Monday, June 8, 2009

O negative blood

I did a search to learn how many people have O negative blood. I found out today while participating in a student research project I have O negative blood--I'm sure I knew that but had forgotten. Anyway, mostly normal stuff about blood shortages and the RH factor came up, but the sixth thing on Google had the headline:

"Type O Negative Blood Hints At Prince Charles As Descendant of Reptilians."

I won't post the link because it crashed my browser, but subsequent searches revealed a number of conspiracies about Type O- blood including ancient astronauts, reptilian conspiracies, alien abductions, Illuminati, and so on as you might imagine. I had no idea.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

May in Earlham History

Earlham College Pressroom

Link will take you to Earlham's pressroom, which now has a "This Month in Earlham History" feature, with images from the Earlham College Archives. May Day is featured for the month of May.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Summer Plans

I just realized I have two weeks vacation to take before the end of June. This means I likely will not get quite as much work as I had planned in the next month or so. I will take a week off for moving and random days in May. Plus I will gone the second week of August and a little more going to SAA and visiting Rafia (AGAIN--she better feel privileged.)I am also dogsitting and housesitting through the first week of July, giving me a great deal of time to get the house in order before really moving. I've been camping out the last couple of nights to get away from the loud and smoky environment I've been living in for the last few months. Freedom is HERE!

I need to get working on my poster for SAA--better start that this week so it is not last minute.

I now own a house!

I never thought I would buy a house, but here I am. Pictures if you scroll down one post. I will post more pictures later, after I actually move in perhaps.

I enjoyed going to Earlham's commencement activities yesterday.

Now that most students are gone, it will be interesting to see if I get more or less work done on long-term projects. Last summer (my first) we had quite a few genealogists and "outside" researchers visit, but overall I think it will be less hectic. And no evening and weekend shifts all summer! Yay! (although I think it is good we have those hours and I try not complain too much about them--it is a good time for students to get work done, and that is very important!).

Friday, April 17, 2009

House I bought!

My house!!!

Here is a picture of the exterior:



Here is a picture of the eat-in kitchen (I will keep that range and refrigerator)



Here is the picture of the sunroom:

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Three Things

I am currently obsessing over:

1. Buying a house
2. Work Projects including a large digitization project, Archon v. Archivist's Toolkit, and a presentation I'm giving at MAC
3. Battlestar Galactica and what it means to be human. Also finally read Children of Men which I believe to be about the same topic.

Friday, March 6, 2009

What You Can Do With a History Major

Today I am sitting on a lunch panel to discuss "What you can do with a History degree." I believe I am the only person from the "information" professions on the panel. Other panelists include three history professors. I thus suspect it will be weighted to college teaching and going to grad school in History.

What will I talk about? Well, I have a master's degree in History, and a masters degree in Information, specializing in Archives and Records Management. Like many people, I became interested in archives primarily because of an interest in history and working with primary documents. But as I learned more about the field, I discovered a true passion for other aspects of the job as well--managing large projects, developing better ways to inform people of materials in collections, using technology in innovative ways, outreach, and of course electronic records management which deals with institutional records rather than those old 19th century manuscripts that first caught my attention.

In my current position, I get to engage myself in all aspects of the above. I am working on increasing our online presence through finding aids/making information searchable/search engine optimization, managing student workers to help with processing and digitization projects, working with all kinds of patrons, convening a committee on electronic records management, and hopefully as I settle in at Earlham working closely with faculty particularly in the history and English departments to bring more students down to the archives. And sometimes I get to work with the old documents as well. It's a great job. A mentor once told me that if you are 80% satisfied with your job, you are in excellent shape. I can say that like with all jobs there are moments of frustration, but I feel like I'm probably pretty close to that 80% threshold for happiness.

How did I get this job? I started working in Emory University's archives while pursuing a Ph.D in history. I loved it. When I started doing research for my dissertation, and found myself focusing more on how the archives I visited could improve finding aids, online presences, and the reference experience. My dissertation became a distant memory as I took on greater responsibility at Emory and received grant funding for some projects. I eventually left Emory, and took a position working as a researcher at a non-profit. Why? I needed to work for a while and NOT be in school.

To work as an archivist, or librarian, and often as a museum professional, you likely will need to go back to graduate school. You can get a degree in Information, a degree in Public History, or a library science degree from a more traditional program. I recommend working for a few years before heading back to school; I found that students coming right from school were sometimes--not always--less prepared for a professional program that emphasized group work, developing leadership skills, and did NOT hold your hand--you are expected to be mature enough to handle graduate level work. I went to a liberal arts college and you will find the experience very different in a professional school as compared to your experience at Earlham.

While school is important, finding good mentors and internship experiences is just as important. Take advantage of as many opportunities as you can. I have been very fortunate in this case but I also jumped at any opportunity that looked interesting.

A word about tech skills: They are important. You can not avoid technology in the archives, museums, or certainly a library. You do NOT need to be an expert, but you need to be able to talk with information technology professionals, know the basics of web design and frankly user centered design, be willing to learn about technical issues, and understand how Web 2.0/3.0 and beyond will impact your work.

That's about it, though there is so much more...

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Archives and institutional memory (for lack of a better title)

I had an interesting conversation with a student who was researching public spaces on campus. Specifically, she was researching The Heart, a central place on campus that students use to respect and not walk on, taking detours if needed to get where they were going. Now everyone walks on it and it is not a sacred space. The student lamented this, and told me that through her research, and the research of other students in the class, she believed Earlham to be a better place in the past than it currently is. She believes that students were more into academic pursuits outside the classroom, more engaged, and more active in the organizations they founded. I found her perspective very interesting and confirmed that one of the best parts about working at Earlham is being able to interact closely with students.

But from an archives standpoint, I posed this question to her: if you are finding evidence that students were more interested in academic pursuits in the past, are all voices heard? Are the records accurate? In what sense are you taking your own wishes and needs and projecting them into the past? Because we might not have records that discuss students lack of engagement, is it easier to assume that they were engaged? On the other hand, we do have controversial issues files and some student organizational records that may suggest a troubled past in many areas, whether it be race relations or alcohol problems. How do we acknowledge that our archives are not close to complete, or tell the entire story of the school? How can we better capture the entire reality of campus life? Or do we focus on institutional memory through official records and assume people will capture the many other sides of life through their own photos, diaries, memories, and so on.

Just some ramblings during my evening reference shift.

Current Projects

Within the next few weeks, I hope to complete or make significant progress on the following projects:

--Digitization of selected items from the Pennington Research Association Archives, housed in the Friends Collection at Earlham College. The association has paid us to digitize, create metadata, provide full text of the documents, ensure quality control, post images and host the collection through PALNI.

--Completion of processing of the Louis and Mary Ruth Jones collection, a significant collection of genealogical material. Thanks to an industrious student worker, I am almost done with this collection.

--Moving collections around in our climate controlled space in order to provide more room for our expanding collection. This process included moving supplies out of the climate controlled area, which gave us another free range of shelves. The downside? This free range of shelves is closest to overhead pipes. Do I wish there were no overhead pipes? Yes, I do, but we are not going to be making any changes in the HVAC anytime soon, and thus we must make do with the original system built long before my arrival here (although of course I might have built it in same way considering constraints on cost and the building itself). So, the question is what goes under the pipes? We did have a leak once, though not over the shelves. I have decided, in consultation with Tom Hamm (head curator), to place the Friends Serial Group (FSG) in this space. FST is a burgeoning collection of Friends pamphlets from around the world. These are available elsewhere and thus are in this sense replacable if they were to sustain water damage. The collection also needs expansion room and currently has no room to expand where it is shelved. Thus, FSG will be in better shape with room for expansion, and we will have room to expand our manuscript collections and growing collections of Earlham donor records in better space. And I'm going to be looking for other ways to maximize our space.

--Continuing work on processing the Friends United Meeting collection. This is one of our largest collections.

--Beginning work on electronic records management at Earlham. I'm convening a committee to look specifically into managing our institutional records. This will be a long process, but I'm looking forward to getting started.

Of course, there are a number of smaller projects going on, and many researchers to help! Reference questions take up part of every day. Some smaller projects include smaller collections I work on as I have time, with help from the students of course; adding images to the new Earlham Digital Archives; and various surprises that come up every day. The surprises often are related to reference questions, of course.

I will talk about my long range goals in another post. As I think about these short term projects, and projects nearing completion, I see an emphasis on genealogy and prioritizing based on donors. The Penningtons paid us for the project, we have many genealogical researchers, and the Friends United Meeting is an organization with which we have close ties. Improving relations with donors is very important for future gifts of collections, and for financial donations as well. There is nothing startling in this observation, but I do believe it suggests we are focusing on helping the current users of our collections and those who know about our collections, especially Quaker organizations. Many of my long range projects concern bringing more people into the archives, by providing more information about our manuscript collections through online searching, meeting the standards of the archives profession, and outreach. Our core group of researchers is likely to remain genealogists, Quaker organizations, and students; but I hope with other projects to encourage other types of researchers to use our collections when appropriate. (more on our hidden collections later...)

Monday, February 16, 2009

Google Scholar: Boon or Bust

I'm giving a presentation on Google Scholar today for a faculty technology workshop. Besides demonstrating how to use it, I'm discussing the pros and cons and the murky areas in between. I'm a big fan of all things Google, but am not entirely sold on Google Scholar. Yet. I love this idea however: University of Michigan Book Printing Machine

In the session I will cover how to set scholar preferences to show SFX links from Earlham. It should be noted that exactly how this works is not understood, and I discussed this with our resident techy librarians.


Why might you want to use Google Scholar?


--For quick access to open access articles.

--One stop shopping; Google Scholar, or something like it, may very well represent the future of searching. Instead of having to search multiple databases, researchers could go to one place.

--In theory, Google Scholar provides a way for people without access to scholarly databases--public library patrons, for instance--to be able to find citations, if not full text, of scholarly resources they could then acquire via interlibrary loan. It is free to search, and some items are available for free. Note, however, that of right now an interlibrary loan link is not available from the Google scholar link

--Once you recognize its current limitations, Google scholar can be a useful tool and a place to start research.

Why Might You Hesitate to Use Google Scholar?

--As of today, a significant amount of scholarly material does not seem to be available. Not all publishers have reached an agreement with Google.

--Confusing display: articles and books may come up several times in the search and it may not be obvious which one to choose. How the items are ranked is not entirely clear. Without going deep into the search, researchers may miss an important item.

--Unlike databases such as PsychInfo, there is not a clear editorial policy or explanation of what it is included. The items generally are scholarly, but books for children sometimes come up in the search as well.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Teaching and Learning archives?

As an archivist, I'm very intrigued by self-archiving systems such as suggested today by a professor over email. Teaching faculty have a weekly meeting called Friday Forum where often the subject involves teaching or research. The idea is to create an archive, open to the Earlham community, with syllabi, teaching practices, improving discussion, etc. Earlham is very much a teaching institution, and this makes a lot of sense to me. While here at Earlham our physical archives focuses primarily on print material, it is clear to me if we want to continue archiving and chronicling Earlham's history we need to pay close attention to systems like ELS and other ways that Earlham's history is being archived--including students uploading pictures to photo sharing sites like Flickr. Of course, teaching is such an essential part of Earlham's mission having an archive--online or physical--devoted to teaching and learning is a great idea. (assuming of course people submit material!)

One aspect of systems like ELS that intrigues me the most is the ability for social tagging, which allows many users to identify the subject of a particular item rather being limited by Library of Congress subject headings or other such controlled vocabularies.

I'm excited about projects like this that can capture Earlham's history and teaching practices in ways we haven't always been able to do- for example, we might get a professor's papers after they have retired or died, but with digital files items can be captured in real time--of course, it is possible we might not always want to do this or professors could be concerned about confidentiality and copyright. I think the positive aspects outweigh the negative and hopefully these are challenges we can work on here at Earlham.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Fun and Educational things I did this week

(not necessarily in any kind of order)

1. Visited the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, in the Texas School Book Depository. I thought it was an excellent museum, with good integration of video footage of various aspects of JFK's assassination with the museum exhibits. It is really weird to stand in the place Lee Harvey Oswald stood.

2. Fun with Rafia's WACKY GPS system. It often lies.

3. Engaging in shenanigans with Rafia's colleagues.

4. Southfork Ranch, where Dallas was filmed (outside scenes anyway). Oddly enough, we went there on my insistence. EPIC photos were taken there.

5. Ft. Worth Zoo: many active and adorable animals lived here including black bears, a white tiger, lion cubs, cheetahs, meerkats, otters, and more.

6. Kimball Art Museum: A nice art museum, with terrible signs for parking. But a nice museum.

7. Free IMAX videos including "Sea Monsters" and "Extreme". I preferred "Sea Monsters" while Rafia preferred "Extreme"

8. Movies watched: X Files I Want To Believe which I have decided was a dream and thus will pretend didn't really happen, Hamlet 2 which was mostly funny, and Wall-E, which I loved, but wept throughout.

9. Photo Shoots of Rocky, Uniqua, DJ Pinja, Bearning Love, Renee, and a nameless blue reindeer

10. Delicious foods were eaten, possibly to the point of gluttony.

11. San Antonio Missions National Historical Park was wonderful.

12. Riverwalk in San Antonio was sort of cool, if you like that sort of thing. I sort of do. Love San Antonio, and the Southwest, overall.

13. Much, much more!!!

Thursday, January 8, 2009

In Dallas

I am at Rafia's. I'm reading the New York Times while she shops for shoes!

Friday, January 2, 2009

Graceland

I am in Jackson MS tonight after spending the day at Graceland and driving part of the Natchez Trace in Mississippi (and a brief trip to Oxford MS). Memphis was full of Kentucky and East Carolina fans; having avoided the sports page over the last week I was oblivious to the bowl game being played until I started wondering about all the UK flags on the cars passing me on the highway. Anyway, Graceland was nuts. I sort of felt the same way I felt about Las Vegas--really glad I visited, but felt a little overwhelmed.

Other than a trip a while ago that took me to Tupelo and Elvis Presley's birthplace, I have not spent much time in Mississippi. Tomorrow I'm going to take the Natchez Trace to Natchez before heading to Beaumont Texas, near where my grandfather was born. I am not sure what I'm going to there, but I've never been to that area and I'm curious about where my family is from. My ultimate destination, of course, is Arlington.

The outside of Graceland:



Crazy airplane:


TV Room:


Me with mirrors on stairs:


Presents in the Jungle Room


Trees inside house:


The drive on the Natchez Trace was very foggy (still pretty, and not much traffic)