In which I ramble about music and whatever else pops into my head

Today's been a busy day, mentally-speaking, and instead of following my usual pattern of either talking it out of my system with other people or ignoring it until the wheels in my head stop spinning, I figured I'd inflict another blog post on the world. :)

Have you ever noticed that when describing a new band to other people, most of the time, you default to describing them based on other groups that have a similar sound instead of describing the sound itself? I was thinking about that earlier today while listening to a new album that's currently rocking my socks off. I love to share music I think is amazing with other people, but when I was trying to figure out a good way to describe Elbow to people I think would like them, I found myself trying to figure out who they sounded like instead of trying to find the words to describe the music itself. It's so much easier to make comparisons than use your own words to describe something, which is a little sad to me.

It reminded me of one of the many random events that occurred while I was volunteering at the library a while ago. A blind woman came up to the welcome desk and asked for some assistance with a couple basic things, and at one point, she wanted to buy some thank-you cards from the library shop. She asked me to describe the cards to her one by one, and the knowledge that she'd choose based entirely on my description gave a sort of pressure to the situation that doesn't normally exist when picking out greeting cards. It was surprisingly difficult to describe the scenes on the cards to her, which really made me think about how much I take in sense-wise without it actually registering in my mind. Describing something visual was difficult enough, but describing a smell? Or a sound? No wonder people revert to comparisons when trying to describe music. That being said, bear with me while I mangle a quick outline of some current favorite tracks.

While I'm writing this sentence, I'm listening to Grounds for Divorce (Elbow), and I'm really digging it. It's one of the most interesting songs I've listened to in a while because it's insanely layered. Every time I listen to it, I notice something different - a new little gravelly spot in the vocals, a new piece of the bassline, etc. Gah, even now when I try to describe the scene it sets for me in my mind, it's really hard to think of the right words to put it in. It feels like a song that should be heard in a bar with a beer in one hand and the other pounding out the time on the table. There are so many moments in this song that are ripe for audience participation - repeated lines, post-chorus intensive percussion sections, vocal hooks, you name it.

Next up is The Bones of You, also by Elbow. This song stood out to me when I was thinking about buying the album, and the percussion hooked me right away. I'm a sucker for a good beat, and this one definitely has that. This song feels like a driving song to me. It feels like a song that should start a summer road trip mix. Car windows open, sunshine streaming in, driving down the Oregon highways that I miss so much sometimes I can hardly stand it (one of the very few things I miss about living in OR during undergrad). I used to go for long drives when I just needed to get off campus and not think about things for a while, and I really wish I'd had this album back then.

On a somewhat related note, Derezzed by Daft Punk from the Tron soundtrack is definitely near the top of my list of current favorites. I've been a fan of Daft Punk for quite a while now, and their soundtrack to the movie was absolutely fabulous. This particular track is a favorite because of the incredible moment about ten seconds into the song where the beat gives way to the heavy synth. While Elbow is great for a leisurely car ride, Daft Punk (this song in particular) makes me want to sign up for motorcycle certification and start saving up for a sport bike.

I really don't know how I've gotten so far in life without knowing about Rodrigo y Gabriela. I don't even remember why I happened to look them up on Youtube a week or so ago, but I'm glad I did. Watching them play Tamacun and Diablo Rojo makes me feel the kind of awe that I don't really feel very often when it comes to watching musicians perform. I've always loved Spanish-style guitar, and their music makes me want to take up some form of dancing that would allow me to not look like an idiot while dancing to the beat. I bought both of these songs on iTunes, and while they're great, it just isn't the same as actually watching the song being performed. When you just listen to it, you don't see the fingers flying all over the place, or them getting so wrapped up in the beat that they're practically dancing in their chairs. I think they swung through Seattle (or Marymoor, at least) earlier this year, and I can't imagine how amazing they'd be live.

And with that, it's time to pack it in for the night. I'm off on what I'm sure will be an epic cabin adventure with some friends tomorrow through Wednesday, and I still have to track down half my snow gear. I've located my coat, pants, and boots so far, so all that's left is to hope that my goggles and gloves aren't stashed in storage somewhere...

Happy Katie is happy

Just a quick post tonight - Steam is having a completely ridiculous sale, so I'm about 3 minutes away from some serious gaming bliss. Downloading Portal (finally), Trine, Braid, Super Meat Boy, and all three Winter Voices games. Yay.

I've got to say, now that grades are all in for all three classes, I am pretty damn pleased with how my first quarter of grad school has gone. As stressful and overwhelming everything was at times, coming out of it with much better grades than I was expecting gives me a lot more confidence going forward. Now that I've got a good baseline established for what's expected of me, I can finally start to up the ante and really push myself.

I'm pretty excited for next quarter to start up too. I'll be taking LIS 520 (Information Resources, Services and Collections) and LIS 560 (Instructional and Training Strategies for Info Professionals), and on top of that, I'll be reading and evaluating what will probably be a mountain of applications for admission to the MLIS program next year. I'm so ready for it all, though. I'll take the stress of school over the stress that comes with putting off Christmas shopping until the last second any day. Whoops. O_o

In between now and January 4th is going to be a ton of fun though, so while my brain's ready to get another pounding, I think my liver's first in line. Christmas weekend followed immediately by an epic cabin trip with some friends and a NYE bacchanalia to finish it all off? Yes. Please.

