A productive vacation? That's silly.

I took my computer, books, and notebooks to the beach with me on vacation this past week...did I honestly think I was going to get both school work and job tasks completed? I forgot what a vacation is for: to get away from everything for awhile. So, while the trip was great and I feel recharged, now I'm back to trying to catch up and keep up with everything. Ah.

As a recent undergraduate, I'm a little thrown by grad school. I'm constantly watching lectures, reading books/articles, and doing supplemental work, and I feel confident that this is the right degree and career path for me. The things I'm learning are exciting and I look forward to doing the work; the tasks I need to complete are never a waste of my time (unlike taking a bio class requirement as an Art History major). It is just so overwhelming sometimes! Our class has learned so much in the past two months, but I get anxious every time I think about how much more is out there to learn about this new career path.

I am an optimist, so bring it on!

Procrastination

I'm slacking on the two posts a week requirement. For the readers out there (aka classmates and Mom), I don't want to blog just to blog and have it be a complete waste of your time. I'll leave this one short and sweet and just comment on our first quiz.

Even though we had all weekend to complete the quiz, of course I left it until Sunday night to do. Once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator. Ironically, (and luckily for me) procrastination usually produces my best work. Anyway, this was my first time taking a quiz online, and it was kind of difficult. I'm used to the quiet classroom with 30 other people and the clock ticking minute by minute. Instead, I took an online quiz sitting on my carpet with my dog sleeping next to me and time flying by. I think I did alright, at least I answered all of the questions, but I was constantly worried my computer was going to crash or the site would kick me off. Maybe being in a different setting (like a library!) for the next quiz will help me focus.

Jing-Zotero Assignment

For our assignment due 6/9 we had to create a brief presentation with audio narrative showing how to download and configure Zotero. Enjoy!

Now back to work on the LIS 2000 essay due tomorrow as well...

OED3

I just finished The Meaning of Everything, by Simon Winchester, for LIS 2000. (Of course, as soon as I finished reading it, I realized I had taken three hours to read the completely wrong book for an essay assignment.) It's the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, which, as daunting as it sounds, was actually a fast and interesting read. The book mainly tells the story of the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which took 76 years to create and is twelve volumes. It mentions the Second Edition which came out in 1989 and is twenty volumes, and Winchester speculates on the Third Edition which is currently being created.

This third edition, conveniently shortened "OED3", expected to have forty volumes and could reach a million words. (http://cogscilibrarian.blogspot.com/2007/08/from-unregistered-words-to-oed3.html) Winchester brings up excellent possible disadvantages regarding the OED3, such as environmental waste and taking up too much space, and he throws out the possibility that OED3 might only be available online.

Is this a good idea? Should we even entertain the fact of printing such a massive collection or go straight to a digital version? (It might be a refreshing change of pace...at least there would be no arguments on the best way to digitize the collection!) The historian, romantic, and pack-rat in me would like to see a printed version just for the sake of having one created. Unlike local newspapers, hardly read novels, and barely circulated journal articles, there is no question on the importance of keeping a record of the entire English Language. No matter how many digital copies and formats we have, wouldn't you just feel safer with a printed version to keep in libraries and universities?

Luckily we have plenty of time to figure out the answer to this question...the latest estimated completion date of OED3 is 2037.

Connected

In LIS 2000 (Understanding Information), the group discussion this week involves the question of whether libraries and librarians themselves are becoming obsolete. As technology evolves, more e-books are created, more journals are scanned, and more articles and books are published directly on the internet, and so on. Will this lead to less trips to the library, less hard copies being checked out, less human librarians needed to help with research?

In one word: Yes.

It is extremely faster and more convenient to be able to access the information you need from the internet in the comfort of your own home instead of traveling to the library, searching the catalog, wandering around the stacks, lugging massive books around, and hoping it has the quote or piece of text that you need. (I actually happen to love this part of researching, but I know there are not many of us left.) If there's a rare italian 17th century book that an art history student needs for a thesis, instead of going through the inter-library loan process and waiting weeks or months for the book, the student can possibly just have the scanned copy sent to them in days. If they're lucky.

If the librarian of tomorrow is smart, she will embrace the technological evolutions to avoid the threat of obsolescence.

In addition to the new ways of finding information, I think that it's also very important to stay up to date with the different ways of sharing information. With the ever growing social networks, blogs, webpages, and so on, it's definitely not difficult to share information...the hard part is keeping up with all of the different ways of sharing. In addition to having three email addresses (work, personal, and school), a Facebook account, a MySpace profile (if people still use MySpace anymore), and this newly created blog, I also created a Twitter account after discussing with my friends the benefits of following "tweets." I am so connected it's scary.

Just call me Overwhelmed...

Hello to the impossible-to-imagine number of MLIS students, friends, and random people in the world reading this blog.

First ever blog and first ever semester in graduate school. It doesn't help that due to work circumstances, I am now officially 2.5 weeks behind in starting both of my classes, and overwhelmed does not even begin to describe how I feel. How did I ever think I could work a full-time job, spend 20+ hours a week on school work for a masters, and have a life, let alone sleep, eat, and be human?

The little devil on my shoulder is telling me to stop whining and get back to reading Double Fold so I don't fail...so I'll leave this at one of those emotional ventilation posts and tell myself that the rest will be more optimistic, entertaining, and academically sound.