Collections for Personal Enrichment

I like to collect things. I have quite a few collections of things, most of which have no value to any museum, archive, or estate/ junk sale. When I write this three of my most worthless, yet highly cultivated, collections come to mind. My collection of tattoos I have seen (good and bad), boat names (good and bad), and t-shirt sayings (just bad).

On a recent sailing adventure I found a real treasure to add to the boat names collection. Sighberspace. What a terrible boat name. Imagine with me for a moment Sighberspace’s distress call; “Mayday mayday, this is Sighberspace.” It’s such a bad joke name for a boat, not to mention just a downright terrible computer joke that can only spark more terrible computer jokes. If I wanted to relax, you’d better believe I’d spend some time floating around in Sighberspace. Har har.

Millennial Mania

Lately I've been thinking a lot about millennials.* The librarians I know often discuss millennials -- our current generation of younger patrons. How do millennials access and use information and how do they communicate? If librarians can pin down millennials' needs, we can better serve them and we can maintain our relevance in an increasingly decentralized information age.

I realized recently that the youngest of today's library school students are among the first crop of millennial librarians. In this vein, I have a confession to make. I am a millennial (a fact that I hadn't confronted about myself until, fittingly, I read it in black and white on Wikipedia). So what does it mean that we new librarians are in the same generation as the students that more experienced librarians are desperately seeking to understand?

As a millennial (however reluctant I am to admit it because it makes me feel like an awkward middle schooler), I am accustomed to rapidly-evolving information and communication technologies. I remember dial-up, but barely. I may not be a skilled texter, but I could be if I focused more. I rarely have the attention span to read a book cover-to-cover, but I can spend hours following a trail of interesting Facebook updates.

I've been asking around about millennials, and I've heard they expect information resources to be intuitive, to be Google or Wikipedia-esque in their ease of use. I've also heard that millennials are as likely to rely on peers as they are to rely on their superiors for "expert" advice. I’m not sure how true these things are of me, but I think they may be generally true of those youngsters born in the 1990s.

This collaborative way of approaching knowledge (and in a sense determining our truths by the consensus of any given moment) signals a shift in society discussed --and sometimes bemoaned-- by philosophers and pundits alike. But older generations have a history of worrying about what cultural dead-ends those young kids are leading us into. And as of yet, cultural evolution has continued apace both despite and because of the innovations of the young.

Personally, I don’t think we need a revolutionary response to millennials’ supposed information, communication and technology prowess. I don't think we need the brand "Library 2.0" to open ourselves to a paradigm shift. Libraries have always evolved to reflect society’s views of knowledge, and have so far managed to remain relevant and useful. Maybe we respond a little more slowly to the latest technology, perhaps with slightly more deliberation. But we adopt the things that work and we empower our patrons adopt them, too. I value this traditional function of libraries as much as the next librarian, millennial or no.

So, what does it really mean to be a millennial librarian? Is there really a generational gap here, or are the reports of our differences greatly exaggerated?

* Beware that Wikipedia link, the year range listed for the "millennial" or "gen y" generation changes regularly. I guess that's a symptom of society's attempt to describe itself as it evolves. Or the lack of authority and dependability of Wikipedia articles. Take your pick. For more on naming the millennial generation, see this Washington Post article.

Theft, Part II: TO CATCH A THIEF

I think one reason our library director considered the stakeout a viable option for dealing with a series of thefts was that Oberlin actually has a history of apprehending library thieves (which is a whole other amazing/ridiculous story).

James Shinn, who got his 15 minutes of infamy in the early 80s, was caught by a librarian at the Oberlin College Library in 1981. He had stolen 480 rare library books with a combined value of $35,000. Shinn is a nerdy-interesting Google if you are curious. A brief 1981 NY Times article describes the manhunt. Besides inspiring librarians in general to beef up security for special collections, Shinn also gave librarians at Oberlin a hearty sense of their own crime-fighting capabilities, thus enabling me to have my very own brush with library covert ops nearly 25 years later.