Hope all you MLIS folks are having a fantastic break thus far, and congrats to all of us on successfully navigating our first quarter of graduate school! In a lot of ways, this will probably go down as one of the most difficult quarters we'll face, and I really couldn't have asked for a better group of classmates and colleagues to tackle the rest of them with. :)

Oh Christ. No, seriously.

I subscribe to a couple listservs through the UW that target both student and professional positions, and one of the emails that made the rounds this morning advertised a Library Assistant position opening up in Cataloguing at Seattle Pacific University. In a frenzy of excitement, I clicked on the job description, decided to ignore the fact that I don't have any direct experience in cataloguing (yet), and got to work filling out a job profile during my morning break that I never ever take.

About two questions in, I noticed something odd about the tone of the application. I was asked to read the mission statement and statement of faith of the university and state whether or not I agreed and supported them. Normally, I'd have just not read them at all, clicked the Yes button, and gone on without a second thought like 98% of the other applicants will probably do. But I was curious, so I actually read them. And got extremely uncomfortable extremely fast. One of the options regarding your opinion of the mission and faith statements was a "Yes, with the following reservations:" button followed by a text box, and I wrote a basic "was raised Christian, now no longer follow the faith, still have the highest respect for people who choose to do so" blurb, and moved on.

The next two questions basically assumed I'd answered Yes in my support of the mission and faith statements. They asked me to explain in detail my assumed personal relationship with Jesus Christ and about my assumed involvement with a church or youth group, including any leadership roles I had taken. At this point, I clicked out of the application, and I'm still debating whether or not to continue it.

I feel like I'm an extremely accepting person when it comes to issues of faith. While my personal church-going experience has been mostly negative (leading to a current diagnosis of "I don't know what the hell I believe" and a definite aversion to most church-related activities), I have zero problems with other people's beliefs as long as they aren't getting shoved down my throat. To be confronted with these questions of faith in a job application really made me stop and think: should I go through with this application even though I can't justify being anything but totally honest about my lack of faith? And if I do decide to apply, would I be ruled out from the get go because I don't ascribe to their particular brand of belief? Is it more valuable in the long run to be honest on a job application than to just say what you think they want to hear?

Interesting thoughts, for sure. On a happier note, please read this. It totally made my afternoon.

I really didn't mean for this to dissolve into a rant, but what can you do. Once it starts, there's no stopping it.

When I re-downloaded WoW a few days ago, I was sort of afraid I'd fall back into the pattern I developed the first time I played the game: going to work, coming home, turning on the computer, falling into bed five or six hours later after a hefty bout of leveling. I'd never played competitively or even really collaboratively in the past, as by the time I got on board, most of the friends I knew who played had been doing so for years, while the most complicated video game I'd tackled prior to WoW was Ocarina of Time (fucking Water Temple forced me to pull out the FAQs every time). As a result, I'd maybe actually play with friends about 10% of the time, while the other 90% was spent running around blissfully killing everything I could see.

I was listening to a Stuff You Should Know podcast on the Vikings the other day, and their discussion of the Berserkers definitely rang a bell when it comes to my video game playing - I am an admitted button masher, and I am not ashamed to say so. This makes me little more than a huge nuisance when I play with other people, so I usually wind up soloing my characters, as doing anything more than moving the mouse WHILE hitting a key or two on the keyboard, like strategizing or attempting to chat during a battle, turns into me dying in a matter of seconds. So while WoW is probably going to be a lot of fun to mess around with during break, I somehow doubt I'll have that much of a problem putting it away once classes start back up again.

School has finally started to get back under control for me, which has been great. After a last-minute crunch to get my IB paper and presentation put together (the latter largely thanks to my incredibly on-the-ball teammates without whom I probably would have totally bombed the thing...or at least certain deadlines), as well as an incredibly frustrating afternoon putting together my final website design project for the quarter, I'm 10 presentation reviews in and looking good to finish out the quarter strong. I decided to only take two classes next quarter instead of trying to squeeze in an elective, since I'm guessing that admissions committee work is going to be pretty intense and time-consuming, and of course, probably going to amp up about two or three weeks before the end of the quarter.

A frustration has begun to surface as of late that I've hit in the past before, but had hoped not to encounter in my library science journey. I've been keeping an eye out for any library jobs in the greater Seattle area that would suit a 23 year old graduate student, and while a couple have popped up, despite a pretty significant amount of library experience and one hell of a resume, I still haven't gotten any bites whatsoever. I'd interviewed with one institution in particular quite some time ago when I'd just graduated from Linfield and was desperately searching for a job, any job, and while the evening shift library supervisor position I applied for would have been the perfect next step, I was passed over in favor of someone a couple decades older than me. Since then, despite frequent follow-up with the library positions I've applied for there during the past couple months, I've never even gotten an email back to thank me for my interest in the position. And sure enough, a couple weeks after the job closes, I see another 40-50 year old in the position.

