“No matter where you go, everyone’s connected.”

Well, readers, my good friend Jordan is now back at home (and what an ordeal it was to get him on the plane in time!), the weather is COMPLETELY INSANE, and I’m finally sitting in my office to do some work after a big brunch that I feel I will never recover from. (I made Derek and I eggs, hash browns, and “breakfast links” from Tofurky. We also had a magnificent mug of freshly brewed French press coffee. We felt so American) Saint Patrick’s Day did not actually keep me from doing most of my work yesterday … it was a spider. I am acutely allergic to spider bites, which is terrible, but sometimes it’s a great excuse for me not to even try to like them. I went on a  bug spray frenzy around 7pm which then completely suffocated me out of my own apartment, so I ended up wandering aimlessly around the rowdy Madison streets until I thought my apartment would be aired out.

Even better though: the second installment of the Sound of the Archives podcast came out yesterday. We did an entire show focused on Irish collections. Please have a looksy and listensy here! Editing sound is quite fun, but I can’t wait until I can spend more time truly editing: adding music, sounds, cutting out noise better, etc.

Something else I’ve been busy with lately is getting quite interested in digital legacies postmortem. (I did a big paper on the graves of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre being archives, so I am sure my professor thinks I am obsessed with death and graves …)

A PostSecret card from 3/18/2012: "I look up random teen 'in memorial' groups on facebook because it comforts me to know that other people are mourning a friend too."

A (quiet) Room of Her Own

I’ll say it plainly: now I am just adding to the noise, I know. I am just adding to the data deluge, the echo chamber, and so on. I’m linking to the article, The Joy of Quiet, which was published nearly two months ago but one I found just today. It is an article that encapsulates many of the trends I’ve noticed and spoken of before, as many others have: this need to get away from the electricity.

When Derek and I drove across the country to get to Madison, I purposefully looked for a non-wifi Bed & Breakfast off the beaten path (and oh boy, did we find it in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming). When I studied abroad in London in even 2007, I already loved how my phone plan was too expensive to text or call often, so I just left it in our flat. I felt not only free from this pull to remark on things I saw to a friend through a text (“omg! a man is selling roasted chestnuts in front of the British Museum!”) but I loved that without it I didn’t have a clock at all either. It felt like a very, very quiet and timid jab at the modern world, ever so scripted and scheduled.

On Pinterest, I find myself pinning images that exude quiet and contemplation, simplicity and thoughtfulness. Friends planning weddings (or most often not) love to pin farm-like ones, with rustic barns and a simple spread on a wooden table under a tree. Fascination with good cooking is partly a fascination with being not distracted while you focus directly on the beautiful, tasty meal YOU are going to create with your own hands — your own hands! Is this getting too Marxist, a desperate desire for us to be shaping the world around us through the materials we shape?

So there’s these trends, for the wholesome and pure. Just bread. Just olive oil. Just wine. A lot of my 25 Before 26 goals and then general changes to my life I wanted to make had to do with being more selective, to slow down, to focus. I’m pretty sure part of my new lust for living in Maine mostly comes from just this idea of it in my head, that it would be slower there (maybe because everyone is frozen …).

These trends are a backlash to the information overload idea, the idea that so many books are being written about these days. We do more at our jobs because budgets are crunched, we do more in school because the competition is so fierce. Even relaxation has competition: do I watch a movie or TV show on Netflix, do I play with the Wii, do I play a game on my computer, do I listen to music, do I listen to a podcast, do I read blogs, do I read The New Yorker, do I read a book that’s not related to school, do I partake in some arts ‘n crafts, do I explore my new town more, do I go out to dinner with my boyfriend or friends, do I go to a bar, do I go to a cafe, do I repeatedly cycle through Twitter Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn Gmail WiscMail Yahoo!Mail … Boredom is not an option. Distraction is the way of life.

Is there even a point to a vacation from it? I went to the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, where we barely had cell phone reception and no Internet. But then we went to bed, got up, and drove back into town. Our brains didn’t feel magically refreshed. They wouldn’t have after a week either — I am almost always more tired after a week of “vacation,” mostly because 1) I know I have to face a lot of work and 2) I usually feel like I should use the vacation time wisely by either cleaning up after a mess or preparing the deluge to come.

