Category Archives: Librarical

Jason told me about a Blogger-like wiki site I could use for a group project*, called Peanut Butter Wiki. After creating a site so we could dump our resources**, and working with it, I realized that wiki technology has come a long way. Kind of like Blogger is to those who are HTLM inept, PBwiki makes things a little more WYSIWYG. (That won’t make sense to those folks I mentioned in the previous sentence. Oops.)

My last interactions with a wiki (other than wikipedia) have been on Nounatron, which at the time seemed neat and new, but now kind of looks like a Commodore screen. (Sorry Jason, I know you are going to restyle it.)

So the hot or not question arises with this: the Hot Librarian wiki. Mostly, I wanted to make lists of things, and organize them. And I thought it might be a good place to keep stuff like upcoming hot librarian events and stuff. Ryan’s into the quote board thing, so that could take off. All of our Flickr pages could be in the same place … if the site had interest, I think it could be neat.

My only concern is if the whole “hot librarian” thing is kind of exclusionary. You know, like religion. My mom always warned me against excluding. Those who are hottt should email me for the password, so you too can start dicking around with the wiki.

*the only reason why I’m not going to make snarky comments about this group project is because I’m working with two elite library students.
** It’s going to be a website featuring roadtrip-themed library materials.

“No, I’m serious. There’s something really weird about library science.”

silence. friends nodding.

“I don’t know what it is about library science that’s so cultish, but I want to apply and find out.”
“Yeah, I heard that a guy got trapped in the stacks once. He was there at the end of the night, and they locked up with him still in there. Instead of using one of the phones, he took a stool and broke a window to get out.”
“What about the guy who was living there? I heard he was there for, like, two months before they found him. He had a lamp and a cot inbetween the shelves.”
“Well, and it’s haunted.”

nods of agreement.

As I sat down tonight with my cup of tea to read the required articles for this week, I noted how old they were – by no means a deviation from this semester’s norm. For some reason, the next thing that happened was the title line popped into my head “everything means nothing to me”.

My synapses are poignant as fuck. (Hi, Mom.)

It seems all the articles I’m reading are horribly outdated, and I’m just not taking them seriously anymore. I’m not sure why my brain connected my frustration to Elliott Smith’s song, but it was kind of neat.

Now I have to go play that song, so it isn’t stuck in my head all night.

I’ve been having a bit of a heart wrench lately, thinking about what kind of hot librarian I want to be when I’m done with the program.

I’ve known I wanted to be a children’s librarian since I was in high school, and I came to school with that as my goal. I started volunteering in the conservation library (The Place that Fixes Broken Books) and have kind of fallen in love with it. I’m not as much a fan of preservation – that means writing reports and guidelines and grants – but I do love fixin’ books.

So I talked to the amazing Jennifer Hain Teper today about how I could possibly mash-up these two happy things. She, of course, had the answer I wanted to hear. She described having a background in conservation as a cookie. I’d be a public library young adult librarian candidate with a wonderful, useful, not-common cookie. A sidehatch, if you will.

I feel so much better about spending all this time in the conservation lab, and I’m going to sign up for a practicum next semester that will allow me to learn about how preservation and conservation in a public library works – because public libraries often do not have a good system for this – and I will be even more valuable as a possible employee. That makes me feel extra smug about it.

Here’s my winning tee shirt design. (And by “my”, I mean “The Hendersons, who gave a lecture on preservation”.)

I suppose if you non-GSLIS folks want one, I could wrangle it. Marti?

I had my first librarical injury. While volunteering in the conservation library, I managed to stab myself in the thumb (behind the nail, not on the pad) with a pair of small pointy scissors. I absolutely cannot believe how much I bled. Seriously.

That got me thinking about the last time I gushed blood from my hand. It was, I think, almost exactly five years ago that I cut off the end of a finger with a giant paper cutter. (Mom, do you remember?)

So yeah. I should be good on the book-injury front for a while. I hope I’m immune to paper cuts now. Oh, and I managed to not bleed on the book I was fixing.