End of a blog?

Maybe it's kind of ridiculous to point out the obvious, but I think this blog has outlived its usefulness. I am not living online as much as I once did. (Though I am maintaining a presence on Facebook.) As I've indicated previously here, the blogposts and podcasts and bookmarks and reader comments were just too much for me to keep up with, and when I enrolled in two classes this semester they were the first activities I jettisoned in favor of scholarly articles on archival theory, books on my reading list and DVD rentals from GreenCine. Like so many people, I am trying to find what works for me in terms of wading through the great glut of data the world is creating, and I think blogging may be one of the experiments I have to leave behind.

I've been thinking, though, about what to do with this little archive of library school musings. So many blogs just vanish ... a broken link on someone's blogroll. Do I just somehow archive the text of the blog and remove it from the web? Or should I leave it here and risk that someone who Googles me will stumble onto some out of date record of my bitterness. It's bothered me, for example, that for months the top of my blog has been a rant about Dominican and my longtime workplace, the Newberry Library. The bitterness I expressed there is ancient history for me, but there it is, still front page news (at least from the perspective of someone looking for me on the web).

For now I will leave this here as a sort of archival record. I will be finishing library school at the end of Summer 2008. Maybe before then I will change my mind and find something else to do with this.

Ta ta for now.

Fed up.

Another full day at the Newberry paging books and putting out fires. Another night conducting research for a library school paper I barely believe in.

"Join the Dominican University GSLIS community," an email I received tonight says, "as we gear up for an exciting Spring with two exciting back-to-back programs on April 19 and 20." But like a hundred emails previously from the "GSLIS community," this is advertising events scheduled during the day, while I am at work.

And no matter how many times I complain about it, it never changes.

Quoted.

"Raised with instant access to information, Generation Xers are accustomed to frequent, immediate feedback. But they don't always get it. In our Generations survey, 30 percent of Xers said they receive their phone bill more often than they get relevant feedback on the job. That's a huge source of frustration. "

-- Lynne C. Lancaster, "The Click and Clash of Generations." Library Journal. October 15, 2003: 38.

While I'm a fan of Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X and at one point in my life embraced the label, I don't entirely agree with the over-simplified characterizations in this article. The thesis here is that if the generations understand one another they will work more successfully as a team and thus better serve the patrons ... who are themselves born of many different generations. Which is fine. But I fit somewhere between the Gen Xer and the Millennial in the astrological-like character portraits here: I don't distrust all institutions and I don't always embrace change.

That said, the business I quoted above fits me to a tee: always impatient for communication and response from the higher-ups.

Keeping Up and Dropping Out.

I am dumping my plans to write here consistently about articles and other library news items of interest. Likewise I have declared a temporary moratorium on Bloglines.

I have said it before, but I need to say it again. I simply can't keep up with the ever-increasing flow of potentially-but-contingently valuable information out there in the "biblioblogosphere" while also keeping a full-time job and attending graduate school.

What do I mean by "potentially-but-contingently"? Well, so many of the articles I've bookmarked and the blogs to whose feeds I have subscribed seemed at the time to be worthwhile for what they might tell me about the world of libraries at large. The root of their apparent value, from my standpoint, is the opportunity they offer to be a voyeur in the world of, say, academic libraries. That's all fine and good. But the contingency is that I find time to read it all.

I have no doubt that if I, for example, gave up my movie-watching habit, or ceased to do any personal reading, or stopped listening to my iPod that I would find the time to do all that reading. But I am unwilling to do that. I insist on pursuing interests outside of the library.

And what's more, I believe the work I do at the Newberry and the attention I give to my classes each semester are enough. I am keeping up, dammit.

I am beginning to believe that a great deal of the misery and frustration I experienced last semester was due to this feeling I had that I simply wasn't keeping up. I even bookmarked Stephen Bell's Keeping Up website. (Which, I see, hasn't been updated since last July.) But of course I never went back and actually read anything there.

Recently I've been thinking about taking up meditation. David Lynch published a book last December called Catching the big fish: meditation, consciousness and creativity, and particularly after hearing him speak at the recent screening of Inland Empire I find myself wanting to read it. If, that is, I can keep up with my own curiosity.

Tiptoe through the archives with me.

I need to find ways to toot my own horn, so to speak, more often. In my handful of posts last semester I made several references to my Archival Internship, conducted as part of my class 775: Archival Administration and Services. But I failed to make a final report here.

My internship took place at the Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections at the Newberry Library. Martha Briggs, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Midwest Manuscripts, supervised me. I am a full-time Reference Assistant in the Newberry’s Special Collections department, so I conducted my internship on Mondays, when the reading room is closed. I worked five to six hours each Monday, then left the papers untouched throughout the week. The entire project took about 60 hours.

