first months of school recap

October 21st, 2010 • 1 comment library
Tags: afghanistan, assignment, canada afghanistan solidarity committee, censorship, faceted classification, google instant, librarians without borders, lwb@ubc, mlis, news, observation, powerpoint, refdesk, school, seminar, slais

Library school is going well. We’re over halfway through the term and I’ve done a few assignments and they’ve gone okay. I’m taking the “what I’ve learned is more important than the mark” approach so as not to stress out about things too badly, and it’s working out pretty well.

So far, I’ve done a news article review thingy about how Google Instant is an inconsistent censor (PDF link), an observation of reference interviews (PDF link), a seminar on censorship based on assigned readings (PDF link), a faceted classification of the performing arts (PDF link), and a PowerPoint presentation about nerd games. (I’m sorry if that last link doesn’t work for you; We had to do them in Office 2010. Here’s the page full of everyone’s not really library related presentations, if that makes it up to you.)

This weekend is going to be spent doing a bunch more stuff, but if you’re interested in what first-term MLIS assignments look like, there you go.

Also, in school related things, I’m the co-secretary of the UBC student chapter of Librarians Without Borders. Next week we’ve got a speaker coming in talking about a Library Initiative in Afghanistan, sponsored by the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and we’ve had speakers talking about open access to data as well as building education centres in Nicaragua. I think it’s neat stuff.

book review: the curtain

October 10th, 2010 • books
Tags: agelast, art, confrontation, europe, history, jokes, kafka, milan kundera, nonfiction, novel, pretentious, review, sacrilege, school, the curtain, writing

Reading Milan Kundera essays about topics like Art and The Novel and such always makes me want to be a better writer than I am. To be a bit pretentious because that’s a way of faking yourself out into thinking that maybe you’re doing something worth a damn.

To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional – thus, not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious – is contemptible.

The Curtain is a short book-length essay about art and history and how history has no taste.

The more attentively, fixedly, one observes a reality, the better one sees that it does not correspond to people’s idea of it; under Kafka’s long gaze it is gradually revealed as empty of reason, thus non-reasonable, thus implausible.

And part of what I love about a book like this, even though it’s so European and also so snobby is seeing bits of me reflected in there, like someday I might not make something that’s a piece of shit.

For if agelasts tend to see sacrilege in every joke, it’s because every joke is a sacrilege. There is an irreconcilable incompatibility between the comical and the sacred, and we can only ask where the sacred begins and ends. Is it confined just to the Temple? Or does its domain reach further, does it also annex what are known as the great secular values: maternity, love, patriotism, human dignity?

An important book for me to read. I feel more at odds with this whole idea of being at school learning to do something that’s almost the opposite of art, but being at odds with something is good. Keeps me from being complacent.

lego and the future

October 7th, 2010 • 1 comment library
Tags: bricklink, cataloguing, classification, controlled vocabulary, description, lego, libr502, mlis, school, slais

In our classification class the other day we learned about faceted classification systems, which sounds amazingly exciting doesn’t it? I wouldn’t have thought so, except that our in-class activity was building one of these systems for organizing Lego. Which made it awesome.

I am a bit of a Lego nerd and loved the idea of building a system that would allow you to find things based on your needs at the time. If I may say so, we built a pretty good fucking scheme which, had we had more time, could have been extended to be much better than how Bricklink does it. I was really into the whole thing. As in, it was the kind of thing I’d have fun doing a lot of.

Which is interesting because I didn’t really come into the program thinking “I’m going to be a cataloguer” or anything like that. I’m not anal about keeping everything in its right place, which I’d had the impression was a requirement. But I’m kind of excited about the puzzles sorting Lego can provide. And creating these schemes is sort of a form of describing, right? Describing stuff is why I write, and this is describing with a very controlled vocabulary. Slotting things into their place in the world.