I'm trying really hard not to draw the wrong conclusions about this cold-shouldering, but getting a foot in the door is turning out to be extremely difficult. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the job I currently have - I've taught myself quite a lot about the legal process, and met some very nice people. But one of the reasons I thought I was hired there would be to aid in legal research using the skills I acquired during 3 years as a student worker in reference, and to date, I haven't done one damn bit of research. My days are mostly spent doing copy jobs, data entry, and basic filing, which I probably could have accomplished just fine when I was 15 years old. Being 23 and trying to find a challenging, interesting job that pays enough to support you is starting to seem like a mythical state of being at this point.

While I know my eventual MLIS degree will probably help, I suppose I'm just afraid that after graduation, I'll run smack into the same wall I'm beating my head against right now - it'll just be a little further along the path. I don't expect to waltz my way to the top of the library world, but I'd like to be given the chance to accomplish the things I know I'm capable of doing, and want desperately to do. I miss working in a library. I miss interacting with patrons, and having every day hold something different. I miss the feeling of being excited to go to work. I suppose that's one big reason I volunteer at SPL, but even there, I get chewed out pretty frequently for stepping beyond the established boundaries for volunteer aid. About a month ago, for example, a patron came up to me who spoke only Korean, and he managed to convey he needed a translator. I asked the circ desk worker what the normal procedure would be for that, and she handed me a placard with the number of the free translation service used by the library. I called the service, explained the situation, and set up the call for the patron. After speaking with the translator, he handed the phone back to me, and the translator conveyed his request (he'd forgotten his library card at home and needed someone to look up his number for him) to me, which I passed along to the right person. Simple enough, right? You'd think I'd have run up to one of the stacks, doused it in whiskey, and lit the thing on fire based on the librarian-in-charge's reaction to my account of handling the situation myself.

I think half of what attracts me to library administration is the concept of self-management, and not being constantly bitched at by people higher up on the food chain than me. Realistically, you can learn all there is to know about an entry-level job (if you aren't a total idiot) in a month. Why 3-5 years of experience on average is required for most of these positions is totally beyond me.

Okay, enough ranting for now. Trust me, I could go on, but that isn't exactly productive. For now, I'm going to stick with networking as much as humanly possible, which doesn't really feel like work, actually. My interest in the field is absolutely genuine, so meeting and interacting with as many people as possible that are currently in it is extremely interesting, and I've really enjoyed talking with the folks I've met so far! I'm hoping to get a chance to speak with some of the reference librarians at SPL sometime soon about what exactly they do, and in an informal, conversational context. I'm interested in getting to know what people really think about their jobs as librarians - not just the rainbows and butterflies that's projected to everyone that doesn't know better.

Sorry about the enormous post - despite taking an HTML class, I'm still trying to figure out the easiest way to hide chunks of text behind links in a blog post. I was a champ at that during my Livejournal days, but since there isn't a handy little button anymore, I'm a little lost. Hokay, time to Worgen it up for a while before bed. Later!

Resurfacing!

Hi everyone! I just put the finishing touches on my portion of the 510 group IB project, and holy crap am I glad the past two weeks are over. Now that I've turned in my IB paper and our IB project is done (collectively worth 50% of my total grade in the class), I feel like I can finally breathe again.

I'd planned on writing a longer post about everything, but I think I'll wait and let my brain recover a bit first. But hallelujah to the ever lubbin jeebus I survived that gauntlet. :)

Pessimistic-affective break time!

I'm currently smack in the middle of watching Everything is Illuminated from a perspective based on Dervin's info-gaps, and since I'm drowning a little in IB theory, figured I could use a quick blog break before heading back to it.

Writing papers for this program, even though I've only completed one so far (not counting the midterm), is unlike any kind of writing I've done before in a really interesting way. I was an English Lit major in college with a smattering of History, Religion, and European Studies thrown in, so most of the papers I've written deal with relatively concrete ideas, concepts, and events. I took a grand total of one literary criticism class, which was both my least favorite lit class at Linfield and my only exposure to stand-alone literary theory. Studying information behavior theory independent from context, which is mostly what we've been doing this quarter, has been a definite learning experience for me. I'm much more used to applying theory to example situations or works, so figuring out how to discuss IB theory from a broader perspective has been challenging.

As things stand, I feel much more comfortable than I did a month ago with the multitude of IB theories out there. I'm really starting to be able to quickly identify the key elements of the work of certain theorists, and some of what I've read is absolutely fascinating. Favorites so far include Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory, Kuhlthau's Information Search Process (ISP), Salvolainen's Everyday Life Information Seeking (ELIS), Erdelez's Information Encountering, and Dervin's Sense-Making. We've done so much reading for this course that sometimes it feels like I can't stuff any more theory into my brain, but of what we've read, these theories and models have stuck more than most. I've decided to focus primarily on Dervin and Kuhthau for my IB paper, mostly because Dervin's discussion of the affective factors of information seeking fits in well with the emotional tone of the search in the film and because I think Kuhlthau's model thoroughly represents the typical information search by including those affective factors instead of glossing over them as some of the other models we've examined tend to do.

