the soy), I think I could easily live like this, and live happily. However, food is a complicated and delicate subject in my house. I live with perhaps the pickiest eater on the planet. Imagine a typical four-year-old boy - big on the burgers, Cheerios, and pizza, and not so keen on much else. Now imagine he's grown up and can use a stove by himself, but is usually too lazy to do so, but has a car and knows where to get what he wants. That's my husband. I love him more than pretty much anyone else on the planet. He's intelligent, incredibly kind, and fun. But his diet is appalling in general, and in particular for a thirty-five-year old man.

When I was newly married, my mother passed on this bit of wisdom: if you love each other, you'll only fight about money. Well, in this house we rarely fight about money (Lego budget aside) and more often come to verbal blows over a 24 pack of Coca-Cola and Wendy's bags in the foot well of a car. As the using a toothpick to clean a stove incident might suggest, I am a touch on the neurotic side. Since my fencing has decreased to almost nothing and my running is a twice weekly affair, I've had to abandon my "I'm an athlete and I can eat whatever I want" attitude towards food. I've mostly vegetarian, bring lunch everyday to work, and try my best to eat something other than coffee for breakfast. I read food labels carefully (which is why there are two boxes of Girl Scout Cookies stashed in the freezer, since I discovered that two cookies filled about half of my daily saturated fat intake) and have been trying to cook more for myself and the husband. This is still a challenge. Tonight I feasted upon roasted beets and a tomato and red lentil soup (spiced up with cumin and garam masala). The husband might have a large bowl of plain pasta (no sauce... ever) or, if he's feeling adventurous, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the ubiquitous can of Coca-Cola. While he recovers from a late night of coaching I will be in bed, imagining that I can hear his arteries hardening and his blood sugar rising.

I know he's not going to drop dead in the next week, but I can't help thinking about what his intake of red meat and ultra-refined carbs will mean for the future (for both his body and the environment). I've managed to change in whole-grain pizza crust and whole-wheat/seed packed bread for sandwiches, but I can't seem to do much else. Yelling is ineffective, as are carefully placed articles on the amount of sugar in soda and the recent study on the dangerous of red meat. But I believe my husband isn't alone in this resistance, that his diet mirrors that of hundreds of thousands of other people in this country. How do you shift a country where the American Dream is celebrated by a steak and potatoes and washed down with cola? At times like these, I feel that I'm just a liberal urban hipster jumping on the next great alternative thing that will soon appear on Stuff White People Like. But it still remains that we are, inescapably, what we eat.

ACRL - Post the Second and a Half

2009-03-16T09:14:00.002-07:00

Onwards in our recap!

After the last stats presentation, I wandered up to catch the end of the PCC/PSU presentation on information literacy programs and standards. The brainstorming rubric they presented, which focused mainly on how to locate and work with other similarly minded librarians on information literacy, could easily be used in almost any sort of interlibrary collaboration (collection development could easily be replaced, with a little tweaking). I had a chance to chat with a number of the community college librarians from the Portland area (and there are a lot!). Mainly our conversation focused on the impending cessation of the residency program at UW (my friend/cohort member Maria is now a full-time tech at PCC). Though I can understand the rationale behind the administration's choice (it's an expensive adventure for many in the program and last residency's flooding fiasco showed that they could either record or sync-up class presentations), I will still miss it and wonder how the other cohorts will get situated without it.

At this point I think I finally made it down to look at the poster sessions, many of which I recall being fascinating, but none of which I actually wrote about since my hands were full with free ice cream and a free dictionary from the amazing and friendly people at the Oxford University Press. This is why I am so happy that the entirety of the conference proceedings is stored online. Also I should mention that at times I went down to the area they titled the "Cyber Zed Shed", only to discover that the presenter was not there (I sat through two no-shows and my friend informed me of a missed third!). There were topics at this part of the conference that seemed interesting (interactive subject maps) and some that weren't (Google Docs). The big tech event for this conference seemed to be Twitter. There were a number of presentations on this 2.0 technology and I saw people throughout the event (and during Ira Glass!) tweeting.

I am of a mixed mind when it comes to Twitter. I can see the point of microblogging, it's immediacy, and it's inherent succinctness. But it also feels like another version of my Facebook Status Update and I keep wondering if I have anything that amazing to say, something so terribly pertinent and yet easily crammed into 140 characters. I'm hesitant as well when it comes to libraries entering the 2.0 space of the user. A coworker who went to one of the 2.0 technologies and libraries presentation mentioned that the presenters gave a number of great hints, such as don't try to friend students. That means entering too deeply into their personal space. Instead let them become a fan of you, which means they get all the information they need from you and they don't have to worry that you're going to see their latest beer pong photos. I think so many libraries ran headfirst into these spaces without really thinking carefully about how to do it, and it doesn't help that the platform changes on a weekly basis (Facebook, I am looking squarely at you). As 2.0 technology starts to stabilize, it will be interesting to see what rises up.

At this point on Saturday I had the energy left for two presentations. The first was on the TIDES Experience (presented by Susan Clarke). This is a fascinating collaborative online image project. This grew out of a digitization of historical/archival images in a Texas university library and grew into an interactive project that develops and supports a wide ranging education curriculum for Texas and now Mexico (kindergarten all the way through university). What was interesting here is how a grant project on digitization turned into such a wonderful and sustainable project (how they got sponsors, broadened their collections and curriculum stores etc.). And this is really something that is for the average user, not the library or archive junkie. Most of the site's hits come from Google or Yahoo. They get requests from teachers to add images to support their classroom (and have started taking teachers out into the field to collect stuff themselves. Having worked in a very traditional (albeit fantastic!) archive, I was really intrigued to see such a explosion of ideas and images from one project.

Next up was a discussion of the challenges faced by distance students (something I'm very interested in on a personal level). Presented by Capella University, this presentation was the only one I saw where the presenters work in an entirely virtual library space. In fact, until 2 years ago all of the library services at Capella were outsourced. The library staff is responsible for 26000 "learners", 80% graduate and 20% undergraduate. From the presentation it seems that the library staff does a lot of troubleshooting for technology. A successful treatment for an ongoing problem (which they track through a database of answered questions) was to have a librarian go into a course space with a help guide and to offer assistance. So many students responded to this overture and the library found their requests for help go through the roof. In an online program it's often hard to know exactly where you should go with a question. Yes, you have a list of resources, but you've probably not tried any of them yet and it's always a bit nerve wracking to know that you might wind up in the wrong space and will be send on and on trying to find the right person. While the presentation wasn't helpful to me as a learner (and not really as a professional since I don't do any reference outreach), it was still really interesting to see how the staff tackled problems and worked to establish themselves within the university. Most of us at academic libraries take it for granted that we are an inherent part of the university structure, so it was interesting to see how the library staff worked to collaborate (the word of the conference!) and make themselves known to the rest of the administration.

Sunday morning brought Ira Glass, who was totally on the escalator with me and who I tried very hard not to stare at! Once again, the room was packed. Glass began his talk entirely in the dark. Some soft background music played while he spoke about how "this is radio", about the intimacy of listening to a voice in the dark. Sadly, he was not encouraged to do his entire speech in the dark, so the lights went up and there he was, in a hoodie and with rumpled hair, two CD players, and mixing board. He spoke mostly on how to develop stories, how he arranges and presents stories to keep listeners interested. He works on a storytelling pattern that turned out to be sermon-like- action, action, action, idea, action, action, action, idea. It's about hooking people, keeping them interested, but keeping them interested in the people as well. The second I can really remember from this is that all of his tape archives are stored, just in boxes listed by show number, in a facility in New Jersey. They're not really organized or digitized (some are so old that he would have to bake them and the would only get one shot at copying them). He asked the room of librarians and archivists if anyone would be able to help him out with this and offered his email address. He shocked the room when he revealed that if he lost the archives, he wouldn't be that bothered. He feels the strength of This American Life comes in it's immediacy, in that it is so of the moment, of the now. The show isn't prepared with the long-term in mind at all, but how it will be and sound the night it's aired and 1.8 million people tune in.

The conference was a great experience. I got a sense for what it's like to walk around a hotel full of librarians instead of fencers. I learned a lot about a variety of topics and how to present. A number of panels or papers seemed so interesting when I read about them and added them to my schedule but then didn't really live up to the description, were too general to be very useful outside of broad conceptualizations, or were difficult to parse out (this is especially true when there are slide after slide of complicated graphs). It's really an art to get up on a stage with a PowerPoint and blast out in twenty minutes (you have to have ten left over for questions), a subject that you could have been studying for years. I'm hoping that the UW program, with all of the Pointecasting, will give me an opportunity to practice this in the coming years. What I found weird about being a student instead of a professional at a conference like this is that I kept wondering about my impact. I can't promise the vendors that we'll use their products. I really, really liked the project on staff information needs presented by the University of Regina, but it's not really something that falls under my job heading. But this has given me a lot of thought about projects I can do in the future and how I can start making little changes in the bit of the library when I can make an impact.

ACRL - Post the Second

2009-03-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

Friday night's keynote speaker was Sherman Alexie. I don't think I can even begin to summarize how wonderful he was. It's hard to take someone who is so about words, so deep in words and who has such a command of words ,and try to replicate them yourself in words. Suffice to say, he's a brilliant speaker, jumping between traditional speechy bits, poetry He spoke a lot about perceptions - how people look at librarians and have a certain set of beliefs, just as they look at Native Americans and have another set as well. He's a bit rambling as a speaker, punctuating ideas with poems and other asides. He's fluid, self-deprecating, and hilarious. I didn't take notes (this is not the sort of thing you could really write down), but the one bit that really stood out for me is when he answered a question about why he lives in Seattle. He said he loved a nomad woman (her family moved around a lot). He met his wife in Spokane and she couldn't stand living there. She would only marry him on the condition that they wouldn't live in Spokane. He got to choose out of a select list of cities where she would live and he picked Seattle. She got him to Seattle, but he was keeping her there.

On Saturday I went to a number of really good sessions. The first was a presentation by the library and IT staff at Bowdoin college on how they fostered communication and collaboration between the two departments. They took a very chill, almost friendly approach. The two groups spent a lot of time just getting to know each other and learning how to communicate with each other. The two departments have very different cultures and ways of working together, so it was essential that they take the time learn about each other so one culture wouldn't be "superior" and alienate the other. It was sort of a "touch-feely" approach, but they've been so successful in developing projects and aligning their goals that you have to think that this is certainly worth a shot (worse case scenario, you just wind up having a lot of group lunches!).

After that was a fascinating look at the OhioLINK collection analysis project. Working with OCLC Research, the consorta analyzed their monograph holdings with a view towards using this data to encourage collaboarative collection development in the future. By presenting clear data on how many copies the system has and how often they circulate, they hope to reduce unncesssary duplication and to encourage a diverse collection. Also in these tough economic times, if you can get away with not purchasing a title in favor of another, that's worth it. The conference got the first look at a wealth of data, which was presented in a very clear and coherant way (a true skill, I'm starting to realize). They took the holdings from each library, collected it onto single OCLC records (to facilitate analysis). Data for collections were broken down in really interesting way. Universities often wanted to see their entire collection, then administrative units, then individual branches, and even unique collections within branches! This clearly took a lot of effort, but I think it presented a really rich picture of the individual holdings in a instiution.

Two ideas stood out for me in this presentation. The first was how the collections spread out around subject. Law seemed to be the most heavily duplicated subject (due to accreditation requirements - each library is required to have the same set titles). Computer Science, perhaps not surprisingly, had a ridcidulous obsolescence rate. Titles in that subject need to be immediately cataloged and get out on the shelf, since they will be used the most when they're new and then checkouts gradually fade away. The second concept was the most surprising. I did learn in LIS 500 that 80 percent of your checkouts come from 20 percent of your collection (there is a core collection of the most popular or pertient items, which certainly shifts and changes over time). However, the analysis done here suggested that 80 percent of the checkout came from only 6 percent of the collection. The group will look at language (they noted that most foreign checkouts not in Spanish could be attributed to the foreign language departments of universities who use the same materials over and over), age of items, and will also look at publisher type to see if a suggestive pattern emerges.

A less enlightening statitical lecture focused on the recent ALA-LSSCP email survey. I thought the presentation would focus more on the actual proficiencies thatthe certification will require or sees as necessary in the library world. Rather it was a lightening fast array of charts, numbers, and more charts. The data was pretty rich, but rather complex and I'm not sure I walked away with a real understanding of anything (other than there are different skill sets in public and academic libraries, but that wasn't all that surprising). However, I did note the idea that support staff, in this survey, tended to give a higher value of importance to their tasks than MLIS staff or library directors. Why is there this break in perception? Clearly staff workers are proud of the work that they do. But why isn't that perception shared? Should it be shared?

Okay, this post is already overdue and already too long. More later (since Ira Glass is about to come on!)

ACRL - Post the First

2009-03-13T14:51:00.002-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, Bonnie and I arrived in surprisingly sunny Seattle. We're at a small hotel within walking distance of the convention center and a Top Pot. Delish! After checking in and sorting our emails and other work stuff (I handed in the first of two final assignments), we went off in search of food. We stopped by the ACRL of Oregon happy hour, but the place was packed. We then wandered to the College Inn, one of my favorite places in the city (second only to Mary Gates Hall in terms of where I've spend the most time!). We joined the iAlumni group in the back and I had a lovely chat with a woman at the iSchool who work for Alumni relations/development. We chatted a bit about the recent announcement that the residency requirement will be removed from the program and she assured me that this was not a decision taken lightly, and in fact has been in discussion for at least two years. This makes me feel more confident about the decision, but I will still miss the opportunity to travel northwards to meet up with my cohort and other online students.

This morning, after breakfast at the aforementioned Top Pot, we headed to the convention center to check in. A snazzy tote bag and coffee mug were obtained (and the former is being progressively filled with fliers and pens!). I wandered around the exhibition hall and checked out some new microfilm/fiche readers and scanners and the dizzying array of vendors. It's a bit weird to walk around an exhibit hall like that knowing that you really have no say over budget lines (or real concern for budget lines). Everything appears shiny and amazing without a price tag.

After the exhibit hall, I headed out to the lectures. I caught the end of a discussion on information literacy, which I really hope will be posted online. However, I did see Campus Disconnect: Academic Libraries and the Information Needs, Skills, and Behaviors of Non-teaching University Staff, presented by Cara Bradley of the University of Regina. She undertook a survey of staff on campus (distinct from faculty and students) to try to understand why they did or did not use the library and how better to attract and serve this potential users and advocates. The difference in needs from the students was particularly noteworthy - instead of looking for what is cheap and fast (typically the undergraduate focus), staff members wanted materials that were accurate and current. Staff members want assistance with evidence-based decision making, locating the best data possible, and stress reduction. Bradley gave an example of how a staff member related how he spent 6 hours on the phone to locate data. Bradley went back to her desk and located the same data in 15 minutes! Since at my library we really do need a new space, it would be wonderful to pull more staff members into the library to not only assist them in their work, but to really make them see just what a valuable resource we are to the entirety of the university community.

Something I didn't expect from this lecture was how useful the comments and question portion would be. Many librarians who have undertaken similar projects or outreach efforts related some of their solutions and strategies, many of which I scribbled down. A conference is of course intended as a place to share information and ideas, but I guess I didn't realize the ideas would be so practical or audience-generated.

After lunch, I attended a session on E-books, where the presenters (Andrew Revell and Aaron Shrimplin from Miami University Library in Oxford, Ohio) spoke on their research regarding user perceptions of the format. They utilized Q methodology, which is a fascinating mixed-method approach. What I took away from this lecture was the realization that out of their 4 generated viewpoints, 3 contained the idea that people do not like reading off of a computer screen. It will be interesting to see how readers like the new Kindle will impact this opinion, but I think it will have to come down substantially in price before we see a larger user base.

