#hlsditl

[foureyedsoul]

Hack Library School Day in the Life - Day № 4

I'm one of quite a few library students currently taking part in Library Student Day in the Life Round Two, put together by Hack Library School. I'll be posting at least once a day on what I'm doing with my student jobs and courses at Indiana University-Bloomington's MLS program.

A bit late, but aiming at being a completist, this post covers what I did back on Thursday.

Checking out Catalogs

I started working at the GIMMS library at 8:30 am, with most of the day spent out at the circulation desk. Even though I'm mostly working on digitization projects, my supervisor wants me to get a bit of circulation experience this year—which is greatly appreciated!

Of course, sitting at the circulation desk doesn't mean twiddling thumbs or crushing lots of candy (digital or physical; we have a rather popular candy jar next to the barcode reader). There's always a project to do, and this week's involved helping process some new maps before they go to the catalogers. I looked up each map in WorldCat to see which libraries own a copy, since we can save a lot of duplication of work if we find that a library with a similar cataloging style already has it in their system.

While humming along doing that, I also helped out with any reference questions. It was slower in that regard than the last few weeks have been, with the only question I got being a directional question. There's construction going on in the library, so the main circulation desk has been moved up to our floor, verrrry close to my desk. It's been nice having the chance to overhear the different patron relation approaches, as well as noticing what patterns emerge.

Presentation Day!

This week is when all the groups in my Evaluation of Resources and Services course shared our results-in-progress for the various studies we're doing. Learning that we're not the only one having to continually revise our codebook was a big relief, and it was exciting to see what other people are discovering from the job ads. This content analysis project is taking a long time, and my group has another meeting tomorrow

My group's also finding that Google Drive is giving us strange grief about not always making the newest versions of spreadsheets or text documents visible to everyone in the group even though they're listed as such. So we're jumping to Dropbox instead. If there's one thing I suggest to incoming students, it's that you get used to having to coordinate documents and work with others. Although the desktop versions of Drive & etc seem willing to associate multiple email addresses with one main account, the mobile versions of many of these types of apps aren't coordinated enough to handle that sophisticated kind of double dutch.

Facts and Feels

I worked for 4 hours at my library job, then had another 3 hours for that class. After coming home, I worked another couple of hours on reading and doing coding. So that's at least 9 solid hours.

It being Halloween, I eventually headed out to the student live production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a treat. And proceeded to run into a couple co-workers who had gone out separately!

Perhaps the new librarian stereotype will be that we work hard, play hard, and make audiences and cast members laugh with well-timed, loving heckling?

[msbooksy-blog]

Day 4 of #HLSDITL

Happy Halloween fellow #HLSDITL followers!

Today's post will be brief since I'm writing this as I'm in the middle of taking my Organization of Information Class. We're discussing authority control and controlled vocabularies, exciting stuff for library folks!

Below are some of the highlights of Day 4:

Processed article requests for patrons, order those we did not own in our collection

Attended our department's quarterly meeting and discussed the changes that have taken place since the previous quarter.

Entered articles into copy service as a way to track library usage

Placed a book on hold for a patron

Other highlights:

Created an image to go with my HLS post

Scheduled to have my Organization of Information class tonight from 8-10 p.m.

Ultimate highlight to my day?

I met Simba, a golden retriever therapy dog:

[foureyedsoul]

Hack Library School Day in the Life - Day № 3

I’m one of quite a few library students currently taking part in Library Student Day in the Life Round Two, put together by Hack Library School. I’ll be posting at least once a day on what I’m doing with my student jobs and courses at Indiana University-Bloomington’s MLS program.

Today was one of the two days where I work but do not meet for class. When I got to my job at GIMMS (Government Information, Maps, and Microform Services), a map to scan for ILL was waiting for me near my desk. My desk is flanked on one side by a table for maps, and on the other by the biggest scanner I’ll probably ever meet.

See that thing that looks like an 88+ key midi keyboard controller? The thing so big it stretches outside of the photo? Yep, that’s our leviathan of a scanner. It’s a feeder scanner, meaning that it grabs onto and rolls maps through its maw, producing a lovely digital image as its gruesome outcome (sorry, it’s well after midnight, local time, so all my descriptions clearly must be influenced by Halloween).

Anyways, we do ILL scans rather frequently, and today’s map was a recent map of the Hoosier National Forest near Bloomington. After that, I worked on identifying birthplaces of “Golden Age” Indiana authors in the Indiana Authors and Their Books and putting them into a spreadsheet so that we can make a map of Indiana authors for that time period. We plan to eventually make a more recent one, as the “Golden Age” stretched from 1880-1920, but that’s further down the road.