The Oberlin College Library has a special room named for James Shinn and plastered with news stories of his crimes and capture. This room is not open to the public and is rarely visited by staff. The Shinn Room is the library’s Executive Washroom. I mean, where better to study a rich history of library heists and library heroism than a library director's bathroom? Nowhere, I suppose.

[Something I discovered along the way:
books about people who are crazy about books.]

P.S. Mr. Shinn, if you Google yourself regularly, thanks, and no hard feelings!

Summer Time Warp

The library is quiet. There are a few people studying at tables or working at the computers. A librarian sits behind a computer at a desk. There is a middle aged man (Patron) sitting at a public computer.

Patron: (gets up from the computer he is seated at and slowly approaches the librarian) Excuse me, do you know what the date is?

Librarian: (looks up from the computer) Hello. Yes. It is August 5th.

Patron: (confused) I'm sorry did you say August?

Librarian: Yes.

Patron: (squints and shakes his head) It's August?

Librarian: (shows patron a calendar on the computer screen) Yes.

Patron: I missed my flight.

Librarian stares at patron with a commendable straight face. There is a long silence.

Patron: Huh. (pauses) Do you have a pay phone I could use? I think I need to make a phone call.

Librarian: I'm sorry, we don't have a pay phone. There is a pay phone on Liberty near Border's.

Patron hurries out the door. Librarian shrugs and goes back to looking up interesting things on the internet.

Theft, Part I: LIBRARY STAKEOUT

STOP, THIEF! Security is a legitimate concern at libraries and librarians often struggle to balance the ideal of open access with the reality that monitored areas are sometimes less prone to theft. Is it our responsibility to protect innocent borrowers from visitors who will prey on unattended valuables? What level of monitoring would our users prefer and what would serve the community's best interests? Librarians like to ask such questions of ourselves and each other. If no immediate agreement can be reached, we form committees to deal with the issue. Or, on certain occasions, we snap into action. This is story of one such action.

In my undergrad years, I worked as a circulation desk attendant and student supervisor at the Oberlin College Library. One year, we had a rash of laptop and backpack thefts. No matter how many signs we posted warning people of the danger, they still left their stuff unattended and it still got stolen. One patron came to the desk in tears to report not one, not two, but three separate thefts of her valuables over the course of a week. (Responses among library staffers ranged from sympathy to incredulity that she would leave her stuff unattended the second two times.)

The library administration decided reporting these numerous incidents to Safety and Security after the fact was not enough. We needed to catch a thief red-handed. Thus, a plan was hatched and a LIBRARY STAKEOUT was born.

Late in the semester, the library's student workers received an email announcing extra work shifts. We were told we had the chance to join the library's effort to end the theft problem once and for all (well... at least for that school year). Get paid for a covert mission in the library? Yes, please! The following day, I signed up for my very own stakeout.

This is how it went down: A circulation staffer planted a "dummy" backpack in a high-traffic area of the library. Whoever was on stakeout duty got paid to sit in a darkened room for an hour with a walkie-talkie and keep a watchful eye on our planted backpack. If we saw someone grab the bag, we were to radio down to library administration, where the library director or assistant director would run out of his office and stop the thief as he or she exited the building. The staff implemented this plan with fervor (that particular and rare fervor of bored library workers who are suddenly tasked with a vitally important stakeout mission).
Photo: abbyladybug on Flickr - pretty much exactly where our backpack was planted.

You're probably buzzing with excitement right now, just as we were in those precious, early days of Operation Catch-A-Thief.... Come on, already! Did you catch the thief or what?

Day in and day out, we watched that dummy backpack. Day in and day out, we brought the backpack back to the staff area at the end of the day's scheduled stakeout shifts, simultaneously relieved and disappointed that no theft of our utterly conspicuous fake bag had been attempted.

Soon, since no more thefts had occurred, the stakeout shifts became more expensive than they were worth. How could it have been that we had so many thefts, followed by none at all, right as we began our stakeouts?

