Mission accomplished

It's hard to believe it, but my first semester of library school is just about over. My final group project has been presented, my final paper has been submitted, and I guess now is a good time to reflect on what we've learned this semester.
It's amazing to consider how much we have learned this semester. Creating a website felt like a big deal, but looking back, it was only the beginning. We learned UNIX commands, surveyed website usability, and built a database. I had the good fortune to work with a group of people whose talents complemented each other beautifully. I was able to do a lot of the technical work, which Sandy, Alyssa, and Kristin turned into wonderful presentations. Kristin created an instructional video that I'm still marveling over.
Although I will probably not use hand tagging or UNIX a great deal in my immediate future, I can approach a variety of technologies safe in the knowledge that I can handle whatever is thrown my way.
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The Huntington Library, Art Galleries, and Gardens are incredibly photogenic, as visitors have known for decades. Just yesterday, the television show NCIS was filming in part of the library. As I was walking back in, a coworker and I stopped to talk to a friend and we ended up chatting with Mark Harmon. He was delightful, and he complimented my shoes.
Back in 1938, a group of costumed actors visited the Huntington residence. They wore 18th century costumes, which compliment the Georgian art and French Regency furniture. For those interested in classic Hollywood, Victor Mature is the man on the far left.

Ever onward, or, Romantic musings on hand-tagging and Unix

It's hard for me to convey the sheer quantity of information that I have learned since starting this course two months ago. I leapt into the void that was my understanding of information technology and have emerged with a new set of skills that will serve me well for years to come.
My first major accomplishment was the creation of my very first website. In the spirit of all my endeavors, I made this infinitely more complicated than it needed to be. I created a section with links to all of the blog posts that I wrote when I was living in Ireland ten years ago. The site that they come from is so old that they are tied to an email address that I no longer have access to, and finding the blog has been a chore whenever I went looking for it. Now I have all of those posts in one place, organized by month. The other facet of this website that required an enormous amount of effort was the inclusion of book reviews that I had written for Good Reads. I learned how to create a navigation bar on the left side of the page and took advantage of a cascading style sheet to save time on formatting each of the pages. I'm pleased with my work, and though it might not be the best looking website in the world, it is a unique creation, made by hand.
My second major accomplishment was emerging unscathed from a foray into the world of Unix commands. The interface is a bit intimidating at first, and reminds me of the first, DOS-run computers that we had at home. It's strange to see that little black box against the lively and colorful backdrop of my Windows 8 computer, but it seems almost like a window in a world behind the pretty facade. The logic is clear and unforgiving - if you type so much as a letter wrong, your results will be skewed or just non-existent - but the accomplishment that I felt when I was able to create new directories and navigate between them was very real.
I feel like I've gotten very poetic for a post about my IT progress, but perhaps that is fitting. I've moved beyond thinking of hand tagging and coding as cold, sterile instruments. I can see know that they can make things richer and more vibrant, and the only thing that was holding them back was my own attitude.

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 For this post's peek into the past I thought I would show you a bit of Huntington history. The white haired gentleman with a mustache in the center is Henry E. Huntington, the founder of the fine institution where I work. The tall awkward young man on the left is future general, George Patton, Jr. (though he's actually the third of that name; did you know that?) The Pattons and Huntingtons were neighbors from the late 19th century, and when George was bringing things (that maybe he shouldn't have had) back to the United States at the end of the Second World War, he left some of them with the Huntington Library. One example, which was recently transferred to the National Archives, was the original Nuremberg Laws, signed by Adolf Hitler himself.

Progress I've made

I may not have mentioned this already, but this is not my first course of instruction in programming. When I was a freshman in high school I took PASCAL computer programming, and by God, I was amazing. That was, unfortunately, about 15 years ago. At this point all that I remember is the word "boolean" and that I got asked to prom because of that class. Probably not the most solid base that I could have going in. But that means that I was able to start HTML with the knowledge that I can do this.
Learning hand tagging started out easy. Creating titles and bodies, formatting text into different sizes and colors, inserting links and documents. I love the balance and attention to detail that is required. The whole process requires forward planning and building a website is rather like building a house of cards. Thus far we have gotten to a two story house, maybe three, but soon we will be progressing to the airier reaches of design elements and XHTML. I like having the videos that Professor Bonnici provided as well as the HTML5 book. Sometimes it's easier for me to follow written instructions, but being able to see someone go through the steps is also instructive.
One of the more interesting outcomes of learning HTML is that, even though I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I already feel more confident in my dealings with the internet. I use GoodReads pretty regularly, and until now my posts have tended to be just blocks of text, because I was intimidated by the "some html ok" note that accompanies each post. I have steered clear of adding images or links in the past, but I feel like I can be more creative in my reviewing from now on. 
My biggest problem in creating a website comes not from the technical process, but from the creative process. I struggle to come up with content that I think will interest people, or which will even interest me.

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Today's image is in honor of the ungodly heat we're experiencing in Southern California. We're also in the midst of an epic drought in which frivolous water usage is frowned upon, but that can't stop me from imagining the cool waters of the Olympic Swimming Pool which was constructed for the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Leisure reading

This isn't directly related to LS560, but I thought the timing was interesting.

