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Library school

Library geeking for school and fun

This week’s assignment for one of my classes was a "pretend cataloging" kind of assignment: take three books we’d read, and assign them Library of Congress subject headings. I discovered that I gravitate to hard-to-classify books (James Elkins’ Pictures and Tears was the trickiest one; I still don’t get why "Crying," an honest-to-God LC subject […]

Winter blahs and everyday information seeking

This has been a week of tiredness and too many layers of clothing and that nagging "am I coming down with a cold?" feeling, combined with mild panic over the fact that within the next five weeks, I have to plow through a big stack of readings, write a grant proposal, and put together a […]

Reveling in geekiness

In class tonight we all had to bring in a couple of reference books. Most of us grabbed whatever we could find at home, though a few of us found reference books that could be checked out of the library. (I brought in 201 Italian Verbs, the MLA Handbook, and the Gramophone Opera Good CD […]

Hooray for productivity

The stack of readings and assignments I have due tomorrow and Thursday? Done, all but for the last five or so pages of a chapter from Thomas Mann’s* Library Research Models that I didn’t quite finish on the train. (I’m finding it surprisingly engrossing. The bit I was reading on the train elucidated why encyclopedias […]

Winter quarter overview

My classes this quarter are Information Resources & Services II and Professional and Social Aspects of Information Services. I’d heard good things about the latter last term, and now I see why. The professor uses the mildly terrifying pedagogical device of randomly choosing four class members to stand up and talk for a few minutes […]

End-of-term status report

Final group project for systems analysis class: Turned in on Monday. (And you know what? I really dig entity relationship diagrams.) Final exam for systems analysis class: Taken. Whew. A bit tougher than I thought, but not impossibly so. Final bibliography for information resources and services class: Uploaded to Blackboard today. My first term of […]

The not-so-lost art of conversation?

Last night and Tuesday night were my last two nights of classes this term. I’d forgotten the end-of-term feeling: one part nostalgia, one part "yikes, I’ve still got to take an exam and hand in two final projects," one part "onward!". On Tuesday night we learned about project management and systems implementation in my systems […]

That uncharted-territory feeling

For my Information Resources and Services class, our final project is an annotated bibliography of research into the information-seeking behavior of a particular group. My initial idea was to choose voters as the group I’d research; I figured that, since information about candidates and ballot initiatives comes from such a variety of sources, and since […]

What else I’ve been up to: a list

Wrapping my head around data modeling, particularly entity-relationship modeling, which is bizarrely fun. Also Dialog, a.k.a. (depending on one’s perspective) “You’re learning Dialog? Oh my God, why?” or “a powerful teaching tool” or “hours of pain, but you’ll be better at power-searching databases than anyone else.” Even though I persistently forget that S is short for both “set” […]

New vocabulary

Unfamiliar phrases to which I’ve been introduced of late: inverted filecritical pathscope creepwaterfall modeltimeboxbusiness logicpre-coordinate systemassembly language I keep thinking I should make a found poem out of them…