Instead of taking a fifth class, I'm doing an independent study this summer on the relationship between book publishers and public libraries in Canada. Last night I finished the first section, a Literature Search of articles, books, web sites and other materials that dealt with this topic and as I talked about in an earlier post, if it's sometimes hard to let assignments go or to stop adding to and editing them, this one was ten times harder to stop revising and adding to.
When I'm done the whole project, I'll probably post it here for anybody that's interested. A hard copy also goes on the shelf in the Grad Resource Centre for the permanent record. (Looking through the other ones, I was a bit surprised there haven't been more done. This seems like such a great option for people to explore literally any topic they're interested in. I've heard that sometimes people want to do them but the hardest part is finding a supervisor who'll agree to monitor the project.
In that regard, I was very lucky as Lynne McKechnie (who's also teaching me Children's Literature) basically suggested the topic to me when I was in talking to her about some different stuff. I'm pretty glad she agreed to do it – in a faculty full of extremely busy people, I can't believe how much work Lynne does. She's the Acting Associate Dean, she holds the Cleary Research Chair, she teaches our Children's Lit course which (surprisingly?) has one of the heaviest workloads for assignments of any class I have (which means it's also a doubly heavy workload for her reading and marking them.) This week, she's in Toronto for the CAIS conference presenting a paper she did with some of the PhD students so she only gets to run over and join us for part of our field trip. I'm getting tired just thinking about it all!