First Snow of the Year

First Snow of the Year, originally uploaded by librarykatja.

It snowed! And then melted. But it was really pretty while it lasted.

 

A Snapshot of My Day

As per usual, most of the good ideas that I write about in here are not my own, so I’m giving full credit to David Lee King and his “What did David do today?” post. I was especially intrigued by the idea because I’m a huge fan of microhistory, and I always like to read about what other archivists actually do…so here’s my very own little slice of archival life.

• Refined and sent out for approval the text of an outreach handout that will be included in the “Athletic Hall of Fame” inductee packets. (”Athletic Hall of Fame” is a University of Denver Athletics and Recreation ceremony that’s held once a year to honor individuals and teams who have made important contributions to DU Athletics history)
• Discussed the progress of the baseline DU Athletics and Recreation chronology with my research assistant.
• Received the “ok” on the image header I created for the blog that will contain all project updates.
• Attended a lunchtime presentation on the use of Second Life for distance education in the physics department.
• Reviewed the draft of the record group structure that I developed based on DU directory information, Athletics and Recreation org charts, and my interviews with unit directors and other project personnel.
• Drafted preliminary processing plan for the Athletics and Recreation records that are currently in the University Archives.
• Did some test data entry to see if the record group structure and processing plan would hold up under systematic processing with our collections management software.
• Went home and watched “Valley Girl” and “Harold and Maude.”

Okay, so the last one isn’t explicitly job-related, but taking mental breaks is key to maintaining workplace focus…and I view Friday night movie-watching as a very important mental break.

 

I is workin. Wat u want?

I know I’m usually a grammar stickler, but I can’t resist the lolcat grammar. Also, the grammatical unorderliness is a mirror of my mind at the moment; my new job is fantastic and challenging and I’m learning a lot, but the result of all that learning is that when I do actually get home, I’m effectively brain-dead.

So, hopefully that will change soon, and my brain will adjust, and I’ll start rhapsodizing (coherently) in detail about various aspects of my job.

Until then, well, here’s a lolcat. Enjoy.

 

SAA 2007 Synopsis - Full Report Later

First and foremost, Studs Terkel is amazing and a legend and he really, really likes to talk.

Second, only Studs Terkel’s talk running late could have prevented me from attending the Blogger Get-Together that happened this Thursday. I did get to meet with Sally Jacobs, the lovely author of The Practical Archivist, that night, which was a treat and a half…I couldn’t have asked for a more ebullient fellow blogger.

Anyway, to the business at hand:

Workshops and sessions I attended and will be blogging about in further detail:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Managing the Digital University Desktop

Advanced Electronic Records Management

Digitization Matters Symposium

New Member/First Timer Breakfast and Orientation

Free Speech, Free Spirit: The Studs Terkel Center for Oral History (in addition to Studs, Michael Gorman spoke…which I thought was more than a little odd)

When Good Photo Collections Go Bad: Critical Concepts for Understanding and Managing Photo Collections

Reference Service and Minimal Processing: Challenges and Opportunities

MPLP Comes Home to Roost: Applying the Greene-Meissner Recommendations Broadly Across an Institution

Archival Education for the Digital Age

The Dynamics in the Aggregate: Shareable Metadata and Next-Generation Access Systems

If anyone has any specific questions about these, just leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you; I took copious notes, but given the ridiculous price of wireless internet at the Fairmont (don’t even get me started on that) and the fact that most of the discussion rooms were chairs-only (no tables on which to set my laptop), a lot of those notes are hand-written, so actually getting a handle on them might take awhile….not to mention that tomorrow I will be flying to Colorado and beginning to unpack all of my things, and so I’ll be pretty busy (to say the least). However, I do think it’s valuable to have some information on these sessions out there, so I will be blogging about it…it just might take awhile.

To everyone who is currently in Chicago, I hope to see you at the All-Attendee Reception at the Millenium Park Rooftop Terrace. I’m tall anyway and I’m wearing wedge heels, so if you see me (that is, if you recognize me from my pic on the SAA wiki profile), say hi!

 

MacBook and iPod Lust - Requited! Also - I’m Leaving for Chicago Tomorrow!

Lots of things have happened in the past few weeks:

• I got my first professional archivist job in Colorado (see below post)
• I found a house in Colorado (see Flickr pics…and picture it without the rasta flag and other college paraphernalia)
• I had my last day at the office where I have worked (in a non-archival capacity) since 2003

But, the most momentous of all….