Up next is Sherman Alexie's keynote, which I've been looking forward to since I registered.

ACRL - Preconferencing

2009-03-11T22:03:00.001-07:00

Tonight I'm tying together the last bits of final projects (oh, purposive sampling, how you vex me!) and avoiding the empty suitcase on the floor that should be filled up with clothes for the trip to Seattle tomorrow. I should probably also do practical things like get together snacks for the road trip, gather up extra business cards and think of a classy way to store them other than banded in my pocket, and then locate and pack away my conference schedule so I won't forget it.

Or maybe I'll update my blog.

At least my iPod is fully charged and full loaded?

I am nervous about what is essentially my first professional conference. There's a lot going on, both in terms of the actual presentations and the socializing and networking in the evenings. There's the desire not to miss anything fighting against the anxiety that it will be all too much to take in. There are a number of programs that look like they could be really valuable (on topics like student workers, tagging, the role of support staff), but do I want to sit back and take it all in or be the crazy girl furiously scribbling notes. I used to be an inveterate note taker, but I'm relaxing more of late. Or maybe my handwriting has simply deteriorated too far.

The sensible thing would be to go to the first time attendees introduction, but there's something almost too organized about that for my taste. Maybe I will just have to quiz my ride (an experienced professional) and maybe compose an entry on this very topic in the future.

But right now I really need to pack something.

Clearing Out

2009-03-08T22:40:00.000-07:00

The new rule in our two-bedroom apartment is that if you bring stuff in, you must remove an equal amount of stuff. Our apartment has a ton of closet space, which we immediately filled up with boxes randomly tossed together with all the bits and pieces that comes from moving rapidly from one coast to the other and then jumping straight into work and finishing a grad program. Through the years we've cleared out the boxes that AK simply tipped his office drawers into and recently I cleared out all my old notebooks and crap from Vassar. But slowly the entropy builds and the floor of the office becomes obscured by papers, fencing equipment, and the detritus of life. And yes, I am panicking about the Great Sibling Visitation 2009 and how my apartment will appear for the first visitors from my family. I come from a family that deep cleans twice a year, vacuums every day, and cleans out closets and cars as a pleasant Sunday activity. My years with an art major who is naturally messy has tempered this impulse (though I think it's telling that I'm seriously considering cataloging and organizing information as a profession).

Today AK and I worked on clearing out our respective office space (mine is a corner of the bedroom and his is the guest room). We recycled more paper than I thought imaginable. We're both such pack rats when it comes to documents. I can't bear to let go of photocopied readings and he has probably two dozen partially filled notebooks, each with scraps of story ideas or fencing progressions. Now the office closet looks like a storage space instead of a pit and I can find my notes from the quarter (key for revising and doing finals). There's something so soothing about cleared space, neatly stacked boxes and alphabetized items. Tidy room, tidy mind?

But maybe this entry is just more procrastination/distraction from the end of the quarter. Only two more projects to go, both of which are well-under control. I think.

Saturday!

2009-03-07T09:02:00.002-08:00

When I applied for my current job over three years ago (how did that happen??), I was uncertain that I could take to a job whose schedule is primarily Tuesday through Saturday. I soon learned to embrace the brilliance of shopping and running errands early on Monday mornings and spending the Sabbath as I think was originally intended, essentially curled up in bed with novels and without worrying about work the next day. I love being virtually alone in our apartment complex on Monday mornings - the same feeling of mischievous quietude that filled the dorms where I lived during Fall and Summer breaks. There's something just so pleasing about knowing that you're by yourself in a space meant to house so many others. It's almost bested by the frisson of surprise that courses down your spine when you do run into someone else (tinted pink by embarrassment if you've been singing Guster at the top of your lungs before you turned that corner).

Because of Spring Break (whoooooo!) and the brilliant comping of time for ACRL, I not only find myself off on a Saturday morning, but on a Saturday morning that begins a three-day weekend. I had originally planned to wake up with AK and join him at his Vancouver class, but the idea of finishing a novel for the first time in two months while drinking fresh coffee in a silent (if somewhat messy) apartment was too good to pass up. He'll forgive me if we can manage to get into a showing of Watchmen tonight.

It's not a decadent and leisurely a day as I would like - I keep forgetting that the quarter isn't yet over. So the rest of today will feature coding and grounded theory homework and finishing the draft of a final project, but I am still determined to fit in both a run and a hot bath. A few hours to myself - in the tub, on the road, at my desk - is the sort of treat I allow myself lately. Not that I was a bit spender before the economy decided to start tanking (the box set of Little Britain was completely justified, though). I just like having space of my very own, space to fill with my own stuff and my own thoughts and my own ITunes and my own empty mugs. I'm not sure if it's nature or nuture - am I predisposed to this from my genes or from having shared a womb/room with a twin sister?

This is cleary something that should be contemplated in the tub.

Playlist for an Impromptu Evening Run

2009-03-02T19:51:00.002-08:00

Warm Up
Celebrity Skin - Hole

Cruising
The Drama You've Been Craving - Sleater-Kinney

Turn the Corner
Shh - Frou Frou

Coasting Home
What Went Wrong (In Your Head) - Supergrass

ACRL-tastic

2009-03-02T12:16:00.003-08:00

In order to thank my work for helping out with the cost of ACRL in Seattle and allowing me to travel north (for what will be probably the second of five trips this year), I'm planning on creating a series of entries on my experience. This is my first professional conference, so expect a few "OMG, I got completely lost among the vendors" posts along with some reviews of lectures and other events (like Sherman Alexie!!). I am now extremely excited about this trip. Just have to hope that the wifi holds out.

This is also a reminder to update my UW site. Mrp.

Day of Rest

2009-03-01T12:37:00.001-08:00

When I was a child, Sunday was the most fraught day of the week. We were up early and out in the dark morning to get to mass, where I would fight to stay awake during the homily. True, breakfast was excellent (made by my father or eaten at a diner), but after that you faced a long dark afternoon of golf on the TV or homework ignored since Friday.

Sunday is now the beginning of my weekend and the day when all my homework is due. I'm awake by 8, alternatively typing and scrubbing the apartment by 9, and usually ready to turn it all in by 3 or so. Nothing is better than being able to stay curled up in bed while turning in homework. No running around trying to locate a printer or tracking down a drop box for a professor. Few things in life are more satisfying than that that sweet little green checkmark indicating that you've made it in under the wire.

This Sunday I'm finishing one of my final five assignments for the quarter (infinitely less exciting that the BSG Final Five, but more useful in a library setting). It's still difficult to grasp that assignments and final projects do not have to be tense affairs with last minute Herculean trials and panic attacks. My mother noticed that my sister always did better in school during the volleyball season. There was something about the rigour of practices and games that made Kate focus up and plan things out. After the final game she would sink back into her old lethargy. Work and school might be producing the same effect for me. Or maybe I'm just older. I really hope it's not just because I'm older.

Last Sunday was infinitely more exciting than today. I finished my search assignment while watching an excellent and bizzare documentary on Henry Darger. He's billed as one of the big names in outsider art, but I think the documentary clearly shows that he never really thought of himself as an artist. He was creating his only world for sanity (though I suppose that can be an artistic drive as well). The conditions he grew up in - the poverty and the ignorant treatment of what was probably a very excitable and very intelligent young man - was appalling. Though I have to say I'm sure that the same conditions exist somewhere else today in the world. Reading authors like Dickens really builds up an appreciation for what childhood does for human in general, artists in particular. What if John Dickens had remained solvent? Would his son still have that drive, that never sated need to move and move? The Darger film made me think about my relation to Catholicism as well. Darger was as devout a Catholic as you could get - a continual presence at Mass, lead a chaste and humble life. His appeal to God for the return of a photo clipped from a newspaper and his belief that he was being punished when it didn't return reminded me of myself as a child. His devotion, his confidence in Heaven was that simple - not simplistic, but rather uncomplicated and true. As an adult with a liberal education and agnostic view on life, it's hard for me to imagine what that must be like. An 8 year-old girl to praying and fearing and believing with that level of intensity - that I can grasp. A 60 year-old man doing the same? That's somehow harder for me to wrap my head around and I can't help but think it's my fault.

Informing in Public

2009-02-24T18:47:00.002-08:00

Today was a very Portland day - skies of various shades of grey and various levels of moisture falling from the sky. I continued my afternoon in a very Portland fashion - taking public transport to the Central Branch of Multnomah County Library. For a project on collection development, my partner and I are looking at how to provide an awesome collection to community-based recycling nonprofits in Portland (yes, we found that niche and we are working it). Central boasts a Foundation Center sponsored Nonprofit Resource Center. While it was a much smaller section of the reference section than I expected , it was still a wonderful grouping of otherwise very expensive grant materials and other guides. If you are a nonprofit in Portland, check it out. The librarians at the nearby desk are a great resource as well.

I should qualify that the section was probably smaller than I expected because I have spent far too much time in academic libraries, especially private institutions where the acqusitions budget is generous and consortia/ILL borrowing is plentiful and free to staff. For a library tech/future librarian, I'm a horrible public library user. My local library is a quick walk away, but I rarely go. The hours don't work that well for me and I really don't feel the need to go since I realized that ILL will borrow from that very branch if I need it. I feel I should be using the local library as a way to show my support since I don't pay property taxes or however public libraries are funded in Oregon... see, I don't even know that! Brushing aside a lame excuse like "the wrong hours", I really wasn't a fan of the public library atmosphere. The short video I posted a few days ago lists liking people as one of the main requirements of being a librarian. But I'm sort of ambivalent on that matter. I like the people at my academic library and I don't think I could cope with the variety of life that needs and uses a public library. I often think of public librarians as having the same sort of calling as a priest. They're willing to go out there and give and give to a insane range of people and cope with situations that would challenge a social worker. I admire the members of my cohort who have already decided to pursue this sort of work. It's just not work that I could see myself doing.

But I do need to say that it truly is important work. My first library job was in a small public library. My mother took us weekly to our local branch (where I'm pretty sure I checked out the same biography of Sitting Bull 30 times between the ages of 7 and 12. I had a mad fascination for him and Custer), just as her mother took her. My absolute fear of people (and my mother's own avoidance if possible) lead me to learning as much as I could about how to find and use materials myself. I think that experience informs how I interact with new ideas and technology today - poke at it and play with it and eventually it will reveal its secrets. As an adult (of sorts), I'm more willing to admit that I don't know and to ask for help. But I still completely emphathize with the reluctant patrons mentioned in my course readings, having been terrified on both sides of the desk.

One more down....

2009-02-20T21:04:00.003-08:00

First, Armitage reading his poetry, including "Kid". I love the Yorkshire accent.

This might turn into a week of posting! Straight! With actual content (sort of..)!

I spent the evening holed up in the local branch of the local bookstore reading an interminable article from 1996 that called for librarians in the nascent days of the digital age to rebel against the oppression of the big publishing houses by taking back control over the publication and storage of scholarly work. Sadly, we're still paying obscene amounts of money to journal vendors for print and online copies of journals. Digital repositories aren't filling. The author of the article (I'll find the citation when I'm more awake and add it in) argued that libraries who undertook to challenge the presses would have to somehow replicate the prestige and the clout brought by publishing in specific titles. Unfortunately he didn't give a how and I think that's where the field is a bit stuck. It's easy to argue against vanity printing and to point out the success of small digital repositories in very specific fields. But how to suddenly recreate the name and pull of a Big Name Journal? It's not going to happen overnight, but the technology is changing overnight. The underlying basis for the clout, not the clout itself, needs to be challenged... not that I have a great suggestion as to how (which is just as useless as the above argument).

ETA: The article in question: Atkinson, Ross. 1996. Library Functions, Scholarly Communication, and the Foundation of the Digital Library: Laying Claim to the Control Zone. Library Quarterly 66: 239-265.

After finishing the article, I met up with a young woman who has applied to VC. She was lovely - bright, confident, articulate. I look back on myself at that age and can't imagine having that powerful a sense of self. I like to think I'm somewhat together now - note that I had a comfortable conversation with a complete stranger and lived to tell the tale. I just wonder sometimes what I missed out on because of my reticence, my shyness. Silly to wonder, really, but there it is.

Prawo Jazdy

2009-02-19T21:00:00.002-08:00

This makes me inexplicably happy.

There's something appealing in the image of a man resembling my father's cousins tearing down the back roads of Ireland with his rebellion in his pocket.

Do you like books? People? Good!

2009-02-18T20:14:00.002-08:00

The brilliant Stephen altered me to this fine educational film.

Love of books! Love of people! Love of cross-indexing!

A few things struck me about this film. Most of the librarians here are women. They're reading stories to children, locating books for teenagers, and whipping up catalog cards by the thousands. I believe there are two male librarians in this film. The first is asked to compile a scientific bibliography (about radar) and the second is a library administrator. Yes, this is 1946 and the glass ceiling was a bit lower. But I still see some of this today in the library world - more in terms of administration than in the bibliographers. Of course I lack more than anecdotal evidence to support this assertion, and there are a great number of fiercely intelligent and admirable women in leadership positions in the field, this still bugged me. I'm not even sure if that's even a complaint, because in this world of books and people, I'm by no means alone. For LIS 510, we read an article featuring a study on typical users of libraries. The typical user? Overeducated, middle-class, white and female. Yes! I am deep within my world, with my sisters in overachieving. But I wonder if I need to stop more often to think about what it must be like to not have 10 years of various library work experience, to be one of the few men in the program. What must it be like for my friends who are doing this program with kids at home? From the East coast? I need to remember what it was like to be a freshman too scared to use the reserve desk. I need to remember what it was like to sit and wait for that article that I needed yesterday. What is it like to be lost? To be displaced? To be angry? What is it like to be the person on the other side of the desk?

The second thing I noted in this film is that the field really hasn't changed all that much. If you ignore love of books (and I've yet to meet a librarian who isn't somewhat of a reader) and instead focus on the qualification of loving knowledge and lifelong learning, you're in 2009. Learning and people are still at the core of what we do as librarians. While shelf-list cards have bowed to MARC, the goal of technical services is to still create a tool to allow the users to come into to contact with the collection, with "the stuff". That attitude towards service, to trying to get out there to find what the patron needs so they'll come back and get more knowledge featured prominently in a class lecture a week or so ago. Documents change. Service types and tools change. But we're still trying to get the user to their blue book on television as best we can.

Armitage

2009-02-17T22:40:00.002-08:00

I read this today in Simon Armitage's collection Shout while taking a procrastinatory bath. It's not the subject that attracts me here (though it helps), but rather the energy, the pushing rhythm that leaves you breathless at the end.

Kid
Simon Armitage

Batman, big shot, when you gave the order
to grow up, then let me loose to wander
leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder
as you liked to say, or ditched me, rather,
in the gutter. . .well, I turned the corner.
Now I've scotched that ' he was like a father
to me' rumour, sacked it, blown the cover
on that 'he was like an elder brother'
story, let the cat out on that caper
with the married woman, how you took her
downtown on expenses in the motor.
Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker!
Holy roll-me-over-in-the-clover,
I'm not playing ball boy any longer
Batman, now I've doffed the off-the-shoulder
Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number
for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper;
now I'm taller, harder, stronger, older.
Batman, it makes a marvellous picture:
you without a shadow, stewing over
chicken giblets in the pressure cooker,
next to nothing in the walk-in larder,
punching the palm of your hand all winter,
you baby, now I'm the real boy wonder.

