This is a list of potential slogans to put on our class t-shirts last semester - provided by classmates, other students, faculty, staff, alumni, library joke sites and more. Some are pretty obvious, some are in-jokes that only our class would get. I've put the winning choice in bold and her personal favourite in italic.
020.7 (This is Dewey for "Library & Information Science -- Education")
Embrace Your Inner (Book) Nerd
I Learned More in 3 Hours at the Grad Club Than 3 Semesters at Library School
I Went To FIMS (And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt)
I'm Part of the Librarian Hegemony
Less Powerpoint, More Charisma
Librarians Have Nice Buns
Librarian In Search of A Metaphor
Library School 101: Shhhh!
Library School: Like Being Pelted With Popcorn
Maximum Access to Information
My Fate Is In The Hands of FIMS
Photocopier Expert
Putting the rarin' in Librarian since Jan 2006
Semester One = Anxiety, Semester Two = Anger, Semester Three = Apathy
Spider Web Tattoo = Prison Gang Symbol and/or Bad Library School Metaphor
"That's what the books say but what's it like in real life?"
We're All Fools For Rules
What *Is* Information? (or "...And I Still Don't Know What Information Is")
Which one would you vote for?
2006-10-06 Update: Rob Craig, who teaches LIS645 and is a former Student Council Chair, passed along a couple t-shirt slogan ideas from his time at what was then known as SLIS:
Dewey or Don't we?
Major SLIS Tool ("back in our day" - man that sounds like I'm old, the SLIS network had a link to all of the electronic databases called "Major SLIS Tools").
As September comes to a close, it’s a good time to point out that Wikipedia has an option to view the Top 100 viewed pages of every month.
In September 2006, sex-related pages (List of Sexual Positions, Sex,
Pornography) compete with popular media stories (Steve “Crocodile
Hunter” Irwin, Dawson College Shootings) and more general topics
(Canada, Brazil) for the top spot.
As for Classmate of the Day, yesterday goes to Iona Henderson who brought some smoked salmon her dad had sent her to our Thursday night class. Today, it goes to Linda Bussiere, Quinn Dupont (and Robin and Rory) Mike McNally, and Christina Winter who all joined Shea and I at the Grad Club for what felt like old times in so many ways (except for a lot more talk about cloth v. Pamper diapers and the advantages of breastfeeding than I'd ever heard with MLIS'ers at the Grad Club before.)
Former CLA President, Wendy Newman, who is teaching "Advocacy and Libraries" this semester has kindly agreed to let me reprint this list. The full version is a speech that she gave as U of T's Faculty of Information Science on March 22, 2005.
What I Wish "They" Had Told Me When I Started Out In Librarianship 1. There really is a tension between being an employee and being a professional. 2. Know what you believe in. 3. In your first three years, become a ranking practitioner-expert in one great thing that becomes your "brand". 4. You and not your employer, are in charge of your morale and fully responsible for your own feelings. 5. Presentation is more important than you think. 6. Take the long view of any job, even if it is a temporary job. 7. I wish someone had told me how much librarians could strengthen their leadership skills, knowledge, network and resume through volunteer work in associations. 8. I wish someone had told me the simple truth that the higher up you go in any organization, the more ambiguity you have on your plate. 9. You must be a skilled advocate. 10. Finally, I wish I had the benefit of some frank talk about when to quit.
I'll be at the Grad Club tomorrow afternoon around 4pm to celebrate the impending birth of my child (okay, it's nine months away but any excuse to go for a drink, right?).
Actually, Quinn Dupont who was in the program but is currently on leave after being accepted for a Masters of Philosophy at the U of T will be back in London-town so we're going to be hanging out.
Quinn is legendary in this program (er, or at least within my cohort) for a variety of things including:
running the Untitled Movie Series featuring films about libraries and library-related issues
working to start a comic book as a response to Access Copyright's "Captain Copyright" character
regularly using phrases such as "socialist hegemony" and other multi-syllabic words in class comments
maintaining a blog which had weekly pictures of his Tuesday beer drinking exploits mixed with gourmet-level recipes and in-depth accounts of his battles with Rogers Cable Internet
being a virtual giant of a man (in this photo, the bottle he's holding is a 66 oz but he makes it look like a mickey).
