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July 19 = Busiest Day of the Year

July 19 is shaping up to be the busiest day of the year for those of us who enjoy the extracurricular activities that library school offers. 

Noon – 1pm (NCB 293) – Lunch Bucket Speaker Series with Jean McKay, author & creative writing instructor and Corey Redekop, soon-to-be-published FIMS student.  Whether you're a closet writer or not, come out and learn about the writing process and what it takes to get published. 

4:30 – 5:30pm (NCB 293) CLA Student Chapter Presents…Cabot Yu
Are you interested in working for the Government of Canada? Not sure what GoC BBB and LS mean? Then on July 19th from 4:30-5:30p.m. in Rm. 293, join
us for an informal discussion with Cabot Yu about how to find and apply
for library jobs in the federal government. Also, find out how to use
your coop experience to your advantage in landing a job.

 

PLUS: Tired of being pelleted with popcorn? What can your library
association do for you? How can CASLIS Ottawa and CLA help make your
MLIS experience more meaningful and useful? Tell us what you think.

Cabot Yu (MLIS '99) works as an Electronic Information
Specialist at Citizenship and Immigration Canada. He is also on the executive of the Council of Federal Libraries' Priorities and Planning Committee and of CASLIS Ottawa.

(Personal note: Cabot is a really wicked guy who is super-active in the Ottawa area and is sure to have lots of good things to say.  Super-active?  Is that like radioactive?  Because he's that too!)

5:30 – 7:30pm (NCB 114) Student Film Series
Quinn Dupont will be hosting a free screening of a film which is connected to libraries and library-related issues.  This month's film will be “The Motorcycle Diaries”.  As I think I said somewhere else, come out for this.  It will make you a better librarian (or your money back!)

Posted 10 July 2006 § LibrarySchool § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

"'Hot Shot City', which is particularly good"

The Amazon.com Reviews of a David Hasselhoff “Best of” album
which is a special import from…you guessed it, Germany.  Perhaps the funniest thing I've read all year.  (via Metafilter)

Posted 10 July 2006 § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

A Weekend of Athletics (Other People) and Socializing (Me)

This weekend was probably my busiest social weekend since getting to London…

Friday night, we went to Christina's party as I believe I already mentioned.  The athletics of other people alluded to in the title of this post were the group of crazy buggers who played bocce ball in the dark…

 

…while I held the flashlight (and was not doing a very good job of it from the aim in this photo!) 

Saturday, we went for Korean BBQ and sushi with David and Sabina (which was awesome except for the part where Sabina got worried because she thought I was going to stick my face into the tabletop barbeque and start licking the grill since I was enjoying the food so much.)  Then on to the Wilco show at Centennial Hall which was great plus we even caught a bit of the final band at SunFest afterwards.  Uhm, the athletics of other people this night has to go to the guys who were dancing in front of us off and on throughout the concert leading to a funny exchange between David and I about whether any of them would pause briefly in mid-air, like Wil E. Coyote, if we pushed they fell off the balcony. 

Then Sunday, two guesses what the athletics of other people were.  Yep, World Cup finals babee!  A group of library students went to watch the Final at a nearby pub and, as you can imagine, being library students, we nearly started a riot with the Italy fans at the next table.  But after the Zidane headbutt, the Italy fans were afraid to start anything in case we used similar tactics on them. 

Here's a photo of the group of hooligans…look at them, coiled, ready to lash out at the slightly provocation!  I said “SHHHHHH! dammit – the game's on!”


And just for the heck of it, here's a shot of the sunset from Christina's balcony on Friday night. 



Oh, Classmate of the Day goes to ME!!  Why not?  I'm working on my Individual Study project and that thing has ballooned up to 60 plus pages (it was supposed to come in around 30-40.)  How crazy is that?  I deserve some credit for how much blasted work I've put into this thing.  It's an honest-to-God monster. 

Posted 10 July 2006 § LibrarySchool § Main Page § Photo ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged:

One Red Paper Clip = A House in Saskatchewan

A 26 year old guy from Montreal has managed to “trade up” from a single red paper clip to his end goal of a house which, in the final trade, ended up being in Kipling, Saskatchewan.  He takes possession on July 12 and is planning “Saskatchewan's Biggest Housewarming Party” for the September long weekend with an open invitation for anyone who wants to show up. 