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The book store that I work for occasionally, Book Soup, is an independent store in West Hollywood, and I've been working there for almost six years. Many of the books that fill the shelves have recommendations written by staff members, and I've written my fair share. One of my briefest recs is for The name of the rose by Umberto Eco, which simply says that it is my favorite book ever. I realize that that's not the most informative description, but it's true, and it seems to sell a fairly steady stream of copies. While I was in Alabama for orientation, a woman came into the store, saw the recommendation, and gave the cashier her contact information to pass on to me, to see if I would be interested in doing a book club for The name of the rose. I'm not much of a book club person, but I've been meaning to reread it, and thought, what the heck.
I started reading it a couple of days ago and was struck by how relevant it is to my latest educational endeavor. The book tells the story of William of Baskerville's visit to an unspecified monastery in 1327, where monks are dying and mystery shrouds an ancient codex. The monastery has a magnificent library whose organization is so obscure that only the librarian knows where books are. William asks the abbot about access to the books, and the abbot describes it in this way:

Only the librarian has, in addition to that knowledge, the right to move through the labyrinth of the books, he alone knows where to find them and where to replace them, he alone is responsible for their safekeeping....only the librarian knows, from the collocation of the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility, what secrets, what truths or falsehoods, the volume contains. Only he decides how, when, and whether to give it to the monk who requests it; sometimes he first consults me. Because not all truths are for all ears, not all falsehoods can be recognized as such by a pious soul; and the monks, finally, are in the scriptorium to carry out a precise task, which requires them to read certain volumes and not others, and not to pursue every foolish curiosity that seizes them, whether through weakness of intellect or through pride or through diabolical prompting.

 What a delightful interpretation of the librarian's role! I'm mostly being sarcastic. I enjoy the idea of the librarian as arbiter of knowledge, though of course it's no longer practical. In the 14th century there were obviously far fewer scholars, and those that existed were working within a much narrower intellectual framework than today's scholars. I must confess that there are times when I look at the scholars at the Huntington with suspicion, wondering if they're worthy of the materials to which they have access. I like to think that I'm slightly more open-minded than this fictional 14th century abbot, but this may be something I need to work on.

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The Huntington doesn't have any photographs of Book Soup that I've found, but we do have photographs of Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, which purchased Book Soup in 2009 after the death of our owner. Vroman's opened in 1894, and in 2008 was named the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year.

User Survey, or, My mom is smarter than I am

A lot of my classmates' interviews have been with older individuals who are not particularly inclined to using technology. I could have interviewed my dad who is in his mid-70s and pretty good with technology. He's got an iPhone and an iPad mini, he texts and emails, and he plays Words With Friends. He's not afraid of technology, but like a lot of other people's older subjects he's not interested in keeping up with the latest advances.
Instead I thought I would interview my mom. She's in her late 60s, and got her first home computer in 1982. She has an iPhone, an iPad, a gps unit, and a device that tells you how far from the pin you are on the golf course, the first two of which she uses on a daily basis. The most advanced program that she uses is Adobe Lightroom 5. When she needs to send files she uses email and Dropbox. Mom follows the latest tech developments and can fix most of the problems that arise during her regular usage.
What could make my mom's relationship with technology so different from that of other people her age? Being an early adopter was probably a big help, and she continued to be engaged with technology up to her retirement. She volunteers these days at the Chicago Botanic Garden, where she has helped lead the way towards imaging substantial portions of the gardens' collections. When I talked to her, she was getting ready to learn about the pdf creation software used at CBG so that she could develop a new template for photographing trees. When I asked her why she thinks she's so much more willing with engage with evolving technology, she said that it all depends on seeing technology as a challenge which you are up to. That's an attitude I know that I could benefit from, and will try to carry with me throughout this Master's program.

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Today I thought I would share a rare sight, a snow jump in Los Angeles, 1938.

 

Back to school

When I finished my last Master's degree, I thought I was done. That degree was in Medieval Studies, and even though I do not regret getting it, I will fully acknowledge that there weren't many career tracks leading out of it. I was ready to walk away from school and into the real world! That was 2008. Not the best time to join the real world, if you remember. So I puttered around in a book store for a year, then was hired at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I was hired as a library assistant in the rare books section of Technical Services (home of the catalogers). 

I spent four and a half years telling anyone who asked that I would never get an MLS or MLIS. Everyone I met at the library looked on it as drudgery that you just happen to need if you want to work in the library field. Then, around the holidays last year, I realized that this is where I'm supposed to be. My parents refrained from saying "I told you so", because they're good people, but they've probably known for years that this is the direction I was headed.

Given my previous, negative attitude towards library school, I was somewhat trepidatious when I finally chose a school, the University of Alabama, and when I showed up for orientation last week I was pleased and surprised by the experience - everyone there, students and instructors, were all so motivated and enthusiastic. 

Distance education is a new experience for me, and although I use technology, I don't think of myself as a tech person. The difference between "fluency" and "literacy" that Professor Bonnici was talking about on Wednesday provides an interesting framework for thinking about how we use technology. I tend to do well on the literacy side, but am a bit of a hold-out on the fluency side. I can fix most minor malfunctions ("Have you tried turning it off and on again?") while avoiding the technical explanations. That's going to have to change now, I guess.

I thought I would end each of my posts with a picture and link to something that I've worked on at the Huntington. We'll start out with a lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair.