Northwest Archivists Student Scholarship

I received a letter today informing me that I've been awarded the 2007 Northwest Archivists At-Large Student Scholarship. The Northwest Archivists is a regional association which includes the states of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Oregon. I will use my award to take distance learning classes on archival topics through SOLINET . Some classes I may be interested in taking are Preservation of Photographic Materials, Metadata for Digitization and Preservation, Preserving Oral Histories, Emerging Technologies, and Caring for Scrapbooks.

2007 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad

Another of my long-time interests, along with time and how we view it, is linguistics. Linguistics, the science of language which answers questions about how languages are alike and how they are different, gives us insights into how the mind works.

Pieter Bruegel's (1563) Tower of Babel

The inaugural of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, funded by the National Science Foundation, will be held later this week at several Eastern U.S. locations-- Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Ithaca, N.Y. --and on the Internet, allowing people to solve puzzles that test analytic skills and demonstrate the diversity of languages. That diversity is shrinking. During the past 200 years, the number of languages spoken on Earth has shrunk from 15,000 to 6,000.

For more information about the Olympiad, check out their website here.

Fall Term Classes

These are the classes I've registered in to take this Fall:
LI827 - Preservation Strategies
LI861 - Current Issues in Information Transfer: Advanced Preservation
LI837 - Teaching in the Information Profession
LI 835 - Information Transfer in Disciplines
LI 870 - Practicum

Portland State University Library

I've just returned from a week-end in Portland. This class was on reference and we spent Saturday at the Portland State University Library . The library is closed this week-end because of Spring break but the instructor works there and arranged to have it available for us to use. This is a gorgeous library and I loved spending the day there.

Summer Term Classes

I'll be taking the following classes this summer:

LI 806 - Global Information Infrastructure
LI 819 - Repackaging Information
LI 863 - Project Management

Because I am a part-time LBCC employee, the college will pay the tuition cost for up to 3 credits a term (a deal I can't ignore!). I'll be taking classes Spring term in powerpoint presentations (I'll be making a presentation at the OLA staff support conference in July), Excel (I need to learn a lot more about this software!), and grant writing.

Invitation

I was recently invited to serve as a virtual member of the ALA Membership Committee for a two-year term beginning at the close of the 2007 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC and expiring at the end of the 2009 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, IL.

The "virtual" part of that is important as it's unlikely I'll be able to attend all the meetings. I accepted the invitation and am very honored that it was offered to me.

Meanwhile.....

I haven't been writing about what I've been doing at the LBCC library. Many of my tasks have to do with weeding as we are getting ready to move so that the library can be remodeled.

Here's a brief summary.

** Preparing spreadsheet of journals in reference section listing which we have in print, which are in the electronic databases, the years we have them for, and if any of those we have in print are available in databases or online.
** Preparing spreadsheet of reference titles with information similar to above plus reading reviews in Choice to determine which are outstanding titles and which may have duplicated information.

I've also been attending and contributing to remodeling and staff meetings, working the circulation desk, answering reference questions, helping students with software and printer problems, and preparing bibliographies as well as answering the ubiquitous directional questions.

I have the next two weeks (finals week and Spring Break) off but only from this position. When I return I'll be responsible for offering the materials we are weeding out to other libraries, preparing and then shipping them.

As for the next two weeks, I'm finishing up a project for a class due on Monday and attending an all-day workshop in Salem on the Basics of Archives sponsored by The State Historical Records Advisory Board (SHRAB), headed by the Oregon Secretary of State- Archives Division on Wednesday. I'll be working at the OSU Archives on Wednesday and Thursday nights and on Friday I'll head up to Portland for a week-end class.

During Spring Break I'll be working at the OSU Archives half-days and working on a couple of scholarship applications.

Another Archives Project

Another archives project I've taken on is locating and pulling photographs of selected Oregon State University basketball players from different collections for a researcher. I was given a good, detailed research strategy to use beginning with using the photograph collection card catalog index and then searching the inventories of specific collections.

New Project at OSU Archives

I began working on a new project yesterday. I'm determining browsing terms for the Oregon State University Archives collections listed in the Northwest Digital Archives . The NDA provides access to archival and manuscript materials in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington through a union database of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids.

This means I am reading detailed descriptions of the collections and determining which browsing terms from an approved list might be appropriate to use. For example, one collection has documents from the Oregon Board of Regents 1886-1929 and includes correspondence dealing with problems at what is now Oregon State University of feeding students, a decree that students should be made to live on campus unless they have written permission from parents or the college president, a petition from students complaining about a professor (who was later fired), a complaint from students about the lack of heat, and another complaint from students, this one complaining that they are not receiving individual attention in classroom work. The browsing term I added was "student life".

Oregon Library Association Staff Support Conference

I'm going to be presenting at the Oregon Library Association Staff Support Conference in July. My topic will be about developing volunteer programs for libraries. I've organized a variety of volunteer programs--church, community, school (both individual schools and district-wide) during the past twenty years or so and I'm working on developing a volunteer program for LBCC so I feel pretty confident about being able to handle a one hour presentation by myself.

I'm preparing by reading books and websites about how to set up such programs and I also plan on interviewing the volunteer coordinator at the Corvallis Public Library .

A Collection of Librarians

There are collective nouns for groups of animals--a sleuth of bears, a mischief of mice, a pounce of cats, a crash of rhinoceri, a shiver of sharks, a tower of giraffes but I think the birds have the best ones-- a charm of hummingbirds, a piteousness of doves, a murmuration of starlings, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, and an exaltation of larks.

But what's the collective noun for a group of librarians? This was discussed on 50 books recently and then on Librarian Avengers .

My favorites were a hush, a stack, a collection, a catalog, an index, and a Dewey.

Dr. Seuss' Birthday

Today is Dr. Seuss' birthday, an event we celebrated a few times with parties when my sons were very small but "A person's a person, no matter how small". We had fun. "Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow there's another one." All the boys loved Dr. Seuss. My favorite of his books was Green Eggs and Ham and yes, I remember fixing that at least once for breakfast on Dr. Seuss' birthday.

I believe it's true that "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."

Sometimes I miss my little guys. "My goodness how the time has flown. How did it get so late so soon?" but "Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

“Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way.”