For anybody who's reading this back in Saskatchewan (or anywhere – anyone from FIMS up for a 26-hour drive to attend?), I encourage you to take advantage of this offer and plan a good old-fashioned road tour to Kipling for that weekend.  (Of course, the town only has 1100 people and one 25-room hotel so you might want to pack a tent or make plans to stay with friends in a nearby community.)

Kipling is about 100 km from my hometown (80 km from Shea's hometown) and in fact, when I had a summer job selling cable TV subscriptions during college, Kipling was one of the towns I worked in.  It's actually a great little community and the highlight of my week there happened one evening  right before I finished for the night.  I went to a house where an elderly lady was working in her yard.  I gave her my sales pitch and she put me off but we ended up talking some more for some reason and it turned out that she'd worked for Tommy Douglas during the formative days of the CCF. 

(I went back and found exactly what I'd written in my journal at the time:

Nothing significant [in Kipling today] except I met one 92 year old lady, right at my last house of the night.  She ended up talking at me for about half an hour as mosquitoes chowed on my plasma.  Talked about how her husband loved her 'absolutely and completely' and advised me to do that with my wife someday if I wanted her to love me like that in return.  She told of her husband building her the house we were standing in front of and dedicating this “castle to his queen”.  I'll admit that how she said it actually made me tear up a bit.  She told a few other stories about her family and also how she's sewn dresses for people “north, south, east and west” and made a fair living at it.  She talked about how her family (along with many other fine English families) had built Kipling into a beautiful community and how she had been involved with Tommy Douglas and the formation of the CCF!  I promised I'd go back and see her and part of me would like to sit and have a cup of tea with her.  I don't know if I will have time though.

I never did go back.  If that lady was 92 back in July 1994, I assume she's not alive anymore.  But it's pretty crazy to think back to that brief connection.  How one random encounter over ten years ago has stayed with me to this day.  And how things always seem to come full circle in ways you'd never expect. 

Posted 09 July 2006 § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

A Week of Learning at FIMS

Here's a sample overview of some highlights for a random week at FIMS…

Monday
I don't have class on Monday which means it's technically the day that I work on my independent Study project.  This week, I think I worked on sleeping, playing computer games, watching Oprah and eating Cheetos.

Tuesday
Tuesday is our management class.  Because it's a compressed course, it starts at 8:30am instead of 9am like most other morning classes.  And for some strange reason, lately, I'm usually one of the first people there.  This week I had the pleasure of being the absolute first and turning on the lights.  As for the class itself, I should maybe just say that not too many people I've talked to have ever enjoyed their management class at FIMS and leave it at that? 

Okay, I did learn one thing this week – the professor spent some time talking about one article he read as an undergrad which he called “the most influential article I've read in my life.”  It's called “The Science of Muddling Through” and was written in 1959 by a guy called Charles Lindbolm.  I haven't read it yet but the prof described it as the author basically poking holes in all management theory and saying that essentially, what happens is that managers are faced with constant decisions and they make the best decisiosn they can in the quickest manner possible given limited information and time to decide.  This resonated so much with me that I went up at break and got permission to respond to this article instead of one of our assigned weekly responses to the textbook which the class are increasingly disliking.  I know I was frustrated enough to use Dilbert as my required “source” a couple weeks ago.  Another classmate has used Monty Python sketches three weeks in a row.  And one classmate showed me her latest weekly response in which she used the methodology of the documentary, “The Corporation” to assess our textbook as if it was a manager then finding it unable to motivate, ineffective, disorganized, unreasonable and inflexible.  She concludes her paper by saying if our textbook were a manager, she would fire it. 

