Wrapping it all up

 

 Mount Shasta and Whitney Glacier in California, seen from the crater (Shastina). Photo by C.E. Watkins. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. 

My time at Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science is coming to an end! Saturday May 7th is the last day of classes and I graduate on May 20th. It's been quite a journey for me and I won't go on and on at length about that right now. This semester I had an internship at the Science and Engineering Library at UMass/Amherst. I loved being there and would love to work there someday. If you want to know what I did there you can read about it in the GSLIS newsletter, Infolink.
In addition to my internship I took a class called Photographic Archives Management which was absolutely fabulous! I spent the semester working on a group project which turned into a website called Photography of the American West: 1850-1885. I really enjoyed working on the project and the class was really fun. I love photography and this project was a great opportunity to explore 19th century photographers and the "wild west" as Trevor has been calling it. I hope you enjoy exploring the website. I'm proud of it! I wish I could take credit for the design of the site but I can't. We were fortunate to have someone in our group who is very tech savvy and knows all the cool tools to use. I'll take credit for a good portion of the content and quite a few of the fabulous resources we found.

Repair this Book!

Seriously, send this book to be repaired. This book is from an academic library in the Happy Valley. Yes, that is a little sticker in the upper right corner that says, "Loose pages. Be careful. Please rewrap in rubberband after use." Yes, that is a produce rubber band. You know, the kind that comes with your asparagus from Peru in mid-winter. It says, "PRODUCE OF PERU". People, please, repair this book!

BUY this book!

I've been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. The blurb about the book says, "Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years." It's really well written, hard to put down at times, and to be quite honest, shocking.

The HeLa cells have been used for medical research for decades. Doctors, researchers and big pharma have gotten quite wealthy as a result of using her cells for cancer research. Yet her family is poor, undereducated, and many go without medical insurance.

At about 2/3 of the way through the book I couldn't stand not knowing if Skloot was going to do anything to right the wrong that had been inflicted on the Lacks family. So I skipped ahead to the back of the dust jacket and read that the author had set up a scholarship fund in Henrietta's name. Curious, I went to the website and learned that the author is donating a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book to the foundation. Then I learned that the foundation had already awarded grants for tuition for 5 descendants of Lacks as well as healthcare for 2 members of her immediate family. Feeling guilty for borrowing this book from my library, I immediately went to Barnes & Noble on-line and ordered it. As soon as my book arrives I will return the one I borrowed from the library that is now overdue and in high demand. Thanks, Rebecca Skloot, for taking care of the Lacks family!

Resolutions

It's that traditional time of year when people make resolutions. I generally make a resolution that I think is actually achievable, not some grandiose, completely impossible goal that will be completely abandoned by January 8th (or sooner). For example, I never resolve to lose 50 pounds.  Although losing 50 pounds may be a good idea and possibly a good goal, I think I would abandon it by January 29th or the start of the new semester, which ever comes first.

A few years ago I resolved to use less plastic shopping bags. This required that I always have a shopping bag in my bag (which means I have to carry an ample size tote and not a cutesy tiny purse). I bought a ChicoBag. It's made of nylon and squishes into a little pouch when not in use. It's about the same size as those cheapo plastic bags that you get at a grocery store, Target or CVS (or anywhere else that has plastic shopping bags). It's been so well used over the past few years that I've reinforced the seams with my trusty sewing machine. In addition to the ChicoBag (I actually have 2 now because I got one for free from an exhibitor at the ALA mid-winter meeting last January -- Thanks DK Publishing!) I have several cloth shopping bags that either stay in my car or leave the house with me when I know I'm going shopping. This is where it's all about learning a new habit. You know you're going shopping, right? You've got your list all ready? Grab some shopping bags on your way out the door. Put them in the front seat right next to you. When you go into the store, take them with you. Use them.

This was working pretty well for the first year so I decided I'd make that my resolution for the next year. You know, improve upon the first lesson. And it worked so well, that I repeated it for a third year.

Just want to let you know that this had less to do with saving the environment than it had to with the fact that we have WAY too many plastic bags in this household because we live with other people. I'll never ask them to stop using plastic bags but at least I can contribute less to the accumulation of plastic bags in our house.

This year, I've set, what I think, is an attainable goal for the month of January. Baby steps! I confess that I got an early start on Dec. 26th. My goal is to exercise every single day for the month of January. So far, it's DAY 10. I've either been to the gym and done 20 minutes on the stair stepper, or walked 2 1/2 miles through mushy snow (that's quite a work out!), or gone to a yoga class (turns out  that I'm somewhat flexible but don't have much strength in my thighs -- but I knew that already. PLUS I've got these 2 large melons that get in the way of some poses.)

