My final papers are handed in for the semester, and my brain is mush. Thus, I fall back on the joy that is Wordle, and present this blog and my workout blog as interpreted by its most virtuous algorithms!
The Nascent Librarian, as of today:
Jim vs., as of today:
Have a great and restful weekend, all!
So, because I’ve got so much time on my hands, I started another blog. This one’s dedicated to personal fitness, and it’s called “Jim vs.” Why am I posting about it here?
See? It all hangs together.
I’ll be back later this week to review Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds.
So, my Day 3 retrospective on CiL was driven from my head by my absolutely awful trip home. Rather than dwell on that, I’ll put together my thoughts on the whole shebang this weekend, perhaps with a discussion of trendy vs. viable.
Until then, check out something glorious (that some of you have probably seen already, but hey).
Well, the beginning of this blog, anyway. CiL2008 inspired me to start this thing, so it’s exciting to be back at CiL2009. And not just because I got to regale librarians with RockBand renditions of “Call Me” and “Dead or Alive”.
Last year I took a tremendous amount of information back to Catherwood and Syracuse. The study that I talked about in one of the first posts here found its way into a major project for my planning, marketing and assessment class (and a number of minor assignments for others), not to mention informing my contributions to the Web & Digital Projects Group and the various committees I serve on in CUL. And that’s only one presentation.
Hopefully, this year will top it.
This week I’m in the company of family in lovely Rehoboth Beach. I figured it’d be a good idea to explain why my posting pattern was about to become sparse.
*snerk* Comedy. Gold.
Self-deprecating humor aside — and there’s something that deserves its own tag — the past two weeks have been kind of crazy at the library, with some staff alterations and a trip down to Northern New Jersey to obtain nearly 600 volumes of labor and employment law books from a generous donor. (For the record: me and Ryan, the student assistant who accompanied me, managed to fit them into 55 boxes, all of which fit into the van we were driving. If that’s not success, I’m not sure what is.)
I’m trying to forget the craziness for the week, and stop thinking that I’d be better off there. Because, seriously? It’s all gonna be there when I get back, and right now I’ve got warm weather, a beach, and a sack full of books.
I’ll deal.
…but post infrequently.
The last two weeks have been very hectic, hence the dearth of posts. I’ve begun work on my internship for school, as well as undertaking the planning of a mission to New Jersey to collect a large collection of books that a friend of the library is kindly donating. The latter is turning out to be… logistically interesting. This is on top of my usual workload, by and large, rather than replacing it.
I’ve also found that my bi-weekly Google Calender posting reminders has transformed from a helpful spur to a crushing reminder of how remiss I’ve been. So, I’m gonna delete them all, start from scratch… and hopefully get back to posting stuff that’s a little less narcissistic than this post.
Professor Scott Nicholson, director of the Syracuse University iSchool’s LIS program, has put together a single RSS feed that provides posts from several professional blogs maintained by folks associated with the school.
The Nascent Librarian is one of those blogs. The publicity has doubled the number of total comments here in less than an hour. Sure, said number has gone from “one” to “two,” but surely that’s cause enough for giddiness and nervousness, right?
So, if you’re coming here by way of the aforementioned feed, welcome! And if you’ve actually been following this blog all along, go subscribe to that feed. Lotta cool people there posting cool things.
So, I turned in my last assignment for the semester last week, and then promptly went on vacation. It’s my sincerest hope that regular posting will happen this summer; in hindsight, starting this blog right before two of the toughest weeks of my semester was not a good move.
As it is, the semester seemed to end well (though I’m still waiting on grades for one of my classes), and I’m looking forward to a summer off that may or may not be replaced with a summer in which I work on my required internship. We’ll see.
But, as it stands, I’m wrapping up my first full year with 44% of my required credits completed, my enthusiasm for the profession undiminished, my skill set within the profession expanded, and a 91-page planning, marketing, and asessment report to show off.
I’m hoping that counts for something. :)
I’m sitting in the overflow space for the Washington Room at CiL2008. It’s a lovely space, with wide, outlet-filled tables perfect for laptops, and quiet while most attendees are off grabbing lunch at the free reception. Me, I grabbed food quickly and ran; things can get ugly when library folks line up. I mean, I started bringing this laptop after I almost caught a shiv in the kidney because someone thought I was trying to cut in the public computer line.*
I’ve enjoyed this, my first real library conference. I think I’ll try to dedicate a few posts to some of the more interesting seminars. I’m going to try to push out two or three posts a week on this thing, so it’ll be nice to start off with a good supply of fodder.
And with that inspirational metaphor for the future quality of this blog’s content, I shall retire to someplace with cell phone reception.
* This statement is a total lie. I’m still in the process of “finding my voice,” as they say in the blogosphere (or at least, in the blogging workshop I attended on Monday). It remains to be seen whether or not “mendacious hyperbole” will remain a characteristic of this voice.
So, this is where I’ll blog about my experiences attending library school online and working as a library paraprofessional who’s trying to make the jump into official librarianship. I’ve been considering doing this for a while, but my experience at Computers in Libraries 2008 inspired me to get started.
Of course, since I’m sitting in a session at said conference as I write, I’ll keep this short.
More to come!
