Tales from the library! And library-esque tales!

I recently sat down with an advisor and made a plan of work to get me through school. The LIS program recommends students do this after completing their first semester, which I think is a bit unfair. I can't decide what I want to do! I have to follow rules, though. I was assigned an advisor who was on sabbatical last semester so I took it upon myself to switch advisors and I picked a professor that I had a class with, assuming I would feel more comfortable with her because I knew her.

We had to reschedule the appointment two times because one of us was not feeling well each time. Luckily, this gave me extra time to come up with a more coherant plan than "I dunno... I just want to touch books." I hadn't really thought about my experiences at the Opera House as something I would want to do for real but the whole time I was scanning things I kept thinking that there had to be better methods to doing this. I have very minimal scanning experience and even less experience with photo software (like Photoshop or the like). On a whim, (well, a friend said I should take this class with her) I enrolled in a Digital Imaging class for the winter semester. It's only offered every other year and I'd heard awesome things about the professor. This is my favorite class I've taken in the program so far. We're learning all kinds of information about proper scanning techniques and about the retention schedule of digital files. Our group project this semester is working with the Charles Wright African American History Museum. We're helping them digitize some of their random collections for a future web collection.

So I'm officially going into Digital Archiving. This means that I'll be focusing on technology and building web collections for things. I'm really excited about this. I think that this will really help me after I graduate. I'm hoping that I can work for the Library of Congress doing something similar to the Flickr project they have. I also came across a job posting for the CIA that needed archiving experience.

The other news is that I'm going to be given more responsibilities at the public library I work at. I mentioned to my boss how I liked my cataloging class because to me, it's about fitting data into a puzzle and formatting things the right way. She decided that she wants me to learn how to process new books and do minor repairs. I've been feeling annoyed at that job because I don't have anything to do except help people at the circulation desk, so I'm glad that she's giving me a project. I have realized that I'm not sure I could ever work at a reference desk in a public library. I would really love to make the library I work at better but the director is super back-in-the-past and doesn't care about improvements. The reference librarians are all older and seem to like the job stability the most. There are also some annoying patrons I can't stand. I'm fine with chit-chatting and there are som patrons that I absolutely love, but I could really stand not to hear about which pet food is the best and did you know that Obama wants abortions for the whole world? It's totally true, the internet told me. I did manage to create a piece of art based on a patron's hair. He was an older gentleman but was going for that Bob Dylan-my-hair-is-its-own-entity thing. Here is what I produced in MS Paint:



I obviously need to learn Photoshop.