I alternated between doing the spreadsheet and fixing more of the scans for the literary maps display PowerPoint I’m putting together. Keeping with the undercurrent of overwrought Halloween-behexed description, a number of the images I’d found elsewhere underwent maddening changes that defy Euclidean geometry, the eldritch powers of color balance, contrast, and brightness rendering that which should be dark ever darker and pulling forth clarity like a long-submerged island welling up out of a hitherto barren stretch of ocean. But really, some of the images I found in repositories (whose, ahem, names shall not be mentioned) were disturbingly murky, so I did feel a little magical.

After that I worked on things for tomorrow’s class, reading the three articles and writing up a response to one for the class message board. And still lots of coding for tomorrow’s presentation!

I still feel like I owe people a write up of the “Library Legends” discussion on Monday, but it’s looking like that will have to wait another couple of days, perhaps even after this week is over. We’ll see!

[msbooksy-blog]

Day 3 of #HLSDITL

Feeling a lot better than yesterday, I returned to work with a cup of delicious mint tea, ready to document my day for #HLSDITL :-)

Highlights of my day:

Because we’re a small library operation, I have to manually process overdue fines. So, I ran an overdue items report and checked it against patrons who received a notice and were still past due with their library materials. Afterwards I submitted the fine deductions to be processed by the payroll department.

Sometimes requests will come in for articles found in our print collection. We have a pretty extensive set of rolling shelves that house large volumes of older medical journals. Today, I scanned quite a few old medical articles from large bound journal sets and converted them to PDF files.

I worked on my first draft for my Hack Library School post during my lunch break. I was finally able to submit my first draft for review by the HLS team. I received some initial feedback and am working on its revision in time to be published this Friday, November 1st.

One useful tool I used today?

Pubmed.gov

Often times, when requesting a journal article we do not own, it makes it convenient to search for its PMID (Pubmed ID) in order to quickly process document delivery requests through Docline. If the article is indexed by the National Library of Medicine into the Medline database, the PMID of the article could searched for on the Pubmed.gov site.

Here’s how:

If you know the article’s citation, use the Single Citation Matcher feature on the site.

Go to the bottom of the abstract to locate the PMID.

[foureyedsoul]

Hack Library School Day in the Life - Day № 2

I’m one of many library students who are taking part in Library Student Day in the Life Round Two, put together by Hack Library School. I’ll be posting at least once a day on what I’m doing with my student jobs and courses at Indiana University-Bloomington’s MLS program.

Today’s post will be briefer than yesterday’s, as I’m in the middle of a huge coding session. Not coding as in programming, but coding as in content analysis of ALA job ads.

Thing One

My day today has mostly been consumed by plowing through a set of ALA job ads, coding their content with a scheme that a group in one of my classes devised. We’d noticed an odd tic of many articles written about academic libraries in that certain types of libraries were often excluded, so now we’re doing some research to make a comparative study between the excluded set and the ones far more often studied. It’s really fascinating, but quite a different methodology than the close reading and critical analysis I’m accustomed to.

As much as I’d love to take credit for all the initiative of this research paper, it’s actually how Prof. Cassidy Sugimoto structured her Evaluation of Resources and Services class this semester. She has a number of years’ data from the ALA job postings, and we’ve all formed groups to sift through them to write papers of our own devising. According to her, the best way to learn how to critique articles and resources is by writing them and seeing them from the inside, so our papers are one of the biggest threads through the course. She’s pushing us to try to publish them as well—not just with “do it!” encouragement but also specific pointers of what journals would be wise to aim at and why not to dismay when you hit certain straits that are apparently just routine. (Simulated dialog: “Wait! Our code book is weird!” “It should be! You’re learning from the data, just add what you’re learning!”)

Thing Two

The other main thing today was my Reference course. I’m in another small group, working on a briefer project in which we imagine an information technology project plan for a library type. Today’s class session was partially a discussion of how to approach this type of thing and partially group time to get started. We’re probably going to do academic rare books libraries because one of the other students is super passionate about rare books, and I think it’ll be an intriguing scenario for implementing information technology. It takes human talent, an aesthetic eye, and knowledge of your source material to make wondrous gifs like they’re making over at the University of Iowa Special Collections & Archives, but I think the technology does help.1 This will also be interesting to try to figure out what technology researchers need in a part of the library that ostensibly is the most focused on older technologies, e.g. vellum and specific types of binding.

Thing Surprisingly Somewhat Tomato Red

Okay, I’m vacating the keyboard now so I can code more tomorrow, since we’re trying to have some preliminary findings for class on Thursday… meaning that we’ll need to discuss things tomorrow evening. One of the trickier things about library school so far has been that many of the assignments are group assignments—excellent practice for working with others in libraries—but we all have various jobs on or off campus and scheduling meetings becomes quite tricky.

