Keith Richards & DC

April 9th, 2010 by pladd

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I have always known that librarianship is awesome, but apparently Keith Richards agrees:

SHHH! Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian. After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.

He has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in Sussex and Connecticut, according to publishing sources familiar with the outline of Richards’s autobiography, which is due out this autumn. He has received a reported advance of $7.3m (£4.8m) for it.

The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.”

The rest of the article can be found here.

Also, I’m going to DC today! I hope to relive my childhood and also show Steven what is what. It will be just like The Roadtrip, but much shorter.

Posted in Cool Things |

This Just In: Library Science Professor Has Never Been To a Library?

April 2nd, 2010 by pladd

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Reports remain inconclusive at this time, but we do know this:

At approximately 11:47 AM, Eastern Standard Time, on March 30th, 2010, a library science professor who shall remain unnamed was presenting data to a class on computer use in America.

Professor: So since this percentage of people use computers at the library, we can infer they don’t have them at home.
Someone in class: No, you can’t. What if they just want to use the library’s databases or programs?
Someone else: They could just need to go to the library to print.
Professor: I don’t know about that. Printing is so expensive! For toner and things. I’m not sure how libraries deal with that.
The Class: (stares)
Me: Chapel Hill Public charges ten cents a page.
Someone else: Yeah…. so do all of them.

She seemed genuinely surprised that you could print things at a library. I’m not saying this means she’s never been in a library ever, but maybe not since 1985. I’ll continue to gather data on this…

Posted in transcripts |

How To Teach a Library Science Class (or at least pass one)

March 23rd, 2010 by pladd

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A step-by-step guide to being a library science professor

1) Decide on a title for your class using a random amalgamation of these words: information, human, knowledge, database, metadata, seminar, user(s), design, administration, interaction, critical, studies, scholarly, communication, academic, information science, crucial

2) Create a course description by using more of the above words. Create long, buzzword-ridden terms for simple concepts, and then further confuse by referring to them only in unexplained acronyms. Example:
Anomalous State of Knowledge (ASK)

3) Create a personal website and a page on either Blackboard, Sakai, or Moodle classroom management systems. Find out which management system other professors are using this semester and avoid it. Include copies of syllabus and assignments in both places as well as in a printed hand out on the first day. Each of these syllabi/assignment descriptions/schedules should be subtly different, especially in terms of: due dates, page lengths, room numbers, required reading.

4) Introduce each class with a PowerPoint presentation. Take at least the first fifteen minutes to fiddle with the computer/projector. Fill your presentation with confusing and unlabeled graphs and diagrams that supposedly explain key concepts from the readings. Stress the importance of understanding these diagrams but never fully explain them.

5) Tell one rambling story from your job experience as a librarian. Make sure it is completely outdated, romanticized in your head, or at least totally fabricated. End it with dire warnings about the future of the profession and how everyone sitting in class will NEVER find a job EVER, particularly not one they like.

6) Break the class up into random groups to discuss the reading for the next hour. Attempt to group students so that they are with those they have the least in common with (e.g. one music librarian, one elementary school librarian, one digital archivist and one confused business school grad student).

7) Wander around amongst the groups and offer them “Just something to think about” using as many buzzwords as possible

8.) Bring everyone back together to decide upon the point of the reading

9) The point will be: “It really depends on the community you’re serving”.

10) Ramble for precisely five minutes after class is supposed to be over so that everyone JUST misses the bus.

I could TOTALLY do this for a living if this whole librarian gig doesn’t happen. As my professors are trying stridently as a group to assure me it won’t.

Posted in Uncategorized |

Reasons I Do Not Update My Blog

January 29th, 2010 by pladd

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1. I am in grad school

I spend all of my time in a building designed by M.C. Escher hearing people who haven’t worked in a library in 10+ years prattle on about “What IS information” and “the philosophical meaning of the public library” and how we decide what’s GOOD for our patrons, as if the very fact of BEING a professor in library science weren’t elitist enough. Sometimes other people talk and it is interesting. Most of the time other people talk and they are either A) trying to impress the professor and therefore incomprehensible, B) telling meandering and irrelevant stories about their personal lives, or C) both. When I am not there, I am at home reading the same thing but in written form, and pretending I agree for grades. Sometimes there are also practical assignments, which tend to take three weeks and twenty-five group meetings.

2. I have a job

I get paid to part-timedly do a full time job. It’s like being a public school teacher, but with even more complainy parents and way less vacation.

3. I AM IN GRAD SCHOOL

I don’t think this can be stressed enough

4. The Winterpocalypse is coming

The Weather Channel’s headline this morning was “Winter Misery”. I have decided to just prepare for a hurricane while wearing three sweaters.

5. You can’t believe everything you read

Interesting story: the runner up for the title of my blog was “The Daily Narwhal”. The joke would be that it would neither be daily, nor a narwhal. Hilarious!

Now I am going to read 100 pages of something about how “people negotiate their information needs”, buy batteries, and go to sleep for the first time in like two days.

Posted in lists |

Things I Have Seen on Unerased Whiteboards in the Library Science Building

September 4th, 2009 by pladd

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In a Sylvia Plath kind of sense, all books are really dying slowly.
—
1. articulate need
2. seek informational resource
3. find and interpret data
4. refine search if necessary
5. go have a hamburger
—
Manning Hall thinks it lives in a pre-Copernican universe, but everything does not revolve around us.
—
[drawing of a stick figure man on top of a book pyramid]

Posted in archivery |