My name is Mark and I live in Champaign, IL where I attend graduate school in Library and Information Science.
I am divorced, and have two amazing kids—Jeremy and Sara. Jeremy is in the Army and has been to Iraq once already. Sara is an Oberlin College grad and did nanotechnology research for a year and is now an indexer and abstracter for Chemical Abstracts. I am very proud of both of them!
After "retiring" from the Army in 1998 I attended Illinois State University in Normal to finish my undergraduate education. I majored in Philosophy, and also completed minors in Cognitive Science and Applied Computer Science. I worked at Milner Library as a student for 3 years and upon graduation got a job there as a civil service employee (paraprofessional) in Access Services (Circulation, Reserves, and Interlibrary Loan) where I stayed for 3 more years. I lived in Normal for 6 years—that is the 2nd longest that I have lived anywhere in my life! The longest period of about 9 years ended when I was 13.
I started library school in the summer of 2004. I hope to work in an academic library. Universities may be as flawed as other institutions, but they are a wonderful environment for me.
I graduated with my MSLIS degree in May 2006 and began a 2nd LIS degree (CAS) the very next day. My focus is on classificatory strucures, with a continuing interest in education and training of catalog and metadata specialists.
During my time at GSLIS I have had graduate assistantships in:
Organizations a Member of:
Interests (some):
Roy Harris and Integrationism; language use and theory in LIS; classificatory structures; authority control; controlled vocabularies; standards; cataloging and metadata education and training; technology and its impact on society and the individual; education; XHTML and CSS; life-long learning; librarianship, especially its history and philosophy.