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.

Good Librarian/Bad Librarian

I've been gone for four months, busy getting married and honeymooning and the associated. "My husband" added to profile interests... check!

Well, the campus closed at 1pm on Wednesday and was closed all day yesterday due to the snow. We haven't had this kind of weather in over ten years. Paul (aforementioned husband) drove me to work today and we saw one of those flashy billboards stating it was 9F/-12C outside. Good times.

AL Direct mentioned both a good librarian and a bad librarian in their last newsletter. Thought you would get a kick out of them.

Cataloging Twilight

So on Sunday, I headed three hours south of my home library to a three-day group of cataloging courses through OCLC. Not only did this turn out to be a physical vacation (I got to stay in a hotel on my employer's tab), but also a bit of a mental one.

Now, I did find out plenty of important things that will enable me to do my job better, and that was good. I can look at a MARC record now and more easily pick out flaws or understand exactly what it is that I'm seeing. This is kind of awesome. But the material itself . . . you don't know the definition of dry until you sit through a cataloging class. About the only interesting thing about it was the view-of-Earth-from-space wallpaper at the very back of the long room and the "Transporter Room" sign taped to the nearby elevator door.

The time I wasn't in class was mostly spent reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. Between swimming and sleeping, I burned through the first book and a half back at my hotel. Meyer is a masterful suspense writer--her ability to pull you into the world is flawless; her character development is terrific. Her authorship is the only thing powering this "girl falls in love with a vampire" plot and turning a cheesy premise into something so involving.

Getting addicted to this series inspired my creativity too. I felt a desire to write that I haven't felt in years. Juxtaposed to that was the cataloging . . . it's stifling, really. I am so grateful that there are people out there who love it. It is necessary--the backbone of libraries. But despite my detail-oriented nature, I find cataloging to be soul-sucking. There is little room for creativity or imagination in this man-made system constructed to capture man-made knowledge.

Fortunately, my degree can lead me to other areas of librarianship. Navigating this system of knowledge holds much more interest to me than constructing it and making sure it runs correctly.

And with all of this reading about vampires, I think I will feel the urge to bite the next person who asks me, "what do you do in library school? Learn the Dewey decimal system?" I will tell them to come back and ask me the same question once they can tell me what all of this means. Seriously.

This is your brain on Google.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Atlantic Monthly)

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this?

Haven't these people read M.T. Anderson's Feed?

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to think that Google is, in fact, evil (and I'm only partially being tongue-in-cheek).

Book Collectors

I'm not a snob about books, but I'm probably a show-off -- as who isn't? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever noticed -- much less commented upon -- my collections of minor German Romantics, accounts by UFO abductees, books by and about hoboes, or memoirs by former employees of the New York Evening Graphic.

So states Luc Sante in his article The Book Collection That Devoured My Life. Very entertaining--take a look.

I can somewhat identify, although my own library remains steady at about 400-500 books. It's not likely to get bigger anytime soon either, as I've sadly curbed my desire to own books for the sake of owning. It is still good to keep my favorites, the collectible ones, the ones that have sentimental value, or the ones that I really want to read but that a library is unlikely to have. So many books, so little time!

Some trivia: I like it that Mr. Sante uses the term "library rat" to describe himself at the end of the article. He states earlier that he's bilingual in French, and "library rat," or un rat de la bibliothèque, is a French term equivalent to our English "bookworm."