Secondly…how joyous to be able to just click on my library’s wifi network and be online in an instant, with access to my class page and a zillion (that’s scientifically calculated, mind you) resources.

I do love, though, that I’m also able to peruse stacks with ease and find where a reference book is. According to J, the reference librarian that I interviewed for this same class, kids of the current generation frequently struggle to do that because it’s simply not part of the literacy skill set that they’ve learned, what with so much being just a few keystrokes away.

Previously, both as an undergraduate and MA student, it was easy to find that balance of me-time and school time. While my peers were giving up reading for fun, I read novels, did reading for class, spent time with friends, and generally felt fairly balanced, although I have always struggled with “functional” depression and that colored the enjoyment of said activities depending on how well I was coping. Hereditary depression is probably always going to be a part of my life, although considering the high recommendations that I have always gotten from professors and employers alike, in my case it is a matter of knowing how to deal with that, ensure that I’m on an anti-depressant if I’m in a phase where I’m needing one, and continue to work on self-care.

I know some people would say that one shouldn’t mention depression in a public setting that can be read by future employers…but when all is said and done, I don’t hide who I am. Depression is part of who I am but does not make me any less of an asset (just ask my current supervisor, who says that he has never seen my department run as well as I run it!) and, in my opinion, employers need to be more aware of mental health issues and the truth about those issues.

Anyway.

Depression aside, the differences between my previous academic experiences and this one are striking. I have to be organized in a way that I’ve never been organized before! While I have never been a procrastinator, as evidenced by the fact that I never once pulled an all-nighter in either my undergraduate or MA work, I could afford to let things wait until a little later because I knew that I’d have the time to do them. Now that I know that I can only do homework on the weekends (when I’m not spending time with my son or trying to keep my house from becoming a disaster) or on weekday evenings from 7-9 PM (on evenings that I don’t put my son to bed or, like happened sixty seconds ago, have my son beg to have me sit next to him after my husband has read him his story), I have to plan out my time.

More corners get cut these days. I don’t skip reading (mostly!) but I sometimes can’t spend as much time thinking about it as I would like. It’s not laziness. It’s just a simple lack of hours in the day to do everything that has to be done AND do that self-care thing I mentioned. If I don’t have thirty minutes, or an hour, to check e-mail, read a book for fun, and have some introverted-me time, my performance everywhere else in my life suffers. I am acutely aware of that and have to deal with it. That self-understanding and recognition is a difficult lesson, really, but one that I’ve had to learn in the last few months to stay sane.

More on this later, after I sit with a three-year-old who broke his arm last week and has been rather more restless and clingy since then!

I’ve been quite active online since my college days, when I’d stay up late chatting with friends and browsing the Internet on all manner of topics. It’s come as a surprise, therefore, that I find it so difficult to engage with online classes and, most troubling, how hard it is to keep a class calendar in my head. I was never good at keeping a class calendar and just remembered my class schedule and due dates through most of college and graduate school. Now, however, something about not getting the aural reminders from professors makes it that much harder. I see that I will need to drop by a bookstore at some point, buy a calendar, and physically write down everything in it, because it’s just not sticking in my head without that additional physical component of writing it out.

As someone who tends to be ridiculously organized about class work, this is a challenge for me, because I do not like feeling uncertain about what I am supposed to do when. Is this something that anyone else has found to be true about online classes that you perhaps hadn’t realized before?

And…my toddler has just come in with his airplane and is begging in a high-pitched voice “caniwatchpingu caniwatchpingu caniWATCHpingu caniwatchPINGU?” and is now climbing all over me roaring “like Simba”.

Now I have a plastic plane dangling from my head and my husband will have to chop a chunk out that is caught in the plane’s propeller. Ouch. In comparison with that, sitting down to read about Reference & Library Services or digital libraries is somehow so much less…present and painful!

So.

