librarygrrrl.net

I promised in my last post that I’d leave you with a list of blogs our interns found in their cruisings around the web. Some preferred the more professional blogs, like librarian.net, while others liked the more personal ones. So in no particular order:

• Tiny Little Librarian
• Sex and the Library
• LibraryLaw Blog
• Next Gen Librarian

One final thought: an intern mentioned, in the midst of our anguish about stereotypes and did we care about them and what were they and what should we even think about them, that there really isn’t much of a fear of aging in this profession.

Whoa. What do YOU think? Do librarians fear aging professionally?
.
.
.
And with that, I’m out of here for a week. St. John, Virgin Islands, here we all come!

P.S. American Airlines has just made my life hell. I’m off to the airport to get the boarding passes that they wouldn’t let me print out. Fun times! /sarcasm

If you’ve tried to leave a message over the past couple of days and gotten an error message, it’s because I’ve been playing around with my comment-spam settings. I changed some settings, and hopefully real people (not the lovely online poker, texas hold ‘em, or tigerspice jerks) will be able to leave comments now.

Tomorrow I’m teaching a class for some library interns. I get to lead discussions on stereotypes and anti-stereotypes of librarians. Last year when I did this session, I had a blast. This year, I’m going to show snippets from Desk Set, It’s a Wonderful Life, Party Girl, and Buffy. We’ll also look at a few children’s books (Miss Rumphius, The Library, The Library Dragon, and The Librarian from the Black Lagoon) and read passages from adult books (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett). It should be pretty fun to see what the stereotypes all have to say about librarians, and if the interns’ actual experiences with library workers support or negate those stereotypes.

They also had an assignment to find and read some librarian blogs, and to think about how those blogs might help them in library school as a student or on their jobs as a future librarians. After I find out what blogs they found, I’ll be sure to let link them from here.

In the midst of my knitting on Klaralund, I made a quick hat. The pattern was my own, based on reading lots of hat patterns out there.

Yarn: Plymouth Yarns Baby Alpaca Grande in colorway 2050.

Pattern: A simple roll-brim hat, ending with a LONG 3-stitch I-cord tied into two knots.

I made this on the plane as Amy and I were headed to Minneapolis for my father’s retirement party. It took just about the entire plane ride (3 hours) to knit up. Easy! The only problems I’ve had with it are that it was a little loose to begin with (although you should have seen my FIRST attempt at it) and that it’s stretched out since then. Fortunately, a cup of coffee jumped onto it the other day and it needs to be washed. Hopefully that’ll tighten the stitches again.

This hat looks really good with my new L.L. Bean winter jacket, which is destined to be one of those jackets I wear until my mother looks at it with disdain in eight years and says something to the effect of, “Isn’t it time you got a new jacket?” It also looks nice with my dark grey wool peacoat.

Bear with me on the site… I’ve just upgraded my WordPress install and am playing with themes and my old layout. So far, I seem to have killed off the ability to leave and/or view comments in that layout. I’m thinking that I need to do some work on it.

In other news, I’m halfway done with sleeve two of my Klaralund sweater!

And Maggie still loves her blue large tennis ball.

Becky over at Good Grief writes a delightful story about her first experiences with email, and it made me wax all nostalgic.

Way back when I was in college at St. Ben’s, during the years 1989-1993, I noticed these strange computer-looking things in the library. I must have asked someone what they were all about, because the next thing I knew, I had a VAX account and was telling all my friends on campus to get one too. My friend Lynn and I used to sit with our backs to each other in the library, each at a terminal, and we “talked”. It was a precursor to chat, and probably explains a lot of why my computing patterns are much closer to the Millenials than to those of the the Gen-Xers.

At any rate, I decided that my best friend Nan, who went to college way off in snowy central New York (at Colgate) needed to get an account of her own, so we could chat without racking up big phone bills. Mind you, this was in the days when you couldn’t get a cell phone account with 400 minutes plus free nights and weekends for $35/month… So she got an account, and we began emailing. But we never could figure out how to make “talk” work, so I got her boyfriend to get an account, give me his login information, and I connected to their system from central Minnesota using his credentials, and we chatted. So clever… and probably pretty illegal. Oh well - we didn’t hurt anyone at the time, did nothing malicious to the systems, and saved ourselves some money. I wish I could remember what my user name was then.

I do know that a couple of years later, when I started grad school at Syracuse’s IST, I was poking around in systems in similar ways, trying to make sense of the architecture of the internet. I got my first non-school email account in 1996, right after finishing my MLS. It was the hotmail account that I’ve been using ever since then. Imagine, I’ve had the same free email account for almost 10 years now! I’ve had that account for as long as I lived in my hometown of Aitkin, MN. And that’s the longest I’ve ever done any one thing.