3 Weeks

I'm on the last couple days of a 3-week 1-credit course on books, paper, and preservation--right in the midst of working on my final paper on the preservation and conservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This course is taking place during "UWinterim"--that gray area between Fall and Spring semesters that is synonymous with "claw out your own eyes."

Normally, a 3-credit course takes 15 weeks, so 1 credit is usually the equivalent of 5 weeks, not 3. The information we've been going through has been super-compressed, and I am experiencing info overload to the point where I've been out sick the past couple of days.

Yesterday evening I wrote five pages, but today I have reached the deer-in-headlights point. I stayed up too late last night working on it, and now I am forgetting to drink enough water.

It's about lunch time, though--maybe I can put off that paper for another half hour and make myself eat something.

At Last

Finally, finally, I'm seeing the light. The MLIS program I'm in requires 4 core courses and 8 electives. On December 17th, I'll complete the last of the core requirements with one elective under my belt t'boot! 5/12 of the way through the program... almost halfway done.

When I started this, I didn't expect the degree to take me this long. I didn't expect a lot of things to happen--people dying, pets dying, getting married, buying a house. This is technically my third year in the program, and it's going to run at least another year and a half before I can complete it.

This semester has been going better now that I have taken to heart the advice that I don't need to get straight A's. There are things that are more important than school (gasp!) It's been working well for me... less stress, less time spent on it, and I'm still averaging over a B.

And now I get to take whatever classes I want for the rest of the program! Woot!

Yesterday I signed up for Spring semester--taking "Genealogy I & II" and "Information Resources for the Health Sciences." The Genealogy series is two back-to-back one credit courses which end in April, so they will overlap with the other three credit course for the first three months, then leave me a month of breathing room to finish up finals for the second course in May.

It is exciting and sad that for the first time, I am truly looking forward to my graduate classes.

Questions

Our assignment in class for this week is to do a search for a question in both a regular search engine (like Google) and a natural language engine (like START), then compare the two and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of natural language processing.

I really, really want to use the question "How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?" . . . but I'd like to find something that an NLP engine can actually answer, thus proving that NLP is awesome, which is the topic of my final paper.

Music Information Retrieval Systems

This week, I wish I had more time to devote to what we're studying in class. It's one of the most interesting things we've talked about so far: cross-linguistic and multimedia information retrieval systems.

Many of you are probably familiar with cross-linguistic IR systems--just go to Google and play with its ability to translate foreign web pages into English, or head over to Babelfish and experiment with its machine translation.

Multimedia IR systems are another matter, though. How can we search for things that aren't expressed in text? Image IR systems have ways of analyzing color and shape in pictures. And music IR systems can analyze things like pitch, melody, etc.

Part of our assignment this week was to choose a multimedia IR system and try a search in it, then report what we did and what we found.

These are the three music IR systems we were given as examples. Play around with them; they're fun! The technology allows users to search by tune rather than by song title or artist.

Tunespotting lets you search by arranging the notes yourself, playing the tune on your computer keyboard (which I found difficult), and also by the regular method of text relating to the tune.

This one is based more around pop music: Midomi. It boasts of being the "ultimate music search"--I wouldn't exactly agree since most of what it has is popular, but if you're looking for a tune like that, I've found it to be spot on so far.

Musipedia is very cool. Probably my favorite of these three, it allows searching by singing the tune (as in Midomi), playing it on a virtual keyboard, contour, or rhythm.

Enjoy!

Slowing Down

Had a chat with my husband the other day about what I'm doing, and decided that what I need to do is slow down.

I'm working full-time AND I'm in grad. school AND I just got married AND we're trying to buy a house AND I still want time to relax and spend with the people I love. Something had to give, and right now that thing is grad. school.

My grand plan was to finish next year, which would require summer classes, two each in the fall and spring, etc., and no breaks. A lot has happened in the past year, though, and I'm just a human being.

Lately I've felt a bit frantic, like I have to finish school as soon as possible so that I can still have kids before 30, if we decide that's definitely where our life is headed. But it wouldn't be the end of the world if I started at 30, or even 31.

What have I been thinking? With work and school combined, my load has almost been heavier than my friend who's in a fairly intense Masters in counseling program, and rivals what one of my co-workers did working thirty hours a week with one class at a time and kids. My very first semester in fall of '07, I took two classes. I was so stressed out that I started getting paranoid about lending tupperware to people, of all things.

I am what you would call a "Type A" person--I really hate saying "I can't." The truth is, though, that I can't do this to myself if I want to stay mentally healthy.

So, I'm taking this summer off, and I may do this one class at a time from now on. It would take me three more years to graduate, for a total of five years from the time I started. That's a long haul . . . but breaking my mind to do it in a shorter period could end up being a longer one.

Information Access & Retrieval

This is the class I'm taking this semester. So far, I'm not impressed.

My professor's clear communication of the expectations is admirable, but the expectations themselves are not--so, I have been busily living down to them. She doesn't expect us to read the assigned materials thoroughly, nor to understand most of the more difficult concepts in our textbook. The subjects she is lecturing on are things that I mostly learned in high school, or at least in my undergrad days, not graduate level material. Some of the things she's gone over I've already learned in my last class (which is mainly the fault of the program's structure, not the teacher herself). And her goal in guiding us through the process of writing our final papers seems to be to extinguish as much creativity as possible; i.e., if nobody's written about it before, we're not allowed to write about it.

