"boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs"

I have a great respect for my cataloging professor. At first I wasn't sure what I thought about him or his class, and even though I'm still deciding how I feel about the course content, I've decided about him.

It takes a very special person to make metadata schemas interesting (or even comprehensible) to people who don't actually care. Danny Joudrey is a very special person. How many people do you know who can lecture for three hours straight and still be excited about the topic even when most of their class is struggling to stay awake? His background in theater really shows through at this point. Frankly, I'm not sure why so many of my classmates have issues paying attention--the man is funny.

What really sets him apart, though, in my mind, and what has earned my respect is his vast knowledge on the subject. And not only does he have a deep resevoir of facts on metadata and the current state of inter-library debates over Dublin Core, MARC and XML, he can communicate all of this to us--essential laymen--in language that is understandable (well, most of the time). And he is clearly passionate about the topic, which will earn anyone points in my book. I am not quite ready to put him on a par with Bender, but he's getting pretty high up there on my list of people to admire (he's also almost mastered the names of everyone in class--and we're a big class--which is more than I can say for my own advisor, who I am also taking a class with this semester). Actually, if I were to compare him directly with anyone from USF, it would be Jeff Paul, who was our band director for only one year. I think they own the same enormous, grey, shapeless sweater.

All of this serves only as an introduction to a funny story about something he said in class yesterday. As you've no doubt guessed from the title of this post, it involved boobs. Well, not really. It's was actually about metadata, and why it doesn't work the way it should.

There is some background information you should all know in order to understand the context of the story. Our class discussion was on the Dublin Core metadata set, which is a simplified way to catalog electronic items for searching. The idea was that website creators would enter data into the 15 data elements (title, creator, description, etc.) and this metadata would be included in the code for the webpage, so that web searches could more effectively search for sites relating to search terms. Good idea, right? Only, people who create web pages don't seem to think like librarians and didn't see the point in spending time describing the sites they had just built. And occasionally, unscrupulous web developers would enter false data into the data elements, giving their site false hits with popular search terms. At this point, our professor thought it helpful to give an example:

"The data fields could just say, "boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs" and all the 12-year-old boys would go there." He then thought a moment, gave a short laugh and, turning slighly red, cupped his hand in his chin and continued. "Did I really just say 'boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs'? I don't even know that much about them."

I couldn't look at him for the next several minutes because I was trying very hard not to laugh out loud. My description cannot properly convey the humor of that moment, encapsulated not so much in what he said but in how he said it.

Who would have thought that cataloging could be do fun?

-Kim

make way for goslings

The geese in this city are absolutely fearless. (And no, bird watching isn't all that keeps me busy this semester, it's just all that's photogenic.) These four began crossing well before I had a chance to push the button for a walk signal and were this far out and blocking traffic by the time the signal changed.

questions

So, random story from the library yesterday. It was actually pretty quiet for most of my shift, what with it being a holiday and all. There were no classes, so fewer people were on campus, but the library was still open so those of us at circulation got quite a bit of homework done. Of the few questions we did get (besides students asking for reserve books), one really stood out.

Two students came up and were looking over the counter at our chairs and arguing about the color. They then asked--no, essentially told me that they were going to check out the chairs in the study rooms to see if they would suit their purposes. Apparently they were doing a dress rehearsal for the upcoming production of "The Vagina Monologues" and needed a chair as a prop.

Um, no. You may not take the library furniture away to use as a prop. There is plenty of other furniture around the campus, and I will not allow anything to leave the library that has not been properly checked out. And no, the chairs do no not have barcodes. She had a lot of nerve to assume we would let her have any chair she found suitable.

But we already know she has a lot of nerve--the whole campus knows. The other thought I had when she explained why she needed the chair was, "oh, so you're one of the girls who posed in her underwear for the posters all over campus." Until that moment I hadn't had a face to put with the image, but now I do.

The posters advertising the production feature the five female performers clad only in their undergarments standing in a line. The photo is framed so that their heads are not included in the image, which really only makes it creepier to me. But that's not the worst of it. There is another version in which at least two of the girls are no longer wearing even the underwear. They are positioned against each other so that it's still technically not an R-rated image, but it's very disturbing. I cannot wait for the show to be over so that the posters will come down.

Clearly, these five girls (they are all undergrads, so I will continue to refer to them as "girls") are very comfortable with their bodies and don't mind shoring them off. But is that really the best way to advertise the show? This may be an all-female outwardly progressive campus, but there are plenty of us who never wanted to see that, not to mention the large number of male workers and professors who will see the posters. And isn't an advertisement like that self-defeating? I've never seen the show and will not attend this production, but wasn't the purpose of it to de-objectify women? Why would they want their poster to make them faceless, just bodies for everyone to stare at and lewd minds to lust over? I don't get it, and I can't wait for it to be over.

-Kim

February weekend

So, yesterday was actually pretty fun. I managed to not think about what holiday it was for most of the day, which was a relief.

I was going to lock myself in my room and get some writing done, but that ended up not happening. At brunch I can into Christina, who informed me she and Jen were going shopping that afternoon. Well, I tagged along with them for a tour of Boston's best thrift shops and had a pretty good time, even if I didn't find what I was looking for (I did get a pair of fuzzy slippers to wear around the dorm, so it wasn't a total failure. I almost bought a swimsuit to replace mine, which is wearing out, but it wasn't quite right, so that search is still continuing.).

Getting downtown was more interesting than usual. Going to the Longwood T stop is a bad idea with Christina--she seems to be cursed to always just barely miss the train there. Really, the station's design works against us, since we have to double back pretty far to get from the steps over the hill up to the end of the platform where the train actually stops. Well, we were almost there when the train pulled up yesterday, and we refused to miss it. So we scrambled up and over the muddy embankment, to skip the doubling-back routine. Well, I made it over on the first time, but Christina and Jen had to go down a bit farther and try where it wasn't so steep and then run to the train door. I took my time getting my Charlie card out to keep the door open for them, and they made it just fine. Of course, we all had mud on our shoes, but they were worse off than me. We entertained our fellow travelers for a few moments as Christina dug some tissues out of her purse and we cleaned up our shoes, but soon another passenger became the entertainment, as he jammed away to the music in his headphones.

Returning from our shopping excursion, I bought Girl Scout cookies from a table set up in the Copley subway station. At least I won't miss out on them this year! When we got back to campus, the cafeteria was all decked out for Valentine's Day, and all of us girls gor carnations. Mine is a very dark red, and it makes me happy to see it on my desk (I even had a vase for it--one more useful cast-off from Tetima). After dinner I spent the night by myself, writing letters and watching a favorite movie to pass the time.

This morning I went to church early to help out in the Park Street Church library. They're in the process of reorganizing the collection and putting barcodes on all the books to have an automated checkout system. I spent about an hour putting barcode stickers on books after being shown where everything was. After this project is finished, I'm not sure what they'll want me to do, but I'm more than willing to go to church an hour early every week if I can be of service. It's about time I got more involved at church instead of just waiting for someone to reach out to me specifically. The only way to really connect with people is to get involved, so I'm finally moving forward on that. It's a great church, and I want to stop feeling like a visitor.

-Kim

Library Theory

Just so nobody gets the idea that I'm not doing any schoolwork out here just because I'm not writing about it, here's an excerpt of a post I had to make for my cataloging class. We were talking about metadata in class on Tuesday, and our assignment involved trying to tell someone else about it and reporting back on the experience. Here's the assignment "Ask a non-librarian friends or family member if they've ever heard of metadata. If they haven't, try to explain it to them and then blog about the experience. What was confusing to them? What was confusing to you? What made sense?" And this is my response:

I chose to talk to my friend Dianna about metadata. Even though she had never heard of the term, she was smart enough to guess at a definition for it based on her understanding of words like "metanarrative" (students in English programs tend to be pretty smart about word derivations). "Is it data about data?" she guessed.

That much was correct, but then we went further into the types of metadata and I got the chance to explain things to her that she couldn't just guess at. Even here, the logical definitions of what descriptive, administrative and structural metadata were used for made sense. (Dianna has worked at a library [but hadn't learned about metadata!], so she could envision the catalog record as we spoke and then connect each piece of information to a concrete image.

We really got into the good stuff when I explained about structural metadata, using the example from class about the digitized CD and a digital book. We both agreed that we're glad the computers understand that metadata so we don't have to.

The only real problem with this conversation is that I kept telling her things out of order and would end up telling her about an aspect of structural metadata, then return to administrative metadata so we could address the idea of meta-metadata. But somehow it all made sense. Maybe I didn't give her enough of the nitty-gritty complicated details, or maybe humanities students are just that intelligent.

The one real comment she had at the end was that she had never before realized that there was actual theory behind what librarians do (and a reason I need a Master's degree!). This was even more clear after I explained the basic concept of entities in FRBR.

It rambles a bit because I'm tired, but then, so did the conversation. If all of this just confuses you, call up Dianna and ask her to explain metadata to you--I'm done with that for tonight!

-Kim

PS--I am typing this post on a brand new keyboard! I ordered an external keyboard a few days ago so I could type more comfortably at my desk, and it arrived this afternoon! The mouse was shipped separately, so it's not here yet, which is making it more difficult to transition to using just the external keyboard. Since I still have to reach up to use the touchpad mouse, it's hard to fight the habit of reaching for the old keyboard after using the mouse. Still, my wrists and back will thank me for making the change.