I have a theory. Remember that email I told you about, in which all the student workers of the library system were offered extra hours? And remember how hilarious and ridiculous it seemed that the library would pay us to sit in a darkened room watching a planted backpack, armed with only a walkie-talkie, intense focus and the library director as backup? I forgot to add that there was a clarifying email sent out a couple of days after the first, reminding us that this library stakeout mission was supposed to be... a secret.

But if all those other library workers were anything like me, they got that first email and immediately told everyone they saw that day about an amazing new project at the library. And like me, when they got that second email, they probably thought, "Oh, well... you probably should have told us that to begin with."

Instead of catching our thief red-handed, the Oberlin College Library effectively spread the word that the building was being closely monitored by staff. Instead of stopping crimes in progress, we successfully prevented them.

Come to think of it, all the library had to do was convince its student workers that a series of stakeouts would occur, and we took care of the rest. I guess it just goes to show: you should never, ever underestimate the power of a funny story.
Photo: StudentsReview - Oberlin's Mudd Library. Looks like a fortress, but it wasn't really. Until the stakeout.

The Typical Librarian (a Friendless Old Hag?)

My good friend Remigio recently forwarded me a comic that depicts the typical librarian in a slightly negative light:

http://www.theonion.com/content/cartoon/nov-19-2007

This satirical commentary on our current political climate, where debate continues as to whether the use of torture will strengthen our national security, compares steep overdue fines meted out by librarians to the cruelest form of physical punishment.

Since we librarians generally have a sense of humor, I'm not going to argue with this representation.

But one "friendless old hag" to another, is this -

- the face of a sadistic state-sanctioned torturer?

Most likely. Steer clear of this one if you see her in your local library. Safety first, friend. Safety first.

METADATER: a long explanation for a short joke

Caution: This post contains a hearty portion of information nerdiness/ geekiness/ dorkiness. I will try to "overexplain" some things a little for the benefit of our average reader (returning readers will notice that "overexplanation" is something I do on the regular, for real).

So, feel free to skip ahead if you already know a thing or two about metadata. Or don't, if you want to see me try to explain it.

Context: What the heck is metadata, anyway? According to wikipedia and SI, metadata is "data about data." Metadata helps us make sense of information by providing us with context. It allows us to better communicate and organize information and thus retrieve information more efficiently.

Titles and formatting are examples of metadata often used to describe text. For instance, the metadata I apply to READ THIS NOW! tells you a lot more than a less invasive "read this now" would have. The metadata (bold, caps and exclamation point) I use to describe the data (three words which represent your imperative) helps me communicate my meaning, draws your attention and hopefully inspires you to continue reading. It also allows me to classify what I say as important, rather than just plain old words like the stuff around it.

Recently, when I asked a fellow information professional if he had any thoughts on metadata, he asked, "Can you be more specific?" I said no. He said, "It's a ... good thing?" Metadata. It's a good thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata

Aaaaanyway...

What's the deal with METADATER? Last semester, I was writing a literature review on Metadata Standards and Interoperability for the Digital Libraries course that Emily and I took together. While this may sound vaguely impressive, I can assure you that I had almost no idea what I was talking about, but I sort of guessed at a string of plausible words and ended up sounding mildly coherent. Professor, if you're reading this... sorry dude. Thanks for the passing grade.

So Emily and I were both typing like mad in the office trying to get these overly technical lit reviews done and submitted on time, and I typoed "metadater" and I sort of cackled and said "METADATER!" in this incredibly nerdy affected voice and we both died a little in a good way. We wrote the term on the office white board and it lasted for a while.

Since then, we've realized what METADATER is really all about. We've learned the true reason I discovered the concept in the first place.

METADATER is an online dating site for information professionals. Or it should be. It doesn't actually exist. But it could.

After all, http://metadater.com/ was recently "registered\purchased." And who knows what it'll be when it finally goes live.

I'll give you a few moments to think about the ramifications.

Seriously?
Yes.

Well... seriously bad/good joke. I mean, word play and information science? It doesn't get any better/worse. I warned you it was nerdy.

Need a good LOL read?