Wednesday
Wednesday is my Managing Internet Information class and even though I consider myself fairly technnology-savvy,  it's a great class where we're constantly learning about useful web sites, program and technology tricks.  This week, a bunch of my classmates were raving about www.protopage.com for instance.  The prof knows his stuff inside and out and is confident enough to teach the information he has each week and then let the class go even if we're being let out early, something other professors almost seem afraid to do. (Of course, the fact that class happened on the same afternoon as a World Cup semi-final and the prof is a huge soccer fan is probably also part of the reason we got out early!)  Went to the Grad Club to watch the game but it was packed so ended up sitting on the patio for a few hours with various people from upper cohorts and having a few laughs.  I heard from someone (Christina?) that FIMS has a new policy that we'll get a reading week each semester which is great news.  (I put that in bold so it'll stand out for anybody scanning this entry quickly and ignoring most of my babble.  I haven't heard it confirmed by any authority but the calendar on the FIMS intranet – http://intra.fims.uwo.ca/dates-grad.asp – shows Oct 30-Nov 3 as “Research Week” so that sounds promising.)  I missed having one this semester (although CLA was sort of the same thing – not a full-on break but definitely a break from school) and you can see people starting to crack up a bit by mid-semester so it's probably a wise decision.

Thursday
I have “Collections Development in Academic Libraries” as a night class and after thinking I'd drop the class after our first session, it's grown to be one of my favourites.  One of the things making the class so valuable is the professor brings in guest speakers on nearly a weekly basis and this week was no exception.  We had two women who work as collections developers in the nursing and health sciences areas at UWO.  They gave a great presentation then had us do the single best exercise I've done at FIMS.  For it, they handed out a sheet that listed the typical courses that would be offered to undergrad Occupational Therapy students, the research interests of the faculty and a list of 15 books in the area along with cover scans, prices, dates and short blurbs.  As small groups, we were given a budget of $300 and told to come up with a list of books we would buy and why.  This was interesting enough – talking with my groupmates and discussing the strategies we would use (we ended up going through the books one-by-one and ranking them on a scale of 1-5 based on things like cost, whether it was Canadian or not, relevance to courses or faculty, etc.)  Then all the groups wrote their lists on the board, it was revealing to see the similiarites and differences.  Although no one visiting a library sees which book you ranked first and which you ranked seventh (no matter their choices, all groups ended up buying 7 books which was also interesting), it was cool to see how the different groups ranked them and hear a bit about why.  Some (including us) put the one written by a faculty member first (obvious decision, I thought.)  Some put an introductory textbook first because of how much value it would have to many students (others thought that libraries didn't normally collect textbooks unless it was to be specially put on reserve so didn't choose it at all.)  Oh, and our group actually ended up being the only one to “buy” eight books because, thinking outside the box, we decided that our vendor always gave us a 20% discount on our purchases and this freed up an extra $60 to buy one last book.  Very fun, very enlightening, and very useful. 

Friday
Went to Children's Literature in the morning and people who aren't in the class probably find it hard to believe that this is the class where I'm doing the most work of any course I'm taking!  We have to read both professional articles/chapters from textbooks plus a novel or two from various genres of children's literature each week.  We have to e-mail the prof a brief response to these readings.  We have three major assignments.  Plus we have to do a fairly involved direct interview with a child about the books they own including preparing a transcript of the interview, a list of the books they own (my child had over 100) and a short essay about our experience.  Plus we have to do a “Book Talk”, a brief 3-5 minute presentation “selling” a book to our class as if we were presenting it to a group of young people.  Luckily, in addition to being my hardest class, it's also one of my favourites.  So that's all good! 

Classmate of the Day: Christina for having a very fun party last night (she lives just down the hall in our building which was extremely convenient)

Posted 08 July 2006 § LibrarySchool § Main Page ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged:

Friday Fun Link – July 7, 2006 (Largest Cities Throughout History)

One of the great things about doing a weekly fun link targetted at librarians is that I can basically link to anything
interesting I find since it’s all information and librarians tend to be
interested in…information. This week’s link is one of this type – not
directly related to libraries or librarians but very cool nonetheless.

The largest cities throughout history
list “is an an amazing work providing the population of cities
throughout time. [The author] utilized a plethora of historical sources
to locate approximate populations for the world’s largest cities since
3100 BCE.”

(via Kottke.org)

Posted 07 July 2006 § FridayFunLink § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Five Things That Make Me Insanely Happy

Stealing a meme from my mentee's blog:

Name five things that make you insanely happy for absolutely no fathomable reason:

1. Sticky notes (and office supply stores in general)
2. Walking in the rain without an umbrella
3. Spicy potatoes
4. Long Greyhound bus rides
5. Crossing things off my To Do list

(Of course, if I think about it, I can easily come up with the reason why each of these things make me happy.  It's actually pretty hard to come up with things that make you happy for absolutely no reason at all.) 

