discoveries: a LIS student's journey

Just in case anyone finds this site, it's (obviously) no longer being updated. I've switched my major and career path away from libraries and towards educational technology.

You can find my new blog at: http://edtechhacks.com.
-Britne

So I haven't been blogging as much as I'd like to lately. The semester is getting into 'crunch time,' I've been keeping busy at work with special projects, my hubby and I have been scouting houses to rent (I think we found the perfect one!) and we've been working on our business. Lots of life getting in the way here.

I do have some plans for my blog in the near future, though. I plan to build a personal/professional portfolio online for myself and move the blog over there. I also want to get into the world of book reviewing, since I love to read and write, and plan on posting some of my reviews on the blog soon. I also want to keep experimenting and developing my web design skills, so that's coming soon too.

I don't see how all these professional librarians keep up with the blogs they write, let alone read. My aggregator says I have over 3000 unread posts. I either need to weed better, or learn to keep up with my professional reading!

Okay, back to more homework!

Great story on NPR Morning Edition about the Iraq National Library and Archives. The head of the Library says "his library seems like a small beacon of light in the dark." I love hearing great stories like this. =)

In other news, it's ALA Election Day! Don't forget to vote!

And for my TBR news, I finished Bibliophilia, loved it, and moved on to Diary.

Just a few updates from the week:

I was appointed to the ALA NMRT Web Committee beginning at Annual! I'm SO excited!

I started my volunteer position at the St. Louis Zoo Library on Saturday. It was fun! I think I'll really enjoy this experience.

BookMooch had their first gathering at BookMooch's Second Life place this afternoon. It was a blast! Good food, good times. They'll be meeting every Sunday at 11 PST, if anyone else wants to come!

And a book list... I was automatically tagged by reading the post at Literary Cache.

Look at the list of books below: * Bold the ones you’ve read * Italicize the ones you want to read * Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in. If you are reading this (and haven't participated yet), tag, you’re it!

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) [A friend recommended this one to me, I promise I'll get around to it!]
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) [my favorite book as a child!]
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According to Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Audio: What's your favorite hidden track or song from an album?
Submitted by Kristine.

Weezer (Green Album)

Weezer's Green Album. My dad and sister bought it for me in Japan, and that version had a bonus track: I Do.

I'm on Second Life now! Being all nifty and 2.0-like. =)

I read somewhere that some crazy percent of blogs started around the new year end up failing. Like soon.
Not me!
Granted, I've been crazy busy. Like, so crazy busy that my husband started worrying for my mental health. I was always forgetting things and feeling like I was in a haze all the time.
So, I dropped one of my 4 classes. It probably wasn't the best idea anyway, to take 12 graduate credit hours and work full time. But I figured somehow I made it through 18 undergraduate hours while working 45+ hours a week, I could handle 12/40.
Nope.
And now I feel better. I dropped my favorite class, Digital Libraries, because I felt really bad about not devoting the amount of time to it that I should. I told my professor that I could really see the DL field as a career path, and I wanted to give myself a better opportunity to learn all that I could from it. And that I hope he offers it again!
So, time for another mini-crisis about my program of study. The thing is, it has to be done before I complete X credit hours, which will be in May. And since I had myself booked for 12 credit hours on many semesters ahead, and now realizing I can't handle that, I have to completely re-arrange everything.
But hey, by moving my graduation date forward, maybe they'll find someone to teach Advanced Cataloging before I leave.

So I read Dot Calm yesterday while I was getting my oil changed [there was a bit of a wait, and I'm a pretty fast reader], and let me just say that I wasn't impressed. I guess I was just expecting more than the obvious "turn off the cell phone" and "take time to meditate" as help for getting away from the "wired world".

My problem is, I'm flooded with so much information, and I have trouble weeding it out. I'm on almost all the major library listervs [as a lurker, mind you], and have well over 200 RSS feeds coming to me daily. And my problem is, I WANT to read all of it! I'm still learning about all the facets of this profession; I guess I think by reading everything out there, I'll learn what direction I want to go when I'm done with my LIS degree. It's just becoming difficult to keep up.

So when I find a book that gives more practical advice, I'll let you know.
Or do you know of anything helpful? I'd love to read it!

Work:
^Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country - William Greider [recommended by my boss =)]
^The Simplicity Survival Handbook - Bill Jensen
^Dot Calm: The Search for Sanity in a Wired World - Debra A. Dinnocenzo & Richard B. Swegan

This is probably one of the best [worst?] things about working in a library. I get to shelve all of the returned books, and therefore have time to peruse our collection and find some really neat stuff in the midst of ALL that economic stuff. [I only say worst because my To Be Read list grows almost daily...]

Oh, and I bought a couple of books on my first list: Girl's Guide to Witchcraft and The Case of the Missing Books. Call me crazy, but I'm so into all this library stuff that I'm reading fiction about librarians in my free time. [Still working on Bibliophilia!]

Here's the list of classes I'm taking next semester:
ISLT 7314 - Reference Sources & Services
ISLT 7370 - Intermediate Web Development
ISLT 9409 - Digital Libraries
ISLT 9414 - Internet Reference

And here's what I've already taken [with my grade, just because I'm pretty proud of myself =)]
ISLT 7301 - Introduction to Information Technology [A]
ISLT 7305 - Foundations of Library and Information Science [A]
ISLT 7312 - Introduction to Cataloging & Classification [A]