I'm going to get really agitated if one more person remarks to me, "Do you really have to go to graduate school to be a librarian? I just thought you needed to know the Dewey Decimal System...hmmm...." (The best response I've ever gotten to the "what are you doing with your life?" question was, cracking up laughing, "no really, what do you want to do when you are done with college?") Though I think that graduate level education is appropriate for librarians, I think that most of the things that we encounter in libraries are experiences that our Web 2.0 education cannot fully prepare us for.

Scott Douglas' Quiet, Please is memoir of his experience as a public librarian. Douglas humorously describes the current issues in libraries, and the experiences that library school doesn't prepare us for. Basically, the book is a collection of humorous accounts of grumpy-pants co-workers, the importance of community, issues surrounding Myspace and porn in the library, food in the library, and my favorite, problem patrons. No one can resist a good problem patron story. Librarians live for them. They spice up our days.

Douglas' memoir is a fun read that I think all information professionals can relate to in one way or another. Let's be honest, it's a total jungle out there in Library Land, and you probably need some summer reading that will remind you that you can survive it. Read on and on.

Extraterrestrial Life: A Quick Lit Review

Yesterday at the reference desk, I had one of my most interesting research questions of the summer. A student was creating a bibliography for her class and chose extraterrestrial life as her topic. She needed a couple more sources, and I was more than happy to fire up my Proquest-searching skills for the occasion. Here is a sampling of what we uncovered (cited in APA format, with some added bolding to really make things pop).

Dartnell, L. (2008). Hairy Blobs found in an acidic hell. New Scientist, 198(2569), 15.

• This article addresses recent research that shows life (in this case, hairy blobs) could survive in similar conditions to the Martian oceans (an acidic hell).

Want proof? Here're some hairy blobs:

http://io9.com/5013254/hairy-blobs-discovered-in-acidic-lake-could-have-evolved-on-mars

Pendick, D. (2008). Earth through alien eyes. Astronomy, 36(5), 23.

• This article discusses whether aliens with our current level of technology would be able to find Earth from lightyears away. The answer is yes, they could.
  
• My favorite quote is from scientist Sara Seager, who discusses her research published recently in The Astrophysical Journal: "Maybe somebody's looking at us right now, finding out . . . the length of our day."
  
• Quite possibly, aliens are discovering the length of Earth's days as I write this blog entry. What an extraordinary thought!
  

Sheehan, D.P. (2008). On the eighth day, God created extraterrestrials: Vatican says life on other planets possible. McClatchy-Tribune Business News (wire feed), May 14 2008. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from Proquest Research Library.

• This newspaper article was originally published in The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa. I've never heard of this paper, but now I wish I read it every day.
  
• In an interview in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes (the Vatican's top astronomer, according to the article) says rejecting the the idea of alien life outright would be "putting limits on God's creative freedom." Extraterrestrial life is apparently a "thorny" theological issue in Christianity, but the Vatican has made its position clear.
  
• In addition to Vatican experts, this article includes views on the topic from a UFO researcher:

  Besides, he added, aliens themselves may be creatures of faith. In a few of the many thousands of reports of alien abduction, abductees said they could speak with their captors. "Where people could ask questions, one of the questions they asked was, 'Is there a God?' or 'Do you believe in God?' " Bassett said. "Without fail, the ETs would say 'Yes.' "

In Wired's report of this story, they captured this related image of a saint and an alien meeting in a small chapel:

http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/06/alien_religion?currentPage=all

All in all, a productive day at the reference desk!

Emily and Katie's Super Classy Office Warming Reception!

A photo montage.

There were stories of problem patrons.

There was lots of leaning.

Of course there were jokes!

There was super classy food.

It was a delight.

Why I am becoming a librarian

Today Katie and I were having a discussion about why we are becoming librarians. Katie suggested that we both make pie charts of why we are choosing this profession. I sort of ran with it, and then Katie helped me make this sweet pie chart.What are your nerdy motivations for your profession? Dear reader, assure me I am not the only nerd out there.

LIBRARY ORIENTATION: the coolest gig in town

One of our summer projects is running Library Orientation sessions for incoming freshmen (class of '12... makes me feel real ancient). The UGLibrarians have come up with a pretty sweet instructional style for these half-hour sessions.