Here's the blurb from his Spirit of Librarianship nomination last term:
"Quinn embodies many of the qualities of the ideal librarian
- whether it is enabling access to information by sharing digital
versions of
readings with his classmates or by raising awareness by running a movie
series
that is focused on librarians and library-related issues. Beyond this,
Quinn has a deep intellect and a collegial manner. One classmate
summed up his presence like this: "Did you ever notice that Quinn's the
only one of us, who, when he puts up his hand to make a point in class,
everybody stops typing or daydreaming and pays attention?" Finally,
although it is only in the planning stages right now, his idea to do a
"Captain Commons" comic book in response to Access Copyright's biased
and library-unfriendly "Captain Copyright" character is a stroke of
genius that I'm sure will show another side of the copyright debate and
garner
much attention from the wider library community, across Canada and the
beyond." If all of that hasn't intimidated you into submission, everybody's invited to join us.
I was going to post this a couple weeks ago after seeing a link on Boing Boing (and as a way to drop a sly hint about what Shea and I suspected was pending).
But then I just put it in the "drafts" folder and forgot about it for some reason. It's still pretty crazy so I thought I'd post it now. For anyone worried that this will turn into the "Baby Poop Blog" instead of the "Poop Around FIMS Blog", yes, that is a distinct possibility at some future point. But for the time being, I'll try to keep the baby content to a minimum and keep writing about my life in library school and what's going on around FIMS.
With that said, I've got to comment on keeping this a secret. After announcing it on the blog the other day, I went to school to find out a few classmates already knew - Lara because I'd said I had to miss a management class to go to an appointment with Shea (but it was nothing serious) then that Shea didn't drink when we went for supper with them and another couple.
Lindsay said she knew because she works at the library. "I knew you looked at my record!" I said. "No. But I do have to process the holds and if you're taking out What To Expect When You're Expecting, I figure it's not for a school project."
Sabina (and anybody else who visited our apartment and saw the collection of baby books from the library) knew as well.
Who else knew? I think Shea's parents suspected as well when she wouldn't have a drink with her dad when she was home for a visit at the end of July.
So the moral of the story? If you're pregnant and want to keep it a secret, don't do any reading on the subject and keep drinking like always. I mean, it worked for mothers in the late 1960's - early1970's and their kids turned out fine. Turned out fine. Turned out fine. (Of course, I could've turned out like this kid which would've been worse!)
Spent a few hours working on the family history project I have to do for my genealogy class last night. Luckily, not one but two of my family members have done some research so that's a big help. I'm still waiting for one to send me her stuff but the other one had given my parents some information and copies of some old family photos during a trip to BC a couple years ago. My mother was able to scan the photos and portions of a family tree for my paternal grandmother which was almost 100% complete for the five generations before me. Now I just have to try to fill out the information going back a few generations for the other three branches.
I can see why this gets addictive - seeing the paths that people took, getting glimpses into their lives (for instance, realising how many of my ancestors lived very close to where I am now before coming to Saskatchewan.) We also started working on Shea's side too although that's not officially part of the assignment. But it'll be nice to have all of that information compiled for some day when we have kids.
I wish I could find a journal or diary (or whatever the 1885 equivalent of a blog was! ) that one of my ancestors had kept - it would be amazing to get a glimpse behind the birth dates and marriage dates and death dates to what everyday life was like. I saw one that a great aunt kept when she was at teacher's college in Regina in the 1930's (?) that was just about the most engrossing reading I've ever done.