Of course there are a few things I'm learning from it. It's been valuable to get exposed to a larger array of search engines, since I admit, I'm a Google-holic. And even if my final paper can't be at all innovative, either way I'll learn a lot about Natural Language Processing. In other words, there is a silver lining to this cloud. That, and we're already almost ten weeks into the semester, which is well over half done. If I can just hang on until May 7th, I'll be free and clear.

These are the kinds of classes that make me want to drop out, though. Completely unchallenging--but then, maybe I need some of that as I learn to balance married life, work, and school. At any rate, this summer I'll be taking the last required course, which I hope won't be too difficult since it's packed into a shorter session. Then, all I'll have left are electives. Woohoo! Genealogy, here I come.

My faculty mentor, who is a fantastic woman, thought that I should try and do an internship for 1-3 credits at a different kind of library. The only problem with this is that in order to do so, I would either have to do it at night or on weekends, take vacation leave for it, or take leave without pay. None of those is very attractive, especially the last one since my husband and I are trying to buy a house. I haven't talked with her recently, but we'll see what happens with that. I am thinking that right now it's not likely, although it would be interesting to get some time in a public library setting.

Murphy's Law

Of course now that it's finals week, my internet is down at home. It's been down for four days. I am crossing my fingers that the technician coming on Friday some time between noon and five will be able to fix it.

The upside is that I was able to print my final at work, the questions look doable, and I only really need the internet for two out of the ten. On top of that, I have until next Tuesday to finish it.

And then, no more school until next January--I'm taking summer and fall off for wedding planning and . . . you guessed it . . . wedding. :)

Organization of Info-what?

After a spectacular January that included a horrific incident, the untimely death of a loved one, an acute attack of the stomach flu, the complete and utter depletion of all of my sick leave, a sluggish return to my normal full-time work schedule, and the start of the Spring semester course that I didn't drop, February is looking up.

This semester it's time for "Organization of Information." From what I can tell so far, it explains the abstract theories of organization and all of the strange and complex words that librarians have created to describe simple concepts. For example: no longer is it a "book" or a "DVD" or a "website," it is an "information package." Then there is "metadata," or "data about data."

"Metadata" is one I'd heard before--the idea is that an "information package" contains data, and thus any data describing that package, such as a bibliographic record, is metadata. Compare this to a similar word--"metafiction" (you guessed it; it's fiction about fiction, those wacky stories about people writing stories, or movies about people making a movie, etc.).

The most thought-bending one I've heard so far is that a "work" is the abstract, intangible idea in a creator's head, such as the David statue before Michelangelo carved him out of that block. An "expression" is the original tangible form that the work took, such as the David statue itself. A "manifestation" is a particular version or form of the expression, such as a picture of David or a book about David. And an "item" describes the particular copy of a given manifestation, such as that 4th printing of that picture of David, which happens to have a torn corner and exist in your local library. This is all part of the new-ish "FRBR" concept--"Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records."

Confused? Try reading my textbook.

What it really all comes down to is that library school is what you do if you want that piece of paper. And I want my piece of paper. But I think we could all benefit from some of the courses suggested by The Annoyed Librarian (read them and laugh, laugh hard. It's things like this that make school bearable and life livable).

Assignments

Some of you are probably wondering how taking an online class works. Well, it involves a lot of reading and a lot of posting to online discussion boards.

And just when you are about to go nuts from doing that, there is the writing. I now have two assignments left for my Intro class, and one for my Young Adults class. One from each of those categories is due mid-December at the end of the semester.

The remaining one is due in a week. 2500 words on an issue selected from a list. Ten sources. I have selected "Information Ethics" as my issue.

I would like to write "if someone is informationally unethical, punch him or her in the face," but I don't think that would fly. And it wouldn't be very informative, anyway, not to mention ethical. Instead, I will write 2500 words about "Libraries, Privacy and the U.S. Government," because that is the issue for which the library where I work has the most books.

And we all know that in the world of college research papers, the one who finds the most books semi-related to a given topic wins.

The other assignment I just completed allowed me to write about a book that I like, then record myself pretending to be an old lady. That was much more fun. But then, I suppose that if everything were fun, we wouldn't know what fun was because we would have nothing to compare it to. Isn't that funny?

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow...

While working full time in library tech. services this semester, I am taking two classes online through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee--Introduction to Library and Information Science, and Library Materials For Young Adults.

To keep sane, I know already that I must practice discipline in how I balance work, school, my relationships, and my own health while working toward this degree. Still, it will be an amazing ride. If I doubted my desire to become a librarian, all such thoughts are dissolved like salt in hot water, especially after reading this article for my YA materials class:

Lessons and Lives: Why Young Adult Literature Matters

Parts of this article had me in tears. This sums up what I lived for as a child and a young adult . . . not just books, but stories. Stories that tackle hard truth, stories that manage to at once lift you into joy-filled castles in the sky and drop you onto concrete from the tops of skyscrapers. Stories of love and hope and pain, skillfully sewn with strands of creativity, pounded together with the nails of imagination.

What better vocation than to infuse the lives of future generations with such narratives? To my mind and heart, there is none, other than perhaps to write those stories myself.