positively presidential

I’m finally getting around to reading Sarah Vowell‘s Assassination Vacation. It rules. I’m three quarters of the way through, and I bought it a few days ago. (I needed something to read on the train that wasn’t school-related, so I could let my brain rest, but not actually fall asleep, because if I did, then when I got home I’d be too tired to do more school work. Make sense? Good.) She tells a fine story. I already knew I liked her, what with the bits of Partly Cloudy Patriot, and the various TAL bits, and who could forget her appearence on the TMBG documentary, Gigantic… etc.

It’s been fun to read because in her quest to follow the routes of John Wilkes Booth, she of course went to Maryland to visit Dr. Mudd’s house. Now, I lived for 10 years in Charles County, MD. Not many people understand what it’s like there. I mean, the only famous things we have are a 1) a tornado ate most of my town (La Plata) a few years ago and 2) that crappy neo-punk-pop band Good Charlotte graduated from High School two years after me. Other than that, what do we have? Dr. Mudd, of course! The man who was convicted (and later pardoned) of helping John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln.

Maryland is a peculiar place. Few people really appreciate the “southerness” of it. Technically, Maryland was for the Union, but they really didn’t want to be. Sarah Vowell is quick to point out that their theme song is all about being more like Virginia and woo hoo south and what not. And Charles County is adamant that you’re aware that it’s in Southern Maryland. It wasn’t really all that bad. Had I not spent my adolescence there, it might have been way more fun. She sure does hit on the vibe, though. I was reminded of the reasons I moved away. Oh, and one mustn’t forget the fact that most of the area is swamp land and that makes for one oppressive summer, I tell you.

It’s been great fun learning more about things I only vaguely remember from history classes. Her sense of humor makes her seem like someone I’d totally be friends with. She’s obsessed with this stuff, and makes looking at skull fragments and blood-stained shirts the most fun ever. I’d certainly never say that I’d been “Seward plaqued” for having read this book.

What’s especially cool is her explanation of why she’s so obsessed with assassinations. It comes from wanting to know everything about American history for the love of it. That sounds lame, but it’s really quite cool. I love stories, and know so very few about the people who have made this country what it is (for better or worse). I just kind of vaguely remember the ones I’ve heard repeated over and over again, but those seem so fake and touristy. I want to know the real people involved– all the gory details.

I mean, I’m an archives student for goodness sake. I should have a better grasp at the people involved in making American history. It’s the people that are the center of Sarah Vowell’s story: the presidents, yes, but also her sister, nephew, friends, etc. They’re all a part of it, too. And that kicks ass.

silly silly

Today’s technology class was a silly time, indeed. It seems that when pushed to the limits of sleep deprivation, I tend to lose control over my inner monologue. I think I must have verbalized every thought that went through my head including this gem:

Other student: There’s this website, called “book burro.”
me: What? (Much louder than I had intended.)
OS: Book burro.
me: Oh! (really fucking excited) Like a DONKEY!!!

It was an amusing time, I tell you. Oh, and combined with my over enthusiastic donkey outbursts, I was also barely able to contain my utter boredom and lack of tolerance for some of the students in class. There was this one guy who wouldn’t shut up. Hypocrite? Indeed. But, really, he hasn’t shut up all semester, and me? I just had a little outburst-filled day, that’s all.

It got a little out of hand when (for goodness knows what reason) I felt compelled to show off my cell phone cozie… I think it had something to do with making PDAs more friendly.

I’ve walked around today not knowing what to do with myself. I don’t have to be in the library. It’s really nice out. I went for a walk. I talked on the phone. I’ve eaten food. Now what? I have a fun book to read, but I can’t seem to settle anywhere. Strange times, I tell you.

(editor’s note: 2 spelling errors fixed -Electric Monk)

time for beers

I just submitted the last paper I have to write for the semester. Hurrah!