Classmate of the Day: Lauralee Gilmour who uploaded some of her hilarious stick-figure artwork to our cohort's listserv.   I've asked her permission to post a (relatively tame) excerpt.  As well, a glance at the time stamp on this entry will show why I too, am a member of her group: “SANE SLEEPS – Students for Afternoon and Night Education / Students Longing for Extremely Essential Periods of Slumber”

[Edit: Okay, permission granted.  This is part of a comic she drew in a recent 506 – Management class when a few of us who are taking “Collection Development” were able to leave early to attend a presentation by a vendor to UWO librarians.  I'm pretty sure I'm the stick figure saying “good-bye” as I apparently walked out of the class with a shit-eating grin on my face as I looked at the rest of the class who had to stay there.  The funny thing is that because I was at CLA the week before this, I'd missed our Collections Development class and only heard about the presentation that morning.  Otherwise, I too, would've been sitting in class thinking “Why do they all get to leave early???”]



Oh, and Chris Graves put his own statement of intent from his MLIS application on his blog so I've updated the related entry on my site.

Posted 06 July 2006 § LibrarySchool § Main Page § Meme ‡ Comments (5) ° Tagged:

Lunch Bucket/Film Series Double-Header

Our first Lunch Bucket speaker of the summer will be on Wednesday July 19 from 12-1pm.  Jean McKay is a local author and creative writing instructor who has published in a variety of genres.  Her latest book is titled “Exploded View: Observations on Reading, Writing and Life.”  Come out and hear about the process an author goes through to become published and some other behind-the-scenes information about the publishing industry.  (We may also have a FIMS student who has placed his first novel with ECW Press in Toronto speak but I can't announce that yet as he's not confirmed! ) 

(For anybody who doesn't know, the Lunch Bucket speaker series is a recurring event at FIMS where we bring in speakers from the wider book world to help place librarians in this context and to complement the library-related speakers that are brought in by the department and by the various student organizations.  Last term, we had a publisher, an international development officer from CODE (co-presented with Librarians Without Borders) and a panel discussion with students who had worked in libraries as para-professionals.)

Then, that same day from 5-7 pm, Quinn will be showing the second in his ongoing film series of movies relating to library issues.  Last semester's screening of “The Aristocrats” was a big hit with the brave souls who came out on a very rainy evening.  This semester's showing will (likely) be “The Motorcycle Diaries” and if you haven't seen this film yet, you owe it to yourself to see it.  I would go so far as to say that it will literally make you a better librarian. 

Mark your calendar and come out for one (or both!) events.

Posted 05 July 2006 § LibrarySchool § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

A Very Efffective Use of PowerPoint

This was the second slide in a presentation that Linda Schneider of the FIMS Graduate Resource Centre gave to our “Collections Development” course back in early June.  She joked about using my intellectual property without permission so now I get to do the same to her!  

As I blog about strippers and porn and the lack of a decent meal at the CLA conference, I really need to keep in mind that not only students but professors, working librarians and former grads (who may someday want to hire me) are reading this blog!


Posted 04 July 2006 § LibrarySchool § Main Page § Photo ‡ Comments (0) °

Randomness (Happy Canada Day & Fourth of July)

How Hot Is It In Ontario Right Now?
“It's hotter than a bull's balls when the summer stalls” as we say out west.  (Actually we don't say this out west – I just made it up.  If somebody did say this, I have a strong suspicion that a guy in a cowboy hat would beat them up.)  Renee provides a Westerner's perspective on that unique Ontario heat in a couple entries on her blog.  Her entry about what a Humidex is and why western Canadians are unfamiliar with them is particularly funny.

Statement of Intent Trackback
Quinn posted his own Statement of Intent that he wrote for his MLIS application on his sexy, newly redesigned blog and as he says, looking at his and mine side-by-side, it's interesting to see how two people take different approaches the same question.  To me, it's even more interesting to see how, although they're very different in tone and format, we're actually doing similar things – name-checking our previous work experiences and personal abilities, our connections with librarians/researchers, showing our familiarity with both the MLIS program and the issues of librarianship and so on. 