All that being said, I'm having a hard time not letting myself sink into a bit of a panic. The IB paper is due in a week, but even more dauntingly, our IB group presentation is due in two weeks, and although some good work has been done on it all so far, consolidating the vast amount of information and research we've gathered in into a coherent, focused thirty minute presentation is going to be a pretty enormous challenge. I think my strategy is to get the paper written as quickly as I can (ideally over the next two or three evenings) so that all my energy can be focused on putting the presentation together.

I seriously can't wait for the end of this quarter. For better or worse, shit will get done, but it'll be so nice to have a break.

On the plus side of things, I ordered myself a Droid 2 on Friday, so I should have a shiny new toy to play with come tomorrow evening. :)

HELL yeah!

3.85 out of 4 on my first grad school midterm.

...bitches.


:D

Theraflu is a close second to Vick's for grossest medicine ever created.

Because I should probably stay as far as possible from the discussion boards while I'm in the state I'm in, and because the fuzziness in my head is refusing to let me focus on any one task for more than thirty seconds at a time, BLOG POST! Hopefully I won't regret this later when I regain consciousness!

School update time! Everything's been going pretty well, surprisingly enough. I'm sure I'll crack up reading that sentence in a couple weeks when everything starts coming due, but for now, I feel relatively on top of things. Well, at least not behind to the point of panic, anyway. I've got a lot to catch up on with the lit review for my Information Behaviors group presentation, but there's a good chance I'll actually have two interviews and a set or two of observations under my belt by the end of next week. I'm hoping to interview one of the librarians at the central branch of SPL about her experiences helping senior citizens in their info seeking needs, and if I can pin him down, my grandfather (who builds computers in his spare time). I think both of them would give some pretty awesome and unique perspectives on the info behaviors of senior citizens, and that combined with our lit review and observations should make for a pretty great presentation. I hope. O_o

Another looming project coming up is a paper that analyzes information behavior in a social setting. Sounds redundant when placed next to the IB project, non? The thing that distinguishes this paper from that project (and makes me pretty freaking stoked to write it, actually) is that this social setting can be real or imagined, meaning I can pick a favorite book or movie in lieu of a real life scenario if I so choose. I'm thinking of dibsing one of my absolute favorite films, based on one of my absolute favorite books: Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book itself is one big information seeking quest, but since the scope of the novel is much more grand than what's appropriate for a 7-10 page paper, I'm thinking focusing on the film will be more realistic given the time constraints.

Other than the IB project and the paper, 510's going pretty well! I'm actually enjoying posting in the discussion boards a lot, and it's been fun picking everyone's brains about the intricacies of information behaviors. I've probably said this in a blog post before, but it bears repeating that I feel we're finally being given the vocabulary to describe processes that we've all engaged in our entire lives. Learning in this way always makes me think of a phenomena that until recently I'd thought was just a me thing - whenever I learn something new, it feels like it's being learned for the first time. Period. Because it didn't exist to me before I learned it, it didn't exist period. Very Descartes of me, I know. :3 At least I think it was Descartes...I checked out of my freshman philosophy class about a week in, so I may be misquoting.

Life in general is also proceeding pretty well. My orientation meeting for the MLIS Admissions Committee is coming up next Monday morning, and I'm really REALLY excited for it. Work is shmurk. Hopefully soon, when I've recovered from this cold, I'll be able to rejoin the social world. But for now? More Dr. Who and *sigh* more Theraflu. Cheers!

Seriously EXCITING news :D

I just got word tonight that my application for the MLIS Admissions Committee for next year was accepted! Meaning I will be serving as one of four student representatives on the committee that selects next year's group of residential and online MLISers!

I could not be more excited, honestly. I'll be reading close to 50 applications, and fully participating in the work and deliberation carried out by the other members of the committee (i.e. iSchool faculty, staff, and administration). It's going to be a metric fuckton of work on top of the pile I already have for school, but to be in a position to help give a new group of students the chance to begin what I've started with the iSchool is such an amazing thing to be involved with, and I'm very honored.

