I don't know that I accomplished much at work today but it was a good
day. The girl who was in the library the other day working on a
research paper for the same library school I go to came back to the
library today to shadow the reference desk for another assignment.
She was there for three hours and along with asking everyone
questions about the library and reference, I had conversations with
her about her classes and random other things. I barely feel like a
librarian so it is weird trying to act like a librarian in front of a
fellow student. But I think I pulled it off.
This afternoon I had good conversations with two of my fellow
librarians about displays and other random stuff. I got to read the
book I Love Lemonade by Mark and Rowan Sommerset. It is a
sequel to a book I have not read yet but it is a kids book that takes
three minutes to read, so I survived. And the book was pretty funny.
Gross, but funny. I ended up buying the book (and the first book)
when I got home as a present to my mom because she is very
entertained by funny kids books. Her birthday isn't until December
so I figure I will give them to her as graduation presents.
While talking to my coworkers I was also flipping through an issue of
Library Journal and saw a short article about browsing and it
has led to a new project. The article brought up the idea of appeal
terms and how Netflix is able to create new categories for movies
that aren't confined to genres. I would like to try something
similar at the library. The idea is to start small and come up with
a word bank of controlled vocabulary words to describe books in more
detail than just a genre. We can then have library staff, whenever
they finish reading a book, use the word bank and pick out the words
that describe that book. Then, we can use that metadata to link
books that have been described using the same terms. This
information can be used to create displays for books that aren't
necessarily in the same genre (which is how most of our displays are
grouped at the moment) but have similar qualities. We can also use
this for book recommendations. Novelist has a similar system built
into their site, something I just learned about today, so I need to
play around with that. I am excited about the potential of this
project. It might fail miserably but there's only one way to find
out.
Tonight I worked on my capstone portfolio and I did not make the kind
of progress I would have liked. I finished adding in all of my extra
artifacts and I added class descriptions for each of the required
artifacts. That means I still have to talk about each one. Maybe
that can get done tomorrow. It's late now but I need to wake up
early-ish tomorrow so I can take advantage of my time before I go to
work. Either working on my capstone stuff or adding content to my
group website. Can't wait. But I can't complain too much because I
am nearing the end.
Oh, also. I bought a skateboard. I made a decision and went for it.
I am getting the Sector 9 Ft. Point board which is 34” long and
8.75” wide. It looks pretty cool and looks like a pretty forgiving
first skateboard. It is a complete board, so it's already put
together, but I also bought green wheels to replace the orange ones
that come with it. I found a promo code for $20 off with free
shipping so the extra wheels only cost about eight dollars. Not bad.
I got an email today saying it had shipped and the estimated
delivery date is next Tuesday. I won't be opening it until my final
assignment is turned in but it will be nice to have it and not have
to wait on it.
And now I'm going to go to bed because it is even later than it was
when I previously said it was late.
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