A bag of rock salt

2009-02-16T11:35:00.002-08:00

Like most people who claim to be of the geeky persuasion, I have a difficult relationship with George Lucas. The Star Wars Trilogy - the Original - ranked among my favorites growing up. I saved for the VHS box set and to this day will put them on when I'm sick or cranky or when background noise that's not Absolutely Fabulous is required. I listened patiently to his ramblings when required to watch The Power of Myth for a course on Arthurian legends. I just ignored the prequel trilogy (except for the third, which I saw with a friend while studying in London on a hot summer's day).

But now he's gone too far.

Because I ignored most of the prequels, I missed out on Jocasta Nu. Happily she was brought to my attention via a lecture on reference interviewing for my program.

She is the ultimate in old librarian stereotype. Let's run through the list:

Old woman with possibly witchy tendencies
Disapproving mouth and attitude
Tight bun, complete with sticks for stabbing out your eyes once you realize, Luke, she is your mother
The belief that all of the knowledge of the world (that matters anyway) is contained within her own collection and you are wrong, sir!
The willingness to say "Nope, nothing doing" after a 10 second interview.

Fantastic! I mean, it's not Lucas' fault entirely that he's relying on one note characters to not really progress the non-existing plot forward. Is it?

Annoying, but I won't kill him with a shovel at midnight.

Keeping It Positive

2009-02-15T17:21:00.002-08:00

In an effort to remain on the happier side of thing, here is a semi-annual list of things that are currently made of awesome.

*Nerdfighters

*The Elegance of the Hedgehog

*The glorious sunlight

*The run/walk I took with my husband in the aforementioned sunlight

*Amy Ray

*Postcards waiting to be mailed

*Nearly completed search assignments

*Getting a week ahead in reading

*Siblings visiting in April

*Dinner and hugs with good people

*Dickens (always Dickens).

James I

2009-02-14T16:32:00.000-08:00

The Husband and I are in the middle of what I like to call "Everyone Makes a Films About the Tudors, with bonus points for extra Glenda Jackson". So far we've seen all of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth R, Elizabeth (Dr. Who and James Bond chat on a beach!), and Elizabeth:The Golden Age. A few weekends ago we watched Anne of a Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots. So much delicious period British drama.

The latter film got me thinking about James I, Elizabeth's successor to the throne and the Golden Age. He just seems ripe for dramatic adaptation, especially in a post-Freudian world. He had what I would consider a troubled childhood - mother exiled, father murdered, and you're King of Scotland by the age of one. He composed works on the ideology of monarchy, survived the Gunpowder plot and Spain. And then it all falls apart with Charles I.

But who to cast? Do we start with his youth or his ascension to the throne? Guy Fawkes would have to show up so people could go "Oh, that's that guyyyyy!" Do we go till his death, with some foreshadowing of the Civil War? Someone really needs to work this out for me. What has Alison Weir been up to lately?

The Morning After

2009-02-14T09:48:00.002-08:00

There's a striking resemblance between a hangover and the heaviness that coats the morning after an anxiety attack.

There are the physical ailments. The skin on your cheeks is dry and itchy. Your eyes hurt - you're not sure how, but they do. You're probably dehydrated, so your head aches. As you drag yourself out of bed, you start contemplating international sanctions against alarm clocks, especially alarm clocks positioned on the other side of the room. You stumble into the bathroom to start the shower and make the mistake of looking in the mirror. Your hair is a gnarled mess. Your fingernails are essentially gone. You're half-dressed in whatever you were wearing last night. Your breath tastes terrible and your glasses are smudged. A long hot shower is all you want right now, followed by a soothing cup of milky coffee and toast. But you haven't the time. There's a bus to catch, a job to do on the complete other end of the city.

There are the emotional ailments. Your recollection of the previous evening comes back in bursts. You move alternatively through embarrassment and faint fear. You feel not necessarily fragile, but raw. The covering over your organs seems thinner, more transparent than useful. You don't want to be nudged too hard or all of the black bile from last night will come tearing up your throat. You want to apologize to anyone who saw you or dealt with you, but that would be too much. While brushing your damp hair your steel yourself for the day. You're not going to think about it. You're going to move on and pretend it never happened. Yes.

Thus resolved, you drag yourself out the door. You turn a deaf ear to that voice in the back of your mind and walk out into the cold morning sun which, even behind the clouds, makes your head ache all the more on your lonely trek to the bus stop.

Living in an Exponential World

2009-02-09T09:14:00.002-08:00

So, I'm a little late to this video, but it's still fascinating. I think it really illustrates the problems that libraries are facing in an increasingly digital world (and it's not just Google) but also the new technology and types of users we'll be seeing. Once it's laid out before you, you can see just how rapidly our world is changing with each new development in technology. I remember the last day of residency and Stuart having to explain why the courses aren't as technologically based as he would like at times - because by the time we would graduate, our first year and a half would be worth next to nothing.

Makes me wonder what exactly it is that I'm getting myself into.

Onwards

2009-02-08T14:49:00.002-08:00

I've been avoiding an update here as I couldn't think of anything appropriate to follow up the post on Sally. Talking about doing statistics in Excel or writing a book review on an Austen encyclopedia seemed inappropriate (though the Austen is Victorian... ish). But I know I just need to get something out here and then I'll be fine. So here goes.

Life has hit it's usual rhythm of the quarter. Sundays are spent tidying up assignments and then waiting for the last possible moment to hand them in (still need to put off seeing that green checkmark for as long as possible). The apartment is unearthed from a week of clutter in between. I am amazed at the sheer amount of stuff AK and I manage to bring into the apartment on a weekly basis. Today we gathered up all the soda cans and bottles that have been packing my entryway and turned them in at the story. We earned an obscene amount of money, but I don't think that will encourage him to take stuff in on a more regular basis. My friend Maria is due over in an hour or so with her child. Lasagna and Rock Band are promised enticements to bring them out to suburbia. Tomorrow we pay a very nice lady to do our very complicated taxes and then I file FAFSA and hope that I look suitably poorer this year than last.

All very grown up activities on the list (except the Rock Band). I was speaking with a friend of mine online the other day about how I keep wondering when I'll feel properly grown up. The years I've spent living on my own or with AK have taught me a lot. There's a change in how I act or think about things that markedly different from how I was 4 years ago or more. But when will things be right? When will life fall easily into place? When will I stop burning the bottoms of cookies, remember to floss twice a day, and cease spending hours on WebMD convinced that I'm about to die of some horrible intestinal cancer instead of just having an upset stomach? When will that clarity arrive so I can put aside all of this useless internal mess and be properly grown up? Turns out the answer is never, which is irksome but perhaps to be expected. A professor of mine once said that her 20s were awful, her 30s difficult, and her 40s magnificient. I'm just not sure I want to wait that long (again, part of the problem).

The wait to become a real librarian feels similar. I'm waiting for the day I'm a professional and suddenly the wisdom of the ages and Dewey will be open to me. But things seem to be moving along slower than that (not that I want to be job hunting in this economy). I've registered for ACRL in March, which is both an extra trip to Seattle (one I think I'll be repeating a week later for residency). My first Profesional Library Conference - a chance to pass out business cards, to gather up some swag, and the possibility of embarassing myself in front of roomfuls of potential future employers. Good times! I'll be travelling and sharing a room with the incredible Bonnie, so that should help things along. It's lovely to have someone currently in the field who is also a good friend.

So, that's a post started and done. Let's hope I can go on from here.

Sally

2009-01-24T10:45:00.003-08:00

From the Royal Holloway English Department website:

Professor Sally Ledger

It is with enormous regret that we must announce the sudden and tragically early death of Professor Sally Ledger. Sally joined the Department of English in Autumn 2008 as Hildred Carlile Professor in English and Director of the Centre for Victorian Studies.

Even in this short time she had established herself as an indispensable presence in the life of the Department. This was not only because of her outstanding scholarly distinction ─ exemplified in her recent book on Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination as well as preceding studies of Ibsen, the New Woman, and the cultural politics of the late nineteenth century ─ but also, and at least as importantly, because of her vibrant personal qualities: her warmth, her infectious sense of humour, great good sense, and sheer intellectual energy. Under her leadership, the College had already taken important steps towards becoming the leading centre for Victorian Studies in the country.

Before joining us here, Sally was Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where she had worked in the School of English and Humanities since 1995. As a PhD supervisor and mentor of junior colleagues, Sally was second to none. A rising generation of scholars will be for ever indebted to her for showing how exemplary interdisciplinary scholarship, collegiality and sense of the value of sociability and family life could be combined.

Her colleagues past and present, and indeed the world-wide community of nineteenth-century scholars, will be as shocked and saddened as we are by this news, and will join us in sending our most heartfelt condolences to her husband, Jim Porteous, and son, Richard. There will be a further announcement in respect of the funeral arrangements and a memorial service for her.

Edited to add: A beautiful remembrance from Birkbeck.

I can't call Sally a mentor. Even friend might stretch the point. But she was an amazing professor, always enthusiastic about her work and the work you brought to her office hours. She helped give shape to my dissertation, listening patiently while I tried to explain just what the hell I was trying to do with H.G. Wells. I still remember running into my first day of class at Birkbeck late (thanks Circle Line!) and her welcoming face. She was the model of what I thought an academic should be - cogent, energetic, dedicated, insightful, and with a remarkable ability to be so human and so real. I regret not keeping up with her or anyone else at Birkbeck really, for slinking away without my Distinction. I regret never telling her what I've just typed.

Windy City

2009-01-18T21:43:00.003-08:00

It's not even ten p.m. yet (as I start to type) and I'm exhausted. The wind has been raging outside my apartment all day, shaking the windows and whistling through the trees. This morning I managed on a longish run/walk with a good friend. The mile warm-up was brutal. My feet were heavy, my lungs on fire. The wind was cold and tenacious, not quite pushing me off track, but not exactly at my back speeding me along. But the next few miles were easier. My legs and spleen relaxed, my lungs adjusted to the cool air, and I eventually found myself cruising along as if I was still on my 15-20 mile a week training cycle.

The first mile and a half of any run is the worst. All I want to do is slow down and walk, just for a minute, and then I'll totally start back up again. If I stop in that first mile, it's over. I'll get a nice long walk in, but not a run. But if I can break through it, if I can convince my body to hold out for the sign that marks the I can go for as long as I want. I'm still not sure what it takes to get through, to get over the hump. Knowing that would make my training so easy - I would just do "X" and find myself an Olympic Marathon contender. A year after I started running for real (as supposed to a random mile here and there marked "cross-training"), I'm still at a loss.

Work, schoolwork in particular, requires a similar sort of mental bolstering. Certain assignments and topics are instantly attractive. These are the classes where the recommended reading is always done and my papers are masterpieces in attention and scope. But the rest sort of lingers in the background. My overachieving ways used to be the spark - I have to do this assignment because it's part of being excellent and a nerd, but I will wait for the very last moment, because I am either not interested or (more likely) terrified of beginning something I don't understand or something beyond my perceived capabilities.

Too much of my life has been governed by fear - fear of failure, fear of disappointing others, fear of being alone. The only way to get over all this is to face it head on. And I have, after a fashion. I have not left anything till the last minute for this degree. I actively email professors or fellow students. I have a fancy agenda where everything gets scribbled down. And yet here I sit, with plenty to do and no motivation to start. Part of it is sleepiness (long run, little food, too much work). Part of it is a fear to start because nothing will be as good as the grades I got last term. Part of it is just pure laziness. I know I sometimes come across as that hardworking, organized girl (at least this is what people tell me), but I don't feel all that dedicated. I have a lot I want to do and would like to do, and then I find myself in bed with a novel or writing a pointless blog entry about how I feel I'm not getting enough work done.

Taking a quick look through my LJ indicates that some things never change.

Boxes upon boxes

2009-01-12T18:29:00.002-08:00

I'm in the process of sending my old notes from VC into the big dumpster next to the club. It's a fair amount of stuff because I apparently kept everything with the thought that this accumulated knowledge, this tangible wisdom, would be useful one day. It's not, of course, and my handwriting is only part of the problem. I pulled out graded essays (not many of them left actually) and one or two notebooks that seemed worth keeping (Darlington, Dickens...). The rest is either pitched or awaiting another trip to the dumpster. I did the same to my Birkbeck box. I kept the beautiful color-coded dissertation notes (too pretty to let go of yet) and the expensive roll of photocopies from the Newspaper Reading Room and the small notebooks from my electives. That's it. All together in a small box that once housed just part of my music and history notes.

I don't think I'm going to wake up tomorrow and regret this decision. Honestly, the notes were packed up individually after the courses were over and transferred to a desk drawer. They were then boxed up when I left VC and that box sat in a basement for a year, traveled across the country, were placed in a closet, and have sat there ever since. There's a larger box beneath the small academic box and the small box of childhood items my parents mailed to me several months ago (all the newspaper clippings of me being a "gifted" child, my high school diploma etc.). It's filled with high school and middle school notes and letters, the bits from the writing courses I took at CTY. I can't quite bring myself to sort through those boxes or the trunk in my closet in the bedroom that holds every journal I've ever touched. Mementos are harder to part with than notes scrawled in a class. They're too much like flesh. But what I've done is a big chunk gone, a heavy burden lifted. I still couldn't read the undergraduate thesis again - to think I put nearly 17000 words together in three weeks! I can't read the graduate thesis either. So much effort into researching and such a painful stalling with the writing!

I really feel that in this program I am so much more invested in my work. I'm proud of my work. I've stopped worrying that everyone in the course can see what I've created because now I actually put the time and the care into crafting something great. I do have a handful of what I consider excellent papers from VC and from Birkbeck. I just had problems finishing up. I left everything to the last minute. It's not been that way at UW at all. I'm on top of things and finding I'm actually retaining items. The drive to hold onto the manifestations of knowledge isn't so great when I feel that I've actually retained most of what I'll need.

I have a number of empty binders that can take on the notes I create in this program (makes sense to keep them now since I'm already seeing overlap between core courses). In due time they'll see the bottom of a dumpster. But I don't think it will be that bad.

Residency

2009-01-12T12:26:00.002-08:00

Residency for my second quarter of grad school was amazing. I managed to get a room in a inn/hostel right near campus - I cannot express how fantastic it was to wake up in the morning, grab a free breakfast, and then leisure stride to class instead of fighting commuters on the buses. The PDX crowd was out in full force and it was just so much fun. Lots of talking and getting to know better people who I typically just spoke to on message boards and Facebook. There's a disscussion on how to revamp the residencies. The horried weather that necessaitated flying to Seattle also meant that the iSchool tried out some sychronous broadcasting techniques so the people who were stuck weren't at a disadvantage. While I wasn't pleased to shell out money for a flight, I wanted to be with my classmates. I wanted to be with people and to talk and connect with them. I chose my program because there is a residency component and I knew that meant I wouldn't ever just be staring at a screen wondering who was on the other side. Money and time are such a consideration, especially in this economic climate, but I would hate to see the residencies go.

Courses for this term look good. Research Methods seems incredibly useful and not terribly challenging in format - essentially if I keep up on readings and lectures and carefully follow instructions, I should be fine. I'm a little worried because it is math, but it's math happening behind the scenes in Excel. Collections et. al is rather dreamy. Book reviews, and collection discussion, history of the book, fantastic! I really came to love my IB course, but at the time it was so incredibly frustrating and stressful (but absolutely worth it). Maybe I feel more relaxed and excited this time around because I've already figured out how a quarter works, how to use the technology, and how to slip back into the groove of academics At least, I hope that's the case.

The husband remains in SD/Vegas and I'm quite ready to see him after three weeks apart. For now the history of the book and research ethics calls to me...