I am finally the proud owner of both a 15″MacBook Pro and an iPod nano! I have to confess, there was a subsidy in the case of the MacBook, but my PC was starting to make me a little nervous (I got the blue screen of death a few times) and I was really sick of being yoked to my desk at home. The nano, well, I couldn’t resist, and I’m glad I didn’t. My trips to Colorado for both the job interview and the house-hunting were relatively stress-free, and I think it was largely due to the Ella at my fingertips.

I will be traveling to the Society of American Archivists conference tomorrow, where I’ll be attending the DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard), Managing the Digital University Desktop, Advanced Electronic Records Management, and Digitization Matters workshops, in addition to the annual meeting. I am pretty darn psyched.

Also, as far as I can tell, the “Blogger Get-Together” (which, incidentally, is not just for the bloggers, but for anyone involved in making the annual meeting more “2.0″…Flickr taggers, wiki creators, etc.) will be held on Thursday at lunch, exact times and locations TBA. This is probably one of the only chances I’ll get to meet some of the other archival bloggers/wiki-creators, etc. out there, so I hope everyone who’s there and who even sort of fits this description will come.

Be forewarned, I’ll probably take pictures.

 

I Am Gainfully Employed — And Consequently on a Blogging Hiatus

I have been offered (and have accepted) a project archivist position in Colorado!

I’m guessing that the next month will be taken up with the general business of relocating, especially since I will be at the SAA conference essentially right before my start date.

Anyway, my point is that I’m not sure if I’ll be posting between now and the middle of September, but I just wanted to make sure that it was clear that I hadn’t abandoned my little blog, I’m just on a hiatus until the dust settles.

 

Tagmash on LibraryThing - Baby Steps Toward More User-Friendly Subject Headings?

LibraryThing has just introduced a feature called “tagmash” that is, as David Weinberger puts it, “creating subject headings from the bottom up.”

I don’t know that I would go so far as to call them subject headings…the experiment is still too new to know how this will all shake out.  However, these tagmashes have a great deal of potential, when enough have been generated, to provide a far more useful search tool than (in my opinion) LCSH does. Tagmashing is a chance to combine a lot of what makes tagging great (user-friendly, current language, allowing for multiple perspectives, users decide what is meaningful/interesting) with what makes subject searching great (potential for less ambiguity, combining frequently searched/related terms).   

How it works:

When users search for two or more tags, LibraryThing creates a persistent URL for that “tagmash” (for example, this page of the tagmash for ‘France’ and ‘WWII’). This is a bit different from Flickr’s clusters, which are (at least from what I understand) fully automated, as these are the aggregated results of user searches.

Why it’s not not a silver bullet (yet):

One of the commenters on Weinberger’s blog post made an excellent point: at the moment, at least, this process has the potential to even increase ambiguity, depending on the subject: “philosophy, history” can be about the philosophy of history (historiography, etc.), “older” philosphy (Plato’s ‘The Republic’), or a history of the discipline of philosophy.

How I think this would (ideally) impact the archival world:

This is an especially interesting development to me, as my first thought after reading about tagmashing was of Elizabeth Yakel (and co-authors’) D-Lib article “Creating The Next Generation of Archival Finding Aids” was how wonderful it would be if the next-generation finding aids that Yakel discusses could incorporate this feature.* Having created EAD finding aids, I found myself wondering about what other possibilities these types of finding aids had for users, especially in terms of subject headings (the finding aids I created used LCSH) that, as far as I could tell, were not often a good fit for very regionally or subject-specific collections, especially those with creators who were not well-known.

One problem I can see right off the bat is that these types of collections tend to be (relative to the types of materials on LibraryThing) low-usage, and so the statistically less useful user-generated tags (”my aunt Alice and her brother”) would not necessarily be knocked out of place by the potentially more-useful tags/tagmashes.

The way I choose to believe that problem would be solved, should archival tagmashing actually arise, is that one would just market the heck out of your collection and make it the “it” place to be online.

*Yakel points out multiple other possibilities for online finding aids in the article…which is fantastic and thought-provoking, and the Polar Bear Digital Collections project, on which the article is based, are fascinating. Read the article and visit the collections now, if not sooner.

 

Web Worker Daily on “What is Your ‘Third Place’” - No Mention of Libraries

Diverging from the archival theme, I noticed a post on one of my regular technology-related feeds that really struck me, and is related to the information profession…but definitely not specifically to archives, so bear with me.

Web Worker Daily posted a “What is Your Third Place?” open thread, primarily discussing where telecommuters/web workers go in order to counterract the feelings of isolation that working from home can sometimes cause, and I was a little sad (but not incredibly surprised) that no one in the comments section mentioned the library as their “third place.” 