Part of the process is setting goals for the coming year. This is a frustrating part of the review process for me – as someone else at work put it, I don’t know what’s going to come up in the next twelve months, so planning for it (or, indeed, setting a direction for it) feels extraordinarily awkward.

After class this last week, I think I’m going to ask if I can be more involved in our website and maybe assist the Communications department somewhat with their writing/design efforts. They’re in the process of redesigning the whole site, which could be a fun opportunity to understand more of the process that goes on behind the scenes. I need more tech background and it would be fantastic to get that in a supportive environment where I’m NOT a primary person responsible!

Yesterday’s poster session was full of new ideas for me. Coming from the background of an art historian who never really expected to pursue LIS, I’m still catching up with the basic issues in the field. I know that as professionals, our goal is to subsume our opinions in a facade (however thin!) of neutrality but the fact is that I am also a parent, also a trained art historian (even if an MA doesn’t get one very far in the art history world!) and a human being. I do have opinions.

Censorship is probably one of the difficult ones for me as a parent, particularly the idea of censoring the internet, one of the poster topics covered. Perhaps as a fairly early adopter of the Internet for personal space (my very first, albeit rather unfortunate) static webpage was created with the help of a dear friend and Comp Sci major back in early 1996. I still didn’t entirely understand what the purpose of all this Internet Stuff [tm] was but I had fun with it nevertheless.

Information is important. Having access to information is important. I could see, even back then in the Dark Ages, that there were sites that children shouldn’t see. However, the question of whether or not it should be a library’s responsibility to censor, rather than a parent’s responsibility to teach, is a harder one (and my opinion probably goes quite contrary to what the vocal parents might be arguing). Of course my son is just three, and we’ve intentionally chosen not to teach him much about the computer except that it works beautifully as a vehicle for watching cartoons like Kipper the Dog (which he also loves on the printed page, I should add, as a responsible LIS student and parent!). He will learn more about computers, especially as my husband is a self-confessed computer geek, but we see it as our responsibility to teach him safe computer use, including things that I wish I’d known (like, my name brings up a personal social networking site, even though I’ve since changed it to a nickname instead, alas!).

It’s a tough topic for me to stay neutral on, even as a facade, because I will readily admit to being hugely opinionated and being extraordinarily stubborn (my son’s overwhelming stubbornness MAY have a genetic component). Learning how to turn that in a “safe” professional direction is one of my challenges.

I enjoyed our poster session rather substantially more than I had expected. I am not a group person…but my group worked together really well. I’ve never seen myself as a particularly good graphic designer, but I feel like I did a good job pulling the poster together (obviously with input from the group, although I ended up doing much of the artsy-fartsy design side). I even got to use an X-acto knife and, really, is any class truly complete without arts and crafts? As a bit of a perfectionist, of course I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t win – it would have been lovely to head to ALA – but the e-book topic is absolutely relevant and their group did a great job of presenting it. I’m certainly not sorry to not have to do more work on the topic!

Scott’s presentation on professional communications was certainly relevant – having encountered various (mis)uses of the internet during the last few years, I’ve become rather more paranoid, not because I am doing anything WRONG on the internet but because it’s so easy to misread communications online.

The afternoon session on ethics had some interesting points – after having spent time working at a psychiatric clinic and dealing with the clients, who for the most part were homeless, I have some idea of the challenges inherent in working with a broader population. What I do question is how I would deal with other ethical questions, such as the issues surrounding access to information (as a parent, I would be appalled if my child didn’t feel free to check out any materials he wished without worrying that I’d be eavesdropping on his records).

I’m happy with my poster group; although we’re not the fastest workers, I think it’s going to be a reasonably strong offering. The hardest part will probably be NOT arguing my own perspective.

There’s still a fairly frustrating learning curve, however, for the tools I need in LIS versus the ones I needed in art history – knowing which databases can be most useful and how to search them most effectively can certainly be problematic. I know it takes practice but it is, as ever, frustrating to be a reasonably experienced art historian going back to being a very, very new LIS student.