November 21, 2014

I got to sleep in this morning and it was glorious. I woke up the first time kind of early and I was perfectly snuggled into my pillows and blankets and I knew I didn't actually have to get up so I just got to lay there and enjoy being entirely comfortable. Then I fell back to sleep. Sleeping in has to be in the top five of the best things ever.

After getting up I watched the video lecture for this week and read the assigned chapters before writing my discussion post. This week the topic was literature reviews and I found it pretty informative. I had to write at least a few literature reviews in college and I don't remember ever getting much instruction on how to do them. I think mine turned into expanded annotated bibliographies, which isn't great. In one of the chapters the author said the paper should flow from topic to topic, not citation to citation. That would have been good advice back in college.

We were asked to come up with why literature reviews may be important to librarians and after thinking about it for awhile I started to appreciate literature reviews for the abundance of information packed into a small space. Librarians can't be experts in everything but they are experts at finding and evaluating information. If a librarian is asked about a topic or a field they have little knowledge of, they can look up a literature review and get a good overview of the current state of the the topic or field. They can then use that as a jumping off point, even using some of the articles from the literature review, to dig deeper and find a good answer. This would be way more efficient than looking for individual articles right off the bat.

I added a little bit to my latest reflective journal entry but didn't make very much progress. I continued working on it when I got to the theater. I made decent progress but wasn't able to finish it. Intellectual property requires a lot of thought, and I did a lot of thinking, but it is hard to put that into coherent sentences at one o'clock in the morning, even after sleeping in this morning.

We had a late night showing of Mockingjay which kept me at the theater almost 2:45AM. Thank goodness once again for getting to sleep in this morning. Working so late after being up since six o'clock in the morning is awful. After deciding to call it a night on writing for school, I switched to Minecraft. Progress is slowly being made on my survival island.

And lastly, it was incredibly foggy this evening on my drive to work. My favorite part about fog is pretending I'm in an old school video game with a crappy render distance.