moe. 2.27.10 Las Vegas

Set One:
Wicked Awesome, Wormwood, Stranger Than Fiction, Shoot First, She Sends Me,
San Ber'dino -> Sensory Deprivation Bank, Buster

Set Two:
Big World -> Ricky Marten -> hi&lo -> Californ-I-A -> Rebubula, Farmer Ben,
meat.

Encore:
Raise A Glass, Happy Hour Hero

In praise of cataloging

Just read this blog post from Speaking of Information. . As a cataloger, I often feel unappreciated and undervalued. At least this blog post makes me think the contrary.

The praised cataloger, while working on the retrospective cataloging project, added a particular 1901 publication to our online catalog at some point during the project. At that moment, our copy of the book was exposed to the world through the miracle of the Internet. The staff member who sent me the email told the story of how our copy of that 1901 book had recently been requested through interlibrary loan by the library at Princeton. In the interlibrary loan system, only two U.S. libraries were shown to own the book: Harvard and our library. After the initial shock wore off, this realization offered a beautiful success story of the value of cataloging librarians and their efforts. On an average day in the back room with no one around, our cataloger clicked the save button to add a record to our online catalog. Little did she know at the time that because of her unobserved efforts our library was positioned to connect a library user a thousand miles away with a book not widely held in libraries.

The moral of the story? Work diligently, and never underestimate the value of your contributions–even (and perhaps, especially) if they come from the unassuming back room. Look around. There are more success stories just waiting to be told.

Winter Olympics

This is going to sound more like a tweet than a blog post, but how can I be in the same time zone as Vancouver but but still get the games on tape delay?

NBC FAIL!!!

A few thoughts

I've been thinking about the Huntsville tragedy a lot this weekend and specifically the media coverage around it. As I suspected, the shooter was almost instantly labeled and quick conclusions were made. Do not get me wrong, I am NOT justifying her actions. My goal here is to say there were a lot more factors involved and it's a more complex situation than is being portrayed in the media.

What I want to throw out there is tenure process. The media barely touched on this. Tenure is a difficult and highly political process. It's a six year process! Six years! Can anyone imagine being on probation for six years?

I found two good articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education that articulated my thoughts over the weekend. The first article discusses the tenure process in depth. The second article discusses the atmosphere in academe.

I'll end on this quote from the second article

Having to add a faculty meeting to the list of places where I'm already afraid to be, i.e., air flights on planes loaded with enough jet fuel to fly coast to coast, or in a skyscraper in dense urban enviornment, means the places where each of us can truly feel safe shrank by one, yesterday.