Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference Scholarship

I was notified on Friday that I'd been awarded a scholarship to attend the 48th Annual Rare Books and Manuscripts (RBMS) Preconference From Here to Ephemerality: Fugitive Sources in Libraries, Archives, and Museums from June 19-22 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Here's a brief description of the conference:

This will be the first time that an RBMS Preconference will explore the theme of ephemera in libraries, archives, and museums. Ephemera collections have traditionally been neglected by institutions and have been underutilized by scholars; they provide unique challenges in cataloging, preservation, and access. The goals of the Preconference will be to explore these issues, and to uncover the value of building and using ephemera collections to their full potential.

There will be five plenary sessions, encompassing: ephemerality; the scholarly uses of ephemera; dealers' perspectives on ephemera; collecting and collectors of ephemera; and the care and management of ephemera collections in institutions. The sixth and final plenary session will be a wrap-up of the entire conference. Plenary speakers include internationally renowned scholars, collectors, and library and museum curators. In addition to the plenary sessions, there will be twelve short papers further developing aspects of the theme, and nine seminars offering a more practical or case-study approach to the topic."

It's a great scholarship but it doesn't cover all my expenses so I'm still trying to find some other sources of funding before deciding whether or not I'll accept.

UPDATE: I received a generous stipdend from Emporia State University SLIM and have accepted the scholarship.

Sebastian C. Adams' Chronological Chart on Display

This is currently being exhibited at the Oregon State Library. Sebastian C. Adams was an Oregon pioneer and resident of Salem. He created a twenty-one foot scroll entitled A Chronological Chart of Ancient, Modern, and Biblical History which was a best seller in the 1870's. It presents the history of the world from its Biblical beginnings until the mid 19th century utilizing a richly illustrated timeline.

This scroll is in the tradition of historical timelines popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Copies can be found in 73 U.S. libraries including those at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. It was printed in 1871 and then updated and reprinted twice more, in 1876 and 1878.

A photo replica is what is being shown at the Oregon Stat Library along with a second framed copy of a later edition. There's an extensive article in the Salem Statesman Journal .

Staff Appreciation Week

It's staff appreciation week at LBCC and on Monday Jorry and Richenda gave me a card and lovely pot of pink flowers. I've also been invited to the staff luncheon which will be held on Wednesday.

Trip to Oregon State Library

When I began working at the Oregon State University Library Archives I told them about my work at the Oregon State Library last summer. They weren't aware of the OSL special collections or of their photo collection and so Karl contacted Merrialyce and made an appointment for the Southern Willamette Archivists and Curators (SWAC) to meet with her and see it, inviting me along. Of course, I said yes. There were eight of us. Merrialyce gave us a history of the Special Collections Department at the Oregon State Library as well as descriptions of the different photograph collections.

Northwest Archivists Conference

John and I will be going to the Northwest Archivists Conference , Dynamic Archives: Preserving the Past and Speaking to the Future, which will be held in Moscow, Idaho on May 17-19th.

Archives Project

I began and finished a project in Archives last week for Erika, pulling letters dealing with budget, political, and labor problems written by university researchers working on finding ways to use latex from Russian dandelions to make rubber during World War II. See this article for more information about this process. I found it fascinating reading. There were a number of letters dealing with the problem of getting gas to travel and also with finding housing when visiting Washington, D.C. There were even a few little snippets of personal information--the birth of a daughter and a couple of lame jokes.

I'm now in the middle of a project for Larry. This one involved adding html-encoded finding aids to the Northwest Digital Archives database.

Oregon Library Association Conference in Corvallis

I went to the Oregon Library Association Annual Conference held in Corvallis and had a wonderful time learning new things, seeing old friends, and meeting new ones. I attended sessions on Googilization, Preparing for Generational Shifts in Library Volunteers, and Oregon History through Oregon State Documents, among others. The top photo is of April, one of my Emporia State University classmates, in front of her poster. The one below is of Michael, another of my classmates, who was one of the presenters along with Camilla and Bryan, on Getting Caught Up in Web 2.0. T And the third photo is of Lori and Perri, our Emporia advisors (I think Perri had just spotted someone she knew when I snapped the photo which explains the expression on her face.)

Extreme Altered Books

This is a photo of a traditionally altered book (click on it to see it in more detail). And here and here you'll find photographs of extreme altered books. Warning: This is not for lovers of books who are faint of heart. One poster described it as "finding artfullness in mangled corpses".

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.”

Links to My Essay

Some sharp-eyed classmates noticed links to my essay and sent them to me. One is AL Direct , an electronic newsletter sent to American Library Association personal members by e-mail (I think the link will work only if you are an ALA member), and the other is the U.S. Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition which can be found here.

Oregon State Library Photo Website is Live!

Merrialyce Blanchard, the Special Collection Librarian at the Oregon State Library, sent me an email to say that the Oregon State Library Photo Website is now available for viewing. You can see it here.

The photo on the homepage is the very first one I entered into PastPerfect last summer and looking through the collection was like finding old friends.

March of the Librarians

If you're having a stress-filled week take a look at March of the Librarians . Filmed at the ALA Mid-Winter Convention in Seattle last month, this is a take off on March of the Penguins.

Library Student Journal Essay

My essay has been published in the February, 2007 issue of the open access Library Student Journal .

Oregon State University Library Archives

I've been offered and accepted a position working part-time at the Oregon State University Archives located in the Valley Library in Corvallis. I begin this week and will be working there Wednesday and Thursday evenings and the Saturday afternoons I'm not attending class. This is in addition to my position at the LBCC library and my volunteer work at the senior center. My duties in the archives include data input, creating html-encoded documents, scanning photographs and other historical materials, and providing reference services to researchers using the Archives’ collections and the Libraries’ Map Collection.