It is New Year’s Eve and I’m hanging out at home, listening to Matokie on KALX, drinking wine, and making polenta in anticipation of having the Stones over for brunch tomorrow. I’m not up for going out tonight what with being pretty exhausted and feeling a bit pouty.
So I’ve been Little Miss Never Blogs again. Time for a quarterly update!
My semester ended a couple of weeks ago. I took courses in Metadata, Research Methods, and Records Management this semester. I just got around to looking at my grades. Straight As. Good times. I actually enjoyed every one of those classes, which was a little surprising and gratifying. I’d had such a difficult semester last Spring for a whole host of reasons that I’d started out the Fall feeling pretty crappy about school in general and my abilities as a student specifically. I’m pleased with how things have worked out this Fall.
I’d assumed that I wouldn’t find the Research Methods course to be very useful, but it turned out to be pretty awesome. I learned about how to put together a sociological research project and different methods for collecting and analyzing data. My semester long project was writing a research proposal, which involved defining a topic, variables that would effect the research, doing a short literature review, and putting together a questionnaire that could reasonably be sent out to study subjects.
In my Metadata class, I was introduced to different metadata standards used in the library and museum worlds. My end of the semester project was putting together an archival finding aid for my own photographs and then writing a tutorial about how to put one together yourself. Good, geeky times.
The Records Management class was less exciting. But I discovered a strange, yet true love for color coded file folders.
In other news, I’m still working at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. I’ve been working on a scanning project for them that involves scanning engineering drawings dating back to the 1920s, when San Francisco began construction on the Hetch Hetchy damn up in Yosemite. Engineering drawings from that time period are absolutely amazing. Seriously, they were hand drawing so the originals are basically one of a kind works of art. I’ve learned all kinds of random things, like how blueprints are made (They’re literally sun prints. Neat!) and about the development of standardized paper sizes.
So yeah. Life’s been mostly about weird, archival based geekdom.
This Spring is my last semester of school. I’m taking Vocabulary Design, and a culminating course wherein I create something called an E-portfolio. I think I’m going to spending my next few weeks off trying to learn XSLT and thinking about how to write coherently about my ideas about librarianship as a profession. So, more geeky good times to come.
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