Guardienne of the Tomes

A guy I'm proud to call a friend has made a difficult decision. Greg Schwartz has announced That Uncontrolled Vocabulary will be on indefinite hiatus as he re-prioritizes things in his life to maximize his happiness. I've had the good fortune to participate in UV as a caller, and a blog post has shown up on the agenda, and it is a wonderful show where enthusiastic and engaged libraryfolk gather late on Wednesday nights (or listen to the cast later), and it's been a raucous good time, and has made me think about some issues from new perspectives, or reminded me of issues coming up that are outside my sphere of expertise in the library world. I will miss the show, but happily have the contact info for many of the participants so I can bug them *grin* While I'm sad to see the show go (and hope someone has the chutzpah to try to pick it up), I admire Greg greatly for prioritizing life items and ordering them accordingly. Lesser - or perhaps weaker - professionals don't...

Fun news! The book in which my chapter appears is available for order. Teaching Generation M: A Handbook for Librarians and Educators is out from Neal-Schuman. My piece is Chapter 1: "The Haves and the Have-Nots: Class, Race, Gender, Access to Computers and Academic Success." Thank you very much to Theresa Liedtka, Dean of the Library at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and the committee who offered me the days of research leave I needed to write the chapter. This is my very first ISBN (Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic and Robert Lackie are the editors on the jacket, but I'm claiming the ISBN as mine too *grin*), and I am thrilled!

More from me soon (I have a couple of posts percolating but not the time to flesh them out yet). I did want to pop in and announce that I was just offered admission to NCSu's Graduate School in the MS in Technical Communication . In my application, I expressed my interest in specializing in Organizational Information Systems, since that seems most closely related to the actual work I do now that I'm back in Access - communication back and forth through the organization between IT about the catalog, technical services about processing workflows that hit us in Circ, and communicating with staff about not just our own workflows but about technical aspects of other things going on in the library that impact service. I'll be starting the program in Fall 2009 if I accept, which means it'll overlap my MFA by a few months, since I graduate with that in November. I'm still waiting to hear back from the EdD in Higher Education Administration (also at NCSU) - if I don't ge...

Today's issue: tears in the workplace. On this, folks either wholeheartedly agree with me, or think I'm an awful ogre. My stance is this: There is no crying in baseball. Or librarianship. Or in any other career you want to be taken seriously at. Don't do it at work. Really. (Note: I am not talking about the rare bout of tears that occurs when exhaustion overtakes you because you've been dealing with long illness, when you receive news of a death, that sort of thing. We're human. I understand that. What I'm looking to address here is the issue of tears that occur during professional conversations at work that are not related to: your surprise hysterectomy, your cancer diagnosis, your wife leaving you for the mailman that morning, etc.) It's quite popular to get up in arms over this issue, stating that a "no crying at the workplace" attitude is inhuman, doesn't take into account the fact that people are human beings, and may have issues outside ...