[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Rethinking things …

Developments

Our blog (specifically, my entry about the library-lessness of orientation yesterday) has been linked by librarian.net (which I found out after getting a couple of e-mails from alums of the SI program indicating that my experience with orientation was, shall we say, not unique). I don’t know whether to laugh or pack my bags. No, seriously: thank you, Jessamyn West. I have always loved and respected librarian.net and consider it a privilege to have been linked (and quoted to boot) by you.

My remarks yesterday were written at the end of a very hot and exhausting day. I want to say a few things in my own defense, and to make some necessary amendments to what I said yesterday, and then I will shut up on this subject (for now).

Number one, the students I have met have been friendly, unpretentious, motivated, highly intelligent, and excited about the project in front of us, which is always good news. Every single one of the students I met in my scavenger hunt yesterday was a pleasure to talk to and to interact with, and like I said, I had a great time with them discovering some of the i er sanctums of central campus. I look forward to working with the students I have met and to meeting many more of them. I also have to admit that I haven’t met as many people as I “should” have. I am what you call an INFP, and that personality profile doesn’t definitionally align itself with a number of the behaviors that social events like orientation are designed to encourage. But I definitely look forward to meeting other students and my professors in less intimidating settings.

And, despite my comments yesterday, I absolutely look forward to the work ahead. I know that Michigan is a great school, I know that SI is a great program, and although there are aspects of what I saw in orientation that bothered me, it’s only been two days, for God’s sake, and I could undoubtedly benefit from being less of a critic. There was part of me that would have been more comfortable staying in the Bay Area, sticking with my City of SF job, moving to some leafy quiet neighborhood in San Mateo (maybe in the hills behind Alameda de Las Pulgas), and commuting to San Jose State, where everything would perhaps have been a lot clearer and a lot more straightforward.

But where would the fun have been in that? I have no regrets about my decision to move to Ann Arbor, other than, of course, the natural regrets that come with nostalgia and sorely missing friends, loved ones, and loved pets (yes, I’m talking to you, Gracie, Rudy, and Suki!!!).

—Posted by Frank at 19:57:24 | 29-Aug-03

Say hello to The AntiFascist, your antidote to that famous right-wing website run by that famous Florida queen-in-denial. (It’s brand-new, so bear with us …)

Oh, yeah: I’ll be on the other side of the LGBT table this year (this coming Thursday), helping greet incoming first-year students as a board member of LILA.

It’s more than somewhat embarrassing to re-read last year’s entries from about this time about the School of Information, actually.

I still feel, a year later, as though the school is emphatic (occasionally over-emphatic) in its attention to Information with a Capital I. This means lots of computer-related coursework, lots of technology, lots of econ, lots of cognitive psych.

But this is not a bad thing, on reflection. I have myself become far more attuned to and interested in those areas in the year that’s passed, and I don’t think you can seriously consider a career as a librarian and not have more than a passing acquaintance with them.

I have worked almost for a year in the UM Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office, which is about, among many other things, transforming books that might not otherwise move off a library shelf except to be placed in another storage unit somewhere — and getting them into a digital format in which they are given new life and new readers. I fill orders almost daily from people around the country who want to see and read nineteenth-century texts about (among other things) religion, the railroads, the Civil War, and cooking. They would not know about these texts if SPO did not have them available online to search, to view as PDF images, and to purchase in printed form (as hardcover books or spiral/unbound paper). This is just one example of how coming here and being educated here has changed and expanded my view of what libraries are and what they can be.

The group-work thing, which I found annoying in my first days (and still have butterflies about), is also, on reflection, an important thing. I thought when I started school that the group-work concept was a construct, a gimmick. But it’s not; it’s the way librarians work. Anyone who expects to get anywhere as a librarian (in my experience, anyway) needs to know how to collaborate and needs to enjoy it. I still have a lot to learn, but I definitely see the point of group work in a way that I could not possibly have seen it last year.

Even the Foundations courses, which inspire a great deal of grumbling and gnashing of teeth, have a point, and they are crucial, I’d say. I don’t think any of the rest of what you experience at SI makes much sense without them. Even 503, the Search and Retrieval class, which gave me many sleepless nights and bouts of anxiety and indigestion, I now see as having been a significant addition to my knowledge base.

There’s no way I would have been able to recognize all of this as a confused neophyte a year ago. And I’m definitely glad I’m not repeating that particular element of the grad school experience: the first weeks of stress, confusion, despair, and borderline panic. I may be buried in work this coming year, but at least I’ll know it has a direction. And I do enjoy the experience, most of the time.

I’m grateful to the University of Michigan (with some help in loans from the federal government) for making the experience possible. I feel very fortunate.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

Does he feel the same way?

Orientation: Day Two

The second day was quite an experience. The highlight of the day was being put into a group with four other students and being sent on a scavenger hunt across the center of campus to find various clues and answers to questions. It seemed weird at first, but it was actually a good opportunity to get to chat with the others in the group and get to know them a little bit. It was much better than the typical HR exercise of matching people “duck duck goose”-style and expecting them to sit around asking each other contrived questions as a form of barrier-lowering.

The rest of the day: went to an activities fair and got to talk to the folks at the LGBT table; had a couple of presentations from the career center and the folks at the “directed field experience” (where you get credits toward graduation for being involved in practical work experience) office; and wandered around for a few minutes at a not-so-hot faculty/student reception.

The LGBT table was a big deal. When I went through my undergraduate orientation, my goal was to keep that part of myself as hidden as possible. I succeeded (or so I thought), perhaps too well. That isn’t the case now. I’m not going to trumpet it from the rooftops. I’m not going to hide it either.

I guess that’s it. Classes start on Tuesday. I’m enrolled in all but one, which has a waiting list. I have a few days in which to finalize details and in which to get myself steeled for the semester to come. Yikes. If there are a few things I’ve taken away from the past two days, I guess the biggest one is that it is going to be intriguing to try to make it through the first-year Foundations courses, in which all of the students are thrown together and expected to work in groups.

My impression, one which may be corrected as time goes on, is that the two categories of School of Information student—the human-computer interaction side and the library/archive side—are very divergent not only in interests but in personality and expectations. The whole library/archive side, to my dismay, does indeed seem to be something that the school is determined to keep in the background. That bothers me. I didn’t hear a word about libraries or archives the whole two days, or why I should be excited about wanting to work in them, except during the almost-obligatory specialization meetings we were corraled into yesterday. Maybe that’s part of the point—the specialization stuff is supposed to come around after you’ve absorbed all of the meta-informational training—but it seemed almost wistful during the scavenger hunt to be wandering around in rare book collections and reading halls, as though these obsolescing arenas, not to mention books, had only the barest and most distant relevance to the School of Information, and then only as amusing clues in an academic parlor game.

—Posted by Frank at 21:39:47 | 28-Aug-03