Big Blue

2009-01-06T15:43:00.004-08:00

In 1988/1989 (I was very little so I don't quite recall), my father was working for Grumman Aerospace on Long Island. He started to see the writing on the wall (the end of the great defense contracts) and since he had two small children he began looking for a new job. In June 1989 he gained a job at IBM in upstate New York (or what passes for upstate for Islanders/City folk). We moved from his hometown to the town where my parents live now. After many years that were quite difficult at times, my parents bought a house, and saw their two eldest graduate from high school, college, and post-graduate degrees. My little sister is now in the same high school, taking the same accelerated courses I trudged through nearly ten years ago. Things weren't perfect, but stable with the addition of a second job my father has been working for nearly 15 years.

This afternoon at work the campus gathered for the annual Christmas luncheon, postponed till the new year due to the unusual wintry weather the descended upon the Pacific Northwest. The President spoke, sharing with us all how great the university is doing in terms of enrollment and funding, that we could take comfort in these tough times in knowing that we are cared for and that the university is well positioned for whatever is thrown at us in the coming year.

The red light was lit on my phone when I got back to my desk following lunch. It was my sister. She had that quality to her voice, that slight tremble that instantly set my heart racing.

After nearly 19 years, my father's job at IBM has been outsourced. Once he has trained his replacement, he has the option of trying to find another job in the company (competing with the 5000 others who have been let go as well) or he's out. He just started nursing school in an attempt to get out of the sinking ship with something (I can remember layoff threats back in elementary school).

My sister, the nurse, is planning on helping out the parents and taking on overtime. I'm a wage slave with all my free time focused on grad school. The husband and I are getting by, but we haven't much to share. I feel useless and helpless, as the family of 4999 IBMers already do.

Keep my family in your thoughts.

New York State of Mind

2009-01-01T17:02:00.002-08:00

I'm typing this from my parents' couch in New York. It's been absolutely freezing here the past few days, the sort of cold where the snow creaks under your shoes and you not so silently curse the dog who has dragged you out and can't quite make up her mind if she wants to go left or right.

I've read a lot of Dickens, spent quality time with the Little One, knitted nearly half a dozen dish cloths, and spent too few hours in front of the fireplace. I'm slowly falling in love with Mavis Gallant and itching to get to my copy of The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Looking back at my Goodreads, it doesn't seem like I'll be getting too much reading in next quarter - at least not novels. Short Story collections seem to be the way to go or re-reading old favorites or new favorites.

2008 has turned out to be one of the better years of my life, a distinct turn around from the past few years which weren't exactly terrible - I've always had food, shelter, money, and awesome people around me. 2003 onwards seemed to be one long period of growth and stumbling and picking myself back up. When I ran into a professor of mine following a bad break up in college, she remarked that her 20s were difficult, her 30s calmer but still difficult, and her 40s rather excellent and chill. I'm hoping that I'm trending towards stability. This past year I've just felt more together, more whole, more calm than ever before. While the impending recession could make things difficult, I'm remaining hopeful.

Here's to a safe and prosperous 2009 for you all.

Christmas

2008-12-25T19:06:00.002-08:00

It's been a fairly typical holiday for AK and me - meaning we pretty much lazed around the house or worked on individual projects. Our nod to the season was a walk in the fiercely melting snow (a second walk was cut short when we both sank up to the ankles in melted snow), a tree drawn in washable markers on the sliding glass door, and the surprise win of the Lakers over the 19-in-a-row-win Celtics (and Phil Jackson shaved off his beard! neither of us can cope with this fact). We didn't do presents this year because we're both horrible about asking for gifts and the procuring them in a timely fashion. We pretty much stick to the "Oh, I saw this and now it's yours five minutes after I've purchased it" school of thought when it comes to birthdays and other major gift giving events. This isn't necessarily a stand against commercialism and the acquisitive nature of society, since we do buy stuff. I am never left safely alone in Powell's (even when doing class research there I had to try to focus on the "serendipitous exchange of information" instead of what was newly remaindered) and AK has a serious problem when it comes to fencing shoes. Expressing love through gifts isn't something I inherited from my bargain hunting grandmother (it all went to the twin sister). I'm better at feeding people or finding them books or other bits of info (there's a bit in the JFW podcast mentioned below about how librarians express love through neat bundles of information and I am someone who routinely brings home articles on fencing or interesting bits for her husband in neat pdf form).

While walking today I talked with AK about a number of conversations I've had/blogs I've read lately about people "de-cluttering" - clearing out the garbage and excess possessions in their lives. One blogger I've been following calculated that in a little over ten days, she and her husband took nearly three-quarters of a ton of stuff to the dump or Goodwill. It's difficult for me to wrap my head around that amount of stuff. I get cranky and stifled sometimes when I look around our apartment and realize that it would take me more than a few hours to pack everything up and ship it out (a product of living primarily in dorms, even over the summer, for five years). The husband does hold onto stuff for a while, but it's never gone beyond the level of "Let's take and hour and recycle the soda cans and this room will be normal". What else is going on if you have that much excess in your life?

Maybe what it comes down to is that I find stuff to be overwhelming and often expensive. Some stuff in life is necessary. Some stuff in live makes the act of living more enjoyable. And some stuff seem just to be there for the gathering and collecting. There are a number of pursuits taken up by friends (often of a geeky nature) that seem wholly about acquiring things. Not experiences or knowledge or personal growth, but stuff. If you're into BPAL, you buy and trade imps of scent. If you're into roleplaying, you buy a number of expensive hardbacks. Boardgames have expansion packs. Films keep coming out with special editions or high def versions. Some knitters have stashes that are probably half the size of my local (tiny) knitting store.

Yes, you can certainly get pleasure from a scent and personal growth from problem solving games. These are not empty pursuits. But where's the limit? At what point do you stop enjoying the objects and are just gathering them to have them? Lately I've been clearing out some old magazines and books, including back issues of Victorian Studies. Did I subscribe to this journal because I really cared about the content or because I wanted to be the sort of person who subscribed to the journal? The clothes make the man and the possessions the person. The Ipod and trucker hat makes the hipster. The limited edition BPAL and SF hardback make the geek. What I'm trying to figure out is what exactly makes the M and am I made out of stuff I actually value, stuff I actually need? Do I need all my old notebooks from college? Do I even need the photocopies of my readings from this past quarter (I should probably finish the degree before I start pitching things). At what point do you stop owning stuff and it starts owning you?

This is perhaps not the merriest of Christmas themes, but I'm in the middle of Dickens' "The Haunted Man" and it's not exactly the most cheerful tale I've ever read.

Snow snow snow snow...

2008-12-22T15:47:00.002-08:00

Sometime today I believe Portland broke a 40 year record for the most snowfall in December. Outside is just unending white, with that sharp wet smell I associate with fall finals as an undergrad (often a blizzardy time of year). I've baked a few half-hearted batches of Christmas cookies (adjusted to the particular tastes of AK), finished a book, made great progress on Nicholas Nickleby, and bought my texts for next quarter (a most expensive expedition). Since his work is still closed, AK has turned nocturnal again, slipping his cold feet under the covers just as I'm ready to stumble into the kitchen for a pot of tea. I shouldn't complain, since it was in just such a wintery situation that we decided that being together in the long term wouldn't be such a bad idea (he coached late into the night and I was fighting with the dreaded undergraduate thesis).

Things seem to be improving outdoors, and I say this after attempting a four mile walk this afternoon where a friend and I managed to completely cross paths, each arriving home cranky and exhausted two hours after we left. The snow has taken on that dense slushiness that forewarns a great thaw and that also seeps deeply into old running shoes that anyone might be using instead of snow boots for traction. Hopefully all will be approaching well in time for my flight to NY on Friday evening. Trips home are always complicated - I want to see my family, but they also drive me insane. I own that this is by no means an original complaint and I do love my family. I've just lost the ability to understand them. It's mostly my fault - I've moved on from them willingly, both emotionally and geographically. For a very long time I wanted to be someone different. I had a very specific vision of this new person: skinny, well-read with an appropriate quote at her fingertips, well-dressed, possessed of a strong voice that was vaguely sweet and which lacked even a hint of Queens, an Important Job with an office that had a door, a couch, and some art on the wall. Nothing of substance, as you can see, but that's as far as I could see as an awkward eighteen-year-old who was very conscious of her jeans, her hips, and her lack of Milton.

Right now, I think I can say that I'm happy. I have a cup of tea, a desk, and a rather welcoming postcard of Elizabeth Bishop (she's caught mid-sentence and seems so enthused by what I'm producing that I'm inspired to keep on going). It's trying to convince my parents, who aren't quite sure what a librarian or a fencing coach does for a living and who haven't seen how comfortable and happy I am in this small room, that I'm approaching content. At least the Little One (14, but that's what I'll always call her) is excited by arrival. I hope I don't disappoint.

Notes and Nigella

2008-12-18T21:04:00.003-08:00

Okay, so this isn't the promise paean to JFW (as I'm now calling her, because we're clearly on a initial basis). Winter has visited its fury upon the Pacific Northwest and after a few days of cabin fevery, a frustrating day at work, and a two hour bus ride home, I'm a little too worn to do the task justice.

So how does a budding librarian shake off the cares and worries of the workaday world? By organizing her Documents folder and by reading Nigella Lawson cookbooks, of course!

My virtual and actual desktop both look rather similar at the end of a quarter/semester - covered with random copies of documents in various states of completion or usefulness and other detritus (for the actual desktop, this includes about 4 tea mugs and several empty gum packets). There's something soothing about tidying away your materials at the end of a project. You're replete with the smugness of completion and the knowledge that, should you choose, you never have to look at any of this ever again in your entire life. The hardest part of this program was realizing that my classmates would actually be looking at my work. My style as an undergrad was one of last minute flair and very little editing, so you can understand my apprehension. I gave myself plenty of time this quarter and while it all wasn't perfect, it was pretty damn good and I probably won't burst into tears when I take this all out again in three years for my portfolio.

I must admit that I am taken, every so often, to look back on old papers or assignments - I did this lately in order to show a friend what I thought an art history research paper looked like. I do this sort of archeological dig with my paper and online journals. It's a check to see how I'm growing and developing as a writer and as a human. While I appreciate my enthusiasm for the portraiture of John Singer Sargent in my Junior year, I wonder why it took three paragraphs to get to a thesis statement. The less said about my first research paper on Owen and Sassoon, the better (thought Craiglockhart is still one of my favorite words to say). My paper on L.E.L. and Felicia Hemans still sounds rather tight (even my bitchier sections on Greer and Armstrong still sound convincing). Will I feel this way about my discussion of context in IB? I've never really been concerened with readibility (at least for posterity - if it sounded okay when I was printing it and waiting to run it across campus, I went with it), so it's satisfying to see my prose coming together into something better. I have edited our more needless words (per Strunk and White) for LIS 510 than I have in my two previous degrees. Concision and clarity usually took a back seat to turns of phrase and enthusiasm. Yet, I'm still not sure if this is where I want my voice to go. We'll see.

How this ties back to Nigella Lawson? I could sit and read her cookbooks all day. Her prose is amusing, original, and frankly the next best thing to sitting down and eating something warm and freshly baked is reading about warm and freshly baked things (also, easier on the thighs). Her previous Christmas Specials (provided by an anonymous hero on Google Video) have provided background noise to a number of projects in the past few weeks. I love this woman. She's smart, she eats, she reads late at night with a snack at hand and seems rather happy, thank you. I was a little annoyed the other night (while reading in bed with a snack at hand) to see this rather dissapointing view of Nigella as a role model for women. Okay, she comes from the top of the Tories (this was a Torygraph poll afterall), her brother got her a sweet job, and she's married to an eccentric millionaire. She's not perfect and I don't think she really gives off that vibe - it's all quick because she's clumsy and lazy and would rather be off writing or reading a novel. She's suffered more loss than is fair and still manages to remain a powerful brand name. Stop hating.

And with that, I will retire with this cup of Lady Grey.

The Future

2008-12-14T12:40:00.003-08:00

Thanks to Maria, I am now falling in love with Joan Frye Williams. I'm listening to her podcast on the Indispensable Librarian (the link on her site doesn't work, but go to the ITunes Store, type in her name, and you'll find it for free download from ASU).

This is totally inspiring. This is why I'm in the field at this moment. Even though there is still a small part of me that is terrified of becoming obsolete, if we as a field can move forward with the patrons, we'll be fine. We'll be better than fine.

When I'm done listening I'll be sure to write something here of use.

Finished?

2008-12-13T21:53:00.002-08:00

The end of the quarter is here. I've handed in everything, I've had a few celebratory gins and some poutine, and I should be relaxing. But there's this small voice in the back of my head wondering if I am done, a voice that can't believe that I don't have any articles to read or lectures to listen to. It's strange to be free, and I'm sure as soon as I get used to it, I'll be on a train heading north with another bag of text books.

Today was lazily productive. I cleaned a bit and traveled to the knitting store with LBA. I acquired some yarn for last minute Christmas gifts and I'm only halfway done with my holiday cards. I should have started on all of this weeks ago, but I've been feeling so out of it lately - it being the normal flow of life. I feel so disconnected from the normal flow of the seasons and the holidays. Maybe it's a byproduc of growing up or maybe it's the last twinges of my lapsed Catholicism that causes this craving for a deeper connection with the passing of the seasons. Sometimes, when completely underdressed for the weather, I look up in surprise at the leafless trees and wonder how the hell I got here. I suppose the same could be said for my schoolwork. I'm still not exactly sure how I didn't crash and burn or hand in things late. I'm still surprised by my focus and my sanity. Mind, not that I want to continue on without them.

I should probably head to bed and nurse this cold instead of doing a few more repeats on a scarf or reading more of Dickens' Christmas stories. I promise to be more coherant and meaningful in the future.

A Corner of One's Own

2008-12-09T21:06:00.003-08:00

I am both easily distracted and easily engulfed in a project. Some days I sit down to work (work-work or schoolwork) and can easily conquer the world before my coffee is cold. Other days it is pulling teeth to eek out at least an hour's worth of salvageable dreck. For me, the environment quickly changes a slackful mood into a workful mood. There must be auditory distraction - as little as the sound of the dryer or as loud as the TV. It is impossible for me to work in absolute silence (or sleep in absolute silence for that matter... I blame my twin sister). I should be neither too warm nor too cold. Distractions for when the words stop or the ideas jam must be easily at hand, but not so easily accessed that I lose all will to do anything but play Solitare. Some days I'm a social worker and other days I need to be several layers away from people. It's a difficult balance. I think my best consistent environment was the British Library. I usually had BW nearby for tea breaks and lunch. I could switch between a well-stocked IPod or the shufflings of pages at the desk next to me. A novel was never further away than a look up computer and a willing staff member's trip to the stacks. When I had enough of Victorian Spiritualism or Scientific Romances, I could trudge downstairs to the cloakroom and then make my way home to my dorm room. Absolutely idyllic (in hindsight, of course).

This quarter has been absolutely experimental in terms of creating a space for schoolwork. In anticipation for the start of my new program, a friend and I ventured to Ikea, where a small folding table was purchase and then ceremoniously placed in the middle of a bedroom wall. I think I sat at it exactly twice for schoolwork. The desk sat parallel to the bed, so the chair barely fit, and it was too easy to unplug the laptop and curl up on the bed. I started sprawling out in the living room instead, losing my readings under the coffeetable while my lectures fought with the XBox for aural dominance. Wretched, but at least effective enough to allow me to complete my work (admittedly, AK would scurry off to his office when I started shouting at the screen).