Maybe eventually I'll have the time to sit down and write a proper entry, but for now, I like the brief entries. Keeps me from procrastinating if I don't have to write an essay every time. :)

I like lists

Observations of the evening:

1. Cranberry juice mixed with ginger ale is a glorious beverage.
2. Reading an article that outlines a particular information seeking model through the use of diagrams becomes slightly more difficult when the diagrams refuse to load on the page.
3. While HTML tagging makes the little OCD gremlin in my brain insanely happy, figuring out how to write a web page mostly from scratch (Thanks, Selena!) and making sure every link I input does its job makes me a little dizzy. But hey. At least there's one more exceedingly classy website out there with my name on it. ^_^
4. There is an incredible sense of pride in finishing a website design project on time. There is an incredible sense of confusion when the online drop-box for said project does not exist.
5. I love folding laundry. Especially when it allows me to put off doing homework.
6. I'm sensing a bit of a disconnect between what I seize on for discussion in the articles I read for 510, and what everyone else in my discussion group wants to talk about.
7. Having the librarians who agreed to be interviewed for a massive information behavior project email me to volunteer a good time and place is great. That their proposed interview date is November 24th (a whole five days before the entire project is due) is not great. Time to regroup.
8. The heater in our apartment works great until the apartment is heated. Then the angry fan clanking noises start.
9. Cats don't like candles.
10. I still need to put together my Halloween costume. Crap.
11. Skype has taken over the internet.
12. I don't actually have a twelfth observation. I just don't like ending lists on odd numbers.

That is all!

Too sleepy to think of a clever title.

Figured it was about time to post an update, and since my brain is still slightly frazzled from a study group that took place earlier tonight (that I ducked out of a bit early due to aforementioned frazzleness), I think I'll keep this one short...if I don't get carried away, that is.

First and foremost, I'd like to issue a halle-friggin-lujah that LIS 500 is over. The intensity of the relief has waned over the past couple of days as LIS 510 is starting to amp up, but still. I (hopefully successfully) completed my very first graduate level course. Jury's still out on whether or not I'm going to get a pass, and I'm slightly worried that I may have misinterpreted/underestimated the minimum number of posts on the boards we were supposed to make, but my paper kicked a significant amount of ass.

Every so often, library organizations across the US like the ALA (American Library Association) or ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) publish a list of core competencies - basically what they as an organization would expect out of a new MLIS graduate in the various areas of the field (ex. administration/management, collection development, etc). For our paper, we were asked to take at least four of these lists and critically review them based on their treatment of one of the following: leadership, innovation, or diversity. Since I started this program, I've had my eye on library administration, so leadership seemed to be the proper topic for me, and sure enough, once I got rolling on examining the sections of these lists of standards that deal with administration and management, I had plenty to say about how it was treated.

In a nutshell (i.e. to spare you the four pages of ever-so-slightly opinionated ranting I turned in on Sunday), my beef with the way leadership was treated in those reviews stems from the fact that if you'd replaced the word "library" with the word "business" in any of the leadership standards, I might not have noticed. At or near the top of each list was the expectation that a future library leader must be able to develop and manage a successful budget, and know how to glad-hand any potential sources of funding (donors, the government, etc). Very little library-centric language was used in any of these standards, and whenever I would spot one I was enthused about, I'd check to see if the ALA list had anything similar and see it veiled behind the ridiculously vague phrase "transformational leadership". While I understand and acknowledge that the financial and HR aspects of running a library are very very important in the leadership sphere of things, there's so much more to it than that that just didn't get mentioned. At all! Like the fact that a good library director should be extremely familiar with everything that goes on in their library, from reference to maintenance, and should work closely with each facet to ensure they're giving the best available service to patrons. A good director should encourage their staff to continue their education and help provide them with the means to do so (to be fair, this was on a couple of the lists I examined, but not on the ALA list). The lists weren't very unified in their views, and the lack of any real flavor to them bothered me a bit.

Okay, ranting on that topic over. All in all, 500 was a pretty good class to break the ice and get us all back in the school mindset, which I know is something I've been struggling with the past few weeks. To add graduate level studies to a full-time job AND a pretty active social life has been a tricky thing to manage, but I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. Being caught up in 510 definitely helps though. I knew I dropped the ball when it came to post frequency for Module 1, but thankfully my content was solid, according to the grade I received from Katherine (the class TA). I've started a couple of the discussion threads for Module 2, and I'm trying to keep up the frequency and quality of my posts. It's surprising how much easier everything is when you aren't behind and struggling to catch up! Go figure! It's also surprising how much more fun things are to talk about now that my basic "info behavior" framework is in place, although it is difficult to stick to the text when all I want to do is go off on tangents and insert opinions and do all these things that may not belong on a graded discussion board.

INFX 503 (Website Design) is proving to be a bit frustrating, to say the least. I think I just don't speak the same language as the prof, because for some reason, her instructions go right over my head most of the time. It takes me a while to muddle through, but thanks to some other ladies in the class, I'm starting to tread water a little more successfully. I even wrote my very first webpage the other day! Looks like something a 5th grader could have done, but still! Woo for me!

Okay, time to go do a little reading for fun. I'm in the middle of An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks, and it is completely fascinating. If I were scientifically minded at all, I'd probably have leaned towards a career in neuroscience, but as things are right now, I'm content just reading books like this and being baffled by the text...but in a pleasant sort of way.

HEEEEEHOOOOOOHEEEEEEHOOOOOOOO

Just finished my second module of my website design class, and after sitting and swearing at my computer for about an hour, I figured I could afford to take a quick break and post. It's been a while since I've updated on all my library science adventures, and that's partly because other adventures have been popping up all week (including randomly finding myself someone to date...definitely didn't see that coming). Unfortunately for me, because of those adventures, I'm falling a bit behind on school, so I'm in the midst of a teeny OMGI'MGOINGTOFAIL panic attack.