(Oh, the photo is my great great grandfather John Brown who was born in Insch Scotland in 1840, came to Binbrook, Ontario (which is now a part of Hamilton which is about an hour and a bit from where I am now) in 1864 then moved west in 1885 and homesteaded at the site of our current farm on the edge of the Qu'Appelle Valley. But shhh, don't tell anyone - everyone thinks Saskatchewan is flat and boring!)
Even though it rained off and on, Shea and I had a great day at the Kitchener-Waterloo's edition of the Word on the Street Festival today.
Having been a board member of the Calgary edition for three years, I was looking forward to seeing what one of the other host cities for this national festival (along with Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver) did that was similar and different to what we did in Calgary. But really, the basics are the same at probably every site across Canada (the festival is a mixture of author readings, children's authors & entertainers, panels/speakers on writing-related topics, main stage entertainment, booths featuring local libraries, publishers, booksellers, writers' associations, literacy groups and so on.)
There were a couple things they did that I wish we would've done in Calgary - the celebrity spelling bee on the main stage was a big hit for instance. Having a brief Q&A after each author got a mixed reaction - one author had no questions but another had lots - but that was something I never even thought to try in Calgary. (To be fair, we booked three authors to an hour versus the two they had so we had less time to fill.)
I was trying to think of some Word on the Street highlights/anecdotes from my three years with the organization in Calgary:
- going to my first board meeting without paying too much attention to the address until I got there and realised it was in the law offices of one of the largest law firms in Western Canada on the 45th floor of one of the two "twin towers" in downtown Calgary. (One WotS board member was a lawyer with the firm.) I was in my typical non-profit outfit of jeans and a t-shirt and I think the receptionist even asked if I was delivering a parcel!
- man, did we have good catered food for those meetings! This isn't a direct WotS memory but one day when they ordered ribs and a few board members couldn't make it, I ended up taking some leftovers with me then stopping in the underpass heading back to my building and sharing them with some street kids.
- Poet Steve Gillespie, aka "EatLardFudge" took the spirit of the festival to heart and invited everyone in the Poet's Corner tent out in front of the hotel pub where it was hosted that year and did a reading from on top of a bench.
- getting to meet the Calgary Flames' Robyn Regher as a celebrity reader (this was back when the Flames still sucked so don't tell him but we even had to scramble to make sure there was a good audience!)
- watching Christian Bok's poetry reading draw a massive crowd. (He writes poetry written in a created language which sounds something like Klingon.)
- Will Ferguson running on stage to the pounding sounds of "Paperback Writer" by the Beatles and giving a hilarious reading.
- I started at the WGA in mid-September 2001 and the event was all but organized by my predecessor but one of the first jobs she gave me during my two-day training session was to write thank-you cards to all the authors who were booked to read. I said "why do you do that too? Don't they get a cheque?" and she replied with something that's stuck with me - "a thank-you card means more than money to most people anyday." Good advice and it really became clear me when the WGA board, to thank me for my hard work during a very busy time, gave me a gift certificate to my favourite restaurant and a thank-you card that all of them had signed with personal messages. The gift certificate is long gone but I still have that card. <a single tear rolls to the ground>
Okay, back to the present...
The event today had a really good panel on blogging and that was the other thing I wanted to talk about. I should've broken out the "notepad of doom" but here's some random memories of what was discussed...
- Panelists were Aimee Morrison, an English prof at the University of Waterloo who studies various technology-related issues and has an anonymous "mommy blog where I post about poop a lot", Alex Good who runs GoodReports.net, a site focused mainly on book reviews and book-related essays, and James Bow who runs a couple web rings (blog rings?) for non-partisan political bloggers as well as one for bloggers in the KW area.
- 75 000 blogs created every day (I wanted to ask "yeah, but how many get a second post?)
- lots of talk about mainstream media versus bloggers
- "never put anything on a blog you wouldn't want overheard in a crowded restaurant" is common advice. (That's a better analogy for e-mail. I think a better analogy for blogs/online forums/message boards is "never say anything online you wouldn't say into the microphone in a crowded auditorium" because that captures that online communications are going to be heard and probably are put out there to be heard.)