In a fit of making space and time for finishing the last of my class presentations, I cajoled a sleepy boy into shifting the dresser so I could move my desk to the corner of the room. To get to the bed, I actually have to stand up and walk. I can't see the TV or the door, but there is a window. I've two lamps and all my papers. It's actually rather snug and I've knocked off a fair amount of work this evening (and this post). I still wish I had an office proper, but I lost that battle three years ago when we moved in and his drumset won the office. I dream of having a proper work office, with a door and a filing cabinet and artwork and everything. Really, that should have been on the top of my goal sheet for LIS 500.

But enough of this. I've more presentations to watch before I sleep tonight.

Pentultimate

2008-12-04T17:56:00.004-08:00

The Great LIS 510 Group Project of Doom (TM) is finished, and involved surprisingly less doom than anticipated. My group really pulled together and we turned out a product that I think is pretty spiffy. It's amazing how fast 15 minutes speed by when you're recording a presentation. I think I've started nearly every project this quarter with the gnawing fear that I would come up short, and instead have spent the final hours tweaking and editing and reducing the content to pithy perfection. I know as an undergraduate I had a tendecy to go on and over the page limit, but I was never reall strictly enforced. We were expressing and evoking! But here it's clear that the limits are absolute and I find that I've responded by tightening my prose and by taking better care in how I compose my thoughts and sentences. It's also telling that I begin my writing earlier than ever. It's actually strange for me to have mutiple days if not weeks to consider and mull over a question or problem. I no longer end papers surprised at the conclusion. I go into a paper with a stronger idea of what I want to say and how to say it.

That being said, I'll still be thrilled when the end of the quarter is here. I'm pretty much done with my database design course and have a little more editing and layout organizing to do on my webpage for my web design class. I should also go and listen to the other presentations in my class. That's more than a little nervewracking. I've never really been in courses where classwork is laid out so openly. The idea that other people are looking at my final projects bothers me because of my own insecurity. "What if all the other presentations are awesome and it just makes me realize how crappy my voice/ideas/etc. are?" Pathetic? Quite possibly.

But dinner and then another step away from procrastination and towards several weeks of knitting and reading!

Giving Thanks

2008-11-27T14:23:00.002-08:00

Since the past few months have been filled with a metric ton of whinging, bitching, moaning ,and panic attacks, here a list of things that are somewhat awesome.

Netflix streaming video on the XBox 360.
My friend and cohort member Maria(h) for providing a place to bitch and much fun.
My group members for being diligent, responsible, and quick with the emoticons.
The sweet soul who uploaded a ton of Dylan Moran to YouTube.
The sweet souls who uploaded Q.I. to YouTube.
My New York/East Coast friends who love from afar.
The Nursing Department at UP.
My family, who don't care that I can't do much in the way of Christmas presents.
A washer and dryer in the apartment.
A fridge full of food.
Steady rent money and benefits.
Charles Dickens.
Jane Gardam.
Stephen Fry.
Junot Diaz.
Explosions/ridiculous races on Top Gear.
A husband who loves unconditionally, laughs easily, and who can brew a proper pot of tea.
Parry two ripostes.
Vladimir Horowitz.
Coffee.

From Student to Scholar

2008-11-19T16:01:00.002-08:00

An idea that's been bouncing around in my head is a change in my self-image from student to scholar. The difference between the two is slight in theory and gigantic in application. I've always considered myself a student of Victorian Studies. Even when I was doing original archival work in the BL or Senate House, reading up on forgotten scientific romances, I never thought of myself as a scholar. Scholar always felt too professional a term for my work - I was reacting to assignments and small personal curiosities. The main intention of my research and essays was never really to add to the body of work on a subject, but rather to get a good grade while writing on something that at least somewhat caught my interest.

I began my work at the iSchool as a student, admittedly a student who was somewhat nervous and apprehensive about the focus on theory and the workload. My intention was to get a degree often termed by some associates as "The Library Union Card". I would develop a skill set, turn in a portfolio, and get cracking on professional job applications.

A series of exchanges with the Dean of the school of nursing where I work altered this perspective. In her emails and during an unexpected and delightfully rich phone call, she referred to us as "fellow scholars". My IRB application (still in process, cross your fingers) asked for me to demonstrate how my efforts for my information behavior class would add to a greater body of work or understanding of the world. And for once, I had an answer. True this project isn't one that I would have necessarily chosen for myself, but I find myself inexplicably drawn to the subject. Perhaps I'm simply too in love with Gregory Bateson, with "the pattern that connects". I love jumping from text to to interview and back, to creating what is a holistic vision of the world (or at least a very tiny slice of the world for a very tiny portion of the population). There's an excitement for my work (and indeed, it's work now) that I've not felt in a long time. There's a sense of meaning with this project, that I might actually impact that world some way.

I'm not sure why I feel the world will benefit more from an understanding of the information behavior of nurses as supposed to an examination of nineteenth century critics vision of women poets or the time shared by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Art and literature and their criticism surely have an important place in our society and I wouldn't denegrate that for all the world. It's just that I used to believe that my goal in life would be to write a seminal text on something that a student, lost in the middle of a term paper, would happen upon and shout with joy at finding a critical quotation to link together her paper. Or maybe just another good article to add to the bibliography. One of the two. Either way, I would prove to be of use to someone. Maybe the clear definitions of my users or user groups allow me to look out and see the benefits immediately. Of course, this doesn't answer why I have the need to be useful, to help or be recognized for that help, but there it is.

I'm at the beginnings of my individual paper for this course and I'm having to cut myself off from reading. There are too many interesting paths to follow. But most importantly, or excitingly, I'm starting to see the holistic nature of the field. I majored in Victorian Studies because I loved the moments in my liberal arts career when it seemed that all my courses were collapsing in on each other, that the same themes and issues and ideas made up the entirety of the world that I was on the verge of understanding something big, something great. I doubt that this complete understanding is anywhere within reach, but it's nice to have that feeling again. I means that I'm on to something at last.

The Calm Before the Calm

2008-11-17T18:49:00.002-08:00

Usually at this point in the semester (my mind still won't wrap itself around a quarter system), I'm hoarding sources for papers (sources that will remain unread until the last minute), trying to keep ahead on reading, and generally hiding under the covers and panicking like mad.

This time around, things are a bit different. I'm pretty much on top of work, in a few days I'll be drafting a paper a full week in advance, and it looks like the Great Final Group Project is heading towards awesome. Of course nothing goes smoothly and I'm facing a few setbacks and difficulties, but it's nothing that won't work out in time, nothing that can't be fixed. And I have absolutely no idea what to do with this surprising turn of events. Sure, I see the final days of the quarter (unhappily coinciding with the launch of the new consortia borrowing software) will probably be approaching fraught, but at the end of it is the rest of Nicholas Nickleby and the collected Rankin Bass Christmas DVDs.

There's a small part of me that's ready to panic about not panicking, but it's surprisingly silent.

Let's hope it stays that way.

Caffeine and Community

2008-11-09T13:29:00.002-08:00

At the end of my road (a short bike ride or a leisurely walk) are the building blocks of my early days here in the Oregon: our bank, the post office, Planned Parenthood, and a fabulous 24/7 cafe with wireless. When we were visiting Oregon to see if it was for us, I spent time at the library working on term papers. On a whim during one of these trips, I looked up a book I needed to cite in the public catalog. Somehow, miraculously or by another form of divine intervention, they did indeed own the book and it was checked it. They also had the great two-volume set of Wilfred Owen poems. Clearly, I was home.

Since starting work at an academic library on the other side of town I've not really visited my public library. Everything I need is closer to hand at work - I have my preferred informal personal sources (hi IB homework!) and the ability to waive fines. Still I keep thinking I should be spending more time there since it's becoming more and more difficult to focus at home, at least when AK isn't out at classes and I can sprawl out in the living room. I know that I don't want to work in public libraries, but is that also part of my aversion to the space? Or it is more of an aversion to packing everything up and bicycling or walking in the cold and the dark to another space, one without a kettle and the laundry the needs to be folded?

Right now I'm at the aforementioned cafe (more coffee, easier to talk) waiting for the arrival of a group member who has been having a hard time and needs some help catching up. I've actually spent a fair amount of time these past few weeks with people in my program. It's not really what I expected - I think I figured that online meant I would be working alone all the time - but I'm grateful for the opportunity to vent and to get some perspective from people who are going through the same thing. This program is taxing on my time, my sleep, and my sanity. It's strange to think that we're so close to the end. In about a month I will hopefully be on a couch with a pile of novels and Christmas music blaring in the background.

What a fantastic dream.

Sounds

2008-11-04T06:49:00.001-08:00

In a rejection of my iTunes, I've pretty much been listening to the following two videos non stop for the past four days.

and

Not exactly sure that that says about my musical tastes or state of mind.

Mind the Gap

2008-11-01T15:14:00.003-07:00

Yeah, it's been awhile. The ease of LJ and the notion that I am not required to post anything of substance there has been almost too great to resist. The message boards for my program (see below) take up some of the "typing ideas in a box and hitting publish" energy. And then there are the thoughts for the paper journal. Anyway...

A summation of sorts before we begin.

I'm in grad school, am alternatively terrified and deeply in love with what I'm learning. There's more group work than I anticipated, the boards are easier to navigate than I thought (I really do need the extra time to ponder), and the balancing act of full time work and part time school seems to be working. What I didn't anticipate about this program is that I would find myself thinking about the program all the time. There isn't a minute of my day where I'm not either puzzling out some concept (metatheories, how you vex me!) or planning my attack on homework for the week. On top of this I've found myself "being there" for friends and then feeling guilty that I've lost precious studying time. I guess the balance isn't as perfect as I thought.

However, none of this compares to the blinding panic and fear that coated my first quarter at Birkbeck. There's no new city to navigate, no bank accounts to create or any of that administrative BS (though it did take several weeks to straighten out my student account, but that required phone calls more than anything else). I have the necessary resources to deal with panic this time around - familiar places and people and habits to keep me steady. But I find I'm not really reaching out to them as much as I thought I would.

The residency was hard in that I was again in the middle of a new city, trying to make friends with the 80 or so people in my cohort, and crashing on a couch two buses from campus. There were moments when I doubted that I could deal with this at all - that I was far too stupid or weak to take on grad school again. I pushed myself through it and left the residency feeling positive, feeling capable. I can't emphasize enough how different this feels from my first grad program, how calm I am and how unanxious I am about grades. My adviser (who I may have to change from in a year or so as she's in the iSchool, but not inlibraries) gave me a fantastic pep talk in week three, about learning for the sake of learning, for improving oneself and the world. It seems cheesey, but it really resonated with me. I have to do this degree so I can go on and make more money and have a proper career, but it's also because I love the work I'm doing and want to take on more. Working in libraries is what I do and what I love. I need to keep plugging away at this and hope for the best.

The other major change I've noticed is my ability to just keep doing. I used to be paralyzed by fear in London. I would curl up under the duvet with a novel checked out from Senate House and just ignore. Today there's a new coping mechanism - the doing things in tiny bits and tricking yourself into thinking you're not doing work until the assignment is done. Case in point - looking at web design assignment turns into just preparing for it turns into completing it. Worrying over an assignment turns into looking at the criteria and then an email to the reference librarian for an appointment. This is how I wound up getting my application for grad school done with plenty of time - "I'm just going to sit here and draft and not finish anything brain, so no need to put the perfectionism into gear!" Let's hope I can keep tricking my brain for the next three years.

That's essentially life - posting and reading and staving off anxiety. I've been reading, but mostly re-reading old favorites (I picked up A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the first time in three years) and papers on information behavior. Exciting times.

Social Distortion

2008-09-15T19:55:00.003-07:00

Before my dentist appointment this morning, I bought my train ticket up to Seattle. This time next week I will probably be passed out in the living room of a good friend, if I successfully manage Amtrak, Seattle Public Transit, and the labyrinth that is the UW campus.

I feel like I should be more apprehensive about this. I whine at AK that I'm nervous and scared and that I hate being a big responsible person, but really underneath I feel like I have all of this under control. There's apprehension over being able to find the time to do my homework (I have to build an Access database, something I haven't even tried since high school), about getting meeting new people. But there's also this sense of "Been there, had to get a visa, and then got the t-shirt in Heath row". I can't go quite so far as to say that I'm excited and ready to take it all on, but I'm calm about. That, or it just isn't real to me yet and next week will find me in a classroom in Suzallo, weeping.

But maybe not. The worst part of grad school the first time around was settling into a new way of life. Naturally this meant a lot of showing up at random offices asking for forms and help and a lot of chatting up new people who had enough in common with me in that we both were spending thousand of pounds to sit and read the same texts. Socially speaking, I think I'm a stronger person now. Being "the Supervisor" forces interactions with all sorts of people, each with their own problems and own way of perceiving the world. I think that I'm very good at reading social situations; I'm just not very good at addressing them. I'm always standing on the stairway just as the words come to mind. This is why I spent so much time at college huddled in my room or standing on the edge of group.

I'm not exactly sure why, but I still perceive myself as an intensely unsocial and unsociable person who should be left locked in a room with an internet connection and a kettle. Yet unbeknown to myself, I have become a social person. I have two very good friends right now who I try to see at least once or twice a week. One is also newly married, a runner, and basically someone who will nerd out with me over random things. She's most excellent. The second is a friend I met through fencing who turned into a non-fencing friend (meaning we have interests and participate in activities together outside of fencing... in fact we haven't fenced together in months). She's incredibly sweet and is going through a bit of a rough patch right now. I keep wanting to have the words that will make it better, to be able to be that friend who can say something meaningful and useful. I don't think I'm there yet. Someday... hopefully.

So that's where I am right now. I'm not writing enough poetry (got caught up in my woeful sense of rhyme and haven't finished the exercises). I'm not reading enough (though that's going to go to hell soon anyway) and am knitting only the most basic things. But I think I'm happy. I think I can do this.

Gaming and Girls: Part the First

2008-09-07T12:22:00.002-07:00

A few weeks ago AK and I visited our local independent bookstore for the very necessities of life: books and coffee . As usual, AK wandered away for an hour or so. When he returned, he gleefully handed me a book entitled Confessions of a Part-time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the D&D Game. The book was a gift for me, to finally start me on the path towards true gamerdom.

Despite my own geeky tendencies and the hardcore geekiness of my friends, I've never actually played D&D. When it comes to a game that takes longer than 20 minutes to play completely, I tend to lose interest. I want to smash you up in Soul Caliber, cut your head off in Guillotine, and completely dominate you in Uno, and all in under fifteen minutes. I don't think it's necessarily an attention problem --I did major in incredibly long papers on incredibly long Victorians novels. I've just never been a fan of long on-going story lines that aren't contained between two covers. AK finds this to be a major flaw in my character, as it means I refuse to re-watch all of Buffy or do more with Battlestar Galactica than pop my head into his office for a recap of the episode and then cry "Lee yelled his love to the stars, Aaron. TO THE STARS!"*

D&D always seemed unnecessarily complicated and picky to me. Maybe this has to do with the sort of dedicated, 12-hour marathon loving, rule freaks I've met in my life. My only personal interactions with RPGs has been one shittacular session of Vampire where I had no idea what was going on and then NPCing at a Changeling LARP (run by my only reader). I liked the interacting with people part. I liked wearing shitkickers and looking fierce. I hated the constantly referring to my piece of paper with all the numbers and codes and the fact that no one actually explained to me what I was supposed to do other than stand around in shitkickers looking fierce.

So when AK proudly held the aforementioned book in front of him, I thought that maybe my time to game had come. I've grown and changed from the days when I would walk past a parlor in my dorm and stare, increduously, at friends who were so deep into the game they would scowl should you dare to say hello. I have gained a certain sense of patience, a willingness to try new things without immediately throwing up my hands in disgust and frustration. Surely a better M would make a better gamer.

