ideas about librarianship
there should be a travel money exchange program where all the academic librarians with travel budgets who are jaded about ALA and don’t want to go to midwinter can donate their money to the up-and-coming librarians who do
Showing posts tagged libraries
There’s my Midwinter schedule. (The asterisks mean I haven’t decided if I’m going to those things yet.) I track it in a tab-delimited text file because that is the language of metadata librarians. There’s a lot of free time there! I wonder what sorts of social events will fill it up. (I arrive Friday at lunchtime.)
shhh! no running in the library!: To take Cataloguing or not? Thoughts?
Hello fellow Tumblarians!
I’m in need of some advice, if some of you may be so kind!
Since I only have a few years to maximize my MLIS degree, I am trying my best to plan out my future courses. After just one semester, I have definitely not figured out what I want to focus on…
Everyone should take cataloging, or at least some sort of course in information organization. I don’t trust library schools that don’t require it. I can’t imagine doing any kind of reference work without having a grounding in that, any more than I can imagine catalogers not taking a reference or user experience class so they know how people actually use catalogs.
That said, do LIS programs still teach cataloging as just a walk through the MARC tags? Because that’s not a very useful introduction to the field, especially since any entry-level metadata job is going to ask that you know Dublin Core at the very least, and probably also MODS, and if you’re in an academic library you have to at least be conversant in academic researchers’ disciplinary metadata standards and how to map them to ours.
When I was at North Carolina there were separate information organization classes for the MLS and MIS tracks, and I got way more out of the information science one because it took a higher-level view than just “here’s what $marc_field is,” so I learned about XML and linked data and all of that, too. Which has been way more useful to me than anything I got out of LIS 151.
So yeah, take cataloging, but not if it’s just rote memorization of MARC fields. You can learn that later.
nypl:
We just had to share this with you! While taking a look at the Library’s Timothy Leary archives with our good friends at The Verge (piece coming to a computer near you later this winter), we discovered that Mr. Leary had a
nintendo wrist controllerPower Glove… and Adidas sneakers. Very clean, red-laced Adidas sneakers. This made us very happy.
They’re looking for an intern to help process this collection, if you know any MLIS students in New York City. Think of all the other awesome things they’ll run into!
starting a new paper
I am working on a new research topic and I’m not sure where I’m going to go with it yet, but I am totally unconcerned with getting scooped (1. tenure stuff is in already; 2. it’s library science, nobody scoops anyone), so here, in the most public forum I can think of, are the questions I want to answer:
- How is “metadata quality” (in quotes because I don’t know how I’m defining it yet) measured in the context of a university repository? What are the factors to be considered in determining whether metadata is good, and in what contexts?
- How do measures of metadata quality affect the work of metadata specialists in a research library generally, and specifically in the context of repository metadata management? Where can metadata services units in the library put their skills to the most efficient use in delivering quality improvements to repository metadata?
Let me know what papers I should read; I’ve got a pretty good stack of them here but am always open to making it higher.
hey librarians
when’s the tumblr meetup in anaheim
cic libraries conference: tuesday project reports
For this they invited faculty from throughout the Big Ten working on geospatial projects in different disciplines to talk about their work, its context, the kinds of services libraries are providing to them now, and what we could be doing in the future to assist these projects. This went for two hours, and so you’re going to have to keep reading after the jump because this post is very long.
cic libraries conference: tuesday keynote
Tom Fisher, dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, keynoted this morning. His talk hopped around from philosophy to information science to his own field of architecture, but was essentially about how new media change the roles of institutions that support the old media. He focused on geospatial resources (since that’s what this meeting is about) and the spatial turn as a way of re-formulating the services that libraries provide. By spatializing resources, we can provide new contexts for them, solve various environmental challenges (he talked a lot about Limits to Growth ideas), and so forth. Making things local also has the potential of democratizing knowledge by making it appropriate to the contexts in which actual people (i.e. not all us academic librarians sitting in a room) live.
The Q&A was the most interesting part. It touched on things like: the costs of making things spatial (because you have to create metadata about a resource to place it in a context it’s not already in); the difficulties of creating resources like this when the people best positioned to do it (early-career academics) have to put up with promotion and tenure and so can’t be innovative because P&T committees don’t reward it; etc.
hey guys i think i’m going to live-blog the conference i’m at
i hope you like geospatial applications and services and the role libraries play in supporting and preserving them
