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.

 

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.

 

Library Juice Commenters Far More Eloquent Than Me on NYT Article

There’s a lot of interesting talk in the comments on the Library Juice post about the NYT article. Lots about aesthetic expressions and how they do (or don’t) express a significant affiliation to a group or movement (political or otherwise), or whether subcultures/countercultures have been so co-opted by the consumer culture as to have lost much of their meaning…much of which is, frankly, over my head, but I’m fascinated nonetheless. Also, as you could probably guess, there seems to be a bit of a generation clash evident in some of the comments as well.

I’ve put one of the books mentioned, “Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture” by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter on my Amazon Wish List so that I don’t forget about it.

Anyway, my post about the NYT article was largely (as you could likely tell) just me whinging about how I don’t like that the information profession (and, really, when it gets down to it, those of my generation within the profession) has been lumped in with the hipper-than-thou. Where I whinge, however, the commenters at Library Juice are really getting into the nitty gritty of it.

 Lots of food for thought. Check it out.

 

KC Currents Featuring New Jazz Museum Director/KC Cultural Heritage Tourism Available to Listen to Online

I’ve linked to the KC Currents Audio Archives; if you click on the “Listen” link for the 7/8 show, the program should load and play on your WinAmp, Windows Media Player, or RealPlayer.

  http://www.kcur.org/kccurrentsarchives.html

It’s an interesting show, especially if you are a Kansas City jazz aficionado, and it’s given me a few new ideas for the educational symposium that I am cooking up for a certain local archives organizaton.  More details on that front to come.

 

New Director of American Jazz Museum and Cultural Tourism in Kansas City - This Week on KCUR’s KC Currents

This week’s KC Currents, (a show on 89.3 FM, KCUR ) will feature:

• Greg Carroll, the new Executive Director of the American Jazz Museum, and his vision for the future of the institution.
• “Cultural Tourism and Visitors Services” president Anita Dixon, discussing Kansas City as a possible destination for “heritage tours,” and possibilities for collaboration among cultural heritage institutions such as the National World War I Museum, Nelson-Atkins, the American Jazz Museum, the Mutual Musicians Foundation, etc.

Definitely tuning in to this one.

 

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.

 

MacBook Pro Lust

Unlike seemingly every other person on the planet (at least by what the media would have you believe), I am not lusting after an iPhone. A few years ago, I had a few brief but scarring encounters with a PDA that I believed would somehow magically make me mobile, as I was both working full time and commuting to graduate school at that point, and about to pull my hair out from trying to keep everything straight. However, the only thing I got out of the whole experience was a potentially lifelong hatred of tiny screens and styluses.*

Fast forward to now. My desktop PC is about 4 years old and I am starting to think that it is time for an upgrade. I’ve registered for the Society of American Archivists annual meeting (yay!) and I think that I may go a little nutty if I’m in Chicago for a week without easy access to teh internets…and I’d love to be able to blog the sessions I attend. Also, I’m at the point in my life where, once I’m professionally ensconced somewhere (hopefully sooner rather than later) I’d like to do more traveling, and traveling is far more pleasant if one has easy access to a personal computer with a USB port for uploading photos and a wireless connection so that you can find where the heck the nearest art museum/malt shop/outlet mall is.

I’ve been hearing negative rumblings about non-basic versions of Windows Vista/PC laptops (from both my far-more-hardware-savvy boyfriend, as well as my own scanning of the comments on individual hardware components on Newegg and articles on Slashdot). The upshot of many of these comments seems to be that you seem to need 2G of RAM just to run a non-basic version of Vista, and likely around 4G to run it optimally…and only the most expensive laptops have even that much capacity for RAM, not to mention the drain it seems to put on your battery life.

This all led me to what seems like, especially given that the MacBook Pro came in 1st in Consumer Reports’ June 2007  15-in. laptop ratings (be forewarned, link only works for subscribers) the decision that a MacBook Pro is the best way to go. A great processor that has capabilities beyond what most current-generation applications will require of it (which means I won’t have to upgrade that puppy for awhile), the Mac propensity to avoid trojans/spyware, and…no Windows Vista.

In fact, given the amount of over-analyzing I’ve put into this decision, I would probably upgrade my desire for a MacBook Pro up from lust, which seems a bit base and ill-considered, to love.

*This is not to say that everyone has this experience…one of my friends has the same exact PDA and she love, love, loves it.