We returned home with more books than we should have bought (this is the problem with having a local store with a sick amount of used books, especially used Simon Armitage) and I settled into my corner of the couch with more coffee and the shiney pink paperback.

I think I managed about four pages before attempting to chuck the book at AKs head.

Though I am highly impatient when it comes to things like tax forms, insolent computers, and husbands who can't figure out how to put dirty dishes in the sink, I am an incredibly forgiving reader. Until recently, I would never give up on a book, no matter how painfully bad it was. I would slog through until the end, confident in my moral superiority and the scathing review I could post on Goodreads. Lately I've abandoned this method of reading - there are simply too many good books out there to waste time on crap. So I thought I could handle this book, even despite the garish pink dice on the cover. I wanted to give the author a chance to convince me, to lead me down the path of stylish gaming.

Unfortunately I am not the audience for this book. I'm not yet convinced that this book is intended for girls at all. Right now I'm about halfway through the book, and as far as I can tell this is a book for teenaged boys/young men. They will see this strange thing sitting in the gaming section, right next to the brand new release of 4th edition, and suddenly realize that lo, they too can have that gaming girl of their dreams. Here, in plain English, is a tome that will lead their girlfriends down the path of awesome. Within are witty asides about shopping, fun new classes only found in 4th ed, sidebars in pink, illustrations in pink, and more witty allusions to shopping. Surely this could turn an otherwise normal person into someone who wants to game. They will plunk down this book (and another copy of the 4th ed. rules book) in front of the cashier and go home, confident that they will now be able to share this passion with someone they love.

In a way, this is truly a noble goal. I can honestly support any effort towards sharing passions - be it fencing or reading or knitting or whathaveyou. However I find myself caught up in the tone of the book. It's written is a very conspiratorial voice, "You know those icky gamers and the 10000 stereotypes about them that I'll bring up every five minutes? Guess what? They're people too!" Such a revelation! It's also somewhat condescending - the author is convinced that, without a revelation such as can be provided by this very book, normal women won't play D&D. And by normal women she means shoe, makeup and sales obsessed girly girls.

I think this is the part of the book that catches me and leaves me completely uncertain of my point. I am not very girly at all and still have a latent sense of dismissive disgust towards women who are (a by-product of growing up as that smart girl who was taught to believe that you can't be a girl and truly intellegent or good at science). This is an attitude that I'm trying hard to change (Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs was a great help), but I still find her "Wow, like I was totally into shopping and now kicking ass with spells is totally bitchin'" attitude to be disconcerting. I'm happy that the author at least tries to dismiss the idea that girls are too dumb to handle the rules or not naturally strategic enough for RPGs. It's her technique, her playing behind the stereotypes while still trying to dismiss them that irks me so.

As I said, I'm still not done with the book and as the book follows the authors journey as a gamer, her tone gradually changes and improves. But I'm still left wondering what exactly is the purpose of this book, if not for Wizards of the Coast to sell more books and more copies of 4th.

More when I'm closer to done.

*Only two people will get this, but I don't care. It's a true story.

Set Up

2008-09-02T23:03:00.002-07:00

My new computer arrived today and I spent perhaps thirty minutes adjusting the settings and moving over the roughly four gigs of data I had on the old machine that's not music. Thanks to the brilliance of Windows, I'm moving things to the new computer via a 4 gig flash drive. This is a painfully slow process, compounded by the fact that my ITunes settings on the new machine were initially screwed up and while the songs were copied to my library, they were not actually saved to my hard drive. I am less than pleased by this, but since I am the sort of person who needs to follow a project to its immediate end, I'm sitting here copying and pasting and waiting to re-install ITunes.

Once again I feel like a failure in the face of technology. After spending an hour and a half trying to network the two computers together (and failing) and then trying Microsoft's new file migration software over our current wireless network (which is flaky and also failed), I'm just ready to be done with this. Like I said, I'm very much the sort of person who likes to tackle a project and single-mindedly wrestle it into submission. I hate when I know a solution to a problem and yet am unable to put it into play. The worst sort of impotence comes when you realize that, should the circumstances be but slightly different, you could have managed it yourself. I'm less bothered by the idea that I'm incapable of doing something; knowing that just can't do something allows for an excuse, an out. It's the potential that kills me, the wasted posibility.

Part of the problem is that I still tend to rush blindly into thing. I'm impatient and stubborn. My vague comptence allows me a certain fearlessness, a sense of "Psh, I can do this, no problem". Just a tiny scrap of knowledge and I'm running headlong into traffic. This can sometimes be a useful skill. In a field that's as ever changing as mine, I sometimes need to just hold my breath and jump. Sink or swim, but sometimes the solution presents itself. Or I wind up losing about 20 gigs of data I thought I had transferred and instead sit up way too late into the night with the original Star Wars on VHS to keep me company.

This is also the strength of will that allowed me to write multiple final papers in one night (a good skill for a former World Class Procrastinator). I'm less of a procrastinator than I was in school. It's harder to get extensions when you're an adult. My version of procrastination tends to be avoidance. I drag my feet on starting a project because I know I won't enjoy it, or I'm terrified of it turning out wrong (so starting on it last minute will certainly ensure success, right?). When I begin to feel myself shy away from tasks, I do the opposite of what my mind wants. I throw myself at the task, finish it up, and then generally feel magnificently productive.

This has worked for things like talking to customer service representatives, paying bills, and preparing applications for grad school. But will this work in grad school? I'm terrified that with a full time job and part-time school that I'm going to fall back into old habits. I did successfully graduate from two programs despite my dragging feet and perfectionism. Can I risk a third? Will it be different this time around since I'll be working on something more concrete than literature (could there actually be right answers?)? AK is confident that I'll be fine, that I've had good break from school and will be studying so much that I either already know or can immediately apply to my work.

It's all uncertain. And I still have 15 gigs to go, but it's far too late for me. So I'll post this and head to bed.

Nights like these...

2008-08-31T23:20:00.001-07:00

When I find one song and play it over and over again, it either means that the song is absolutely amazing or I'm in the sort of mood that could go to hell at any minute. When I would get panicky in London I would recite Hail Marys. The rhythm and the idea that maybe, just maybe, someone out there would hear and understand would pull me towards the edge of sanity. I also find it's easier to think with that sort of aural repetition, my own particular sort of white noise.

When my relationship with Alex was in its death throes, I kept listening to "Buying Time" by Great Big Sea. It wasn't until a year or so later that I actually sat down and listened to the lyrics and realized that the song perfectly described my vain attempts to keep us together. I'm not sure if the lyrics to today's song will be the same sort of oracle (but I've read them just in case), but I've just hit repeat for the third time in writing this.

I'm up much later than usual, old married lady that I am. AK is by nature a creature of the night. Indeed, his mother recently apologized for passing on that trait. Right now he's sitting on my (little used) exercise ball playing some XBox game about WWII planes. I'm at the dining room table, since this is currently the only place in the house where I can get wireless (hopefully solved on Friday). This chair is incredibly uncomfortable, or maybe I'm just not used to sitting with proper posture.

I'm feeling alone tonight, but it's an okay sort of alone. By nature, I think AK and I are some of the most social anti-social people I know. At times we crave people, but more likely than not we'll spend our nights holed up in our respective rooms reading or gaming or otherwise ignoring the world.

Really, I'm just projecting - I'm far more anti-social than him. In my mind I suppose I'm still 15 and awkward (great progress, since it used to be closer to 13). It's strange sometimes how I can crave people, but it must be the exact sort of people and at the exact right time. Otherwise I just want the world to fuck off a little. I've been taking long walks around the neighborhood behind our apartment every night. AK sometimes joins me, but really I crave the solitude. I let my mind wander or guide it through day dreams or worry about whatever it is that needs to be tossed turned.

Today I thought on the late arrival of our new debit cards, the smell of the new dish soap, how AK had dinner ready when I came home from work yesterday, the usual day dreams of living the life of a single poet in London (the escapist fantasy du jour), the smell of the rain soaked pavement and the growing tightness in my Achilles tendons.

Sometimes I don't understand how I wound up here - in Portland, with AK, with a VC diploma, with sanity, with a life that's seemingly on track and ready to grow. I don't understand why there is a tiny part of me that wishes I were someone else entirely -- someone with a capacity for foreign languages, who travels, who is fearless, who hasn't a large nose and thin hair and thick hips. I look at all my bookmarks about library science and Top Gear episodes, my Goodreads list, my bare bedroom wall and wonder if this is right.

That last sentence makes it all seem a little more "Oh no, existential crisis" than it really is. I suppose since I'm on the edge of the next big step I'm going to freak out a little bit. I remember sitting on the stairs at my parents house the day I was supposed to fly to London. I was crying and crying and couldn't stop. I couldn't properly explain why I was crying - I would miss AK, but there was something else eating at me, something for which I had no words. I haven't the words now, though this ache is more of a dull throbbing, the sort of thing that wouldn't even make you reach for the ibuprofen. The worst it can do it make me question - was I right to do X, to love Y, to let go of Z? As long as I refuse to answer, I'm safe.

These are the nights when I wish I could show up at a door in Brooklyn or Iowa or London or Berkeley, completely unannounced. These are the nights when my comfort in solitude turns slowly into apprehension, apprehension to panic, panic to terror if not checked. These are the nights when I wish I had a patrolled campus spread before me, a pile of homework to hide underneath. These are the nights when I need that dream of a new and better me, something I can pull around me that's safe and familiar, like the sweater I would steal from the back of my mother's door on the few nights she actually went out.

These are the nights when the words just seem to show up and fall out behind the cursor, unbidden. I'll leave them here and head to bed, after just one more repeat.

The Safe Color is Yellow

2008-08-31T17:46:00.003-07:00

I am the first to admit that when it comes to cinematic violence, I am a big fat baby. I still remember being about seven or eight and the terror that would strike when the theme music to Tales from the Crypt came on. My mother, who was probably sick of small children dominating the TV, let us watch a behind the scenes episode where it appeared that the Crypt Keeper was perhaps not as fake as I was originally lead to believe. For years the moaning of the organ fighting against the eerily cheerful bells forced me deeper and deeper under the covers. My internet research has recently revealed that the theme was composed by Danny Elfman, which now sounds obvious. I'm surprised I didn't notice it at the time, as Beetlejuice was one of my favorite films. And I must admit that I feel slightly betrayed.

It does seem strange that I would like one slightly comedic horror work and completely eschew the other, but who am I to argue against the vagaries of a seven year old? But this is how it's always been with my taste in movies and violence. I absolutely adore Vin Diesel's XXX (and you can all shut your faces). Lots of explosions, fights, hot double agents with Russian accents - it has it all. But no one dies violently or openly. The blood is at a tasteful minimum and the bad guys get it in the end. Yet I can do bloody, if it's at over the top levels of ridiculousness, such as with Kill Bill or Versus.

What I find myself incapable of handling is violence that appears too real. The moment I can identify with the violence, I shut down. I wince or bury my head in AK's shoulder (and he knows when to tell me it's safe to come out). This amazing ability is not limited to live action. Last night we watched the animated Beowulf, which deserves a separate rant. AK was in his chair and curled up in a corner of the couch with my knitting (we are boring old married people and that is what currently passes for an exciting Saturday night). Within minutes of the opening credits I began to cringe and yell "Oh for fuck's sake" at the screen. Did I need to see Grendel tear that guy in half? Did they have to have that much screaming? I spent the rest of the movie throwing snarky comments towards the screen (since I've read Heany's translation once, I am clearly a Beowulf expert) while reading.

What struck me about Zemeckis's version of the epic tale is how I felt much more aware of the violence in the poem. Of course a soldier devouring demon and a dragon are going to do some damage, but it felt less real on the page. Violence in books always feel less real to me, perhaps because I can choose how much I want to see and how much I want to feel. I lack that option with movies, short of closing my eyes or getting up and leaving the room. Emotional tension is harder to block out on the page, but perhaps that's because it's harder to stop myself from feeling than it is to stop myself from visualizing. This is why I still have not finished Natsuo Kirino's Out.

Maybe I'm sensitive or maybe I'm not. It's hard to say when the only perspective I have is my own. Maybe my distaste for a certain form of movie violence comes from being human (though does that necessarily make those who can deal with or enjoy it not human?). All I know is that I'm sitting here at my dining room table while AK watches The Village.

Every Day

2008-08-27T20:38:00.003-07:00

Last night I found myself curled up in my living room chair (as supposed to my bedroom chair, where I'm now writing this) with AK stretched out on the couch. For the first time in long time we were quietly reading together; I had the aforementioned Murakami and AK had the first volume of White Wolf's collection of Fritz Leiber. There are the usual reasons for the rarity of such an event. We're both busy and often work on opposite schedules. AK reads novels at a much slower pace than me and in random spurts. However he's constantly reading stuff online while holed up in his cave. I'm still very much attached to my print and a good light source. This reliance on print is partially because the last thing I want to do when I come home from 8 hours of staring at a computer screen is to stare at another one (yes, I know I'm doing it right now, but how else to share?). I'm also addicted to the smell of ink and the texture of paper. I freely admit that I am a fan of the book as a sensual and tactile experience.

More on that at another time. The reason I bothered to mention such an idyllic domestic scene is for the conversation AK and I had about working as a writer and that it is, in fact, work. I have long lived under the illusion that writers just sat down and magically perfect prose or verse flowed out from their pens. Take Dickens. Clearly he would realize a chapter was due and then set about furiously scribbling, jumping out of his chair to mime a face in the mirror, and then back to the desk so he could finish his copy before taking a long and brisk walk through the seedier sections of London, followed by an evening at the theatre where he would talk long and loud and probably crack a few jokes at Thackeray's expense and then back the next morning to dash off another chapter.

I don't need my (otherwise useless) degrees in Victorian Studies to deduce that Dickens didn't just sit down and effortlessly compose fourteen and a half novels and god knows how many Christmas books and magazines (Kathleen Tillotson probably knew...). He worked hard and it was his dedication to his craft that made him one of the greatest novelists in the English language (NOTE: Those of you who were subjected only to Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities should go and pick up a copy of Bleak House and read the first page or so outloud to yourself. Then you can judge.) Murakami dedicates the early hours of the morning to writing every day. John Updike actually rented office space early in his career and still writes a set amount every day during the same set hours.

They're mad.

Well, not entirely. If I was a writer, it would make sense to dedicate at least several hours a day to my work. Just as a musician must practice, so must writers. I was a musician at a point in my life. I practiced 5-6 times a week for anywhere from half an hour to an hour, not including lessons or rehearsals. I gave up on majoring in music because I realized that not only would I never master the rudiments of piano or music theory (small stumbling blocks) but that I couldn't bring myself to practice enough. I couldn't force myself to do scales or articulation work for more than the prescribed minimum of thirty minutes. If I had an English horn and some Vaughn-Williams I could get up to over an hour, but interpreting Vaughn-Williams's cello pieces on English horn isn't exactly the most promising career option (the choice of Victorian Studies now appears blatantly obvious).

I don't mean to argue that in order to do something that you love you must do it every waking moment of your life. That would only leave you miserable and hating whatever it it you originally loved. However if you're thinking on taking on the New York Philharmonic, it might behoove you to practice for more than 3 hours a week. I'm competent at my job because I do it for 40 hours a week and have done so for two years now. It's not because I think that composing Local Holdings Records in OCLC is the greatest form of expression possible (okay, you could wax poetic in an 866 field), but rather because I create these records all the time. For a writing related example, let's take the manual I'm composing for one department. My early entries, written at least a year ago, are long winded, obscure, and poorly formatted. My newer entries are shorter, tighter, and easily skimmed. Practice, fucking practice.