I do, however, still have my internship to finish up, and the final project associated with that, but it’s not such a big deal. Mostly, the project will be a compilation of parts I’ve been working on all semester. I do have to write a few pages (2 or 3) describing the work that I’ve done there, and explaining the “final product.” Not too bad, really. And, I have a week and a half to work on it. Huzzah! If I can write two papers in three days, I think I can handle that. (And I didn’t even slack on the papers, it just took so damn long to read all the materials for the papers, that I had to squeeze writing them into those few days. It sucked, but at least I didn’t have writer’s block like last time, eh?)

I’m rather sleep deprived. Could use some coffee, but when I’m over tired, my stomach hurts, and if I have coffee when my stomach hurts, the coffee makes it worse. So, if you happen to see me today, I may be extra loopy. Also due to sleep deprivation, I keep feeling like I’m still on the train– like I’m having to walk around on something that’s moving. Strange feeling, that.

fun times

Lest I forget, I saw the Yarn Harlot on Thursday. As per her usual format, she took photos of the crowd with the sock. I’m in the first one, mid-way on the left. You can’t really see me that well, but I’m the only one in the crowd with a baseball hat on. It’s dark blue. You might be able to make me out in the crowd. Anyway, Abby, the Spinstah*, and I saw her speak in Cambridge at a Masonic Hall. She was very fun and the crowd was super, too. We wanted to find a way to make it in to her blog, but forgot to actually implement a plan. We were going to make sure that she knew we were library students. We figured that might impress her enough to stick us in there, but we got all sidetracked when we actually spoke to her. Silly us.

* Edit: The Spinstah provides a much more comprehensive post about the afternoon. When I wrote this, my brain was tired. You can get the details from her. And, yes, our templates are still the same. I haven’t had time to hunt for new ones. A few weeks and that shall be remedied. Hurrah!

Saturday night was the Life is Good Productions meeting. It was fairly productive, too. I’ll be posting some of our upcoming events for those interested. After the meeting we had a party. It was super fun, as you may have guessed from the previous post.

I probably won’t post again until next weekend, seeing as how I have two papers due this week. Argh. Alright, off to the library.

drunk blah blah blahging

Admittedly, this is probably a bad idea. I’m probalby a little too silly to type right now, but we’ll see how this goes. We’re at Chad’s right now. I haven’t gnawed on too many people this evening– rather unlike me. Usually, by this time I’ve gnawed on half of the attendees. We viewed a ton of photos earlier, as per usual at Chad’s functions. There was a fun slide show of ME pictures, wherein you could witness the silliness of all the faces I tend to make when I’m, um, well, silly I suppose. Funny stuff. Chad loves to take photos of himself. Pretty fun crowd right now. I’m not really sure why I sat down at the computer. Oh, yeah. To look up Corn Mo. I love that guy. He’s awesome. You should check him out. Corn Mo. He rules.

Mucho “fruity Ruthies” this eve. later gaters.

Silly.

Internet quizzes for my deflated brains. Enjoy.

Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

Melty brains and techy librarians

I just had my Technology for Information Professionals “midterm” exam. It was postponed three weeks because we hadn’t yet covered all the material that was to be included. We had 105-110 questions on the study guide (depending how you broke them up) and 25 were on the exam, which was worth 60% of our grade. I didn’t buckle under the pressure, thank goodness, but my brain has officially melted and it’s oozing all over the computer lab as I type this.

I present the following as a draft to my course evaluation, which will be made public through our course evaluation process at the end of the semester. Well, maybe not a draft, but certainly a rambly rant about what I think needs to change in order to make the course more effective.

The purpose of this technology course is to address the disparate technological aptitutes among the students in the GSLIS program. We all come from various technological backgrounds, and the course is designed to bridge those differences and allow us, as future librarians, to communicate with a strong technology vocabulary. After all, patrons will go to the nearest librarian on duty when the public access computer they’re using decides to explode. Librarians need to feel comfortable working in a technology-based environment.

Sounds good, right? It hasn’t been as effective at achieving those goals as it could have been.

