Monthly Archives: March 2005

Hopped up on coffee and chocolate

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Thank you to our local ASIS&T student chapter, I’m now hopped up on coffee and expensive but tasty truffles on a Friday evening.  It is LEEP weekend here at UIUC and they hosted a get-together at Moonstruck.  Two of my three LEEP classes are here today and one tomorrow so these are my peeps. 

I also had lunch with the LEEP Storytelling class which is one of the 3 I broadcast.  It is nice to say ‘Hi’ and put faces with names and disembodied phone voices.

I’m wore out as I walked to and from school twice today.  Been increasing my walking lately but today was a 1st.  I expect to be pleasantly sore for a few days. 

I guess the things I’m hopped up on are better than the general population’s ‘hops’  around our part of campus today.  We seem to be celebrating some sort of Fake St. Patrick’s Day.  Not sure exactly the deal—something to do with the loss of money to the bars due to its closeness to Spring Break or an embarrassing incident a few years ago with visiting ‘future engineers’ (6th-graders) and passed out and puking undergrads.  Anyway, the bars opened at 9 AM this morning and many undergrads have been drinking since then.  Quite the spectacle!  If Michael Gorman wants to talk about about a group that doesn’t do much sustained reading….   Lots of public drunkeness.  Unfortunately, our school house is right in the heart of Campus Town and most undergrad bars.  As a wise woman said:

There will be much public drunkeness on display Friday. Try to avoid getting into any fights (remember… no eye contact with anyone wearing green) and stay out of the way of the various body fluids that will be present throughout the day. You’ve been warned and welcome to the Big 10!

That last line cracks me up.  I was warned but it was worse than I had hoped. 

I used to drink all day long too and on most days; when I was their age even.  But I worked on a nuclear missile site in West Germany at the height of the Cold War and had just got married and brought a son into that world.  Seemed like a pretty damn good reason to drink at the time.  I tried to turn myself in for alcohol abuse and was told to forget about it as it was "simply a symptom of the place."  That was the truth—I just didn’t want it to be and didn’t think it had to be.

Do I want to be listed as a GSLISer blogger?

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Mr. Gorman, why…?  I’m not ready to comment on you; but see what you have stirred up? 

Jill’s asking for ideas on implementing a suggestion to start a list of blogging GSLISers.  Wheeew!  I don’t know how to feel about that possiblity.  I’m not hiding my presence in the slightest, but I’m not advertising either.  Would I want a link to here from school/work?  My 1st reaction is to keep them separate.  It is one of the few areas of my life that isn’t entirely school/work.  Even my website is out of sight behind the LEEP server.  It is kept separate in a vastly different and possibly more efficient way.  This is only separate until people discover it on a search as simple as entry level librarian.  And like that isn’t something someone in LIS might search for….

Mr. Gorman, you are going to have to wait.  I have nothing to add but maybe I should lay out my thoughts for myself.  I used to defend you sir.  It will take me  longer now to urge others to  more moderate interpretations of your comments.  I do not believe that you are a Luddite but that you ask highly relevant and appropriate questions about many things.  But that LJ Backtalk piece?  And don’t tell me it was satire.  I agree with your general characterization of Google’s ‘efficiency’ and with much of your assessment of the value of the digitization project.  But please tell me, you are smart enough to know that what you mean by ‘efficiency’ is not the same as the readers of the LA Times mean by an efficient search engine?

[NOTE: Put in links to some of the better posts from the last week and a half over Gormangate.]

You have forced your way into my life with your comments, in several
ways, sir.  I have generally appreciated your views before but the
difference is that I chose to take them in.  In this case, most
everyone I read was talking about it so I had no choice. 

You are coming to visit us on the 21st of April.  Need to re-schedule my dental appointment.

As you took none of my dignity I want none of yours sir.  Here are my comments on Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians from the Professional Development page of my portfolio for  my 1st library school class last summer:

Again, a very wise man. His first koan, Opening the
Door, where I learned that he, as dean of libraries at California State
University at Fresno, opens the doors to his library each morning made
me cry. What a difference from the academic library that I work at!
Read 25-27 July 2004.

I don’t expect many of the folks who were offended by your
comments—finding them offensive is different—would understand open or
closing a library on a regular basis.  I did it for 6 years to include
most holidays during this time  and within seconds of opening Our Singular Strengths
I was crying.  I was somewhere different then than now, oh, the story
of my life, but…you know, I’m going to leave it at our deans didn’t
open (or close) the building.  It was done by a handful of students
and even fewer staff (I was both).  If it wasn’t for believing the 1st
clause of the next paragraph, I would say that one can not really
understand the rhythm of their library if they aren’t involved in
opening and closing it on a regular basis.  Everyone is important, but
do you spend enough time thinking about these very special and often
very few library workers.

There are lots of ways to experience our libraries people and lots
of ways to have conversations too.  I agree in both Mr. Gorman’s
reviewed, edited & published form and the form of blogs and other
tools of conversation.  There are also forms in-between these.  Let’s
use them.  And not everyone has to use them all, but we should all use
a few different ones.  I think it is pretty much a given that the Blog
People I know of, follow, and possibly respect, are all readers of
sustained text.  And I absolutely love a grand conversation through the
literature of a discipline, but come Mr. Gorman, it is a pretty darn
slow way to have all conversation.

This feeds into one of the main reasons that I’m not so sure I want
this blog widely know throughout the on-line library world.  This isn’t
a library blog.  It’s about the parts of me I’m ready to release
publicly.  And after 20 years in the service giving up my
Constitutional rights while defending those of others, having a son
sent to this damn war, seeing what has happened with our government and
society since 2001…let’s just say I have some things to talk about.
Often it will have nothing to do with the library world and maybe
shouldn’t.  I’m not advocating a fractured, role-playing existence
because I don’t.  My point is that I don’t want to be judged on the
rules of do I make the profession of librarianship look good (always).
Darn, that comment will need explicating.  Later.  I didn’t mean to get anywhere near this involved.  Damn you Michael  Gorman.

 

It is hard to have a great conversation by yourself

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Well, I haven’t  written any more about my ambivalence to this project since my 1st entry; now I’m going to comment on an aspect of it.  Hell, I’m starting to write like I often talk. 

I’ve only had a couple of hundred visits so far and probably half of those are from visiting myself.  That’s fine.  Today I actually checked some of the inbound Google searches that were finding me—most are from Google’s main domain with one each from Google UK and Italy.  I’m not sure how I feel about some of these searches.  I’m not really surprised at any of this, but then again I am a little.  I was 9th for thoughts broken which makes sense I guess.  My entry on Sproles and Ratledge’s article was #2 for entry level librarian.  Their article is #1 so I’m a little stoked about this one; just wish I had said a little more about the article itself.  My other #2 was for ed hirsch and january 2005 for Education and the false dichotomy of depth vs. breadth post.  There are a few others and even a #1 from Google Italy for a search that met part of a post title and the name of an author for a book on the list of those I’m reading.  This page very specifically meets that search string but I wouldn’t have thought it worked that way.

Maybe what they found wasn’t what they were looking for; if it was I wish they had left a comment. 

So many things to say and not enough time; uncomfortable saying some of them this indiscriminately.  Not to say that I am writing indiscriminately, I certainly hope not, but that once whatever is written and posted is then indiscriminately available to practically anyone.  Even if I wanted what I say to be read by large numbers of people, and that is only rarely, that doesn’t imply that I want everyone to read what I said.  Especially out of context. 

And once a post is found they have access to everything here.  Well, if you find it, take it as the conversation starter I intend it to be.