My New Notebook

Back in my journal-keeping days (which have become fewer and farther between since this blog began… that’s okay, actually), I had a guilty-pleasure ritual of selecting a new journal whenever I felt like my outlook / mood / life had changed enough for a new… chapter, let’s say.

For some reason, it took a week’s worth of classes to make me finally want a new look to go with my new house, climate, job, and future.  So I played around with some more images I have, and I’m fairly settled on this puffin above – until another suitable period of change comes along.  Hopefully I haven’t lost any posts or comments with the new template, but that has been known to happen.

I probably need a new journal, too, but a little bit of lingering nostalgia or homesickness has me hanging on to the one I’ve been using.  It’s a really nice journal and I’ve only filled half the pages… too soon to retire it.

“Spider under here…”

Spider under here…

Originally uploaded by Librarienne.

My poor girlfriend was trying to make salsa when along came a spider which sat down beside her… And I came home to this shot glass.

Mental image of the day

Incidentally, a good ol’ Oregon friend, has delighted me once again with her astute powers of observation:

The aura of the Woodsman Restaurant sign has burnt out:

The Woodsman Rest____nt

A picture will hopefully be posted soon. Unless after months of neglecting the dearly departed neon letters, The Woodsman suddenly lit up their aura again.

… a burnt-out aura. I needed a good smart laugh like that. These classes I’m taking… a couple of them are not making me feel smart… yet.

But this image of the burnt-out aura has me thinking about a great new indy band that shall call themselves “Burnt Out Aura” and the cover art for their very first album will be a photograph of the Woodsman, with the burnt out letters front and center. I would buy that album.

So… how is Illinois?

Let me start by saying this will be a brief post.  However, I will say at least one good thing!

The bad first – last night I went for a long walk.  It was 77 degrees outside, which in Northwest terms would mean a perfect pleasant evening.  In Illinois terms, the temperature doesn’t matter, it’s always freaking miserable.  The air is made of sweat.  You walk through, breathe in, 100% sweat.  Even if you were sitting perfectly still, you would still sweat simply because the Illinois air was touching you.

The good parts – people.  The night before last, Lori and I had drinks with a wonderful bunch of people – funny, sharp, interesting, relaxed.  Exactly what a Saturday night gathering should be.  Mind you, all of these people are imports like us, but that’s just another thing we all had in common… besides all being dog owners with wacky dog stories.  There will never be a shortage of laughs where there are good dog stories.  Tho’ the image of a toddler going all Nietzsche on a Wal-Mart cashier is absolutely priceless.  It even cheered me up after the not-so-perfect walk. Thank you for that, M & J!

We’re all catalogers now.

Freewrite
23 August 2006 8:30pm

I’ve been reading the preface to Elaine Svenonious’ The Intellectual Foundation of Information – that last book that I thought would be my introduction textbook, was not. This is. No silliness about “information packages” here. A bare 198 pages, but she packs a punch. In fact, Elaine has already punched me before I’ve even made it to the first chapter:

p. xiii “… metadata that are derived and metadata that are assigned: the former provide the means to find information, and the latter provide the normalization required to organize it.”

This simple statement combined with a lot of thinking lately about folksonomies and the way some folks are wonderfully organized with their tagging, and I realized that the metadata assigned are the very puzzle pieces being thrown out by today’s up and coming information users. The internet-bred population strongly disagrees with / doesn’t relate to the traditional metadata assignments “required to organize” the information and so now we have an internet in utter chaos with open-ended structures like Wikipedia, tagging, open-source software, and our information discovery comes through social networking rather than institutionalized subject terms.

Or, perhaps, another way to see the change is to say that now everyone is taking it upon themselves to assign metadata, but only in so far as they can organize it for their own purposes … personalized, contexual metadata rather than broad, generic concepts. And this is where the social networking element became a necessary partner – without the institutionalized standards, these personalized tags can be all over the map for the same piece of information. But by comparing your tags with others who use similar tags, you have a new filtering method that uses social context rather than subject indexing. It’s all developing this way for a reason – the personalized tagging hand-in-hand with the networking – they require each other in order to even come close to replacing traditional assigned metadata. And deep down inside, I believe they will. Before reading the above quote from Elaine, I only saw tagging as the new information organization method … but thinking of tagging in terms of folksonomies makes more sense … the possibilities (both bad and good)!

Why I’m in library school (or – Why am I?)

On the bus, I started skimming through the introductory chapter of an introductory textbook to one of my introductory library science classes.

I was immediately bored.

Well, not bored exactly, but asking myself “why is this important?”  This opening chapter explained that the book would use the term “information package” to refer to all could-be-cataloged materials, be it book, CD, or website, because there were just too many variables to simply call these things “items.”

And deep down I had the slightest little twinge of… panic.  I thought, “Oh no. Is this what every library science class will be like?  The meta of metadata? The splitting of hairs?”

Well, sure, some of it might be like that.  Every field has examples of analysis that goes too far (too far for some people… like me).  In English studies, one could debate the finer points of using a dash (-) instead of an ellipsis (which I almost exclusively use according to the Rainwater definition of “a unit of three small dots that signifies a trailing off in thought”).  In Linguistics there might be colleagues not speaking to each other over disagreements on the amorphous schwa. This kind of thing is bound to happen wherever you have an abundance of over-educated people.

So I decided that I needed to give myself something to keep nearby for those moments when I ask “Is this all there is?” which will probably happen quite often before this whole graduate school adventure is over.  I need to write out my own personal reasons for studying library science, my own personal ideas of what I want to do when I’m done.  Then, whenever I start to wonder if I’m in the right profession, I’ll look over my little manifesto and ask myself if it still applies and remind myself that libraries come in many, many different manifestations.  Thus I will maintain some optimism.

Writing backwards

This post should have come out a week ago. I’ve been thinking about it that long. Thinking about a lot of posts, actually, but as you can see I haven’t really gotten around to them. (Where, oh where, is that elusive routine?)

Books. I recently finished Class: a guide through the American status system by Paul Fussell, 1983. Also read Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, 2001. Two seemingly unrelated books, no? I’ll get to that.

First off, Paul Fussell’s book probably makes a lot of people angry and he admits that much in the very beginning. Twenty years later and Americans still don’t like to think that there are castes here. Some of his observations are still sadly true, other observations are just plain stereotyping. Something I wanted to read more about, but that Fussell only touched on, was the different perceptions of class. What distinguishes one class from another? He summed up the criteria according to what each class judged important -

Class        their defining element for determining one’s status

lower       money
middle     occupation
upper      taste, style

the Other

I was talking to a woman at a bus stop today – she noticed my ring on my left hand and asked if my husband was going to school, too. I replied that the ring was actually from my girlfriend, who was looking for work in the area. The well-meaning, sincere woman’s response was, “Have you met other gay people here?”

I knew what she was *hoping* to convey — she was hoping to indicate that she was tolerant, gay-friendly, open. I even accept that. But for the first time, it struck me what such a question really means. It really means, “Oh, you are an Other. Have you met the other Others?”

All sorts of understanding hit me. It’s a form of lumping. Anyone in a minority gets this everyday… heck, I’ve gotten this same question plenty of other times, but it didn’t hit me till today that this question carries a lot of assumptions with it. It assumes that my primary identity is “gay”… that I primarily find things in common with other “gay” people… and most importantly I think, it assumes that all gay people are the same and get along like one big happy family.

I guess if my friends reflect my primary identity, I am mainly a book lover. But when I talk about books with people at bus stops, no one ever asks, “Have you met other readers?” Because that includes everyone, doesn’t it? That’s not an Other.