I can’t really quantify how much time I worked today because I fell off the Pomodoro-tracking wagon sometime in the early afternoon after I relocated from the department computer lab to a cafe. Night owl tendencies run in my family, though, so if I don’t quit typing or coding now, I’ll get my third wind. And it’ll be pomodoros more before I sleep. And pomodoros more before I sleep.

Please read that with resonances of Eddie Izzard’s stand up, by the way… I’ll wait… okay, we’re back. ↩

[msbooksy-blog]

Day 2 of #HLSDITL

So today I woke up with a lovely monster headache and serious congestion. I’m officially fighting a cold, so I was not able to list some of the tasks I would have done today, due to my absence at work.

But, library life does not end at the actual library! No, no no. Instead I took some time today to work on my first Hack Library School blog post. I’m feeling a little nervous, since this will officially make me a contributing writer, but I’m also extremely excited at the same time.

I can’t go into too many details, but it will be posted this Friday on the Hack Library School blog :-)

If you haven’t heard about this neat site…check it out here:

www.hacklibschool.wordpress.com

And be sure to see what other library students have tweeted regarding their “Day in the Life” by looking it up as #HLSDITL on www.twitter.com

[foureyedsoul]

Hack Library School Day in the Life - Day № 1

This particular harvest season, library students are taking part in Library Student Day in the Life Round Two, put together by Hack Library School. I’ll be posting at least once a day on what I’m doing with my student jobs and courses at Indiana University-Bloomington’s MLS program.

We are the map makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams

On arriving at the Goverment Information, Maps, and Microform Services library, I started scanning maps. 1 This is a large part of that student position (which also includes reference, inputting archival-quality images into digital collections, etc.), but the specific ones I’ve been working on for the last week are a little different than the usual topographic and Sanborn fire insurance maps. At the clever suggestion of my co-worker Theresa Quill, the presentation I’m creating for our digital display boards focuses on literary maps, to coordinate with November being NaNoWriMo!

So I spent part of my time this morning importing maps out of a few books of writer-related or literary-themed maps, part of the time learning how to crop non-rectangular areas with the magic of the polygonal lasso tool and layers in Photoshop, and part of the time putting together actual PowerPoint slides. The presentation ranges from maps about writers or the places they depict (i.e. a hiking route in St Ives, Cornwall, going from Virginia Woolf’s rented house to the lighthouse or a map showing where various enlisted writers were stationed in WW1) to maps representing in-world literary things (such as the frontispiece map to Haruki Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World show below and a fan-made map of Panem from The Hunger Games). Clearly, I’m excited by this project! The GIMMS library head, Lou Malcomb, specifically asked me to bring my background in literature, media & cultural studies to what we do at GIMMS, as she claimed I’d certainly produce something novel that she wouldn’t come up with herself. It’ll be really rewarding if this helps people consider literature or maps differently. After all, cartographic studies of literature have decidedly become a Thing.

make Murakami’s map legible!

Through the looking class

After working for 4 hours at GIMMS, I headed to the weekly lecture for one of the required courses for the degree. This being my second semester, it’s nice to have a formalized Introduction to Information Science that tells me more about the resources and industry side of things, rather than what I’ve gleaned experientially by bookworming my way through academic libraries. The two professors focus on the socio-technical part of information science, which I particularly appreciate. After all, it’s humans using these things, and if you didn’t already notice from the title of my blog, I’m interested in how to improve the fact that information and access aren’t evenly distributed. (Yep, it’s a nod to William Gibson. I should make a post about that.)

… and you will know us by our trail of advice

That class got out a few minutes early so that interested students could hustle over to the auditorium for a keynote address by NPR’s Dr. Moira Gunn, which also happened to be the launch of the new Center of Excellence for Women in Technology. I lamented the fact that I cannot (yet) duplicate myself and instead opted for a discussion put on by our school’s student chapter of ALA.

Called “Library Legends: Perspectives from Three of IU’s Most Distinguished Librarians,” the forum featured the directors of three different parts of the library. Hurray for passing institutional knowledge! They gave many acorns of wisdom and advice, enough that I’ll probably make that a separate post tomorrow.

Facts and feels

For the chronologically-minded among you, all of that took me from 8:15 am - 5:30 pm. Qualitatively speaking, it was a pretty exciting day… and now I’m stoked to be reading other people’s posts as well as preparing for tomorrow’s reference class.

Digital scanner-scanning, not frantic-public-transit-newcomer scanning. ↩