• LIS 500 is ending in about a week, thank god, but that also means my four page Critical Review of Professional Competency Standards (that I haven't started yet) is also due in about a week.
• My participation in the LIS 500 boards has been relatively sporadic, and not as much as I'd have liked to contribute, but at least I don't think I've made an idiot of myself in discussions...yet.
• I've made a grand total of one post in the LIS 510 board for Module One (Sorry Trent!!!), but hopefully by the end of the night I'll have made up some ground, and once 500 ends, I'll be able to focus more directly on 510. Got to get a little more frequent with my posts for that class - it just intimidates me WAY more than 500 for some reason. Yaaaaay for the return of online stage fright. >_<
• Just finished Module Two for my website design class, which took over an hour and was no end of frustrating. It's going to be just as tricky to wrap my mind around the instructions for each module as it will be to digest the content.
• Had a very productive online chat with my 510 IB project group, which definitely helped me stop freaking out as much about how we were going to organize everything. A huge thank you to my group members for being on top of the deadlines for picking a social group to research and fill out the group strengths/weaknesses/strategies sheet - my mind has been so scattered this week I might have spaced and forgotten about it.
• I really REALLY need to find an efficient way to calendar everything. I'm thinking massive whiteboard that would hang above my keyboard, since I seem to fail miserably at maintaining any sort of physical planner. Comes from never being a diary-keeper, I think. I'm a little too undisciplined to keep something up that isn't staring me in the face every time I walk into my room.
• I have had Hold Your Colour by Pendulum on loop for the past two hours and I've got to say, electronica makes for great productivity music. ^_^
• FINALLY got my textbooks in the mail. Expedited shipping from now on, for sure. Stupid Amazon.

Okay, back to work. Or maybe off to get some B&R Cookie Dough ice cream. I am craving that something fierce right now.

End of Week One. Head still unexploded.

Whew. What a week. I knew my routine would change significantly after orientation ended and classes began, and I thought I'd prepared adequately. Got all the right programs installed on both my desktop and my laptop, got through all (...okay, most) of the readings and lectures for LIS 500, warned my friends that I'd be getting a little busier for the next couple years, and sat down all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at my computer and waited eagerly for the discussion boards to open. Five days, about a thousand emails, and several minor panic attacks later, I am proud to say that I survived my first week of graduate studies! And my head didn't even blow up!

This week more or less felt like the couple times I've tried to learn how to drive a stick. In theory, I knew what I was getting myself into. In theory, I thought I'd woken my theoretical long-dormant abilities and proficiencies. In theory, I figured I could probably smoothly wing it until I really started to get the hang of it all. In practice, however, I found myself jerking back and forth, sometimes moving ahead and accelerating with ease and perfect aplomb, then almost immediately getting overconfident, destroying my momentum (and probably various important car parts/brain cells), and grinding painfully to a halt.

Despite the stress that comes with any sort of major adjustment to the way I spend each of my days (and now most of my free time), and despite how completely physically and mentally exhausted I am sitting here at my desk with a much-needed beer, I still feel like somehow, I came out on top this week. I successfully completed my first assignment, as small as it was (we had to create a short 3-5 minute intro presentation using the tech tools we were granted access to last week during orientation - here's mine if you're interested!). I successfully reworked my strategy for reading in a more effective way, and the progress I made allowed me to somewhat confidently post comments on the discussion boards for LIS 500. I'm starting to get my schedule under control, and I'm settling into a proactive routine that I actually might want to keep up instead of defaulting to my go-to hard-core procrastination. A bunch of small victories in the face of the beast that will be this degree, but I'll take 'em.

Aaaaand now my apartment is being invaded by some friends, so I'm going to go be social for a while. I feel like I've earned it. :)

Phew.

Weeeeeeeell, as expected, it only took a couple of days for the first mild panic attack to set in. I decided tonight that I was going to make my first real attempt at productivity and jump headfirst into the discussion boards for LIS 500, and oh lordy did I feel like a fish out of water.

I think the root of my problem lies in the fact that thus far, I've tried to do everything digitally to cut down on the reams of paper I'd otherwise be going through. Reading the PDFs online and taking notes via Microsoft Word, as it turns out, just doesn't have the same impact as the studying and review I did all through undergrad, because I couldn't turn to the articles while brainstorming discussion question answers. I hadn't marked them up with underlining and highlighting like I normally do, so when searching for relevant points, I got kinda lost. And trying to decipher the paragraph long comments people kept leaving definitely didn't help the confusion, so I wound up having my first real "What in holy hell have I gotten myself into?" moment. I started feeling a little better after sitting back and taking a few deep breaths, and put together a pretty awesome Introductory Powerpoint for LIS 510 (albeit slightly over the 5 minute limit), then when I decided to upload it to Screencast via Camtasia Relay, I find that Screencast has randomly crashed. *insert hyperventilating here*

At this point in the evening, I'm tired, I'm grumpy, I'm confused, and I'm really hoping a good night's sleep will help clear my head. I may have to rethink my strategy a bit when it comes to how I'll be doing my reading from now on. We've been told time and time again that this quarter will be the hardest, since we'll have to readjust our way of thinking and doing things quite a bit, and I certainly hope that's true. If not, I'm just going to have to suck it up and step it up. Can't take over the library world with online stage fright, right?

