(tangential) thoughts from TLA (part 1):

This years TLA Conference really set my mind a whirl in the best possible way.  I went to a wide variety of panels and round table sessions, and there was something in each that got me thinking about my research or my projects or my job search.  I could write several entries on it all, with a single entry devoted to the bizarre bazaar of vendors and tchotchkes-pushers catering to the thousands of librarians wandering the ballrooms. But here are some highlights that offered me insight into this project, albeit tangentially:


The Opening General Session:
TLA opened with a bang. While waiting for the President's address, a group of librarians broke out into a flash mob and started dancing a choreographed number to the Black Eyed Peas. Seriously, this video is adorable:

I loved this for a couple of reasons. First, it was pretty rad. Librarians get a bum wrap for being as uptight as the stereotypical spinster hair-bun, and that is most certainly not the case. It was also pretty great to see a certain iSchool faculty member letting loose and dancing her heart out. But what I loved the most was the fact that you could see just how much these people love their jobs. I have never met a group of people more passionate about their profession.
The keynote speaker was the lovely Jamie Lee Curtis, as charming and approachable as you would expect her to be after seeing all those yogurt commercials.  Ms. Curtis is an accomplished children's book writer, as well as being an actress, spokesperson, etc.  She's also very passionate about the immense value of libraries and librarians to children, and spoke of that enthusiastically, sincerely and with great humor.

By the time I left the opening session I was psyched.  Grad school, while challenging and stimulating, can make you lose perspective on just why you were excited about going into librarianship. But being around all these wonderful, bright and excited librarians definitely put the spark back in my romance with libraries.

surrounded by librarians and loving it:

I'm blogging from the Annual Conference for the Texas Library Association.

I've spent the week at the Austin Convention Center, surrounded by librarians and information professionals.  And I have to admit, I've absolutely loved it! In any profession, there are opportunities for continuing professional development and conferences may be the most obvious opportunity. But they're the most obvious for a reason - conferences can be absolutely amazing and completely inspiring! It's exciting to hear about updates and developments in your field, to see what new ideas colleagues are working on, to meet people who are passionate about the same idiosyncratic subjects as you. I'll be writing about the panels and round table discussions I've found the most interesting and helpful in the next entry, but for now I have another session to run off to before I'm late! If I'm lucky, I'll have time to grab a coffee.

important tools:

As I'm working on grouping together terms into taxonomies - like materials, locations, saints, and so on and so forth - I've found that my passion for office supplies has new focus. I've always enjoyed colored pens, little pads of paper, color-coded tabs, if only for their ability to make organization more aesthetically pleasing. But I've definitely discovered that without these visible markers, it would be extremely difficult for me to create my initial organizational systems. Without the following, I would be completely lost:

HIGHLIGHTERS!

STICKY TABS!

STICKY NOTES!

If you'd like to donate any of the above or any other organizational office supplies to your local librarian, I'm sure they would be eternally grateful.

one big list:

I've officially finished consolidating the haphazard lists of abbreviations that had been passed down to me by librarians of days past! What started as an eighteen page paper manual and an Excel spreadsheet has been consolidated to a forty-four page document with over two thousand terms! Everything from "audio-visual" to "zoomorphism," literally.

So what's next? I get to spend some time with the list and highlighters in a wide variety of colors.This will be the first step in creating a taxonomic schema that will then develop into our controlled vocabulary.

It's exciting to cross steps off your list, isn't it?

card catalog cards:

I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss old-fashioned library card catalogs. Sure, speaking as a graduate student/researcher, data bases and online catalogs make the research process more effective and expansive.  But I do miss thumbing through the old catalog, and seeing just where in the library's collections those cards would lead me....

Although the University of Texas has done away with most of their old card catalog cabinets, there are still remnants of the old card catalog system at the different library branches.  In particular, the old cards can be easily found in boxes of scratch paper left out for library patrons. Stacks upon stacks of old library cards are scattered on the different floors of the Fine Arts Library so that patrons can jot down the call number for which they're looking. Working there, I use the old cards for a myriad of purposes, and am often tickled by which book's card I'm using. But last week, I discovered a stack that were interesting for a much more personal reason....

so what's this all about?

So now that introductions are out of the way and I've explained where I'll be doing my Capstone project, you're probably wondering what this project is all about and what "Objectifying Objects" means.  At least, I really hope you're a little bit curious! Let me describe the project and then hopefully the blog's name will make more sense.

The VRC has an expansive collection of slides that have been used by University of Texas faculty for a number of years. 

These slides are labeled with terms from an uncontrolled vocabulary of abbreviations determined by the slide's physical size.  For example:

N à North    S à South     S. à Saint     AELEV à Architecture elevation

There is no standardized vocabulary for these abbreviations. Punctuation and capitalization are not consistent throughout.  So before the slides are digitized into a web-accessible collection, it's going to be my job to develop a controlled vocabulary specific to the VRC that will replace these messy and inconsistent abbreviations.

hello my name is:

If you've stumbled across this blog this early on in its existence, chances are you already know me. But if somehow through the magic that is the Internet you've discovered Objectifying Objects by chance, let me take a moment to introduce myself.

My name is Alexis and I'm a Graduate Student at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information, commonly referred to as the iSchool. I'm working towards my Master of Science in Information Studies with a focus in Academic Librarianship.  I'm a Graduate Research Assistant at the UT Fine Arts Library and have recently started volunteering with the FAL's Visual Resource Collection.  It is this volunteer work that will be the primary focus of Objectifying Objects.  


Volunteering at  the VRC is part of my Capstone Project.  What is a Capstone? The iSchool describes it as a "capping" experience to your academic studies, enabling you to "integrate [your] professional education and the intellectual and institutional vocations toward which [you] are striving." This premise may sound a tad lofty but, in fact, it's a great opportunity for students to work on a "real world" project, gain some valuable experience, and then present on the topic to colleagues.  And I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity to do so with the VRC.


I'll be updating this blog regularly, describing and musing about the project I'll be completing for the VRC. I'll describe that project and what hopes I have for it in the next entry. It's an interested project and I'm very excited about it! If that's not enough to entice you to check back in, I promise to explain the name of the blog then, too!