Let us set the scene...

THE STUFF - 7 tables full of library resources (mostly books, but some newer technologies are also represented).
THE PEOPLE - overwhelmed and/or cocky 17 and 18 year olds, 50-ish per session, in groups of 6-10 per table.
THE ACTIVITY - a worksheet, the students try to figure out the themes of their tables (not that hard), say what the stuff can be used for, then present their findings to the entire session.
THE SPACE - the Grad Gallery, decked out in the finest signs and banners.
US - Emily H, who hates hamsters; Katie D-T, who has enjoyed Delerium Tremens (a belgian brew) but never had the DTs.
OUR LOVELY ASSISTANTS - one rotating UGLi Babe (that's a librarian, to the uninitiated).

Now that we have laid our stage, please allow us to entertain you with a story or three...

1. One of our fellow librarians, Renoir, has an excellent presentation style. Not unlike an improvisational jazz musician, Renoir riffs on the things the students say (i.e. he uses the openings the youngsters provide to regale us all with stories of the library which swell and reach new heights and show off his oratorial prowess).

Our favorite Renoir story came up in multiple orientation sessions. One day, a student asked, "Is there a limit to the number of books we can check out?" Smiling slightly, Renoir responded "I'm glad you asked," and proceeded seemlessly into this wonderful story.

Several years back, some student groups banded together to protest against another club. They were nerdy and creative and they decided to center their direct action on the library system. On one fateful day, these students rented U-Haul trucks and parked them outside the library. They brought armful after armful after book truck of library books to the circulation desk, hoping to stun the library -- and the university -- in its tracks. The students were successful. Every library staffer had to stop what they were doing and spend their entire day checking out books and loading books into U-Hauls. The librarians complained to their supervisors, and the complaints made their way up to University Administration. The student groups, through a clever knowledge of library policies, eventually emerged victorious.

2. One of our more adolescent incoming students shared with some 70-odd entering Wolverines a picture of a penis he and his tablemates found in a graphic novel. Emily, noticing that each novel at the table was open to its most explicit content, made a quick recovery, acknowledging the penis and addressing the major Graphic Novels Table talking points, thus saving orientation.


3. Katie ended a solid session with a solid quote by pop princess Shakira. The musical theater students she was orientating were impressed, and began to sing the song. Quote: "So, librarians are available whenever, wherever ... we're meant to be together.... yeah, I just ended with a Shakira quote."

Legalize it (Books)

My housemate Sarah recently sent me this comic, which details an alternate universe. It's a dangerous world out there, and books are the ultimate gateway drug.

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/061808/legalize-books.gif

toothpastefordinner.com

ALEXANDRIA, Va. DEA officials held a press conference to alert law enforcement officials of a dangerous new hallucinogen, "books", which can cause users (slang term "readers") to visualize people and places that do not exist.

- Protesters assemble outside drug den ("library")
- A student holds his "library card", which he claims grants him access to books legally.


I'm so glad that in the real world, books are available over-the-counter without a prescription or legal repercussions. Well, if you don't count copyright law.

These children shall pass fifth grade

For those of you have not seen me kicking around town this week, I did survive my mission to _________ International Middle School. My favorite part of my time there was, believe it or not, not working in the library. It was hanging out with my sister. She is a fifth grade language arts teacher, and had her students as a final project write biographies on famous persons. The biographies blew my mind. Some of the facts were a little off. One student wrote that Eleanor Roosevelt was the "First Lady" to ever marry a president. Another wrote that when Truman dropped the bomb, "everything in Eleanor's body stopped working." My favorite was the following:



During the war Winston Churchill He became Prime minster. He was for England. At that time His grandFather deid. When the war ended Winston ChurchiLL sadly deid. I January 30, 1965. In Oxford england. they threw him in the river.

I made sure to buy some biographies for the library.

A blast from the past

In February, Emily and I had the privilege of attending the grand opening luncheon for Bert's Cafe, the UGLi's newest coffee shop. After the luncheon we got to meet the man himself, Bert Askwith, who is known by some as "the biggest thing to hit the library since Google."