But for now, sleep sounds pretty great.

P.S. I've been doing laundry all evening, and I just noticed for the first time that there's a setting on our dryer for "Optimum Dry". But for whatever reason, there's an option right above it for "More Dry". Why is that there? Wouldn't "Optimum Dry" be the optimum option? I am confused.

And now the real work starts...

Today was, sadly enough, the last day of my iSchool orientation. These have easily been four of the most intense days of my entire life, and while I'm really sad to have to leave the happy little library bubble I've been in this whole time and return to the outside world, at the same time I'm pretty relieved that it's over, because that means we can finally get to work. Our sessions this morning were, for me anyway, by far the most intense of the entire orientation, which I definitely wasn't expecting. The rest of our sessions have covered everything from the tech tools we'll be using throughout our program (I'll do a post on them all later...right now I'm just trying to figure out how the hell to actually use them) to managing group work in an online setting, but today, the focus was on our futures.

            

At the culmination of our program, we will be required to complete what is called a Culminating Experience (CE). Going into orientation, I knew very little about these except that we'd have a few types of projects to choose from, and that if at first we don't succeed, we get to try try again until we do. We've got four different types of projects to choose from, and I'll give a breakdown of each along with my initial (and slightly overwhelmed) thoughts on them:

             

Option #1: Professional Portfolio

              

Of our four CE options, building a Professional Portfolio seems to be both the easiest option, but also the most time consuming, and most requiring of significant forethought. In essence, our professional portfolios will be like a resume on crack - a digital record and presentation of everything we've done and accomplished in the field of library science, both within our program and outside as well. These digital exhibitions will help showcase our work, skills, and overall potential to future employers, and as an added plus, they’ll also net us three credits and fulfill the CE requirement. In order to do a decent job with these, we’ll be creating and utilizing a “Digital Repository”, which will serve to hold all kinds of useful artifacts from every stage of our grad school experience in an online storage space that we can access anytime. I’m definitely going to be starting mine up within the next couple days, since class is officially starting up next week.

              

My immediate reaction to listening to Marie talk about the portfolios was excitement. I’m taking a Website Design elective this quarter, and ideally, even if I don’t wind up choosing this to fulfill my CE requirement, I’d like to design and build a portfolio from scratch. It'd be insanely useful in my future job-hunting to be able to tack on a URL to any resume, cover letter, or business card I'll be handing out (and I'm suuuure there will be resumes aplenty that get sent out into the void before I find something that works best for me), and even though it'll be a lot of work to develop a portfolio in my own time in addition to my official CE choice, I think I'm up for it!

               

Option #2: Thesis

            

Ahhh the thesis. A beast I managed to successfully avoid in undergrad, despite being an English Lit major (still not quite sure how that happened). As far as I could tell from the presentation, this wouldn't be all that different from a typical undergrad thesis, save the fact that as a Master's thesis, it'd be of a higher caliber and much more likely to get published. Student-directed research, student-written scholarly paper, and the definite CE priority for anyone looking towards a future PhD.

             

It's been a goal of mine for a while to eventually pursue a doctorate in whatever field I decided to pursue career-wise, but I was definitely taken aback when Joe Janes (our program chair) flat out warned us away from it if we aren't planning on focusing our career on research and teaching. I'd always considered a doctorate as a way of maxing out in our field, but from what we were told today, I don't think it's something I should pursue, since it'd put me on a drastically different path from where I'd like to head. No thesis for me!

               

Option #3: Research Project

                

Collaborating with a faculty member or two on their independent research, something I'd been hoping to be able to do, has apparently been recently declared CE-worthy. Being part of a faculty-directed research team, and potentially being able to aid the prof in publishing, definitely holds some appeal for me, but I’m not sure I’d like this to be the end all and be all of my time in the iSchool. Plus, in order to collaborate on something, I’d have to be really damn sure I’m interested in whatever research was going on, and there's no guarantee right now that any of the profs will be engaging in research that will be interesting enough for me personally to prompt me to want to jump in headfirst. This is definitely an option, but it doesn't top my list. Which brings me to...

                   

Option #4: Capstone Project

            

Imagine you have an information idea. It could be anything from improving the information gathering/storage/retrieval process of a business to establishing a teen outreach program in your local library. Now imagine proposing it to that business/library/organization and with their help, and that of the iSchool, being able to implement that idea and watch its effect on the organization.