I don’t think I can sustain this lifestyle without going crazy and I don’t think a vacation would work. So a lifestyle change, then?

Here’s the crux for me: if you remove yourself from having an online presence, it is suspect these days. I used to work at the Career Counseling Library and we gave workshops to staff members of UC Berkeley about job searching. Social networking was, of course, hounded into them. If you don’t create a presence for yourself, perhaps you’re not fit for the organization. And they notice if you created a LinkedIn profile on the fly that took 5 minutes and then never checked it again. Everyone wants you to be engaged and dynamic. Presence “proves” this.

In library school, there’s constant suggestions for an active professional Twitter account, a blog (hi there!), or other social media networks (a new one devoted to LIS students just opened or perhaps Mendeley is right for you). Librarians and archivists have to embrace social networking just as much as other businesses to advocate for their services — they have to do so to be heard above the others. And we as students are expected to juggle the classes with hundreds of pages of reading per week plus papers/projects to boot, at the very least one internship (but most likely two or more jobs and some other volunteering), student groups for organizations like ALA or SAA, and be on the look out for interesting articles/tweets/status updates related to our field. Even better if you can talk about it eloquently.

It’s a bit of a catch 22. Activity is good because supposedly, it shows you are engaged with the profession. But is that true? If you’re always posting, when are you doing? “Don’t confuse passion with competence.”

Maybe I can’t do an abrupt lifestyle change — as much as I say just living in a small farmhouse in rural Maine with a raspberry patch sounds nice, I would probably go crazy after a week — but I can do other things to combat it. I’ve been slowly downsizing the amount of people I connect with on Facebook, moving acquaintances into that category, unsubscribing from acquaintances’ statuses, asking for just “important life updates.” Some of the people or organizations I felt obligated to follow on Twitter? I realized that’s frankly whack — I am not obligated. I am not obligated to follow all of the library/archive bloggers; everything is a suggestion. I’ve been slowly unsubscribing from more. The articles that are truly interesting, I want to give my full attention to. If I share an article on any platform, it has to be one that isn’t a passing interest — a headline that looks good and relevant to my field — but one that resonates with me on a deeper level, that is written well, and so on. I read recently that most websites are only visited for 10 seconds. I’m in that statistic; with how much I felt like I needed to read or look at or watch out for, I would try to zoom through websites. It’s a bit like skimming an article too quickly though just in case the professor asks a question: after class, I will never remember that article, and what’s the use in that?

I can’t see myself anytime soon breaking off to go live in rural Japan without any cell phone reception, Internet, or other means of communication. But I can see myself focusing in on what really interests me. If all goes as planned, the extra noise I contribute to the Internet will be more like a well written melody.

add another social network to your radar

I know, more social networks: ugh. This means another workshop to attend about the art of _____ing. Much like Twitter catered to our desires for information but in small-bits-won’t-you,-i-have-a-lot-of-other-things-to-read, Pinterest is a site that fully upholds the wish of the human eye for pretty things. In a nutshell, it’s a virtual bulletin board for you, but people have taken to browsing it like they might browse their Facebook friends pages when they’re bored or distracted. It also already has the giants — the folks with huge amounts of followers, waiting anxiously for the next pretty picture they will pin up.

When I first started using Pinterest, I wanted to suggest to my SAA Student Chapter that we try to incorporate the site somehow. At all of our archival jobs, we find the neatest things — couldn’t we share that? Couldn’t we find a way to share a quick image and get people to see the wonderful things involved in these papers? But there’s copyright, working with institutions most of us are only working for less than 10 hours a week, digitization & scanning, the metadata, so much involved. I let the idea drop — it wouldn’t work for us, not now.

But I’ve been very happy to see in just the last few days that Pinterest is really picking up with museums and other repositories! I really think there is a wealth of possibility here. There is the problem that if you put the identifying information relating to your institution underneath the image, someone else can easily change it. However, when you “repin” a picture, the link to the picture is automatically still traced. Ideally, you can pin a fantastically surreal image of some little girl of the 1840s that everyone will be taken with, and will repin over 400 times — but the link will always go back to your website.