Today, I was presented with proof of this momentous occasion:

Notice our big smiles and averted eyes. We were totally awed. I'm thinking of getting this framed.

...

It’s Already Been Broughten, or the story of one librarian’s journey to the 1st Annual Bilderberg Challenge

On May 30th, 2007, an historic call to arms was issued via the SI listserv:

------------------------------------------------------
[BRING IT] softball -- archivists vs librarians (BRING IT)
For literally hundreds of millions of years, tension has been brewing between archivists and librarians...
Well stop your shushing, put down your acid free folders, and get ready because forever is about to be decided:
THE 1ST ANNUAL BILDERBERG SOFTBALL CHALLENGE
When: Saturday, June 7, 2008, 1 pm
Where: Burns Park Softball Diamonds (look it up or follow the information scent)
Who: Archivists vs. Librarians
What: A duel on the diamond - standard softball rules - bragging rights at stake - in a word, BRING IT!
------------------------------------------------------
This email, issued by Maureen and Bill, ARCHIVISTS AT LARGE, started a revolution in the SI community. No longer was the listserv dominated by a handful of HCI enthusiasts. It was time for the traditional information professionals to take the stage, and take it we did, rocking the status quo.

This challenge marked my entrée into the world of SI-all email communications and sparked a fever in my heart that could only be cured by MORE SOFTBALL.

On 06/07/08 at approximately 1:23 pm, the 1st Annual Bilderberg Challenge began, a softball showdown between archivists and librarians. The archivists, hosts and home team, were decked out in black. The librarians wore white. There was tension in the air and a storm was brewing. Everyone in attendance recognized an epic battle was underway.

Photo Credit: Dawn B.

As a proponent of librarianship and former captain of the Oberlin varsity softball team, I knew it was my duty to unite LIS students and allies to overcome ARM’s attempts to undermine us. We dominated from the moment we stepped on the field; the Bilderberg Trophy was at stake and we could taste victory with every pitch.

With our reputation on the line, we put the archivists’ trash talking to the test, and they crumbled under the weight of our heavy bats and profound fielding prowess.

The final score:
Librarians 16, Archivists 7.

Archivists, I have but one thing to say for my profession: IT’S ALREADY BEEN BROUGHTEN.

[If you're curious, Wikipedia has more on the Bilderberg Group. For Quaker porn, please visit Maureen's blog at: http://patriarchive.wordpress.com]

Planning a scavenger hunt/tour

One of my projects at the UGLi this summer is to create some sort of tour of the library for the Great Indoors, an open house held in the library for freshmen during welcome week. The Great Indoors traditionally involves free pizza and provides fun activities that help students get comfortable with the library.

I've been scratching my head to come up with ideas for a tour that will be engaging and will help students learn about the library without the activity feeling like a chore. I think I've settled on creating a scavenger hunt, in which students follow clues that lead them to different parts of the library. I think something active will be more well-received and ultimately more useful for students, but I have yet to figure out exactly how to implement this idea.

So far I have a list of places I want to be stops on the tour/hunt. I'm trying to think of a theme, and decide what the clues will be. Some ideas we've come up with so far: crossword puzzles, word finds and photos of the next location. Originally, this tour was going to just be a Flickr photoset of the library, but I think the scavenger hunt has much more potential to actually be fun and interesting for incoming students.

Has anyone ever planned and created a scavenger hunt or active tour before? Got any suggestions? Send them my way.

He doesn't even know I exist (insert sigh here)

I was spending some time in the British Literature section (PR's for library nerds) of the UGLi the other day, deciding what books we should keep and what we should get rid of. I stood a minute pondering on whether or not we needed two copies of Oroonoko by Alphra Behn, when this lovely photo fell out of the book. I always knew I'd meet my true love in a book, I just didn't expect him to be so good at wheelies.

The Big Move

Our Office Relocation Project is nearing Stage 4: Completion.

The old office, being moved:

Despite our worries, the new office seems quite homey. What a relief!