I have enjoyed the content of the course, and have learned much regarding computing technology, and a little about how libraries use technology, etc., but the assessment process has left much to be desired. First, we were given a study guide in the beginning of the semester that was essentially a big, jumbled mess of questions that didn’t seem to relate to each other in any sort of categorical sense. I’m a library student. Give me categories, please. I wasn’t able to make much sense of the question list until one week before the exam. Prior to that, I had tried to answer the questions as we covered material in the lectures. I found that to be quite difficult, because I had to simultaneously sift through hundreds of slides from the Powerpoint file, while trying to pick out the relevant questions in the study guide. It was overwhelmingly frustrating, and each time I sat down to study, I became more and more confused.

If, however, we had been quizzed after each unit, and if the study guide were broken down thematically, then studying would have been a breeze.If all the networking questions, for example, were set out together, we could have pieced together the details much more effectively and efficiently. I do understand that it was probably the instructor’s intention to jumble everything up so that we had to work hard to find the related concepts among the questions and to figure things out on our own. While that is certainly an acceptable goal, the implementation was frustrating, confusing, and highly inefficient. It wasn’t until right before the exam that the Big Picture of the concepts began to emerge. And then I could finally go back to the very detailed questions and begin piling them together to make some sort of sense.

That method is contrary to all good sense. It’s backwards, really. I’m not against having to work hard to learn the material, but I despise inefficiency. And it’s downright unacceptable for the assessment process in library school to be inefficient. Even if, in my hypothetical model, we had a large final exam to pull it all together, I still think quizzes would have been a great way to help us to prepare for the exam, just to make sure we were understanding the concepts at hand. Not to mention the saftey net it would have provided for our grades.

And I have to mention the sheer size of the instructor’s lecture slides. Hundreds and hundreds of slides per unit, and I think there were maybe five or so units. Not only were they expensive to print, but in order to glean important information from them, you had to use a magnifying glass. Many of the slides were screen caps of web pages with definitions of techy terms. To save space (and money) I printed the slides six to a page, double sided, so that screen cap was teeny tiny, and not so useful to me. Thank goodness I was able to repair my glasses in time.

All in all, I appreciate what this course is trying to do, and I do think it’s necessary for our profession to be, if not tech savvy, then certainly tech literate. I just hate having to waste time and energy on something that could be taught so much more effectively. It’s a problem that other students in different sections are having as well. I should also say that my issues with the course do not have anything whatsoever to do with my opinion of the instructor as a person, or the effectiveness of her lectures. The information that we’re exposed to in class is valuable, and she is able to provide context along the way. So, I suppose this whole blah blah blah is really only about the assessment process.

I want to make note of all these things while they’re fresh, because I want to provide a concise evaluation at the end of the term. I’ll have to come back to these notes when that time comes.

Four weeks, more or less

I had to write out, in excruciatingly minute detail, my work schedule for the next four weeks or so. That’s all that’s left of school for this semester. I still have an ass-load of stuff to do, though. Three assignments for archives, and two for technology, including two research papers, and a crazy exam. Seriously, that technology exam is going to kick my ass. I understand everything, I’m just not up to regurgitating it for an exam. Didn’t I have enough of that as an undergrad? If the instructor wanted to assess our comprehension, I would have rather taken a series of short quizzes after each section, than this monster of an exam. It’s worth 60% of our grade, to boot. I’m not happy about that at all. But after Friday, it will be done with. I just have to make it to Friday.

Anyway, I made the schedule in Xcel. It’s a sort of chart-thing that says what I should be doing when and how long I have to work on things. It took an hour to make, but I think it’s worth it. My brain was getting jumbled with all the things to keep track of.

I’ve finished collecting sources for my papers, now I just have to read all of them. Argh. I think I’m on the right track, though, so I’m happy about that. I’m not really sure what my angle is yet for the Archives paper. My topic is loosely this: the history of the principle of provenance, and new developments. I can’t seem to get hold of any of the classic theory writing, but I have plenty of “rethinking the classics” type stuff that addresses the theories back in the day. I should be all set. It’s not really a research paper, anyway.  It’s more of a literature review type thing. I’ve selected several articles from a few different journals, three of which are published by different countries (Australia, Canada, and the US). I think I’m going to address their differences in approach to archival theory.