I leave you with four posts I recently read about this new tool:

• ArchivesInfo: Pinterest for Cultural Heritage
• burnsscotland: Pinterest
• Museum Diary: Museums and Pinterest, an Introduction
• Best of 3: Pinterest and Museums

There’s the word balance again

An excerpt I appreciated from 116-117 of Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (David M. Levy):

“… to voice any concerns about the direction in which technology is taking us is taken to mean that you are necessarily an extremist; it suggests you are a Luddite, wanting to pull the plug on the whole enterprise. But this needn’t be the case, and it certainly isn’t the case for me. By pointing to other forms of reading and other bookish practices, my aim is to contribute to a healthier mix and a healthier balance.

… Certainly the book functions as an important symbol in our culture, and it can symbolize many things, among them the weight of history, cultural authority, and modes of knowing. Unless we are clear about what we are after, and which values we wish to preserve, we risk losing by winning. It is possible, for example, that the codex will survive the onslaught of digital technologies having been stripped of  the bookish practices that, to my mind at least, make up its heart and soul. It is also possible that the codex will disappear but we will find other vehicles around which more-contemplative forms of reading can arise … And it is even possible, although I doubt it, that reading itself in all its various forms will disappear, but our culture will find other arenas in which to exercise its need for reflection. (Reading is hardly the only guise in which reflection and contemplation appear today.) What is it we want to hold on to, and what is it we want to move toward?”

The Age of Miscellany

This is a reading response I wrote on the book Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger for my class on Information Agencies.

 

I live in a world of multiple planes of order. I do not see librarians, archivists, professors, professionals, experts as essentialist 19th century British gentlemen of the Queen’s land who need unchangeable structure and order (with them on top). Weinberger has many intelligent, extremely fascinating things to say about the third order unbound by the material world, but his biggest drawback is his snarky comments referring to what he perceives to be self-titled “experts.”

Weinberger sees the coming world as a social one, constructed out of personal meaning, which I argue can actually isolate us. If we create a world according to us based on our own meaning, we work within the parameters of our personal vocabulary. We can perhaps take a class with an interesting professor on a new subject – a categorized direction of study with a self-titled expert – to get links to the new language, suggested articles to read, arguments to ponder over. But you can’t learn about “string theory” by searching tags if you do not know of the existence of such a theory, because you do not have the vocabulary for it.

Furthermore, Weinberger assumes much like Microsoft Bing or Facebook that everyone wants to do what their friends do. I traveled in Croatia on my own without any advice from my personal circle of friends; I found all other information in a … book, written by “experts.” I did not feel crushed by their oppressive way of ordering the world. I would not have done nearly as much if I had relied only on my circle of relations. This new social world is somehow supposed to enlighten us without ever letting us out of our bubbles to discover. It does not celebrate the obscure.

Weinberger recognizes and embraces how much more the third order gives us. We are not bound by the colonizers or the state. But are we not still bound? The platforms of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook shape our way of thinking just the same way the Soviet Union can put out posters of harvested wheat to make us forget about the famine. And are we not bound by the fact that not only is there more, but he also expects us to do more? Technology has already sped up our lives, forcing us to feel like the day got shorter, the boundaries between work and play blurred, the expectations for success that much higher. On top of that, he expects us focus on one website – or all websites? – to make it our own, to spend time tagging, to find the explicit in the implicit, to read all discussions “behind” a Wikipedia page so we can truly understand how the neutrality of the article came to be.

No, Mr. Weinberger. We still want websites to aggregate fun stuff for us to look at, we still want career counselors to help us write a resume tailored to us, we still want a librarian to point us to the professor who happens to have the same obscure interest in Latvian folklore that you do, we still want accountants to understand our taxes better than we can, we still want astronomers to discover that black hole that will eat us up, and Wikipedia was still mostly written by a few hundred people.

Information that is not top down does not mean that we can’t still trust someone’s thoughts on a particular subject because that person has accumulated and read enough to “swim in the complex.” By pronouncing information set free of all former constraint, Weinberger has limited us.

Steve Jobs, 2011

The only Apple product I own is a refurbished old iPod, but it and the store made for it opened an entirely new wonderful world to me: podcasts. And for that, I suppose, I have Steve Jobs to thank. My “suppose” in that sentence is this part of all the things I disagreed with, primarily how wasteful and harmful Apple products are for the environment. That still matters and I won’t let that criticism go, but I also won’t let it cloud any of this truth: he changed the world, he changed the world I live in way beyond my listening to podcasts on his product. That can be said definitively, and not supposedly.

après moi le déluge

Well, if my year “goal” was to get to bed by 11pm, I already failed. :) But it’s not! So I’m in the clear. I am, however, drinking some sort of calming/sleepy loose leaf tea from Berkeley (no, not marijuana) to help me get to sleep. I don’t really know how I can feel so wired right now when I only last had a chai latte at 7pm, but thus is life.

I am actually feeling much more in balance than I was. I went into my calendar and scheduled days to go over my next semester plans, possibly getting another archiving gig (about 5 hours a week), and planning for papers and projects coming up. I also set up a date to study with my classmates next Tuesday … I do hope it becomes a regular thing! Because I really like being around them. The other day I actually had an almost uncontrollable urge to hug everyone around me; obviously, I controlled it.

Tonight I spent a couple of hours with the Madison student chapter of ALA, brainstorming for the homecoming parade that we will be in. We’re going to do a book cart drill team! The theme for the parade is music across the century, so each of us future-librarians will be dressing up for each decade. We didn’t want to go deeply into the land of librarian stereotypes, and just dress up as “bun-y shushers” (direct quote from one of my professors) to make people on the sidelines laugh. We really wanted to showcase our spunk, creativity, and the ability to have fun. It helps to not perpetuate the idea that we aren’t approachable, mean, or uncaring. We want to help people! Isn’t that why most of us are here?

I chose the 40s to highlight. I get to pick some iconic book covers/titles from the 40s and we’ll be putting them on our carts. In a week we’re meeting for a fun crafting session. Right when I got home, I started spending way too much time looking at vintage clothing sites. It was a lot more expensive than I imagined, and costumes were usually quite provocative extremes of our conceptions of even pin-up girls, so I went with a dress I already own. Now I just want to get  a few finishing touches and perhaps get a wig, because I can’t get my hair to do this anymore:

The day after my super-short hair cut, my hair curled quite nicely.

It is exciting to be a part of something — and not just eating out for brunch (don’t get me wrong, I still love it) — but something that helps to advocate for libraries. We are literally parading the wealth of knowledge we have to give to the public.

Downside of this 40s outfit search? I started to look too much at clothes I want to buy in general, for me, for winter. I do need a winter coat and winter boots because my California gear won’t cut it, but probably not 3 or 4. I think I can convince myself that I need more cardigans though. For layering, you know.

–

I wanted to show you all a recent blogpost by Stephen’s Lighthouse I found very interesting: Is Google Memory? I have thought of this so much. One time, when I worked at the Bancroft Library, I came across the word “holograph” and since the document was so old, I was pretty sure it couldn’t be from the technique “holography” (or, a hologram). I decided to go to every one of my coworkers to ask what it was before using Wikipedia or Google. It took a long time (and a lot of “Why don’t you just Google it?”) before I finally found someone who knew that it’s something handwritten by the same person who wrote the signature, so not something like a secretary writing something dictated to her. It was my boss who knew the answer, which made me feel even better about working there. :)

I know I wrote a fairly anti-technology post a little while ago, so you’d assume I’d absolutely agree with the horrible state of our minds, but I have to admit my mind is changing the more I’m in school. One way my professor pounded into our heads about how much easier it is to use the databases with advanced searches now is we had to find abstracts in a large book of abstracts from 1973, and then find similar titles with the same subject. It sounds so easy to us now, but all of us got very frustrated working on the assignment with the big book. We also all came up with very different new titles.

I am still not, however, a “cyberprophet” or a “technophiliac.” I do not find it worth my time or money to buy and try the next latest computer, laptop, tablet, phone, whatever. I didn’t grow up with constantly getting new technology in our house (except when we bought new computers because they didn’t last very long between the three of us). Derek and his family were probably appalled to see my tiny, tiny TV that I used (Derek diplomatically suggested that, when we moved, we sell my TV and just use his). I don’t think I will ever find it not-rude for people to bring out their phones and start browsing the Internet. I don’t think my eyes will ever get used to screens.

Mostly, I don’t think I will ever attain that balance I so desperately want if I keep focusing so much effort and time into something like browsing the web. Constantly having something to look at and never truly being bored makes me feel so busy, so full, and so lacking in a space where I can just breathe and ponder. Technology erases silence.

That said — I don’t find it too fair of this graphic to have such a tone about something like writing things down in the Google calendar to remember an appointment. We’ve been writing appointments down for  … how long now? And how is it that much different from something like Outlook’s calendar, besides being much more convenient because you can access it from anywhere?

Google Reader also just makes sense for most people. There are two sides to this that I’m personally conflicted with: one being maybe those sites I follow on Google Reader, that I think are important for me to keep up on and read, maybe I should just … breathe and let go. For example, Pinterest seems like a great way to collect all sorts of inspiring images we see from across the Internet, but maybe we should just let go. However, I think for many people, myself included, that feeling of knowing all of the things you’re missing and knowing all of the pretty pictures of decor or fashion you saw that you can’t have around anymore for inspiration can simply cause a sort of silent anxiety. In some ways I think that when I see a simplistic kitchen that I just love, and know I can’t have, I will forget about the image eventually but that feeling of WANT! stays. Which fuels our consumerist nature more: an extended, vague feeling of WANT! or direct images up on a bulletin board that we will probably get bored of?

Google Reader is a way to keep up on things without that vague, silent anxiety coming up. I feel like I have to follow 50 library blogs to be In the Know, but as I read them, I realize I can easily unsubscribe from a lot of them because actually, they’re boring or not applicable to me. Also, Google Reader helps me with what I spoke about in the last entry, about feeling overwhelmed and unbalanced. I am a deeply curious person who has always gobbled up new learning experiences like they were candy and who never felt satisfied. The Internet became so big that I could no longer be that 12-year-old using small specific parts of AOL chat boards that easily related to me.

I do lament the use of Google Maps or other map apps. I think it’s sad that almost none of my peers understand the geography around them anymore, and laugh as if they are uniquely bad with directions. No, it’s a generational thing; we know we can just be led with GPS. I still always resist Derek’s insistence to use his GPS if I feel like I can do it with my mind. I feel much more accomplished that way. And if I get lost, then we can use the GPS. :)

The graphic’s point about our memories pre-Google and post-Google are way too simplistic. It is as if pre-Google we lived in a completely unbiased, objective world in which people clearly remembered detailed facts. No one spun things to go their way or held up what they remembered to be as facts. Information has never been something that we merely read or experienced and then saved, to be plucked later as if from an untouched archive. And our minds aren’t empty now — I think if anything, they are more filled, because we have more stimuli to interact with. And a harsher thing to contemplate is the very fact that it’s difficult now for people to sit in a space that isn’t demanding every ounce of their attention as they just, well, contemplate. The graphic artist makes this point, and rightly so. The new world I’ve inhabited in the last decade is one that has sped up, and one that is more concerned with breadth than depth.

The graphic artist also points out that we are very much evolving with the technologies around us — however, is that not the story of humanity? Our culture changed with every new tool that came to us. I think the bigger question now is how we deal with the avalanche of information.

Smile and breathe

I come to this blank white text box tonight feeling so out of balance. I’d like to chalk it up to an off day, but I think it’s more than that; and if it’s not more than that now, it will be soon.

I want to do well in Madison’s SLIS program. I respect it and the people in it. I want to fully engage with it and give it as much as I can of myself, to make me and hopefully the profession itself better. But it’s really hard to do that when this night seems like just an extension of other nights: a little bit of heartburn, a big headache, strained eyes, a tight jaw, tired but it takes forever to go to sleep. I don’t feel at the end of my rope in any way, so I don’t want you to get that impression. This was pretty normal for me in my undergraduate years, too. (The heartburn? I’m pretty sure it’s from this one paper that caused me to drink more iced coffees in one semester than I ever would have in my life.)

