Reference Librarianship: not for the timid.

This was the first class weekend for LI 813.

For fun, I've decided to give Wordpress another go by using it as the class blog for this class. I may still do all my posting here and post it there via RSS. Here's a link to that location: Caro's 813 Class Blog.

Tonight we had two guest speakers who talked about the reference interviews and reference librarians. Something one of the speakers said really struck a chord with me when she said that librarianship at an academic library is more about showing people how to help themselves with the database systems. I feel that I would really enjoy this, as it's something I already do as a hobby by teaching friends about my latest flings with new internet finds. I don't think I would be heavily satisfied with the scenario described in a public library, where the patron just expects the librarian to find the resource for them. I'm starting to think this is part of my greater desire to make better systems that are easier for people to interact with.

They also talked about capstone, which was encouraging. I'm very excited at the prospect of capstone, and I'm hoping to do something a little off the wall and creative for mine--I think my multidisciplinary and unusual paths through the education system warrants it. I can't wait to see how my Lakota class influences and meshes with Library Science this semester.

First Week of Class for LING 6510

Well, I signed up for a class on Language Structures in my linguistics program this semester. As happens in this program, the class isn't actually on "Language" structures, per se, because the professor has tweaked the curriculum to play to his current research.

The class is on the language structure of Lakota.

This was both exciting and disapointing to me. Learning about Lakota gets me all excited as a linguist. But the theory of language structure was really what I was after, because it was more pertinent to my career interests.

840 Final Project

I've just returned to this blog after a very brief summer hiatus. So brief, in fact, that some of the professors started giving us assignments for this semester while we were completing finals for last semester.

(Note to my library science program: this is bad. Don't do this. My stress level was so far through the roof that I actually laughed when I found out yellow jackets had taken up residence in my kitchen ceiling, thereby giving me an excuse to not think about school for five seconds.)

But anyways, I wanted to give a brief feedback on how that project went. I loved putting it together--in fact, this class really made an impression on me in many ways. It was very influencial in my decision to create a website for my final project in 802. I put together this outline for my website where I work, and then gave a presentation on it to my supervisor, the senior member of the team, and my contact for the web team.

And now they changes are in the works. They are actually using some of my suggestions in the redesign of the website, and I've found it very confirming. I'm finding myself drawn more and more to a career path that isn't traditionally librarian, but definately serves the same functions in a more technological way.

I created it using Zoho, which I am now using for a lot of things. Not everything, though--Zoho inserts 3 spaces instead of an actual tab when one pushes the tab key, which has created some formating issues for me while exporting. I created my diagrams using Gliffy, which also has some issues, but worked well enough.

Here's a link to my final project for 840:
LI 840 Final Project