I processed the Cloyd Head Papers. Head was a Chicago playwright, theatrical director and, for a brief time in the late 1920s, the Business Manager of the Goodman Theater. His papers were donated to the Newberry Library by the Goodman. The Goodman received them from Cloyd's grandson Christopher. The papers consist of correspondence, manuscripts of Head's plays and essays and other memorabilia.

Processing a collection like the Cloyd Head Papers involves two broad tasks: arrangement and description. The arranging part consists of sorting through the materials and developing a arrangement for them that, in theory, best supports the use of the papers by researchers. The description part consists of creating a guide to the papers that does things like providing background about their creator, explaining the system of organization in the collection and pointing to items of specific interest therein. Guides like these are called "finding aids," and I wrote one for the Head papers as part of the internship.

I also prepared a version of the finding aid for the web in EAD, or Encoded Archival Description. EAD is a coding standard in the XML-mode that was specifically designed for archival finding aids. Standards like EAD can, in the words of Daniel Pitti, "make it easier for archivists and researchers alike to readily identify and comprehend the essential components of archival description." They also enable computer systems to share information about archival collections with one another, meaning that researchers can in theory browse through several different archival respositories' collections at once.

As with other encoding, creating an EAD finding aid demands a lot of attention to detail. At the Newberry, no-one writes raw code. Instead, code is created using two different software applications: XMetaL, which actually generates the code (from a template the Newberry created when it first licensed the software) and NoteTab Pro, which takes the EAD and rearranges it into HTML so that it can be viewed using a standard web browser.

Now that all that work is completed, the finding aid to The Cloyd Head Papers can viewed online on the Newberry website. Making these guides available online makes a huge difference in terms of accessibility. For example, in just a few weeks of existence, the finding aid has shot to the top of the search results for the term Cloyd Head.

Cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences.

For a few months I've been following the posts over at the ACRLog, the offical blog of the Association of Colleges & Research Libraries. The blog has several contributors, all of them academic librarians working in the field. This is a perfect example of the way blogs increase transparency : reading the ACRLog has allowed me to hang around and see what academic librarians are thinking about as I try to find my own way in the field -- and I don't have to join an organization, pay dues or attend conferences. Of course I can do all of that later if I find academia to be my true calling, but in the meantime I appreciate the chance to browse.

Last week Barbara Fister posted about a report issued by the American Council of Learned Societies last summer. As summarized by Fister, the report makes recommendations about the role scholars in the humanities and social sciences can play now that, in Fister's words, "the Internet is changing creation and communication." The report recommends, for example, that scholars consider a larger audience for their work, including (again in Fister's words) "students and citizens, hobbyists and specialists."

Again, transparency.

Fundamentally, this issue revolves around scholarly publishing: expensive print journals and electronic databases. The expense exists to pay the stipends of researchers, and because allegedly the audience for scholarly works is so very small. But as quoted by Fister, this report suggests "It may make more sense to conceive of scholarly communication as a public good than as a marketable commodity," and "A relatively small audience on the open Web will still be a far larger audience than scholars in these disciplines have been able to find up to now in academic bookstores, in research libraries, and in print journals."

Reading at Random.

Bloglines has a feature called Clippings that I've been using for some time now. In essence, when I'm reading from my blogroll and come across a post somewhere that I find interesting and want to spend more time with later, I can add it to my Clippings. I can organize clippings in folders in the same way I organize my blogroll. I find Clippings useful for a couple of reasons: the fact is that I do a lot of my reading from library/librarian blogs while I'm at work, either during break or when I have a free moment. And I'm often pulled away from the screen before I'm finished. Clippings gives me some prayer at scanning the headlines and saving what I find valuable.

Of course, I'm doing more or less the same thing over at del.icio.us when I apply the tag blogpost to a new bookmark, but thus far I've considered my Bloglines clippings as a kind of temporary warehouse of stuff. If Bloglines as a whole is a kind of Tivo for the blogosphere, then the clippings are the shows I keep on Tivo for some time until I'm really finished with them. But eventually, in theory, I will get to them. And when I'm finished I'll delete them from the clippings.

The thing is, though, what am I doing with them? For some time now I've been itching to make something out of this random reading. Because that's what it is, really: I'm still in the stage where I'm sampling what's out there in the "biblioblogosphere." I keep stumbling across things that make me think ... but then that's often as far as it goes.

So why not write about this stuff? Bloglines offers a secondary feature for its Clippings file: it allows one to broadcast one's Clippings file in a Clip Blog hosted by Bloglines. I've considered doing just that: a kind of internet finger pointing at interesting posts. "Here," it would say, "I liked something about this." The thought of creating a third blog seemed alarming, though, and so I'm hoping to do a little blogosphere finger-pointing here in Seven Fifty Three, instead. That way I'll be encouraged to make a few observations about whatever I'm reading.

This will be an experiment. I've already run out of time this morning, so my first clipping post will have to come later. With some perseverance, I hope to resuscitate this blog.