Yearning for the Good Ol' Days
There’s a discussion on Autocat about interfaces and how they are all different, and basically mourning the loss of the totally-standardized card catalog. Yes, back in the day, a person could roll...
View ArticleThe Power of Tradition
I recently was handed “Notes used on catalog cards”, compiled by Olive Swain, from 1963, when I was having trouble remembering how to word a certain turn of phrase related to a translation. This is a...
View ArticleMotivation
I have two quotes printed out and hanging at my desk: "When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."...
View ArticleLC Classification Tables
Just as fair warning: this blog entry is probably only interesting to catalogers. And maybe not even every one of them, but I really need to process my emotions about the Library of Congress...
View ArticleBack to the Archives
It's been awhile since I last posted, but a lot has happened since I last posted, so I suppose that makes sense. I got a new job, now once again working as a "pure" archivist. It's been quite a few...
View ArticlePressures
I remember, when I was starting out in archives, getting excited about every new thing that came across my desk. I was a history major at the time, and every scrap of history was a new world, another...
View ArticleThe Public Face of an Archives
I've been going around and around in my mind about how I want to present this archive to The World. Since we have no public face yet, I'm pretty open to possibilities. The question that I've been...
View ArticleAccess in Archives
I'm back, to ponder the nature of service in the archival world. Get ready to gaze at those navels, people. When I left the realm of "pure" archives, almost 7 years ago, most large archival...
View ArticleOde to Dublin Core
I'm currently trying to take the courses necessary to fulfill the DAS (Digital Archives Specialist) requirements and get certified. I took my second of the first tier of classes yesterday, which is...
View ArticleA Defense of MARC
Today I decided to work on the procedures that we will use in the future to create finding aids. I'm trying to keep things loose and relatively flexible, so I'm creating a form that will have space for...
View ArticleDecision-making and management
Yesterday, we had our professional development meeting. This is for the librarians, and we talk about issues that surround moving up in your career, libraries generally, or management issues. The...
View ArticleThe answer to life, the archives, and everything
So, here's a story problem that I never faced while a fledgling archivist at the iSchool: You have been tasked with creating an archive for a university of 14,000 students, 700 faculty, and a...
View Articlea haiku
i wrote a haiku about metadata. Metadata is not a schema but the heart of a description
View ArticleRetrofit metadata
Part of my challenge here is to create an archives that will be easy for our students to use and access. Ok, that's actually the entirety of my challenge here. I know that our archives will not be a...
View ArticleCreating the historical record?
There's an interesting truth about my work: I am literally deciding right now what people will believe about this university in the future. There are two distinct stories that could be told: one is...
View ArticleMore bad poetry
This is the second haiku I've written about cataloging/metadata, but it was for a report, so I feel like I get a free pass. I apologize in advance. "A haiku about interdepartmental collaboration", by...
View ArticleArchival stewardship
One of the things I'm thinking about right now is how we're going to appraise and accession new materials for the archive. Based on the literature I'm reading right now, and the population we're...
View ArticleThe Future of the Archival Professional
Lots of people are talking about the future of archives, mostly from the point of view of materials and access, and these are indeed very pressing issues. Reinventing the mission of the archives and...
View ArticleOn Curiosity
I am a very curious person. I like looking up random facts and tucking them away in my mental pockets, to pull them out and study them later. I enjoy microscopes and bits of information and sitting...
View ArticleThe Story V. The Reality
A fellow archivist and I saw a job ad for the position of assistant archivist at Tiffany & Co. Now, neither of us knows anyone from their corporate or historic archives, nor do we have any idea of...
View ArticleSquare pegs in round holes
There is really nothing like trying to explain best practices and limitations to lay people to clear your thinking on archival and library processes. Yesterday I was interviewed by a group of MBA...
View ArticleThe Dangers of Nostalgia
I've been thinking a lot on what makes an archives a good one or a bad one. Of course these are totally subjective terms--"good" and "bad"-- but I assume if an archivist steps inside a repository and...
View ArticleRadicalism in Archives
Question posed for submissions to Archive Journal on "radical archives" Is radical content (e.g., the archives of activist collectives, social movements, or avant-garde artists) best served by...
View ArticleThe Perpetual Future, or a Feeling of Despair
The other day, while scrolling through Twitter feelings about the annual AHA meeting, I saw that someone said " too much of digital work is stuck in a perpetual future tense." The perpetual future. My...
View ArticleNoblesse oblige
I was talking to a younger colleague of mine, one who only recently moved over from medical to academic libraries, about academic library research. She went to library school fresh out of college, and...
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