Since I last posted…

So, as I posted more than a few months ago, I took a position as the Project Archivist for Athletics and Recreation at the University of Denver in September 2007. I accepted the position because I could instinctively tell that I would be working with one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic archivists in the biz, Greg Colati, as well as a senior administrator in the Division of Athletics and Recreation who was passionately committed to the success of the project. I have to say, my experience with the job has been everything I hoped for and then some. The only real issue with the job was that it was a year-long position.

I’m happy to announce that, between my hiring as project archivist and now, I’ve been appointed Interim Archives Processing Librarian. The gist of this is that I have a chance, between now and when a national search is completed, to supervise all of special collections processing for the University of Denver. In addition to being a fantastic opportunity, I also get to participate in what I believe to be a pretty revolutionary re-structuring…archives processing will move underneath the administrative umbrella of the library’s Technical Services unit.

I’ve been “on the job” for about a week and a half now, so I don’t really have a lot to report on yet, but I hope to soon…and I hope to do so a lot more regularly than I have been for the past year!

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Your Own Simpsons or South Park Character!

One of my friends pointed out these incredibly fun and funny time-wasters to me a few days ago, and I have to say, after having played with them for the last half an hour, they definitely live up to the hype.

These are the two that I created in my own image (see, funny AND you get to have a little bit of a God complex!). Each picture is an active link to the site on which they were created.

 Be forewarned, the game that allows you to create the Simpsons avatar is within the promotional website for the Simpsons movie, so you will have to look for it a bit; it’s along the top of the screen. It’s well worth it though, trust me.

 Enjoy!

 

Today’s Obligatory Flower Close-Up – Geranium!

Geranium, originally uploaded by librarykatja.

Gotta love that red. It’s a power color.

 

Is Librarianship Cool Now? Did I Miss Something?

Librarians 1.0, originally uploaded by agsaandjsmom.

I know I’ve written about how librarianship as a profession needs to (among other things) embrace and play with its kitschy, sort of retro public image to both make our profession more visible and show in the process that, hey, we do have a sense of humor about it. The Lee County Librarians, in the above picture, are doing just that, to hilarious effect.

To continue with this train of thought, I was surprised how ambivalent I felt when I saw the “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers” article in the New York Times today, especially when it did everything that I had stated I wanted:
 

• Showed that librarianship, as a profession, is changing. Jessamyn West is even quoted as saying that it’s become a techie profession, and mentions that she checks Twitter, does IM reference, and, obviously (to the biblioblogosphere, anyway) blogs frequently.

• Profiled young librarians who reference but don’t fit the aforementioned stereotype. They’re literate, social, (sometimes tattooed and pierced) politically active “hipster” types. 
• These librarians are no teetotalers. Several of the people who were interviewed mentioned being informally recruited by librarians they met…in bars. The lead photo and many of the interviews were apparently done in a bar. A pretty far cry from the stereotypical vision of the “dry” (literally), anti-social spinster librarian.
• There are “guybrarians.”  That nickname alone is enough for that particular point.

After marinating on this a little more, I hit on what really bugs me. This article was written  a lot more about the “hipness” of the superficial trappings of the profession than the profession itself. As one blogger put it, “The MLIS is the new barista.”

It smacked of the same attitude of people who listen to movies only long enough to parse out their favorite quotes and repeat them ad nauseum to their friends, or who listen to indie rock only long enough to figure out which bands are acceptably underground, solely for the purpose of buying that band’s t-shirt and impressing the emo hottie that they’ve been scoping all week at the bar.

Do I get a little kick out of the high-heels-and-pencil-skirt aspect of the public perception of librarians? Sure. Did I join the profession assuming that I would spend a lot of time mingling with well-shod, well-read hotties who were my age? Hell no. I assumed (and was largely proven right, in my case) that many people in MLIS programs are making a career change, and are closer to their mid 30s or 40s than mid 20s (my age). And, far from the impression that this article gives off, very few people outside of the profession that I’ve talked to have any idea what any actual librarian does on an actual daily basis (don’t even get me started on what people do and do not know about what archivists do), which is probably why I was initially so excited to see this article.

Well, this article does make it clear that not all librarians fit the stereotype of ”frumpy, middle-aged ladies in bad shoes.” However, it also spends so little time on the actual mission of libraries and librarians that it makes library school look like the intelligentsia version of getting your “MRS Degree“…so that you can mingle with other socially aware, well-read people. Sure, that’s a great part of being a librarian or archivist, you often get to work with interested, interesting people. However, that is not, and should not, be your main motivating factor for entering library school or the profession.

Do you like to help people? Do you like to search for information in multiple ways and in multiple formats and customize and deliver it to your patrons? Yes? Good. If that is the case, I don’t care if you’re 25 or 75, cool or desperately unhip…you’re librarian material.

 

Canon PowerShot Digital Elph SD700 – Flower Close-Ups w/Macro Setting

I took several close-ups of flowers around the farm with my Elph, and I was really impressed with the results on the Macro setting. I had my doubts about a subcompact camera being able to get close-ups this detailed and in focus, but these are pretty darn close to perfect as far as I’m concerned.

The other two shots I took are up on Flickr right now, if you’re curious to check them out. I wish I could show them to you in full size…I took the above yellow lily one at 2816 X 2112, and it’s now adorning my desktop, without losing any readily visible detail.