I know this is a long way off right now but if anybody who's applying to the MLIS program finds this page in September for the next intake (or at any point in the future), I'd love if you could leave a brief comment so I know if you found these examples useful (and if any other classmates are thinking about it, I'd encourage you to post your own Statements of Intent on your own blogs then e-mail me and I'll add a link to them here.)  I know I would've loved to see two (or even more) examples of what people had written for their Statements of Intent when I was trying to write my own.  Quinn also mentioned posting some of his other application materials which I think is a good idea as well. 

Cantilever Update
The idea of sharing our writings sort of ties into the idea of Cantilever, the open-source journal for student writing we were thinking of starting.  It's in a holding pattern right now as the main instigator went off to Ottawa and got himself a job.  But I still think the idea's a good one.  Although I recognize the value of the assigned readings by various scholars, I feel I have often learned just as much, especially about cutting-edge issues or local or niche issues from reading other student papers.  Having a resource like this, perhaps even part of the department website, perhaps even integrating two different aspects of our training (ie. write a paper in 501 and post it as a 505 assignment) is a great one.  I wonder if any other library school has thought of that? 

Wikipedia as Historical Document
Christina sent this link to our 525 mailing list but I think it deserves a wider readership.  Wikipedia has so many interesting questions surrounding it and one of these is how does it handle history – a field that is traditionally dominated by single, authoritative authors (even compared to the hard sciences where multiple-authored works are much more common.)

Break the Fast Club
Last semester, after our first breakfast meeting as mentor-mentee, Sabina, David and myself ended up making this a weekly gathering with us as the regulars and a few others popping in and out as well on a recurring basis.  We've sort of let it slide this summer but got together again today along with a guy who went through the MLIS program, is currently working at the Grad Club and had the extreme misfortune of getting hit by a bus (!) while riding his bike last week.  He's very lucky to only have a broken foot and a few other scrapes and bruises, especially considering he wasn't even wearing a helmet.  He and his girlfriend were the ones to join us today and it'll sound sappy but it made me think about how quickly things can change and how lucky we are to have the people in our lives that we do. (Uhm, it also made me appreciate a restaurant that has skillets on the menu.)

Library Students As Secret Strippers
That heading is going to look a lot more scandalous than it is as I have no dirt to dish on the topic.  Sabina and I walked up to the school after breakfast and after doing a couple hours of work (if work = trying not to fall asleep while doing management readings), we decided to go for beers at Christina's Pub (the Grad Club was closed) and managed to talk Mike Thibault into coming as well.  It's a long story (not really but I just don't want to tell how we got on the subject!) and somehow we ended up speculating about who in library school (male and female, students and profs) would make good strippers.  Needless to say, it was a very fun discussion.  Also needless to say, my name did not come up in any way, shape or form as a contender for that crown.

“No, But I've Dabbled in Pornography”
From the heat of bull's balls to strippers to pornography, what's got into me today?  Anyhow, I hope Quinn doesn't mind me relating one of the funniest anecdotes from last semester – especially since he was only an innocent bystander.  It began when a bunch of students in our cohort went to the Grad Club early in term.  As we left the bar at the end of the night, a classmate ended up walking next to some of us and asked in a cautious whisper, “Did you hear what Quinn said?” 
“What?”
“Well, it was kind of loud in there but I could swear he said 'I've dabbed in pornography.'”
(cue confused/amazed/curious looks all around)
Reactions include: “Really?”  “Maybe you misheard?” and most interestlingly,  “Oh, I could see it.”
So anyhow, this comment stays as a simmering rumour for a week until someone finally confronts Quinn.
“Were you a porn star in Vancouver?”
“Huh?”
“Last week, you said that you'd dabbled in pornography.”
(Quinn thinks about it briefly.)
“No, I didn't say that.  I said I'd dabbled in photography.”
“Oh, I see.  Uhm, carry on…”

So for his new blog (with hopefully more regular updates to come) and for his fictional career in porn, I'll give the infamous Classmate of the Day Award to Quinn. 

Posted 03 July 2006 § LibrarySchool § Main Page ‡ Comments (9) ° Tagged: