Interior Decorating Librarian

Today at my internship, I was asked to help the one librarian move to her new office. Mind you, as asinine as this might seem, it really did not bother me much because I would rather do something useless like that than sit at the reference desk shadowing a reference librarian who gets no questions. I spent a good hour or more helping Rebecca decide where she wanted to put her desk and helping her move everything into her new office. I also had to fill out my learning agreement, which is due after 30 hours of work. I feel like I should be way past the 30-hour mark there but I guess that makes sense. I want to start adding extra hours sometime soon so I can be at like the 70-hour mark by the end of December.

The funniest thing about the move, though, is that the Head Librarian made it sound like it was all Rebecca's choice to move and that it was such a better office. Rebecca, on the other hand, whined to me about having to move and told me how much she really liked her old office and didn't want to move to the new one at all, where she felt the view was crappier (she had a point). So hmm, whose idea was it for the move?

Back to the grind

Well, "grind" is probably not accurate to describe a 20-hour workweek and 2 courses but I did have to get up somewhat early after four days of sleeping in.

I'm down to only 18 hours left at my engineering library internship and I'm psyched!! Today I spent most of the day cataloging. The list of journals actually held by the library is significantly greater than the list of journals the library catalog says are there so I had to add and correct entries of missing journals. While having a catalog that actually matches your holdings might not be that important for a small library like this one, I can't for the life of me understand why this hasn't been done. I'm still really trying to figure out what the heck Fred does all day.

Thanksgiving weekend

After Thursday, I had a really nice, tame weekend where I pretty much did nothing. I refrained from doing any Black Friday shopping, despite tempting sales offered by many stores. I have no money to spare and cannot go crazy buying stuff I can't afford. See how good and responsible I am? On Saturday, my friend Brian came over for a few hours so it was nice to catch up with him. He keeps himself way too busy!! Sunday I dedicated to job searching and found a few jobs to apply for. Did I actually apply for any? No, but they are all ready to go! Overall, I really kind of forgot it was a holiday weekend, let alone my first Thanksgiving away from family.

Tofurky Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving with my friends in Syracuse was a good time. We had a LOT of food - way more than three girls need - plus wine and a Johnny Depp movie so really, we had quite a bit to be thankful for!! Here are a couple pictures of the food, one of the entire spread, plus one of the tofurky. I have had more requests for information about tofurky than I ever thought possible. "Tell me how that tofurky is" was the statement of the week! Honestly, it didn't taste too bad, although I would probably prefer turkey in the future.

The way of the pilgrims

Well, it's a holiday and I'm staying in Syracuse and celebrating with a couple friends. It should be a good time and we plan on having quite a bit of food, regardless of whether we are with family or not! The only thing missing will be turkey. Instead we are having tofurky.

Anyway, as a holiday greeting, here's a link to a e-card that my friend Nancy sent me. It's cute and made me laugh. Happy Thanksgiving!

Halfway done

I thought I'd already reached the halfway point of my loathed internship at the engineering firm but I was wrong. After today's time there, I have now logged 27 hours, so I have only 23 more to go. Therefore, only after today did I reach the halfway point. Phew. Today was particularly unbearable, for some reason, although Fred did share a bit of information about how things are done at Liverpool Public Library, where he is a substitute. It's interesting that he seems to be more forthcoming about his work at the public library than he is about his day-to-day work at BBL. Not sure if that is because there is more to say or due to some sort of confidentiality he feels for BBL or what. Regardless, it was a little interesting.

No matter what, though, my skin crawls when he tells me to "dilete" something. I thought the word was "delete?"

Where have I been?

So, I had this big 10ish-page paper due Saturday morning so I spent quite some time working on it Thursday and then literally ALL day Friday, too. It was not a fun way to spend a couple of days, but I do actually think it was a pretty good paper. We'll see when the grades come in...

Then, yesterday and today was class from 9-5. Well, more like 9-4:30 but still, it's a long day sitting in class covering topics that we've discussed in detail in other classes. Everyone in my class has whined and complained about the waste of time that is this class and while I agree to some extent, it's hardly the first class I've taken here that has repeated content from another class. In fact, most of the issues overlap in every class.

After class, I spent some time applying at Borders, where I was given over 100 psychological test questions. It was such a pain in the ass. I just want a mall job for the holidays! Who knew it would be so difficult to do that? Ugh. But, I also updated my resume so I can apply for some "real" jobs.

So, yeah, that was my life for the last few days.

Madonna CD

Relying on AOL for free Internet is good in some ways. For instance, I'm currently listening free to the latest Madonna CD, "Confessions on a Dance Floor." Umm, the title is pretty appropriate so far. It's like the music you would hear at a dance club, where they play the extended supercool remix versions of songs and therefore, repeat the same lyrics over and over. I would bet none of these songs have more than 20 total different words in the lyrics. The song I'm currently listening to (which I think is 'Forbidden Love') says something like this over and over "Just one kiss. Just one love." It's got an okay beat to it, although I haven't been moved to get up off my ass to dance. Next is "Jump," which is so far the best of the bunch.

