I’ve made it through another semester in my MLIS program. I was horrendously busy, but both of my courses were great! The first was on academic research methods which was quite helpful; despite working in an academic environment for years, the actual mechanics of how research is performed and published has always been foreign to me.1 My other course was very broadly about electronic records management with a good deal of new concepts sprinkled in that I got very excited about (Computational archival science! Digital preservation and bitstreams! Emulation-as-a-service!!!)
Current Stuff
- This week2 I began a six-week summer course on digital libraries, so most of my time will be spent absorbing that.
- Reading about weird old OCLC projects from the 70s and 80s, like this pilot of a videotex home-delivery library system.
- Changing how I write and take notes - I told myself I’d get a Supernote Manta after the semester ended, so now comes the part where I need to integrate it into my “process” (which mostly involves a lot of lists) so that it remains in use. Maybe that’ll be another post.
- Trying to learn how to write Gentoo ebuilds.
- Going to library/GLAM conferences - next month I’ll be at Open Repositories in Chicago.
I now know much more than I ever wanted to about the publishing side of things. Though since I have a university email address, I’ve always gotten emails asking I have any articles to submit to various extremely reputable and prestigious OA journals… but surely this is just a part of a healthy academic publishing environment. ↩︎
When I began writing this post the semester had just ended and my digital libraries course was two to three weeks out… Oops. I tend to let drafts languish. ↩︎