 I’m having a bit of trouble with the concept of “third place,” (a term coined by Ray Oldenberg in his books “Celebrating the Third Place” and “The Great, Good Place“) as it seems to be tied closely to the terms “public” or “civic space,” (a place that is paid for by all, for all people), but the term “third space” doesn’t differentiate (at least from what I can tell) between commercial and non-commercial space…it’s just the place where you go that is not-work and not-home (as well as meeting Oldenburg’s “eight criteria,” which you can find in “The Great, Good Place”).

Increasingly, corporations (Starbucks, Panera, Borders) have co-opted many of the aspects associated with “third place,” (heck, Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks, even markets Starbucks as a “third place”). Don’t get me wrong, I love coffee shops, bookstores, and restaurants, I think they are vital parts of a creative, connected community. However, due to their commercial nature, I can’t agree with Ray Oldenburg when he calls them “neutral public spaces.” Staring at that sentence, I realize how ridiculous it is that I’m disagreeing with the person who coined the term in the first place, but I don’t see how a place that exists primarily to get the people who enter it to spend their money could be seen as neutral.

So, what happens when, as is mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. article I’ve linked to below, libraries add on a Starbucks? Does this diminish their status as a third place? Does the digital environment of MMOGs constitute another legitimate third place? (P.S., David Lee King and the good folks at It’s All Good (four OCLC bloggers) have some interesting things to say on this topic)

I’m not entirely sure what the answers to those or many of the other questions that are swirling around in my mind when it comes to this idea. But, much like everything else on this blog, I’m sure I’ll re-visit it at some point with at least a slightly clearer idea of what I do actually think.

More articles on this subject. I’m being rebellious and not using APA format.

•  ”Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space,” Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington D.C., February 2005.
• “The Library as a Place: Tradition and Evolution” William Miller, Library Issues, Vol. 22, No. 3, January 2002.
• “The Deserted Library: As Students Work Online, Reading Rooms Empty Out – Leading Some Campuses to Add Starbucks” - Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 16, 2001.
• “Working Out of a Third Place” Marco R. della Cava, USA Today, October 4, 2006.

 

Archivists Are a Class in Dungeons and Dragons

Continuing the horror theme I began in the “Zombies + Libraries = Awesome!” post, I was browsing the “archivist” tag in del.icio.us today, and found that archivists are their own class in the Heroes of Horror, a supplement for D&D players who want to bring a bit of the horror genre into their gaming.

 I’m not super-familiar with D&D, but I found a couple of the tidbits of information about the “archivist class” especially fun:

This quote made me think immediately of the SAA Code of Ethics:

The most important characteristic for an archivist is a keen Intelligence. That intellect must also be tempered with a high degree of Wisdom, due to the fine line the archivist must walk in studying evil without being corrupted by it.

These next two quotes sound a heck of a lot more glamorous than my general daily activities during the small amount of professional experience I’ve had…but I don’t know that someone outside the profession would want to re-enact the creation of EAD finding aids just for fun:

The archivist’s class features all serve to further his overall purpose, which is to seek out mystical, divine lore from strange and forbidden sources, and to gain both understanding and mastery thereof.

  The archivist can use his dark knowledge to help his allies fight off the corrupting influence of other creatures.

This next quote I can see on a t-shirt…Archivists: Not as Stuffy As Wizards.

Something that also struck me was that, even in D&D, archives is viewed as a vocation, and one that won’t necessarily reward you with gratitude (or monetarily).

Generally speaking, you aren’t quite as stuffy as the average wizard, given your breadth of experience and high Wisdom score, but neither are you a chest-thumping champion of the gods. The secrets you uncover are their own reward, and your confidence in yourself and in the job you do is more rewarding than the empty gratitude of some group or hierarchy.

Here’s that vocation thing again:

It is often said that archivists are born, not made. Many who embrace this class do so out of a genuine thirst for learning, often accompanied by a reverence or admiration for divine power.

My favorite, saving the best for last:

 Many archivists are archivists for life; the more hidden lore they uncover, the more they feel they still have to learn.

 

Tim Gunn’s Mom Was a Librarian

Tim Gunn, the stylish voice of reason on Bravo’s Project Runway, is getting his own series on Bravo, “Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style,” (based on his book of the same name).

However, the truly exciting part of reading the article announcing his new series was that, when asked about his distinctive speaking style and wit, Gunn, who describes himself as a “big nerd,” said,

My vocabulary comes from years of teaching…My mother was a librarian, and I grew up with tons of books, and they are a blessing and a curse.

I knew there was a reason I felt such a kinship with him.