                 

Going into undergrad, I had no illusions that my academic work, unless it was exceptional beyond all belief (it definitely wasn't), would be most relevant to my own personal development, and not necessarily to the community at large. This CE option holds the most initial draw for me because it would allow me to begin to leave my footprint in not just my school community, but in the field I've chosen to pursue, which is something I've never really had the opportunity (or drive) to accomplish before. My goals are big, I'll admit that freely, and they aren't going to be easy by any means to achieve. For all I know, I may be seduced by a different area of library and information science than what I've initially pointed myself towards. But despite all that, I see this Capstone as a real opportunity to make my first mark in the library world, even though I had to mentally slap myself for feeling compelled to brainstorm Capstone ideas four days into orientation. I'm slightly crazy, if you all hadn't figured that out already. :)

                  

After these culminating project options were all outlined to us, we sat through another thirty-minute talk on Directed Fieldwork, and our options for that area of our degrees, but by the time DFW popped up, my mind was already completely engrossed in daydreaming about how I'm going to spend the latter half of my degree pursuit. A definite fault/virtue of mine is that I'm very future-oriented - I tend to focus my energies and excitement more on what's to come than what I've experienced in the past and what's around me at the moment. The thing that alternately excites and terrifies me about listening to our options for Culminating Experiences is this feeling that the iSchool, more than anyone or anything else in my life up to this point, is going to equip me with the skills and resources to take over the world. This is the real deal, people. It isn't something to just float through, like undergrad (yeah, don't kid yourselves...we all skated through and managed to pop out with a degree that in most cases just isn't useful or applicable to what we're doing right now). Being made to realize all of this is why today, of all four amazing days of orientation, was by far the most intense and overwhelming, yet at the same time, the most inspiring and validating.

                   

Hokay. I am exhausted. It felt really good to get all this out of my head, but it's definitely time to go do something brainless for a while (Netflix ho!).

Orientation Schmorientation

Good evening everyone, and welcome to my latest (and hopefully least unsuccessful) attempt at a sexy new blog! I just finished Day Two of my iSchool orientation, and it's already becoming apparent that I'm going to need a place besides official class forums to alternately geek out about how unbelievably cool my plunge into library and info science has been and will be, and freak out about the stress and frustrations that I'm sure will plague me along the way. Alors, une blog!

Days One and Two have been increasingly awesome, and every bit as exciting as I'd hoped they'd be. For those of you that know me, and have known me for longer than, oh, a year or so, you know that I have the tendency to retreat into crippling shyness when I'm confronted with a big group of people I don't know. A hold-over from my high school days that I'm doing my damnedest to get rid of with a pretty high success rate so far. It took a while for us all to stumble through the obligatory get-to-know-you phase of the orientation, but one impromptu lunch group formation and one spontaneous coffee/sit outside and chat session later, I started feeling a lot more comfortable and in my element. Undergrad orientation brought together a truly mixed bag of people who all wound up going their separate ways academically after a couple semesters, but this. This is different. Everyone that's here is here because we share similar passions and goals for our lives, and I still can't get over how foreign yet incredible it feels to be among all my fellow librarians-to-be.

That being said, the actual orientation part of orientation has pretty much done nothing but kick my ass since I've started. You know that feeling you get when you suddenly commit to running a marathon, but you haven't exercised beyond an occasional round of Wii Bowl for the past two years? I haven't used my brain in any sort of academic way since I graduated from Linfield almost two years ago, and even though my incomprehension of a big chunk of our assigned readings kind of tipped me off to the fact that Yes, Katie, you're actually going to have to work for this one...go figure, sweetheart, it's still a bit of a shock to sit through a session and come out realizing you actually don't known a damn thing about the field you've chosen to pursue as a career. It's intimidating, to say the least.

I'll probably start posting more about the content of what I'll be doing later, but for now, a quick summary of my class load:

LIS 500 - The Life Cycle of Information

This is the class I know the most about thus far, which is probably because of the shitload of readings and lecture-watching we've had assigned to us over the past three weeks. Seven "modules" that cover everything from defining information to conceptual models and relational databases form the backbone of the class, and as we all found out (to our horror) during orientation, this class is accelerated, meaning our culminating project is due not at the end of the quarter, but October 17th. A little over three weeks from now. *hyperventilates*

LIS 510 - Information Behavior

I know next to nothing about this class so far, but what I do know, I like a lot. The instructor for this one narrated a lecture for LIS 500 on metadata that I found worthy of a geek-out session, and the first article our prof encouraged us to take a look at is titled "New Shit Has Come To Light: Information Seeking Behavior in The Big Lebowski." It's times like these that I feel like I've finally found my people.

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(The kitten says hello.)

INFX 503 - Website Design for Information Professionals

Website design has always been of interest to me, but until now I've been too intimidated/lazy to pursue it seriously. HTML knowledge and familiarity with the tools and tricks required to create and maintain a website or database is an insanely marketable skill in today's job market, so when I saw this pop up as a tech elective, I figured I might as well give it a go. I'm anticipating many nights of cussing out my computer, but hopefully at the end of it all, I'll be slightly less clueless as to how a website is born and kept up to date.

C'est tout pour la nuit, mes amis! Time to cook some dinner (i.e. pour a bowl of cereal and pray my milk hasn't gone bad).