I know I e-signed the pledge to blog every day for reverb10, but I don’t actually want to try the patience of my (I suspect fairly few, after multiple digital moves last year) readers by writing poorly thought out posts for no better reason than “I said I’d blog.” You…
One project stands between me and full librarian status! (Unless you’re one of those sticklers who thinks you have to have some number of years in the field, first. But my title, once I start work, will be both Assistant Professor of Library Science and Web Services Librarian–I hope I…
I make no secret of my loathing for summer classes. It isn’t the standard “I’d rather have a break,” though I suppose that factors in. Rather, it’s the inherent lack of balance. The summer semester at Pitt is 3-4 weeks (depending how you count) shorter than the other two, and…
I’m officially finished with my second semester of library school. It was an inauspicious ending, with my final project for the reference class cut short by travel to my partner’s grandmother’s funeral. (Family comes first, even at the end of the semester.) I got fine grades in my other two…
I’ve changed my summer course schedule twice, now. On the bright side, all of this fiddling has left me with courses I’m excited to be taking! INFSCI 2955: Special Topics: Systems – “Web Engineering†(Monday nights) LIS 2850: Library’s Role in Teaching and Learning, aka Library Instruction (Four weekends, Friday…
I had a pretty fantastic spring break. I did not, as I had hoped I would, research and complete my paper for Academic Libraries, though I did settle on a topic. I also did not catch up on Cataloging, where I feel like I’m shamefully behind the curve (on the…
It’s fun to post about my schedule, because, pretty much immediately after I hit “publish post,” I begin rethinking it. I’ve dropped Instruction to take Web Engineering (seriously, a class about applying software design principles to web development? with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, and PHP? I’m in! I only wish…
Summer counts as “a semester” at Pitt, so that we can make it in and out in a year. If I’d known everything I know now when I applied, I might have done this whole thing very differently, since, for instance, there was no option for continuing into a PhD…
(A continuation from here.) So, the solution? First, retool online courses: convince your video software provider to offer real-time streaming (ideally with a text chat function, though that could be obtained elsewhere and kludged in), or move to a different vendor. I understand that this removes some of the benefit…
Now, folks, I’m pretty clearly in the technophile camp in most discussions. I still hold the (naive?) belief that it’s possible to write an interface that library users could actually use to harvest articles, or at least citations, from all of a library’s various books and databases, without needing librarians’…