Every day I am completely swamped with information I want to sort thoughtfully through to theorize about and remember in a helpful way. I am behind with my New Yorkers and even behind with my Vegetarian Times, which is unusual since by now I’ve usually at least tried one recipe even if I never made it again. Maybe stupidly, I just added Vogue Magazine to the mix of subscriptions. I use Google Reader to take in all of the blogs and websites I want to follow that might be funny webcomics, random cool things, BBC news headlines, NYT news headlines, library blogs, friends’ blogs, and more. RSS feeds are extremely helpful, but I’m way too often for my liking simply marking “All” as read to clear the list. Then, every night before bed, I love to listen to podcasts … Stuff You Missed in History Class, This American Life, Radiolab, Planet Money, and others. Those are the hardest to keep up on because I can’t skim, flip pages, or mark “All” as read. And then there’s keeping up with friends and family through email, LiveJournal, coffee dates, phone calls, and, of course, Facebook (I don’t think I need to link to that one). Oh, but wait: my guilty pleasure that I didn’t want to mention but should. When I’m doing tasks that don’t need a fully engaged mind, I love to watch Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model; I also have a very full instant Netflix queue. Now am I missing something?

Oh, grad school.

When I was an undergrad, I did … a majority of the readings, turned in A-B papers, and liked my professors. I loved to study history and historiography. I loved to learn about Slavic or most other cultures. I wanted to write damn good papers on the Dada movement. And I am stepping lightly here, because I do not want to imply that all of these studies were useless — no, they are not, because they completely shaped my adult life, they helped me see the world in a completely new light, and they were topics that could get 15 people in a room talking to each other with their hearts pounding about something other than who won what Emmy. And on top of all of my studies, I did a lot of activities directly related to my future career as a librarian or archivist.

Never, however, did I directly study librarianship, which is obviously why I’m here. In my past jobs, I was one of those bright young things who Would Go Places, and I flowed along happily with the work given to me. In my past studies, I thought about what a statue says about a society’s collective memory or dialectical materialism, but never did I say, “And that’s what I will become a professional expert in!” I wanted to be caught up and do well, but I didn’t have the pressure on me that everything here will count. I had no personal expectations of writing a paper to be published at a conference to go on my resume. I didn’t worry that much about taking or refusing leadership roles. I never read a 40+ page study on how people look for information.

It’s not just that all of it counts for a career, which sounds so far away and sterile to me. The work I do cannot be separated from the life I live. I know that if I don’t finish this article or that paper that my entire career won’t disappear before my eyes, but I still have very high expectations. I deeply admire projects like TLAM and want to emulate the work done. As I said, I want to do well, I want to achieve, I want to make this profession (and myself) better. I want to take a course that creates something like the TLAM project and be able to give it a majority of my attention because I really do believe in the good it provides.

If the above was tl;dr for you:

To achieve this, I really need to find balance. Whatever I’m doing isn’t working. This is where I ask for some of your input!

I thought about giving myself a “one year” project — perhaps like the woman in Julie & Julia or even the goal of taking one photograph a day. I want the essence of the project to be one of balance: working hard and well but stopping to smell the roses. I want to balance things that make me not go crazy because I am so insanely curious, like the New Yorkers and podcasts, with social life and grad school. I want to sleep more. I want to exercise and get out of this weight plateau. I want to organize my recipes and have a better idea of the good things to cook for the coming week so I know what damn vegetable to buy. I want to keep learning; I don’t want to stagnate. I want to take a walk and think of a really fricking good idea.

If you have ever felt this way, and I’m sure you have, what sort of project would you give yourself? What tools do you use? What project do you think I should give myself, or should I be letting go?

For example, perhaps a project-goal would be to go to sleep by 11pm every weeknight. This seems absolutely impossible to me, but isn’t that why goals are set?

 

edit: I realized that what it sounded like was I was constantly working without a break so I wanted ideas on how to take a breather. What I’m really looking for is useful tips on how to just get to work, in a routine sort of way. For instance, do you go to sleep at 10pm, get up at 8am, have a cup of tea and some yogurt, then sit down on an armchair for a while reading in the morning? Do you come home from work and classes to have dinner with loved ones (including kitty cats), then just simply go right back to reading/studying?