- people often read blogs for controversial thoughts they won't get in other forms of discourse.
- blogs build a sense of community
- you shouldn't focus on how many people are reading your blog but who is reading your blog - if it's your target audience, you're doing your job
- only a few people make money off blogs and most people do it as a hobby on a volunteer-basis
- that's why personal blogs are so common, they're the easiest to do
- lots of blogs are about what colour socks a person wore that day and what they had for lunch. This likely won't lead to a big readership.
- it takes a long time - possibly even years - to build a readership
- one way to build a readership is to post comments on more popular but similar blogs which can lead people to you.
- with that said, blogs can be good practice if you want to be a writer, build discipline and can lead to work (Alex Good says he gets more freelance work than he can handle via his blog.) In my case, the scholarly journal I submitted my essay to came about after a person on the journal's editorial board contacted me having read the essay on this blog first.
Oh, and who's the one group that you want to get the apostrophe right for?
Are you a blogger? Do you have things to say
about the profession (archives, museums, lis, etc . . . )? We're
looking to compile a directory of active FIS bloggers, so why not send
your details along and be included! OPML-based 'reading lists' will
eventually be created so that members of the FIS community (and
beyond!) can subscribe to a 'block' of blog feeds based on areas of
interest. For this reason, please be a specific as you can about your
blog's primary area(s) of focus. Here's what we need:
This is a sort of timely e-mail to receive (thanks Gord!) as I just stumbled across the blog for 757 - Social Software & Libraries. One of that classes' first assignments was to create a blog and the instructor has linked to all of the blogs from the course page to encourage the students to realise that they're part of the blogosphere (which is cool.)
But clicking through and reading some of them, I think she may have made the same mistake that many people teaching these types of courses do - namely, defining what the students must post rather than encouraging them to post whatever they want.
If all that students post are assigned responses to readings and other coursework, blogging is going to feel like homework and nobody is going to continue doing it after the class is done (which should be at least part of the goal of a course like this.)
Not to mention that instead of having original, readable blogs, you have this homogenous mass of blogs that are all talking about the same thing which sort of defeats the purpose as far as I'm concerned.
I look at the list of people in the class and see people with interests in esoteric philosophy, medieval history, Russian culture not to mention those with knowledge of specialized areas of librarianship (one whose mother is a medical librarian and would likely have lots of insight into the profession, many who've been on co-op and could share their experiences on that, etc.)
I'm sure the instruction didn't restrict them to only writing about their coursework but if that's what is assigned, that's likely all a person will have the time to do. I think a much better solution would be to tell the students to come up with an original theme for their blog (it could be specific, it could be as general as "what's happening in my life") and make that the subject of their weekly post (along with the occasional response to the readings/posting of coursework to achieve the learning goal of making them think about the role of/problems with social software.)
How's that for a mini-rant?
Classmate of the Day: Barb very generously offered me a ride to Word on the Street in Kitchener-Waterloo tomorrow. I'd been planning to attend in Toronto all year since I used to be a board member of WotS Calgary and wanted to see what the "big guys" did. (In fact, my ambitious plan was to organize a rental van or even a bus trip to take intereste students. If it was first semester, I might've pulled it off but as I mentioned, third-semester Jason is stretched too thin as it is!) But pending assignments, the expense to go to TO for a single day and a few other things all factored into making me decide not to go.
Still, I was glad to have the offer of a ride to the much closer festival with a local and am looking forward to seeing the KW version. Kathy Stinson is reading, there's a celebrity spelling bee and a handwriting analysis tent plus there's even a panel on blogging that I should probably go take in so I know what I'm talking about when I go on my mini-rants!
) that one of my ancestors had kept - it would be amazing to get a glimpse behind the birth dates and marriage dates and death dates to what everyday life was like. I saw one that a great aunt kept when she was at teacher's college in Regina in the 1930's (?) that was just about the most engrossing reading I've ever done. 
Sherri Vokey: Digital Services Librarian - 