Interesting? Of course it isn’t. But I panicked when we had to choose a topic in the first couple of weeks of the semester, and I didn’t have any other ideas. I’m sort of stuck with it, and have to make the best of it. I’m sure it will be fine, I just have to get reading. Blargh. Papers.

procrastinator makes good

Avoidance leads to anxiety, which leads to avoidance and more anxiety. It’s a known fact that if you just suck it up, and start something, the rest of the process will go much more smoothly.

We had paper topics due today for technology class. I find myself not really caring much about that class, and rather blowing it off. Mind you, I show up and take awesome notes, and what have you, but my heart isn’t in it. My mind is occupied by thoughts of my archives class, and the massive amount of work I have to do yet for that class. Needless to say, even though I’ve had a paper topic all set in my mind, I hadn’t yet done any preliminary research to find some appropriate sources. When we turned in our paper topic, we only had to have two sources listed. That’s super easy, right?

Yeah, well, I checked the posting board today, and wouldn’t you know it, the topic I wanted had already been proposed by someone else. Even my back up topic had been chosen. So, I had to think fast, and get something turned in this afternoon. The paper’s loose specifications state that it has to have something to do with new technology and libraries. I was determined to not let this paper be a waste of time, so I wanted to focus on some archival aspect.

I chose to focus on emerging technologies in archives and how they affect user access. Sounds good, right? I think it’s good enough for a 10 page paper for this class. I have found several sources already, and have yet to finish looking through all the available archival journals. I chose not to do an electronic search, because I can never find what I want right away, and didn’t have time to experiment with too many search strings. I just went to the stacks and began looking through the tables of contents of the archival journals within the last seven years.

My brain is worn out from all that work in a short period of time. I plan on coming in Monday to begin reading some of the articles, and to find more sources for my actual archives class paper. I’m doing that one on the history of the principle of provenance. (I had to pick that topic in a hurry in the beginning of the semester, and it is rather bland, but should be easy enough to research.)

Snow and spells

I doubt it will accumulate, but it’s snowing pretty hard out right now. I finished my paper. It really was no problem. I don’t think it is long enough, and I’ll probably get a few more “not thoughtful enough” comments from the professor, but I’m really not up to caring about that right now. I’m exhausted.

I had some crazy-ass dreams last night. The only one I really remember with any sort of clarity had some pretty gruesome moments. I was gathered in someone’s backyard with a few friends. There was a party going on in the house, but we had more important things to do. Apparently, we were part of some magical group coven thing, and it was up to us to defeat some great evil that was coming. We had wands and were trying various incantations to build our powers so that we’d be strong enough to fight the evil. Somehow (and this is a bit fuzzy) we realized that in order to build our powers we had to kill someone and then bring them back to life. Through the course of our practice in the backyard, it was determined that only I was strong enough to do this.

I was responsible for killing my friends and then healing them. And once they died and were healed, they would also be stronger, and so could go kill and heal someone else to make them stronger, etc. This was how we were going to destroy the evil. By killing each other.

With no hesitation, I muttered some incantation, which sent a light out of my wand, slitting my friend’s throat. I muttered another incantation, sending another light to heal the wound. I did this for each friend that was there. I don’t remember the killing spell, but I do remember the healing one: theodoro-salvatore. It’s some sort of faux latin. After all of the killing/healing I was rather tired, and had to depend on my friends to protect me until I’d had enough rest to fight the evil myself. The dream ended before we had to do any fighting.

Oh, and all through the killing/healing another friend kept interrupting us from the party wanting to know when we were going to make her a drink. She didn’t seem too impressed by the gravity of our situation. Eventually, I became so annoyed with her that I cast one final spell before waking up: dormiendo protectadoro im pace. More faux latin. I didn’t want her to be killed by the evil when it eventually came, so I put her to sleep to shut her up, but also put a protection charm on her.

Interesting stuff, eh?