I am so out of the loop that I have no idea which song(s) has been released as a single. Anyway, I'll let you know if anything fantastic comes up on the remaining four songs.

Webcast

I attended my first Webcast today as part of my medical library internship. It was on patient safety. Basically, it started off reminding us how many deaths occur due to errors, either in misinformation or misdiagnosis or incorrect drugs or whatever... So, we are supposed to, as medical librarians, try to improve this situation by making sure there are good information flows. Well, that's the gist of it anyway.

Other than that, I had an okay day at the reference desk. Again, no reference questions. I shadowed and then talked to the consumer health librarian in depth today and that was pretty fascinating. They have some amazing content on their site. Seriously, I'm impressed and think I will be referring people to it for some time to come. Jim (the librarian) even might have a project for me that involves editing some of their Web sites, which would be sweet!

Gastric Emptying

So I was at my internship (the one I loathe) and inputting all these articles into their catalog and the majority of them are about 'gastric emptying.' Uh, yeah, that's pretty much what you would think it would be. A lot of the articles involved timing the gastric emptying (i.e. how long does gastric emptying take?) and featured titles along the lines of "What are the differences in gastric emptying between men and women" and "How different meal choices affect Gastric Emptying." Lovely, it was.

Kathy Griffin

Last night, comedienne Kathy Griffin came to campus and performed. For students, it was a mere $4 to see her and, despite some effort in getting people to actually go with me, it was a good time and those of us who went were happy with the price-to-entertainment value ratio. Two things I liked about Kathy's act:

1.) She is queen of the tangent. She'll go off on this tangent in the middle of a story and then off on another tangent and so on and so on... yet she ALWAYS gets back to the previous story and finishes it off. It's quite amazing actually.

2.) Rather than telling jokes, Kathy is more of an observer of the oddities of people... celebrities in particular. That's what I enjoy, though. It's like hanging at the bar with one of your friends listening to her stories about hanging out with ass hole celebrities.

Anyway, I definitely enjoyed it!

Library of Congress internship...

Before the engineering firm and the medical school internships, there was the Library of Congress, remember? Well, when my roommate got the latest issue of American Libraries in the mail today, there was an article about our treasure-hunting activities over the summer! Yay! No pictures of me, though.

And the second internship is under way as well...

My second internship - at SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library - began today and it went so much better than the first one. There was official training put in place, where the head of reference showed me how to search for E-Journals and use the primary medical database, Medline. Apparently the most popular questions are along these lines. I did a tutorial on how to use Medline as well and pretty much read everything there is to read on the library's Web page. We set my schedule at 12-5 on Wednesdays and Saturdays so that's not bad. Because they are understaffed currently, she wants me to do Saturdays by myself soon. Scary!

One internship started...

So I finally started one of my internships. After MUCH frustration and a LOT of red tape, I started at the environmental engineering firm this morning. It was awkward and unpleasant and I thank God that I did not sign up for 150 hours there like I would have done had there not been 6 weeks of paperwork hassle.

The librarian is not so much a librarian as he is a 'resource-getter.' Requests for articles or books come to him and he simply has to find the best way to obtain these articles. He might trek to one of the local university libraries and photocopy the article or retrieve it from one of the databases they have access to... He might interlibrary loan it... He might buy an article on a per-article basis... I'm sure there are other options.

I did expect the library to be smaller, though. It has six or seven compact shelving units as well as a couple metal regular units, too. And there seems to be little free space for new acquisitions.

We spent the three hours I was there walking back and forth to his supervisor's office, where the supervisor never was, as well as trying (unsuccessfully) to get in touch with someone from Human Resources. He also had me search Worldcat and submit an ILL request to obtain articles that were requested that day. On Monday, I apparently am going to help organize things, which sounds more exciting at least. He promised I'll get dusty. Good times, no?

You don't know what you've got til it's gone

A friend and I were talking about the HAPRL ratings... ratings about public libraries around the country that are published annually in American Libraries, which is the journal of the Americal Library Association. The compiler uses data including circulation, funding, staffing, hours, etc... to determine the "best" libraries in the nation. I have said this to anyone who will listen in the last year since I've been in library school, but it's shocking to me how lacking the public libraries are in Syracuse. Even those in Virginia, where I was this summer, were less than stellar compared to what I'm used to. Little did I realize that I'm used to the best. Ohio ranks first as a state and a great number of Ohio libraries that I've been to throughout my life rank highly in their specific categories. They divide the libraries by population served and in their respective categories, the Cuyahoga County Public Library ranks 4th and the Porter Public Library in my hometown of Westlake ranks 1st. Hooray for them!