The new office:

We are now housed on the second floor of the UGLi. And we have a FLASHLIGHTS drawer.

What you can really do with a library degree

Katie and I were in the office today avoiding writing our papers for Digital Libraries. Katie was paging through a book we recently found in the office titled What Else You can do with a Library Degree: Career Options for the 90s and Beyond. The book inspired her to perhaps switch her specialization to tailored and take classes that would enable her to become a private investigator. I was in sort of a tizzy and was feeling very uninspired, until Katie said, looking up from the book and at the computer screen at the introduction to her paper, "I wonder how many words I have already." My response, "200." Katie hit word count, "200!" The next edition of What Else You can do with a Library Degree: Career Options for the Internet Age will most likely list psychic.


I guess that librarians do need to be a bit psychic though. How else could we find the right source with so little to go on? (true example; student: "I have to write a paper about my passion." librarian: "what's your passion?" student: "War"... moments later the search/ student's passion is defined as American opposition to the Korean War).

TAX DAY! or, how this one time, I almost didn't graduate from Oberlin but then I shaved a rat's head and everything magically worked out for the best

In past years, April 15 would find me scrambling to complete my overly complicated, multi-state, last-minute tax reporting. Somehow, this year, I got my taxes done early and mailed YESTERDAY. I am like, so administratively sound right now, you guys.

Anyway, in honor of this special day for the United States economy, I thought I would share with you the story of one tax year in which I was NOT quite so on top of things... this is the story of tax preparation and its fallout circa April 15, 2006.

It was my last semester at Oberlin, and I was taking two courses required to complete my psych major (and thus, my degree). One of them was a 2-credit neuroscience lab. Since it was a once-a-week lab course, and only worth two credits, attendance was mandatory. I also had softball games many afternoons, which complicated my attendance and made the professor grumpy. Of course, one week, my lab section fell on April 15, otherwise known as TAX DAY OF DOOM.

Let me mention that I am really bad at remembering to do things if they are not in my routine. Or remembering to do things that are in my routine after I have been soundly shaken out of the flow of normal activity by something as traumatizing as trying to complete my taxes at the last minute.

So, this tax day necessitated a lot of phone tax support from my mom, and generally running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get everything squared away -- the proper forms and payments mailed from Oberlin or Detroit to the appropriate agencies. I let my coach know that taxes had been more complicated than I'd planned and I'd be late to softball practice, but somehow in the midst of my tax-related frenzy, I completely flaked on going to my (mandatory for graduation) neuroscience lab. And this was the day we were supposed to do brain surgery on a rat. Oops.

Having missed rat brain surgery (clearly the pinnacle of my career as a psych major), I was convinced that I would fail the lab since the professor had already been very unforgiving about potential softball-related absences. My only hope was to go to the another lab section the next day, which was run by a different professor, and beg for her to let me participate in their rat surgery session. The only problem? I had a softball game that afternoon, and would not be able to stay for the whole surgery.

Thankfully, the other professor was very accomodating, and allowed me to switch over to her lab section for the remainder of the semester (the rat project continued after the surgery, when we implanted an electrode in the pleasure center of the rat's brain, and then tracked how he learned to press a bar to stimulate the electrode), as long as it was okay with my new group members that I was not able to complete the surgery. I arrived in lab wearing my full softball uniform, ready to perform rodent neurosurgery. The group was cool with me not being there for the whole class, so after the demonstration surgery and the anesthetization of our rat (Orpheus), I was tasked with the important duty of pre-surgery prep before I left.

In other words, I shaved the rat's head. This did not go incredibly smoothly, since Orpheus wasn't quite anesthetized enough, and was pretty squirmy. Nevertheless, I completed the task and then rushed off to my softball game. I remembered to go to the rest of the classes, and eventually passed the lab with flying colors.

So, I guess I might have been overreacting, but for those 24 hours following that fateful tax day, I was absolutely certain I would be unable to graduate from Oberlin. It seemed so ridiculous yet so fitting that I would miss graduation for such a silly reason. But in April, 2006 I learned a valuable lesson about Tax Time: while there are those Tax Days that make you miss the important things in your life, there will always be subsequent miraculous opportunities to shave rat heads and undo the damage you've caused in your tax-induced delirium.

