| Jun. 7th, 2005 @ 09:01 am I'm baaaaack |
|---|
Was away for a while as I dealt with work, illness, and the end of the semester. Semesters, I should say -- end of the academic year at work and end of the Spring semester at Drexel. Some updates re: library school, and my next note will detail progress on my social bookmarking project
School is over, as I've mentioned. I ran out of steam toward the end, but what do you want from a fat old man? After my last entry we covered issues such as the digital divide, accessibility, and the future of libraries and librarianship. I'd have shared some of my stunning insights, but none were either that stunning or very insightful. So, dear readership, you win on both accounts.
The final project was a grant proposal. I think I've written before that I am conflicted by the project. On the one hand it is great to get some grant-writing practice, but on the other the assignment reflects a cynicism about the future of libraries and librarianship. That grant-writing is one of the basic skills necessary to be a librarian suggests that local, state, and federal governments devalue libraries into starvation, leaving information science professionals to proffer tin cups on street corners. It is a sad state of affairs that the state is valorizing public prayer and ritualizing state-sponsored religion at the expense of both information and science. That we are developing important grant writing skills is good; that we need to is disappointing.
'Nuff said on that subject. For my grant I conflated the Botto Labor Museum and the D&L Cheng (doesn't that sound like a railroad line?!) Library into a digital archive that will store "recently uncovered artifacts" of the 1913 silk strike, including sound recordings, texts, and material artifacts. I injected a bit of a joke -- the sound recordings are tapes, and of course magnetic tapes didn't exist in 1913. Let's see if the prof. catches that one. A second joke: the title of my fictional information science dissertation: "The Spinach Papers: Folksonomy v. Taxonomy in the Online Popeye Archive." I don't even know where that came from; I haven't thought about Popeye in what, decades?!
Onwards and upwards. She'll score it, we'll all move on. Rutgers holds it's orientation in August, so I'll drive down to New Bruswick for a few days then start the digital libraries program in the Fall. Chances are good this will have been both the first and the last course in which I'll participate at Drexel, but we shall see.
It's funny -- Drexel's mascot is a dragon, Rutgers' is a knight -- get it?! Oh I just slay myself . . .
;-)
Cheers, Robert |
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