Riot Librarian

Category: personal

  • My long and winding road to the library

    I’m guest blogging over at The Desk Set this month, and I’m pretty excited to have the chance to write about my work. My first post is up this morning, in which I recount the long and winding professional path that brought me eventually to the library. Throughout the rest of September, I’ll be talking…

  • Phew, August.

    So, about two weeks ago I broke my finger. You don’t realize how important a little tiny pinky finger is until the breaking of it necessitates the immobilizing of your whole hand in fiberglass. I have the use of my first two fingers and the thumb on my left hand, and thank god for that.…

  • Library Day in the Life, Wednesday

    Today is going to be a busy one, largely because yesterday I was a little bit of a slacker. Procrastination, thy name is Laura. I have a weekly project phone call with the WEST folks this morning, where hopefully we’ll be able to finalize our final project requirements (for this phase of the project, at…

  • Library Day in the Life, Tuesday

    Today? Well, today was kind of slow. I’m waiting for our programmer to make some changes to a MARC record converter so I can get a new set for QA, and I guess it’s more troublesome than he first assumed. I spent most of my work time today with another programmer, talking about workflow issues…

  • Library Day in the Life, Monday

    Another year, another round of the Library Day in the Life Project. The last time I participated, I was a shiny new librarian in a new job as Systems and Metadata Librarian at Whitman College. Now I’m a slightly less shiny new librarian in another new job, so I thought it would be fun to…

  • The Phantom Tollbooth, revisited

    A few years ago, I discovered that the classic children’s movie The Phantom Tollbooth wasn’t available on DVD. I considered this a terrible, terrible tragedy, and I signed some weird petition online and then kind of forgot about it. It appears that signing that petition was effective (clearly, it was all about the petition!): The…

  • Moving In

    As I mentioned in my last post, I just picked up and moved from Walla Walla to sunny California, where I started a new job at the California Digital Library. I’ve been at the CDL now for a week and a half, and although there were some big work culture differences I had to adjust…

  • Moving On

    I’m both excited and sad to announce that after almost two years as Systems/Metadata Librarian at Whitman College, I’m moving on. I’ve accepted a new position as Metadata Analyst at the California Digital Library, in Oakland. I’ll be working on a variety of projects with the CDL, including work with the HathiTrust and the WEST…

  • Another year of readin’ books

    Two years ago I decided to keep track of what I read over the course of a year, because I never seemed to be able to remember back more than a month or two on my own. With the aid of a simple Google document, I can look back over 2010 and remember every book…

  • Big projects beginning

    Yes, I have been missing in action here since I started my new job. The last six months gave me a great opportunity to settle in slowly and take things on bit by bit. I spent a lot of time getting to know our system, and starting to clean up some of what I’ve begun…