I think what I tend to do is because I have so much I want to do/look through, I extend my “studying” time way too far out. I’ll check things out or take breaks before, during, and after reading, instead of setting myself far away from the podcasts, magazines, TV shows, and web. So I sit down with the goal to finish reading after dinner (which is usually 10pm by that time), and don’t get back up until like, 3am. Then I speed-read, go to sleep for a few hours, get up early to speed-read some more. It becomes a cycle that I don’t want to live anymore.

species as metadata

I’d like to attempt to write more about my classes, because for the most part, I walk out of class tired and hungry, but also with my mind a bit abuzz. Today it was abuzz until I started to get impatient about the bus coming to pick me, and of course only me, up. It feels good to be home next to my boyfriend, both of us fed and warm. He finally gets a day off tomorrow! To celebrate, I am going to sleep soon.

For a generalized introductory course, this week we read an article about the New York Public Library’s usage of crowdsourcing and apps to make the library modern and very much relevant to most of the population. It had a lot of things to point out that made me enthusiastic about the combined future of libraries and the web, but we also got to discuss for a little about how all the cool, neato, whizbang stuff like an interactive app of the World’s Fair was only made possible by the librarians behind the scenes delicately and carefully curating and processing the collection. Thank you! Exactly the sort of thoughtful discourse I love to hear — not the extreme librarian grump and not the hyped up “cyberprophet.”

What about a collection made now, though? What if a few friends and I went into a festival determined to make a collection of our time there .. in real-time? Is that just a Facebook newsfeed, or is there much more that goes into it? What do you think, readers?

–

My biggest problem lately is possibly related to studying history at Berkeley, or, my mind’s tendency to go … wide.  I don’t know about other schools because I didn’t go there, but Berkeley’s history department faculty usually tended towards big ideas that disrupted status quo thinking. Making that jump from ignorance, to details, to the sometimes mind-blowing (to this nerd) thematic observations was always something that gave me a high. Thoughts went faster, sometimes too fast to catch up with, and sometimes my papers were too stuffed.

I’ve read some version of this article 568 times in the past two weeks: the abstract explains very concretely that this article will explore the history of x, y, z and the developments of this or that field, with some of the challenges of the future thrown in, why we’re prepared, why we’re not prepared, etc.

Easy. Simple to understand, except for some of the bad writing that makes the reading a very slow going.

But I STILL am so desperately looking for that thematic jump that I’m reading so far beyond it that I’m not seeing the simplicity in front of me. I’m not taking it slow.

For example, I confused everyone today, including myself, when I brought up species when we were talking about relevance. Species are a pretty obvious example of human classification to better explain the world around them. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Radiolab‘s discussion of the purpose of species when it came to mating. We’re attracted to our own species because our DNA works together; we aren’t attracted to bears because it wouldn’t work without gross mutations — or at least, that’s the gist of the podcast I remember. I tied it into relevancy in that a species was like a set of metadata, with subject headings and the format you needed … your relevant search is, well, searching for a mate among a sea of the human species. I could try to get more technical about then finding the perfect source of information just like the idea of the “one true love.”

It was one of those times that the idea could not get out of my head, even as others were bringing up their ideas, yet when I opened my mouth to try to connect the dots, I couldn’t do it. It was funny, but frustrating too! Because my classmates’ ideas seemed so unworkable for relevancy — things like “you know it’s relevant once they’ve found the answer” or “you know it’s relevant once they don’t have any more questions” — but I also knew my concept wasn’t exactly workable.

Sometimes, I need to just completely realize that we’re talking about a search engine, and not trying to get into the realm of the mind-blown.

A(n Unhappy) Flitterer

While having this blog’s dashboard up to reply to comments and begin writing this, I have gotten up to finally open an iron Derek got for Christmas two years ago, ordered sushi and Chinese (I wanted the former, Derek the latter), fiddled with my new netbook, watched Derek put up new curtains, laid out my allergy medication (apparently, I am extremely allergic to ragweed now too) and lots of other various things. Oh, and now the iron is ready!

No, no it’s not. Or, I am doing it wrong. Now we are going to give up and eat dinner.

I am back, and my point is this: I am, or have become, a flitterer.

When we unpacked after moving, the way I liked to do it was unpack similar boxes, lay all of the things out, and then see where they go. This can take me longer because I get pulled into many different project directions at the same time. The biggest reason I like it though is you can get a very good scope of what you have and where it should go. You don’t have to put everything on the shelf, see that you have more, and then re-do it over and over again. A little bit like shelving books !

