Educator + Infonista + Historian

I found this video on PBS. It perfectly expresses why I want to learn code. Watch Is CSS and Website Design a Fashion Statement? on PBS. See more from Idea Channel. Have a great day and keep smiling! :)

So it's my one year anniversary in Library school and as a librarian. Which means for the last month or so the professional organizations that I joined last year at a low student rate are hounding me to renew my memberships. Last year I took advantage of the student price and joined ALA (American Library Association) along with two sub-groups ( RUSA - Reference and User Services Association and ACRL - Association of College and Research Libraries), SLA (Special Library Association), and re-joined AHA (American Historical Association). I like joining professional organizations because it makes me feel connected. However, last year I spent well over $100 on my memberships and before I renewed I wanted to make sure that I'm getting my money's worth out of these organizations. ;) Renewing my ALA membership was a no brainier. But did I want to maintain my subgroup memberships? While I'm interested in reference librarianship, I didn't really feel connected to RUSA...

I haven't gotten a single post up this week :( My weekend was devoted to completing the second programming assignment. That activity kept me up past midnight Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And I couldn't even finish one of the problems as required because I couldn't figure out the mathematical expression at its core. (Thanks Nelson for helping out with that part.) The rest of my week was devoted to preparing for group meetings. That's right, I'm in the midst of midterms just now. Pray for me please. Since I was working on these projects I didn't adequately prepare for my classes this week and couldn't turn my homework into blog posts for my patient readers. Anyways, my projects should provide fodder for a slew of posts next week. Additionally, today I'm attending 'A Preservation Odyssey: Paths to the Future' National Archives Annual Preservation Conference. Paid for by my work! Have I stated recently how much I love my work and how grateful I...

Sorry for the late post, I spent the morning compressing high resolution tif files of William Morris material scans to email to Wired magazine (at their request)! Typically I find twitter annoying. Too many people just seem to be shouting out and its feels like no one really wants to engage in conversation. I’ve tried following various cultural heritage institutions but frequently they start dominating the stream and drowning out any other information, individuals do this much more often. But I have found myself enjoying checking in on Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities list more than I anticipated. For example today, Jane Fleming tweeted an article about the Google Cultural Institute’s 42 digital exhibits that are now live. I wasn’t even aware that Google had a Cultural Institute so I clicked through to checkout their work. The exhibits were definitely interesting and the format resembled an idea I had been playing with for a DH project. As I went back to twitter, I noticed that...

For the last few weeks we have been defining what a library is in my library management class. The purpose of defining a library is to help us understand the mission / vision statements of libraries. We began by determining that a library is a service organization. Libraries are in the business of entertaining and educating their community. A library is also likely to be a cultural heritage institution (which means that they serve as record keepers for the community). An interesting question that was brought up at this time was, "does the web necessitate more resource sharing and community building on the part of libraries?" Ultimately, we decided that a library is: a collection of resources learning + entertaining culture + community physical + virtual What do you think a library is? Have a great day and keep smiling! :)

Today's class was all about collecting rare books for special collections. There was in interesting article drawn from an interview with Thomas Staley, the director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. The article addresses Staley’s success as the director of the Ransom center which comes from Staley’s focused acquisition policy. Staley aggressively seeks out and purchases the manuscript archives of modern authors. According to Staley, he wants to create THE humanities archive for ‘modern’ authors. The idea that with one stop, everything a researcher needs will be available to them, the specific collection, and all relevant collections, in one single location, a special collection Walmart if you will. This is part of a Texan mindset of bigger, better, best. However, Staley doesn’t address the issue that if collections were digitized then all collections would be available to any researcher from a single location, the internet! Staley doesn’t even beg...

I have to apologize for not writing as frequently as I should this week. All my time has been spent working on my programming homework. This means that I didn't do any of my reading to prepare for my other classes, the bulk of what I discuss in this blog. So I haven't had anything for you all to read about in the realm of education, librarianship, and history for a while. I'm not trying to make excuses or place blame I just wanted you to be aware of the situation. I really enjoy my programming class. It's just hard. For the last assignment I went through the problems one by one and each took me many hours because I'm just plugging in bits of code to see if what I hope will happen happens. Eventually I was able to finish all of them, but only about an hour before the deadline. This time I'm attempting to work on all three at the same time because I felt like I kept going back to the same places in my search for understanding (and successful coding) and I though...

Just in case you missed it, season 6 of The Guild began yesterday. If you are not familiar with the awesomeness of The Guild it is a web series written by Felicia Day ( Buffy & Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog ) about her love of gaming (video not gambling!). Don’t worry about not being caught up on what’s going on, all previous seasons are available here (and an entire season isn’t more than an hour long - so you have time to watch at least one season). Now that you’ve warmed up to videogame culture you might be ready for some more serious content. Did you notice that last week’s reading of Writing History in the Digital Age was published by the University of Michigan’s Digital Culture Books ? And if you had gone into the Digital Culture Books list of offerings you would have seen the following FREE digital books: My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of the World of Warcraft Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni I repeatedly tried to play Myst bu...