Sunday, September 15, 2013

Diary of an Underemployed Librarian

I feel bad for my long absence from my blog!  Believe me, I have not let this project fall by the wayside for good; I've just been very busy the past few weeks, making progress on some other efforts I've been making lately.  That's always a good thing!  For lack of energy to come up with some deep insights this week, I'll just give you a few brief updates on My Librarian Life.  (Because I'm sure you are all clamoring to know how a mostly-unemployed librarian keeps himself feeling sharp!)

First, of course, I am still "mostly unemployed."  I continue my work archiving the papers and documents of the Urban Design Project at UB, but lately I've only been able to get up there one day a week, so it doesn't really feel like a job of any sort.  Compounding that sense is the fact that I haven't gotten paid in a month due to some internal issues in the Architecture department.  Sigh.  Not the most encouraging part of life right now.

Other things are better though!  For one, I've been following along with a MOOC (that's a Massive Online Open Course, folks) all about metadata, which has been offered by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Now I already had a pretty good grasp on metadata from my studies at UB (thanks in particular to Dr. Valerie Nesset and Dr. Brenda Battleson!), but I found the first week of the course a good review, and the second week drilled down into the history and function of the Dublin Core schema, which is always appreciated.  And next week we get into something I've never heard of.  Boldly going!

(I have fallen behind on the numerous webinars I tend to sign up for, but the archived recording s have been piling up in my inbox, so I will get to them.)

Volunteering at the local Dunkirk Free Library continues to keep me feeling connected to the public work I hope to make my career doing.  Recently got the greenlight to work on drafting an Internet and social media policy for the library, and I'm helping out with Library Card Month and Banned Books Week activities.

I've been cataloging my comic book collection.  It feels like really simple copy cataloging, so it's only tenuously beneficial to my life as an information professional, but getting myself organized and generating a searchable database of my comics makes me feel a little more respectable.  If any of you have a collection of comics you'd like to corral, I highly recommend Comic Book Database, which allows you to build a personalized collection from the titles you own!

Last and somewhat least, and as a followup to my previous post (my perhaps over-intense review of/rant about Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind), I read the second volume in "The Kingkiller Chronicles," The Wise Man's Fear.  It was a better experience than book 1.  Kvothe is still insufferably competent, but this one shows a few cracks in his veneer.  Seems a bit like a lot of wheel-spinning, though; I probably would have made some structural changes to the end of book one and the beginning of this one.  Not sure how Rothfuss plans to wrap it all up in one more installment.  Now I'm almost done with Redshirts by John Scalzi, another book with a lot of hype that I find over-inflated.  Perhaps more on that later.

That's all for now.  I'll try to be back with a more substantial post sometime this week!