The place I do not like my flittering is online. We touched upon this my first day of class in Foundations of Reference. Of course we immediately began discussing one of the biggest things to talk about (how could you not?) — technology. One student critiqued what Thomas Mann, who wrote The Oxford Guide to Library Research, had to say about the understanding one forms from reading something on a screen or with a physical book. The student thought it very unfair for Mann to say that folks do not grasp a deeper understanding of something because they read it on a screen. Most people in the class agreed — for example, one student said she reads articles online differently depending on what it is. She’d read something from JSTOR in a highly different manner than Cracked.com. The professor laughed that, yes, Mann tends to be curmudgeon-librarian, something that a lot of older librarians tend to be.

She asked though if anyone disagreed with the student. I don’t know if she was expecting no disagreements, but she did want to give the classroom some space for discussing this. I, and a few others out of probably 50 people, did. I mostly had my own anecdotal experience and not much research in the larger scheme of things to back it up. Technology, screens, the Internet — they’ve exacerbated my flitteriness. I don’t like it. I don’t like it about myself at all. I don’t like that I’ll be reading an article from the BBC and for no reason whatsoever, usually about the third paragraph in, I just open a new tab. Sometimes — most of the time! — it wasn’t anything that the article made me think about. It was like this knee-jerk brain reaction. Do, do, do, OPEN TAB. My brain seems to have rewired itself to take that idea of “study for a while, then take a 10 minute break” to the extreme.

I also know, anecdotally, that many of my friends feel the same problem with their own studying. They always feel like they have something to check. One of the other students who spoke up also mentioned this, that she’ll be reading an article for class and then have all of these outside thoughts drift in like “I need to write an email!” Technology came to us saying it’d make our lives easier, more manageable. Sending an email is so much faster than walking up a memo that we will all get more vacation time. Of course, that’s absolutely wrong. Since you can always be connected, you can always do work. People have to work hard to separate work-life and home-life. Even if you are giving yourself time to read the news, other parts of life always creep in. How can people live now without a planner, and not go insane?

So many friends always have their smart phones out during conversation. Some check Twitter right there in front of them — social multitasking. I don’t think most of my peers remember articles as much anymore when trying to talk about them at some cocktail party; they prefer to send me the link so I can read it on my own.

In another class, one about electronic resources, we began watching a movie called Rip! that was about another subject (copyright) but underneath the subject, was another one: a full embrace of expression besides what we’ve known, like reading long articles on a subject. A generation of flashes that can still maintain deep thought. It just does it differently.

Both classes spoke about this fear of loss for humankind, a fear of losing our memories that has been around as long as the invention of writing. Does this mean I am one of the fearful ones? Or a fearmonger, because I do not fully embrace all aspects of technology? Because I don’t like the way it can feel like a screen burns my face and eyes if I’m at the computer too long?

I don’t think I’m to any one extreme.  I don’t absolutely reject it. I use technology! I like the ease of online catalogs, but, I have found things in a physical card catalog before that just hadn’t made it to the online one. I like the social aspects of Facebook or WordPress or Gmail, but I do not need it in my life 24/7 or think that any one thing needs to be expanded (I don’t trust Google’s expansionist ways, for example).

I am hoping that my time as a grad student and librarian are not going to be unthoughtful views on the use or disuse of technology. Not to toot my own horn, but we need people like me who take time to critique something. Libraries do not need to be as slow to adapt as they have, but I also don’t think they should go out and buy every new iPad. (A big critique and reason I don’t buy every new thing? It’s expensive, and I can’t afford it anyway, and then it goes out of date lickity split, and puts more e-waste into our landfills)

One student in the Reference class laughed and marked down Mann’s comment as just absolutely silly. He was also speaking, though, to the few students who agreed with Mann. Who mentioned the studies showing, through science, that people do not retain information online as well. Who feel like they have become a flitterer, always needing to open a new tab to nothing. Laughing in the faces of these legitimate worries is not the way to thoughtfully consider this debate. It’s not the way I want my expensive experience in grad school to be (which, I hope, does not become out of date).