This is why I'm sitting here in my chair (the bedroom one, not the living room one) and writing. I'm still not sure if I have anything really important to say, but I'm practicing.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Writing

2008-08-24T19:28:00.003-07:00

Even though cataloging was awesome and rushed it, I've only now started to read Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I've missed his prose. I should really be better about rereading him (and another two dozen books I can name off the top of my head), but always overwhelmed by the feeling that I should be reading something new, something different. I was a big rereader as a child - I have beat up copies of Jane Eyre, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to prove it. Why as an adult do I now feel this pressure to consume, to take in at an absurd pace?

Anyway, the reason I'm writing this entry is that I'm in the middle of a writing kick jump started by Murakami's prose. I've caught up on messages that have been lingering for months and am about to clear out my inboxes. In writing to a friend on Facebook today, I told him this about Murakami:

I just today started his memoir on running and have fallen in love with him again. All of his sheep craziness and lack of coherent or emotionally potent endings have been forgiven. He's the sort of writer who makes me want to write - do you ever get that feeling? They're so clear, so controlled (or control their chaos) that I can't help but want to put together words of my own.

I think the best art I've experienced pushes me towards creativity. It sets off something inside me that can only find relief in words. It always comes back to words. I've rarely felt the desire to paint while standing in a gallery, but maybe that's because I know I haven't the skills to paint. I do have the ability to write, to string words together into sentences and then sentences into paragraphs. If I can't write, I talk it out. Talking it out rarely works for me. I find I'm more likely to be misunderstood or to lose the point. I do remember walking around campus my senior year after seeing Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice with AK. I remember pacing around the observatory, talking and talking. I don't really remember what I said, but I remember how it felt, how I felt in the middle of it all.

The feeling isn't always apocalyptic or soul-shattering. There's a quieter sort of appreciation that leads more to reciting out loud or running into the other room to share a passage with someone. That's how I felt today when I reread Simon Armitage's translation/reworking of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I got excited every time I saw him change the alliteration from a liner pattern ("It's Christmas at Camelot - King Arthur's court...") to an inset pattern ("of blasting trumpets hung with trembling banners..."). Dorkish to the extreme, but combine that with a mug of tea and the sort of wind that promises a summer rain, and you've got yourself a very comfortable morning.

I suppose that the point of the entry comes to this: I write because I've been moved to write, because there's something building up in that corner or my mind or in the center of my throat and it won't be shifted otherwise. And I suppose then that I read in the hopes that something will build up in the corner of my mind or the center of my throat.

Laptops

2008-08-21T13:55:00.005-07:00

In the spring of my Junior year, I decided that I could not longer bear being shackled to my pale Dell desktop and that I needed the freedom that only a laptop to provide. I had a summer job as a research assistant lined up, which would require hours spent typing up files of information from the university archives. I had amassed the cash and the odd VC desire to simultaneously laze on the grass outside while checking Livejournal.

With my excuses in good order, I sat down to configure a new system and then promptly turned the keyboard over to my then boyfriend. What sort of processor did I need? Graphics card? Memory capacity? Did it have wireless? My eyes blurred, my stomach turned, and I decided it was better to "let someone else deal with it". I handed the task over to my then-boyfriend and took on the massive Dell laptop on whose screen this entry currently appears.

Please do not misunderstand and label me a Luddite (especially since I have nothing to do with the textile industry). I love technology. You cannot imagine the depths of despair I can reach when my IPod runs out juice. I cannot imagine life before Wikipedia or IMDB (how did people solve arguments?). I adore jet engines, electronic databases, the beautiful scanner/fax/copier at work, and all of the wonderment that is the medical field.

Technology can be a wonderful and intensely useful thing, but there's a side of it, complex and dark and filled with sparking wires, that I simply cannot face. Today I sat down in front of my work desktop with the goal of buying a new laptop for my grad program. I had reviewed the tech requirements on the program's website and knew sort of what I needed from talking with my iPeer. I worked on the assumption that a big hard drive is good, memory essential, Vista is icky but I'll probably have to get it anyway, and that I cannot be bothered to configure a Mac for use with my grad program. I have been rather underwhelmed by my Dell laptop and have a nice discount through the IBM employee program (Thanks, Dad!), so Lenovo won.

After putzing about and annoying my husband, I pinged a wonderful coworker of mine for help. She's the systems/tech librarian, sat down and helped me configure the laptop I needed and then ran it against another online deal she had spotted. Twenty minutes later I punched in my credit card number (though no one really needs to punch nowadays, do they? Keyboards are far more sophisticated... or is it referring to punch cards?) and I'm now checking the website every three minutes to see if it's shipped yet.

The above is partially why I'm terrified of entering a field that is becoming increasingly entwined with advances in technology. Though I haven't any problems with software or playing around with software or breaking software. It's the hardware that's scary and expensive and difficult to recover if I suddenly wipe something. But then I sit back and wonder is this will actually make me a better librarian because I too have tasted fear and have had to work hard to understand exactly what's going on? I know that I'll never be the sort to be able to build my own computer from scratch, unless technology advances so far that Legos will soon have more hard drive space than the antiquated thing I'm using to right now. But maybe hardware is just less important now. It's all about apps and what you can download and what you can do. We seem to be less and less concerned as to how it's done. That's certainly the attitude we assume in our patron base; they're really not going to care if it's VPN on the back end or if they're looking at our OCLC vs local holdings. They want the item and they wanted it yesterday.

It's learning to use the software that's key and this seems to be mainly where library instruction lies. There are so many databases and finding aids and entry points out there that keeping them in order or learning to use them in the best manner can be virtually impossible. This is perhaps where I'll find my place as a librarian. Technology can't possibly make us obsolete as it keeps opening doors and dumping data all over the place. We can help people pick through it and store and use what they find.

This was rambly and not very original, but I wanted to get something down today. It won't get better unless I practice... or until my new laptop shows up.

Statement of Purpose (or at least a Statement of Something Approaching a Goal)

2008-08-19T20:09:00.003-07:00

For the first time in weeks I went for a long run and remembered why I miss NY summers. I miss my weekly rainstorms.

Don't get me wrong, Oregon certainly delivers on the precipitation front (get it?), but usually the heavier rains coincide with lower temperatures and nasty winds. I miss getting soaked when it's warm enough to venture out in a t-shirt and shorts. I miss the smell of hot, damp pavement. I miss waking up shivering to booming thunder.

Anyway, we've finally hit a break in the heat and I'm glorying in it, especially because I can run more than a mile when nature provides a continual aid station. Around mile 2 today my legs started to get that "I could run forever" feeling. I haven't felt that in too long. It made me remember why I put on my shoes at all.

When my legs go on autopilot my mind finally starts to relax. It becomes wonderfully quiet and functional all at once. I don't obsess over not having researched a new laptop this weekend or the amount of loan I'm taking out for grad school or that I've gained weight or any of the normal shit that bothers me when I'm trying to fall asleep. Maybe it's increased blood flow or brain chemicals or the solid rhythm of my feet - I don't really know, but it works.

The point to all of the preambling is I finally figured out what I want to do with this space. I read a number of blogs where people have solid opinions, be it on books or politics or feminism or the state of the world. I admire them all but I finally have to admit that I cannot do what they do. I've never been the sort of person who has felt comfortable taking a solid stand and broadcasting it. My mind is too slippery or, when I do have a solid opinion, I find I lack the means to express it in a coherent way. It never comes out right.

However I do want to write. Correction - I need to write. I've kept a paper journal since I was 13 (they're all stored away in the trunk my mother bought me when I went away to college, along with old letters, programs, and my prom corsage). There are certain thoughts that need to be scraped out of my head and laid onto paper in order for me to digest them or share them or be rid of them. It's just the way I've always been.

But I'm still not sure that I'm a word person. I lack the facility of certain polyglot friends with the intricacies of language. I probably couldn't properly diagram an English sentence. I have a handful of French phrases left, a few Latin words and that's about it. I write the way I speak, the way I think it should sound. And yes, along the way a few commas will be lost or unnecessarily added, but that's just how I roll.

Anyway, the point is that I think I am going to use this space to train my writing, like trellis for ivy. I agree with Stephen Fry (and others) that poetry is a distillation of language. I often quote Strunk and White: "Omit needless words". Yet writing this I have already deleted over two dozen unnecessary bits of verbiage. I can't seem to help myself. Perhaps I read too many long-winded Victorians as an impressionable child. Perhaps I just lack the self-editing gene (which would explain why I am incapable of outlining papers or drafting properly).

So this space will be a dumping ground for the refuse of my mind, which I will then attempt to stack in some sort of orderly fashion. I will try to post at least twice a week. I will avoid filling this space with "I drank a cup of black tea and stared at the wall and decided to take a walk" shit. I will someday get the balls to post some poetry. I doubt I will ever get the balls to post fiction.

And the gauntlet is thrown. Let's see if she can keep it up.

Well, this has worked out well...

2008-08-15T09:50:00.002-07:00

I'm not quite sure what's accounted for the silence of late. Grad school chaos? The typical frantic nature of summer (the husband works non-stop and travels and is generally all over the place)? A certain reluctance to share any thoughts because I'm not convinced they're worth sharing or even well presented?

Let's try again.

The banal update: still alive, not running as much (too hot and I've given up on trying to do the PDX marathon this year), reading as fast as I can in fear of the approach of grad school and the cessation of free time, not traveling to see people I care about, panicking about purchasing a new laptop for grad school, freaking out about grad school, quietly anticipating Summit migration, working my way through The Ode Less Travelled, and trying to find a local substitute for Twinings Black Currant tea. All in all, exciting times.

On a somewhat, but tenuously so, related note:

In the last issue of the OLA Quarterly, the twin ideas of change and embracing change threaded together each article. The past year (well, honestly the past two years... three?) have been nothing but unending and ever increasing change. I think I've learned to roll with it better than before; I make this assessment based on the number of panic attacks suffered/prevented, number of passive-aggressive locked Livejournal posts, number of snark filled lunches etc. I'm incredibly excited about the future - I'm taking the first major step towards becoming a professional and towards actual adulthood (i.e. I will someday be able to afford a house) in a field that is constantly moving, that always seems to be looking for the best way to do something, for ways to improve. It's fucking terrifying, too. I'm not really as ballsy as I think I am. I mean, talking to customer service representatives on the phone is still an act of incredible will and fortitude. But I'm starting to feel that life is pulling together somehow.

Last night AK and I took a long walk around the neighborhood after dark. We started to talk about friends of ours who have problems working with particular coaches because the coaches are their friends/partners etc. AK brought up the point that from fairly early on in our coaching relationship, which is concurrent with and a part of our emotional relationship, we knew we were heading towards marriage. We had to develop ways of communicating respectfully with each other on the strip and that carried off into the rest of our relationship, and vice versa. I'm still struck sometimes by how well we can communicate. He often understands me better than I ever could have hoped and when I compare us now to how we were back in August of 2005, I'm shocked. I didn't really think we could have turned out this well.

But back to work I must go, and listchecking and reserves and all of that. Here's hoping I'll actually post content again in the future.

Blissful 3 Day Weekend

2008-05-27T14:16:00.002-07:00

I love national holidays and the extra days off they provide.

Sunday I was up early and in Forest Park with part of the running group. It was muddy and rainy and wonderful (except for the part where I tried to crawl down a slick hill that was at about 45 degrees, because I have no sense of balance and hate falling down.. good times!). My shoes were trashed - I had to rinse them out and then leave them in front of the dryer. My hamstring gave out around 7.75 miles, but then I walked another 3 miles out of the trail.

It's hard to realize the mileage I'm capable of now, especially when you compare it to how little I could accomplish when I first started back in January. I'm still a bit nervous about adding extra mileage because I can't seem to find a consistent running groove. I'll have fantastic days and terrible days and nothing in between. I'm not quite sure what makes the fantastic days fantastic, so it's hard to replicate. Is it sleep? Training? What I've eaten? Obviously over training is an issue for me; I know that my body is unhappy if I try to run two days in a row (which is something I'd like to get over by slowly adding more workouts). My hamstring on my right leg is also a factor as well, due most likely to the fencing and my en garde.

What else to mention? Devoured two novels by Michel Houellebecq, but I'm still not sure what I think of him. I love John Banville's prose, but am still uncertain about his plots. I've also found the energy/interest to knit again. Huzzah.

A month.... That's not so bad, is it?

2008-05-21T08:13:00.002-07:00

So it's been pretty much exactly a month since I last posted anything (note I didn't say anything of value). It's been a crazy month: old coworkers leaving, new coworkers arriving, getting accepted into grad school for the fall, freaking out about getting accepted into grad school for the fall, AK's ridiculous schedule, too many overnight trips to Seattle, the continuing fight for Accutane (finally finished), and running. Lots of running.

I've made it to running 8 miles straight and finished my first 10k in just over an hour. On Sunday, due to the heat, we hit the trails in Forest Park and rocked out 7.5 miles. I absolutely love trail running now. I think the constantly shifting grade and ever changing background engage my mind more than just crusing along a road. And I am madly in love with running downhill. Yes, it can be a bit harsh on the knees, but it's the closest thing I've ever felt to flying (Delmar once said that the fleche in saber was just like flying, but I can't do that without drawing a card). There's just something so monstrously satisfying about turning around from an 11 min/mi uphill to barreling along at 8 min/mi. Forest Park will probably be the training ground of choice for the summer (once the sun and the heat return), and I look forward to it.

Sunday will bring 10 miles, which I'm nervous about. I managed 8 miles on a very good morning - I was up in time, ate and hydrated, and just seemed to have the energy for it. Even though the important part is that I get up and manage to tie on my shoes, I still don't want to crap out in the middle. Right now I'm running 3 days a week: long run on Sunday, short run on Tuesday, speedwork/track workout on Thursday. I'm trying to walk on the days in between and would like to build up to running more days a week, but right now I know my body can't handle it (my right hamstring rebells furiously if it's forced to work too much).

My knitting is not going so well - I've left AK's sweater at an annoying point and will have to pick it back up soon. I'm nearly done with the sock yarn scarf and have at least two more cotton bags to knit up for my mother and my sister. A trip to the Knitting Bee is in order, but I have to find the time. That seems to be the main problem of late - finding the time.

Stretching...

2008-04-21T16:17:00.002-07:00

I've been too busy with life to do much updating lately.

Yesterday I slept in accidentally and missed the big Sunday run. My running partner knocked, but since we have stupid, stupid woodpeckers attacking the side of our bedroom, I didn't wake up. Good times. They did 8 miles in the cold and the rain, so I'm not really feeling all that bad. In the afternoon I went out and did 30 minutes at a hard and fast pace. Today I got up and joined the aforementioned running partner on a 7.25 trek (walking and running) to the Portland Running Company so she could get fitted for shoes and then back. I invested in a fancy pair of running shorts and two fancy bras specifically designed for those of us who are flat (they had a line of bras for the less-than-well-endowed called "Handfuls" that I wanted to buy just for the name, but they're not recommended for more than a couple of miles, so I picked something else).

Today is basically laundry and sulking at the sweater I'm making for AK (the process for picking up the stitches for the pocket on the front is admittedly clever, but it's intensely frustrating). And napping. Napping sounds like an excellent plan.

Baggage

2008-04-09T22:34:00.002-07:00

Finished the knitted cotton shopping bag today. After a few failed attempts, I managed to bind off a reasonable number of stitches and then knit up some handles for the damnable thing. The handles don't quite line up the way that they're supposed to, but the thing looks reasonable and is finished. I'm slated to knit two more (one for the sister for our birthday and one for my mom for Mother's day), so I should be able to figure it out. There's still a fair amount of cotton left over and I'm tempted to try my hand at some dishcloths (matching ones shipped out with the bags would be a nice touch).