In the end, I graduated. On time. All thanks to Orpheus, who (begrudgingly) let me shave his little rat head when my academic career needed it the most.

Poetry Break

(From Garbage: A Poem by A.R. Ammons, pt. 7. It reminds me of a certain catalog I know.)

... I punched

out Garbage at the library and four titles
swept the screen, only one, Garbage Feed,

seemed worth going on to; and that was about
feeding swine right: so I punched Garbage Disposal

and the screen came blank--nothing! all those
titles, row on row, of western goodies, mostly

worse than junk, but not a word on Disposal: I
should have looked, I suppose, under Waste Disposal

but, who cares, I already got the point: I
know garbage is being "disposed" of--but what

I wanted I had gotten, a clear space and pure
freedom to dump whatever, and this means most

of the catalog must go, so much that what is
left will need no computer to be kept track of:

har:...

UGLi Field Trip

On Friday the staff of the UGLi piled in maize and blue mini vans and traveled to the new Border's. I'm directionally challenged so I couldn't tell you where it is, but it is in Ann Arbor somewhere. Anyway, the store is a test case for their new "concept stores." Basically, the store is just a really big, really technologically advanced bookstore with lots of flashy stuff.

From the moment I walked in, I felt like I was in a computer store, and got overwhelmed. The store manager who gave us a tour must have read my mind when he said, "this space used to be a CompUSA." The store did have some neat shelving and seating, and some clever organizational ideas. But, the big screen t.v.s on the walls made me feel like I was in Best Buy. The store has a technology area that includes a space where customers can make their own CD mixes and download e-books. The thing that really got me was "the Long Pen," which is this teleconferencing device where you can meet an author and they can sign your book. You can see the author over the screen, they can see you, and then you put your book under the machine and the author signs their name on their thinkpad. The "Long Pen" then signs your book, stroke for stroke. It was weird. I have wonderfully awkward memories of meeting authors and basically tripping over myself (not to brag but I ran into David Sedaris in Paris and it was visibly shocking for me). It's refreshingly human to not be able to just turn off a camera and hide sometimes. Plus, if robots start signing our books for us, where will it end? It's so sci-fi.

In the discussion that followed the tour, many of the librarians declared they were uncomfortable with the store. I whole heartedly agreed.

You can see more photos on the UGLi flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uglib/

Highlights of March 19, 2008

Read closely resume tip #2 from Career Services:

2. Use the spell checker feature on your computer and ask SI Career Services staff and at least on friend to review your resume for typos or grammatical errors.

Oh, the hilarity of an ironic typo.

One reason why I'm sticking to public services

DIFFERENCES between, CHANGES within:

Guidelines on When to Create a New Record

["The document helps guide the cataloger in determining whether the item in hand can be cataloged with existing copy or requires a new bibliographic record. General guidelines are followed by specific guidelines for manifestation-level records for single-part monographs, multipart monographs, integrating resources, and serials. The text describes what constitutes a major difference between manifestations, requiring the creation of an original record, as well as detailing major changes within a serial manifestation that would lead to the creation of a new record. In addition, guidance is also provided to identify minor changes that would not require a new bibliographic record, but might necessitate updating an existing record."
from http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=collectiondevb]

Eyes glazing over? Me too. I applaud the work of catalogers everywhere, but I think I'll officially add this to the list of professions I could never do (I actually wrote it down once... doctor, horticulturist, flight attendant, sex worker, and now... cataloger). I think catalogers do really important work, but if I had to use this 38-page PDF on a regular basis... I think I might go over to the dark side (where the future's so dark, I gotta wear night-vision goggles).

Incidentally, when I got curious to see how exactly one does decide whether to make a new bibliographic record for an item and I tried to download the advertised PDF, I got instead a word document entitled "STARTING A LIBRARY SUPPORT STAFF ORGANIZATION." Amazing. Even the ALA concedes that anyone who tries to read "Differences within, Changes between" is going to need some professional help.