End of Week 3

This week has been a little less hectic. I am getting used to Blackboard and understanding how to navigate it...

I am still reading Double Fold which should be required reading for all librarians and archivists, no matter if they are in school or not. At least they should be made aware of its existence. Though the tone of Baker is a little too overwrought, I like his passion and detail in regards to the history of the cabal that has been advocating microfilming and downsizing collections. Baker takes on the supposed leaders in the field (ca. mid-20th century) and shows how their zeal for technology and ruthlessness in regards to destruction of hard copy has wiped out entire blocks of our history - very 1984 in a way (sorry for the hackneyed analogy). I also like how Baker equates or associates the CIA and academia during the Cold War. I was not aware of how close they all were (I don't have the book handy to make detailed references but there are many examples) and how this affected the information sciences. I guess it makes sense that our national interests during this period in our history would want to understand all aspects of data through the intelligentsia's research habits though it is just a little scary.

World Cat, RIS, etc.

Having a bit of trouble with the World Cat project. Trying to export RIS format to is tricky and I'm not sure I am doing it correctly. Basically what I did was to export the references as RIS's and then export them as CSV's in Excel to my computer. My next step iss to upload them to Google Docs. Hope it works...

Week 3 : Starting Late...

Memorial Day kind of messed up my schedule : I have not been able to contribute (and read) as much as I would have liked. Anyway, I am still reading Double Fold for LIS 2000, and it is very good but makes me second guess myself about every other page. I still am not clear about whether or not it is a good idea to deaccession items (not destroy) because of space issues. Baker seems to think, at least fo rthe larger institutions with vast resources, that it is better and even cheaper to store than microfilm and destroy. I see his point but what about smaller institutions? Perhaps he talks about them later, but we have very limited resources and space and a large collection. I would be great to keep everything but i woulsd be stepping over boxes all of the time. for instance, we have many books on subjects that are not part of our mission statement but belonged to prominent Schwenkfelders. What should be done with them? More on this later...

End of week

Started reading Double Fold this morning. Looks like an interesting book and it is a relief to be reading something easier to understand than Kuhn! So far the book has touched on aspects of preservation relating directly to our situation at the Schwenkfelder Library. We have major space issues, and have been in the process of trying to decide what we need to de-accession. This has been going own for the past nine years now so we have sold (at auction or book sales) many books, newspapers, etc. However, we have not destroyed any material (except for items that are so badly damaged that they are beyond repair - mostly water damaged books). We are keeping all of our local newspapers even though we have them mostly microfilmed. I have to admit it is tempting to want to throw away items that are on microfilm in order to create space, but I am not convinced that you are preserving only for information. More on this later...

Tough Week

Well, I'm wondering what have I gotten myself into. I spent much more time than I should have yesterday trying to figure out how to download rss feeds into Google Reader.I am still working on it yet the mechanical aspects of it are all simple. I really need to catch up on my reading so I can understand what I am actually doing: I'm still not exactly clear about how to capture these feeds, at least through Scopus - don't know why this is bothering me so much but I guess I am thinking too much about it. My most important problem right now is time management - there is so much to take in (reading especially) and little time to get it all done.

Speaking of reading...LIS 2000 lecture on Kuhn was very good and helped alot in understanding the book. Thought it was interesting that peolple from the liberal arts in general do not like the book because it is poorly written - which it is , but the concepts are simple to understand - makes me wonder how much easier life would be if we all had our own editors so that others could understand us and vice versa.  Good night.

Getting Started

Well, this is the beginnig of my personal blog for LIS 2600. I am really looking forward to learning about all of the technological aspects of librarianship and particularly how to apply these skills toward making historical documents and books available online. At the moment, since this is supposed to be a sort of diary, I just want to say that I am a little overwhelmed by all of the material coming at me at the beginning of the MLIS fasttrack program. there is so much to keep up with and absorb that I hope I will be able to stay afloat. Anyway, I wanted this to be a short entry since it is a first time experiment and I am anxious to see if I am doing things correctly. More in a day or so...