Most of this is prompted by an article I read in the January 2011 "O", the Oprah Magazine. The blurb on the cover said, "Weight Loss Made Simple: the only tip you'll ever need (page 126).... so I was so excited and thinking this was going to be some super-secret, super-easy thing like eat more chocolate, drink more wine, take this supplement (vitamin)... etc., and the answer was, you guessed it, EXERCISE.  So, it seems that EXERCISE is the solution to most of the problems that I've been having for the past 5 years or so once I turned 40. I don't sleep well - at least twice a week, sometimes more. I want to lose weight -- sure, of course! I want to look better -- who doesn't? I have joint pain - not so much but I had this injury from 2007 when I slipped and fell at work and could no longer sleep on my left side comfortably or sit cross legged (used to be called Indian style) without my left leg wanting to be considerably higher than the right. But when I started going to the gym last January, within weeks I could sit cross legged again. Good stuff, exercise and stretching. So, I resolved to exercise on a more regular basis.

Why the gym? Because I can think of a million excuses NOT to go for a walk outdoors. It's too cold, it's too hot, it's windy, it's too sunny, it's raining, it's snowing, ... the list goes on and on. At the gym it's climate controlled and, believe it or not, there are people of all shapes, ages and sizes. It's just great. I fit right in. They offer all kinds of classes that are free with my membership and I can just drop in for one class and try it out and never return if I don't like it. They have very convenient hours - 4:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays (not that I've ever considered going to the gym at 4:30 a.m. but it's nice to know they are open), and similar convenient hours on Saturday and Sunday. They've got womens' locker rooms with showers, a sauna and a steam room. (mens' too but I've never been in there) It's about 3 miles from my house.

As my life gets busier when the semester starts at the end of the month I know it'll be a bit more difficult to get to the gym every day but I'm hoping that if I plant this seed now it'll be easier for me to find the time, and I'll want to get regular exercise. At that point I may have to make a new resolution for February.

Delicious!

If you thought I was going to write about something tasty I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm here to tell you about Delicious bookmarks, an on-line social bookmarking service. We don't always access to our own computer or laptop so it's really nice to still have access to all of your favorite websites, or resources that you never want to forget. If you're like me and you don't have a memory like an elephant, you may like Delicious bookmarks.

I was introduced to Delicious in spring of 2009 when I took LIS 407 AKA Reference for Information Professionals. I bookmarked, tagged and annotated all of the resources we studied (over 200), and when it came time to take the open "notebook" timed (75 minutes) 75 question exam at the end of the semester, I used my Delicious bookmarks to get me through and got an 96 on the final (out of 100). Yay for Delicious bookmarks!

In the Fall of 2009 when I took LIS 484 Literature of Science and Technology, which is sort of like Reference for science librarians, I used my Delicious bookmarks again to bookmark, tag and annotate the new resources I was learning. Thankfully there was no final exam at the end of the semester.

I've continued to use Delicious bookmarks in my career as a library school student because we're always learning about new resources that we may want to refer back to and it's nice to be able to keep them all in one place, annotate and tag. Most recently I installed the Firefox Delicious plug-in and, wow, it's going to make adding bookmarks and tags even easier than ever before. There's a side bar that you can open and have access to all of your bookmarks.

Thank you Firefox and Delicious!

This Post is Overdue

I met author Marilyn Johnson  at the recent NELA (that's New England Library Association for those non-librarians out there) conference in Boxborough, MA. She's author of This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save us all. She's also a friend of my friend and fellow GSLIS student, Sasha. They worked together at Life magazine back in the day. So, I actually got to talk to her for a few minutes, not just shake her hand and have her autograph my book which is what usually happens when you meet authors. I forgot to bring my book with me! But I think we'll meet again so I'll be sure to bring my copy along with me. She's a super nice person.  I made the horrible faux pas of admitting that I'd [only] read half of her book. She asked me if I liked it and I said yes and then had to come up with a quick excuse for not finishing her book. The truth is, I really enjoyed what I read and told her so, however, as soon as the spring semester started I stopped reading it. I got too busy. Her book is fabulous, like a long love letter about librarians. For me, though, she's preaching to the choir. I know how fabulous librarians are. I just hope that non-librarians are reading her book too. Librarians don't often toot their own horns about how we are saving the world (?!) so it's nice to have people like Marilyn Johnson tell the rest of the world how wonderful we are.

If you don't hear from me for a while...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm taking a class called Social Media for Information Professionals and the funny part is, I don't have time for this blog right now. I'll be blogging elsewhere for a while.