waiting for the swatch to dry

last night I was tired, but not tired enough to be fully asleep... I feel like, with this crazy quarter system, that everything is just non-stop, which it is, as all the coursework is packed into a ten-week sprint, and then you get like three weeks off for the holidays, and I think something like two weeks off between quarters.

I miss the semester system, but at the same time I can't deny that there is this tremendous synergy that goes on within my brain once I realise how interconnected everything can be. This quarter I am taking Information Structures, Issues in Information Technology, and Descriptive Cataloguing. I actually jumped the gun and took Metadata before Information Structures, and while that was a struggle, now I feel kinda ahead of the game concerning the whole metadata issue. Someone asked me today what a controlled vocabulary was and I was off and running.

I was ready to tear my hair out last night because I couldn't find the AARC2 rule for two publishers on a title page, where neither was given prominence. I finally I catalogued them both as equal publishers. We'll see what my prof says.

Anyway, back to last night. I had that tired but cranky thing going when you've been working hard all day, and you know you should go to bed, but darnit, you haven't done anything fun all day, and don't you deserve some fun? So I started swatching the yarn I dyed, first as one strand, and then as a doubled strand. I'm blocking in right now, and it should be all nice and flat for its portrait tomorrow.

I showed up for an 8 am study group today to discover that the person who asked for the meeting to be that early couldn't make it. *sigh* Well, the rest of us still discussed the upcoming midterm. My group then dragged me to a videoconference at the graduate library. It was all about the generational issues going on in the library world. This woman was the main speaker. She's made a career out of writing books about librarian issues, and is the founder of LISjobs.com.

Basically her argument is that there tension because Gen Xers think that Boomers should retire and free up jobs, and Boomers don't want to retire and entrust their libraries to techno-hungry youngsters that don't respect their authority. She says that managers should make all generations work together on committees and in their daily jobs so that everyone can learn and appreciate everyone else's strengths.

I think that there is something to be said for generational issues in any field, but what I found interesting, and what she didn't address, is that isn't just the librarians that are changing, the field itself is in flux. The next version of AARC2 is coming out next year with its big Dublin Core/digital material bent, libraries are competing with Google and the Internet in general in terms of the way users now want their information, digitazation is really booming (and grabbing a lot of the funding) and overall a lot of things are changing because the nature of information is changing.

*sigh* Yes, a lot of it is academic, since the world isn't going to end with these questions, but these are the things I think about.

There was a really funny bit where they showed a "vignette" where a Gen Xer goes into a job interview and to make her seem "young" the costume designer put her in a hot pink jacket, frosted pink lipstick, and permed blond hair. Hmmm.... seems kinda 80s to me.