Today (02/01) is the first day of the rest of my career. It is also the first day that my hiring manager no longer works here. It is the first day that the department is really mine. Read More
Hello, fair readers!
I’m sorry that I’ve been MIA for so long. The holidays are only part of my excuse. The last 8+ weeks have been alternately horrible and promising for me and include a resurgence of depression, a poor performance evaluation, new purpose, new direction, and new situations. Read More
In the spring of 2016 I was enrolled in the University of Missouri’s School of Information Science & Learning Technology’s (SISLT) Online Education certificate program. I was only in the program for that one semester before taking a new job in a new state that made it financially impossible to continue with that certificate program since I was no longer getting the 75% employee discount on in-state tuition. One of the classes I was taking was called “Digital Humanities” (DH). This class introduced me to that field of study and had me thinking about switching enrollments into the DH certificate program they were just about to launch. That class required a final project and ultimately resulted in the largest and most professional product I ever created for SISLT, and this is after I’d graduated with their Master’s in Library Science degree in May 2015.
What follows is a version of that final project edited for this format. Read More
I’ve actually been pretty busy this last week-plus and haven’t been able to arrive at a coherent topic lately, so, instead I thought I’d reflect on my recent history and give what updates I can on my professional life. Read More
For this week’s post I thought I’d share some images from our Halloween festivities. I’m lucky in that I work in a place that allows these kinds of shenanigans from time to time. It was a fun day and the staff and students looked great! Can’t wait to do it again next year. I certainly need to step up my Halloween game. Read More
I recently worked a Sunday evening shift for the first time, 1:00-9:00 PM. I didn’t stay until closing, but long enough to support my daytime and evening crew while the normal closer was on vacation. I’m glad I did, because I certainly saw some things I want to work on changing. I won’t go into details, because this isn’t the correct forum for that, but let’s just say I’m interested in running a tighter ship around here. Read More
Recently, I was sitting alone at the reference desk, wearing a sweater, glasses, and sporting some quality facial hair. While sitting there I wondered, “Have I reached peak guybrarian?” I looked a bit like the dapper gentleman to the right, but less done up. Read More
…I don’t know if I’m going to able to post a “real” blog, this week, as I’m attending a conference. Last year, at this same conference, I was able to do a daily recap, but circumstances are different this time around and I’m not sure I’m going to have time.
Watch the Twitter feed and I’ll tweet it as much as I can.
In the meantime, be careful out there, and make it a good day.
In the first year that I was in library school my early classes were frequently preoccupied with the question “Is librarianship a profession?” And the answer was, of course, “yes!” But the yes wasn’t a confident one as much as a desperate defense of the profession as such. In fact, the early classes were more successful in putting me on the Proud Professional Librarian path than they were at teaching me anything valuable or practical about doing the work of librarianship, being that I already been working in libraries for six-plus years. Indeed, it seems that librarianship has been preoccupied with this question for approximately 150 years. If you spend that much time wringing your hands about it, perhaps it’s not really true? Read More