Headachey and vaguely coming down with something on top of everything else. I've spent the evening curled up in bed with a boy and that aforementioned bag, which was exactly what I needed. There's still too much going on in my life. I keep thinking that I'm cutting down on responsibilities and projects, only to suddenly find myself covered under three or four more. At some point I either have to learn how to say no or how to ask for help... more the former than the latter though.

Bedtime...

Culling and Cutting

2008-04-07T17:24:00.002-07:00

I keep trying to avoid the news so I don't hear anymore on the raid of the FLDS compound in Texas. Just reading about it makes me ill; I'm terrified for these girls, for what they've experienced and the struggles they'll face in the future.

Yesterday I cleared out half the closets in the house and all my drawers and bagged up clothes and shoes for Goodwill. When AK comes home we'll go through his closet (he never throws anything away) and then I'll feel somewhat settled for spring. I also reorganized all the DVDs, CDs, and my books. I can find things now (you would think someone who works in a library would be better about these things). I've just been feeling so overwhelmed lately by the amount of stuff that fills this apartment. Some of it is needful and useful and some of it is nice to have around, and a lot of it we can do without. There's no point in holding on to clothes I haven't worn in 4 years or books I never read or cookware that friends could use. I come from a family where you either moved every 4 years or you completely went through everything you owned. I know that someday I'll have to look at the three boxes of college and grad school notebooks and photocopies, but not today. Today I am happy that all my Margaret Atwood novels are stacked together and that I can find my work shoes in under a minute.

It's less awkward to type than to talk...

2008-04-05T17:57:00.003-07:00

I suppose that my body agreed that I've been too busy and too stressed lately with work and life in general. Last Saturday I noticed that I was losing my sense of taste, but chalked it up to a cold. On Sunday, about ten minutes before a number of friends were supposed to converge on the apartment for dinner, I noticed that my face wasn't working right. I was trying to rinse my mouth and noticed that water was shooting out of the left side. I started to call the Urgent Care Advice Nurse, since I could move everything else on that side of my body, but couldn't get through. AK came home about five minutes later, put me in the car, and drove to a clinic on the other side of town.

I've been diagnosed with Bell's Palsy. It's by no means life threatening. Basically I've lost my sense of taste, the ability to close my left eye easily, and the ability to control my facial muscles on the left side of my face. I was diagnosed and treated within hours of noticing the symptoms and have been stocked up with the requisite steroids and antivirals. I called out this entire week at work, since my eyes tire easily, I have to remember to take my pills five times a day, and it's difficult to eat or drink without looking like a total freakazoid.

The PA who saw me also suggested that this could be the result of stress (because I haven't been busting my ass at work, applying to graduate schools, worrying about AKs car, or a friend's visa, or my performance reviews...). A friend, echoed this, reminding me that sometimes our bodies break down as a way of forcing us to sit still for a minute. It's frustrating as hell, since it'll be at least a month before things are normal again. I am grateful that this is more of an inconvenience than anything else, but it's still hard for me. I'm not used to sitting still or calling out for work in Circ. My coworkers have been amazing covering everything, so I have no reason to worry. It's just hard to stop moving.

On a happier note, I helped a friend out in her lab on Monday. I rinsed out test tubes filled with the stuff that mothballs are made out of and bacterial gunk, and then rinsed them in bleach and put them in an industrial dishwasher (with door like Star Trek.. truly the most impressive piece of machinery they own). I then labeled 200 more test tubes, labeled 200 of those little plastic tubes with caps and watched my friend begin the inoculation of her subjects... or whatever that meant. I'd like to help her out again, since she hasn't any undergraduates or anyone else but herself on the project. It was actually rather relaxing, which of course my friend found astonishing. But you guys know me. I got to spend the day cleaning stuff and then putting labels on them and then putting them in order. And free coffee and tacos.

AK will be heading up to Seattle on weekends until Nationals to work with a group of saberists. It's pretty exciting since it means a new set of people to work out with (if I can head up with him on a Sunday). L, one of the fencers up there, is someone I'm looking forward to training with. We seem to be on the same track, fencing-wise, progressing in a similar fashion. I'd also like to become more familiar with the train up to Seattle (if things work out, I'll be heading up there often) and wandering around the city. However the odds of me ever getting a job up there is slim to none (over saturated with MLIS grads).

Pushing...

2008-03-26T21:09:00.003-07:00

I've not been as diligent about updating this as I would like, but honestly I've been running around too much to stop and compose something. There have been at least half a dozen nascent entries/ideas floating about, but when I finally found the time to sit down and stare at this cursor I couldn't pin anything down.

I've kept up the running, managing my fastest 5.3 mile loop yet (57 minutes and change). I was pacing with a more different homeschool mommy, who is very cool and very active. I'd love to be able to work up to the point where I could run a marathon with her, but we'll see. I think my goal will be to run the PDX Marathon in two years. Two years should allow me to really make running a part of my routine and should allow me to build up a solid base of cardio and strength. The idea of it, in the abstract, is only vaguely daunting. Twenty-six miles doesn't seem so large from here (here being the futon), but I have no real notion of what that means. If some days five miles can feel like an eternity, what about more than five times that? Still, I think it's something I want to accomplish. I want to prove to myself that I can be that strong, that I can complete something that massive. I'm not very good with massive undertakings (see the breakdowns/freakouts surrounding the undergrad thesis and MA dissertation). I suppose I need to prove to myself that I can set out to finish something without fear and pain (one would think library school would qualify, but it'll be another two months before I know if I'm in or not...). I think after running that far I can finally classify myself as an athlete (because fencing at least three times a week, running three times a week, and lifting do not an athlete make). Could I include anymore parenthetical asides in this paragraph (of course I can)?

The sorta-lace-scarf-from-sock-yarn is nearly a foot and I'm almost at the point on AK's sweater where I'll need help (picking up the stitches for the pocket). I'm trying to get a regular knit night going, but the scheduling is proving difficult. There's also the idea of a regular dinner night (bunch of friends get together with food, essentially) and a Geek Night (D&D and food, which should be hilarious since I've never played before and AK will have to DM). I'm in the middle of four books all at once (the memoir of the woman who escaped from FLDS, a biography of Colette, a historical mystery, and another feminist book).

The feminist reading has really been kicking my ass lately in that I'm left constantly questioning my own attitudes, preconceptions, and life in general. This is a good thing in that I will come out a better person for it, or at least a person who is better aware of her own ideals and motivations. However the turmoil of such constant probing is taking its toll. I half decide to have children, to forget the idea all together, to have AK raise them, to not have them, to send them to daycare. I poke and pick at old relationships and current ones and try to tease them apart to find their cores. It's exhausting work and rather self-centered. I can only hope that this will have some sort of far-reaching results in the future, but for now I'm trying not to think ahead that far. AK wonders aloud how it is that I'm managing to worry about worrying things. I tell him that I'm just that good.

Other than that I'm taking the evening easy in order to recover from the hard lesson, plyometrics, and run yesterday.

Catch up...

2008-03-14T08:37:00.003-07:00

The trip to the Right Coast was successful in that I managed to eat plenty of food, read a few fabulous novels, and chill with kittens both cranky and aloof. I really needed a few days of not having anything to do - no applications or pressing projects or editing for AK or balancing anything at all. It was absolutely lovely to be awoken Banzai Kittan style to a day filled with little more than reading, walking around, coffee, more reading, and Courbet (his current show at the Met is fantastic and features one of the best posters for a show that I've seen in a while). I miss being in that city or, more properly, near it.

I cannot profess to be a true New Yorker. People outside of the tri-state area assume that anyone who identifies as "being from New York" was born and bred in Manhattan. However I did grow up never more than a 2 hour train ride away (faster if you caught the commuter express) from all the museums and theatre and life that is NYC. There's a particular smell that catches you when you step out of the MTA car and onto the platform at Grand Central - electrical and dank and hot - that I find so comforting. While I love PDX and its cleanliness and devotion to all that is green and progressive, sometimes I want to walk around a city with a patina of exhaust and sidewalks cracked and skewed by tree roots, where everyone walks quickly and speaks even faster. I feel recharged when I visit, as if I'm somehow stronger, more of a badass for surviving my stay. When I touch down in PDX I feel my Queens' vowels start to fade and my gate soften, but a thin coating of something (dirt, attitude) remains.

The awesomeness of the trip was continued by a day spent checking out local knitting stores with a very awesome person. It was great to just rant and chat and squish yarn all afternoon. Should she open her knitting store with chocolate bar, I will be the first person on the couch. I finally bought the yarn for AK's sweater: a dark blue superwash wool (a Cascade 220). He loves the color and it's actually rather pleasing to knit with, though I am completely over this ribbing already. The pattern (the Wonderful Wallaby) looks like it won't be too much of a challenge. Picking up the stitches to make the pocket will probably be the most annoying part, but this is why I have a Trish. I really need to get a regular knit night going again. I don't think I would have finished my sweater if I hadn't had a set night a week to work on it. In my travels I also picked up some beautiful sock yarn that I'll be turning into a lace scarf (the pattern is, I hope, relatively easy and I can read my work better than before, but I'm still terrified) and a cheap ball of variegated wool that is slowly turning into my third Quant. I really adore that pattern. I wish I could find something else featuring entrelac that I really liked (not too big on the scarf since the wrong side is a bit funky looking).

What this post comes down to is that I miss Edd and I like my new knitting friend and yarn and that I want a cup of coffee now please.

Quickly now...

2008-03-04T13:00:00.004-08:00

I'm busy at work and with preparing for a short jaunt to the other coast, so pardon my brevity.

Sunday featured an excellent long run. We did the same trail as before, but this time I managed to go a little further and finished without stopping for walking breaks. 5.3 mi. in 59:20. I'm rather thrilled I managed it all in less than an hour (barely less... but it's something!). Once again I was pacing around the middle of the pack - the leaders were having a very good day and were at least 5 minutes ahead of me by the end. I noticed that I seem to have a problem somewhere in the middle of mile 3 Everything starts to hurt. Every step seems heavier than the last and the urge to just sit down and take a break gets overwhelming. Then suddenly the pain starts to dissipate and I'm cruising along without any problems. I'm sure it's more mental than physical and I'm trying to notice the physical and mental cues so I can nip it all in the bud. I'm sure it will take time though.

This weekend was short (just Sunday) since Spring Break is almost upon us. I'll be in the air on Thursday morning and back in PDX late Monday. The beauty of it all is that I'm only burning 2 vacation days on a 5 day vacation. I'm really looking forward to this trip; I feel that I've been going full tilt since before Winter Break (weeding and grad applications and more weeding etc.). I'm looking forward to sitting down and reading without worrying if I need to do another load of laundry or if there's another piece of paperwork that absolutely needs to be faxed. Also, kittens and my favorite person on the planet.

I've also been thinking about memory lately... but that's for another post. Local Holdings Records won't update themselves.

X-Training

2008-02-28T19:53:00.003-08:00

A somewhat successful week work-out wise. Monday AK and I (eventually) made it to the gym. I did squats for the first time in forever and really felt it... until about yesterday, actually. I'm happy that I can seem to do more weight on my upper body (not really pressing more than 20 lbs., but it's more than 10!) even with a bit of break from regular lifting. Seems like things are starting to stick, so to speak. Ran for a full half hour on Tuesday - 15 min. out and back. I think I did at least 3 miles (should properly gauge my usual routes), which was pretty satisfying. I just felt fast.

Yesterday was open bouting. It was a small turn out (most of the competitive kids cleared out early), but I still got a lot of practice in. I'm trying to work on parry-ripostes and, as always, finishing my attack. I was pretty successful on doing parry-riposte off the line (Russian #2 action/countertime), but not so much running backwards. I need to stay on the blade more, bind it more in some cases. I kept pushing one fencer to the end of the strip and then would get caught up in a counter-riposte war. Must Stop Riposting to Four! Still, a good bout.

I was really happy that I made the coach change on multiple occasions and picked up a parry when he thought his riposte was assured. I noticed that while fencing the rest of the class I was pretty calm and my endurance levels were excellent (hurrah for running!). But against the coach I found myself panting and tense. The few running books I've read have advised runners to occasionally "check in " on their bodies: Am I slouching? Is anything hurting? Can I push this or do I need to slow down? For the first time, I really checked in with myself on the strip: How's the brain dealing? Feet? Hand? I tried to relax back into my en garde after every touch, to let go of all the tension that developed during the action. I think it sorta worked. I felt more awake and "eyes open" actions came a little easier. I need to practice this in lessons, especially when I'm screwing up an action and about to lose it.

After practice I started writing in my running log (now training log I suppose) and started to wonder what my priority is in terms of sports. Am I a runner (albeit a newbie) who fences to cross-train or a fencer who runs to cross-train? I'm not really sure of the answer. I have more time for the running - it requires less equipment, I can do it as soon as I get home, and it's easy to drag people along. Right now I'm only bouting one night a week (getting to the competitive practice is doable, but a pain in the ass) and taking about two or three lessons a week. I'm not really competing in either sport. Maybe this is something I'm not suppose to answer right now. But it's still strange to think of myself, the girl who did stats for the high school volleyball team, as an athlete, let alone a multi-sport one.

That's pretty much all that's going on. There's the potential for huge changes at work (workflow/software related), but I can't really talk about that (there's also not much to report other than that we're waiting). I managed to make a meal tonight that featured four distinct food groups. I spent all of Tuesday night reading Full-Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti (founder of Feministing.com). The book raised so many thoughts and emotions and rants that I'm determined to read it a second time before I voice an opinion. I find it so difficult sometimes to have a solid, well-supported opinion on an issue or an idea. I tend to rely a lot on instinct and emotion. This is not to say that opinions founded on such a basis are necessarily inferior. Most of the time it's an emotional reaction to someone else's clearly parsed argument. I just find myself so completely unable to articulate my ideas when I feel passionate about something. There's a lot of stumbling over words and cursing involved instead of a well-outlined proposal. I'll sit down with the aforementioned book and a stack of paper and see what comes out. Hopefully more than "It's shitty, but it's not, and we can do better, and does Bush really think he can do that, and why is she writing with this voice, and god why have I never seen the classist side of things....."

But for now I'm going to curl up with American Gods.

1 hr/5 miles

2008-02-24T10:37:00.003-08:00

In preparation for today's run, I was up at 6:30 with AK. I showered and ate a Larabar (AK can get them at a discount at work and I wanted to try something mostly fruit and protein based before I ran). My usual running partner begged out of running today (too much stuff going on and she felt too tired), so it was just the four of us. I was picked up by the other part of the running group around 8. On the way to the trail it was announced the JG wanted to do a full hour today - half an hour out and then half a mile back. Considering I only did four miles last Sunday and haven't run all week I wasn't sure I could do it.

Started out at a slow pace and eventually sped up. Turned around at a little over 2.5 miles and turned back. On the way back I took 3 small walk breaks. I would keep asking myself, "How are we doing? Can we go to that tree?" and if yes, I'd keep going. If not, I'd stop and walk, setting a spot ahead where I would start to run again. I'd start strong from the break and then feel myself slowing down. Repeat. My right foot started acting up around mile 4.5, but I took a quick walk break to stretch it out. Finished 01:00:20 and 5 miles and change. We were all pretty beat at the end of it and I've been hydrating (did not do enough of that to start) and watching The Six Wives of Henry VIII. All in all, a very productive Sunday morning.